Contemporary Art Writing

map of the library/room we stayed in throughout the week. index cards, construction/envelope paper, snack wrappers. i thought about sewing curtains made of page protector plastic for the frame. then imposing a quadrant field on the opacity with navigation labels like “gender as a racialized object,” and “defunct copying station.”

this week’s 9 to 5—art writing intensive.

snazzy, people & coffee. we settle in.

the star of the week is Sixty Inches from the Center.

Tempestt Hazel (Co-founder, curator, and writer) is generous and shares questions.

she shows us the labor of archive work, the density of curation, the shapes of publishing.

Sixty Inches is an orb of possibility.

→

during the archive talk, someone brings up living wills.

i am obsessed with Adrian Piper.

i’ve been going something like “Touching the Glass: the Ongoing Autobiography of a Cyborg.”

been dealing with… my archives [i.e. digital/carbon footprint, diaries, files, ephemera, objects].

i notice i write like a river, long and winding

jagged on the edges, marked with conjunctions.

this week i learn more ways to optimize my emails

and see Virginia Jaramillo [a contemporary of Piper]

who facilitates an encounter with star system Epsilon Indi and Irish bard Amergin Glúingel.

Jaramillo’s color fields are precise and fluid, her large handmade papers seem to be surface

shavings from otherworldly planets. she reminds me that here, too, is another world, a planet

fashioned by the site lines of our cosmologies.

→

the week is affectually/optically in/tense.

we ponder the art economy.

the only writing exercise is a snap review of the art on show downstairs.

i spend an hour looking, reading, and transcribing feeling.

another hour making it legible. the show? the text? the notes? the feeling? the you?

the making? a living?