Stuffed Cat

After David Hammons

In this world anterior

To where you have been

What you will become

The drum is a reminder

Of another world

Extant but not recoverable

Still hidden by its being revealed

An open secret or prophecy in reverse

Of all lost things they tried to destroy

The sun as it shines on dead things playing alive

Uncanny because we think any moment they might wake

Awaken cat! Where there is only the sunlight of recognition

And the refusal of the life-like dead to be recognized

Your snow globe is not a ghost

The coverings on these mirrors only obscure who you’re not

A relation of objects begetting objects

Readymade for the fall of Amerikkka

Armed as it were by your right

To opacity and enigma
What is and what ain’t.

For Julius Eastman

For the basic

For the base not the super-structure

There is this structure

There is a motive to song

Dissonant and aswarm

Like killer bees or simply

Bees riled collectively

These refrains increase

We are their surcease

The reason for this ante-

anthem other pronouns

Don’t like othering

Real basic like a feeling

Or a feeling of a feeling

Reups

Without a season or

Stars to guide you

There is this structure

Not anarchy

This end of theme

Of fugue

Against Cage’s silence

Meaning being in

The closet

Beyond Reich’s bruised blood

His drumming

There is a motive

Actual refusal and not a semblance

In dissonance

He makes a plan

Picks the right instrument

To kill whitey

Tear it up

Controlled bellowing

Let the rest balloon

Until all masters are dead

Or this isn’t antagonism

After 400 years

But stasis sustained by noise

By swarms erring

Until the End of the world

Composition carries this

Information

Of the post-expectant

Of redress or what counts

As redress counting-off

Gives Bach a reason

To do evil

To do evil against evil

Be crazier than the craziest

Grammar of suffering

Because you had to act sane

In this sea of whiteness

Martyring a piano

Lynching

An instrumentation

To alchemize voice

Mackey’s wear and tear

Of too much heaven

Coming up for air

In hell’s sub-basement

Its sub-sub-basement

Smoking with all the lights on.

The Art of Withdrawal

The following audio recording presents two parts of a longer work I have been writing about "artist withdrawals," presented for Patrick F. Durgin's "Poetics of Agony" MFA workshop last fall at the Art Institute of Chicago. In it I look at the correspondences between the work of Lee Lozano and Ben Kinmont as a means of considering more broadly the problem of "withdrawal" in art discourse, a topic that has interested me for some time, and which seems more timely than ever given the increasing importance of art practices that refuse and/or problematize participation with institutions and marketplaces.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/c7nipf3kxgqrhrd/Withdrawal_Talk%20for%20PD%20class_10-15.mp3?dl=0