On Collier Schorr and Karen Kilminik—desire and gaze

Tract 1:

Collier had made these plaster and fabric pieces in the early 1990s. She dated them 1963-91. 1963 was the year she was born, 1991 the year these pieces were realized. This is important. The year she was realized, the memory of the past her beginning to the year her toddler clothes were given modified agency as art works (Relics). That distance—distance is a touchstone in Schorr’s work—is the fermenting, the thinking, the learnt living in the work; the unknown to the known, to that specific distance from innocence to a material reality of the self. Preserving innocence parallels Kilminik’s early work for the innocence of literary and pictorial history, that of the 19th century romantic age, the revelation of self as god (small g) to the desire towards desire, to step/delude into a memory/fiction that is a historical fantasy—damsel, white knight etc. The atmosphere and objects of heroes and heroines of the memory/imagination. 
The gaze flipped on itself probably began with Manet’s Odalisque where the object of desire, of longing rebels and makes the viewer the said object. In the field of the post-historical it became self-desire, not narcissism, but a reading into others as the self. In Collier the model appropriates the viewers gaze to find herself, to protect herself, in other words to be cloaked in being admired, at being stared at, being eyed becomes the desire of defense. It becomes a wall of illusion, a wall of of distance and to rupture that distance would be a betrayal of the taciturn pact of desire and possession renting that pact exhausted and impotent.

Tract 2: On My Work

 Images and words are the stuff of history spilling into clichés by their use. It is the cliché not the image, not the picture that reverberates and obliterates the authentic, which echoes the traffic of history. History being obstinate— is the freighted footprint of our existence. The mining of the cliché, excavating it’s remains as an ancestor, as a representation of a representation, as picture—co-opting it, infusing it with another agency—(Everything in the next world will be as it is in this world, just a little different) or as Jason’s ship Argo, (it is not the same ship he started out with considering it’s repairs from rot and damage)—revitalizes its tenants— beside history, its popularity, repetition, myth—rents the cliché as we understand it, and its purpose outside its conditional agency and separate from comfort of its couching not as familiar or non- threatening but as edgy unsure, captivating. With overuse the cliché becomes its own cliché. And we always overuse. 

I use images, from photographs or film stills (still-life) to construct small vignettes which have meaning for me. I had once said I make lies not art because the truth hurts. Which truth?
 I choose and manipulate fragments from films, photos—again, my own or others—, churning feelings and meaning; several thoughts rent mute, not spoken but sensed a meta cognition. This is the gist of our interior selves as story. Pictures, singularly or in juxtaposition with others act like a mise en scene. It is not what is seen but what is suggested by the seen/scene that is the condition of a possible human activity. A clarity of intent obscured, filtered, suggests an enigmatic reading. Images occupy the fragile working place of memory/imagination. Agitating this cleavage between thought and action develops the inchoate into something like a familiar but not familiar; an understanding though fleeting. My work is a representation of a representation, an acknowledgement of the cliché, a churning of personal and historical experiences to see what appears.
From the first known and thousands of unknown images etched in caves in rocks to the paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs, films, videos, animations—all images edge to edge could probably girdle the Earth; once? twice? several times? This thought is bewildering.
We leave our traces, our marks, perhaps someone will notice…

A Strange Spring 2020

Spring is in the air
But so is dread.
The crocuses and daffodils
are blooming, the tulips
whispers of early bouquets
—not for lovers—

for laying on graves.
this Spring is strange,
bitter not sweet,
not the one of rebirth,
not the one of warmth
not the one of hope
or longer days.
After winter’s sleep
this Spring

bestows a winter shade.
A lethal virus.
A silent killer.
Nothing prepared us.
We are masked.
We are gloved.
Six feet apart,
from love,

from caress,

from new love,

from old love,

—Be safe.

We want to
hold each other,
to feel the blood
of a love,
the echo of their hearts
in our ears, in our souls.

We want 

to touch love.

We want each other,
with sweat,

with wetness,
the stickiness of life—
An intimacy dashed

this strange Spring.

Maybe with roses in bloom,
or autumn’s patina
 on summer’s gloss
 we will love again
without that distance,
with a distance that only love
can bestow—
one of closeness
of new times rhyming
the old, of the ageless.

Simple Things 2019-20

I care about the living
I care about the dead.
I care about the lost
I care about the saved.
I lament, I regret, I grieve,
I hope, I despair—I love.
I remember the unspoken
I am cursed by memory
I have forgotten to forget.
I have not forgotten pain
nor joy,
I have forgotten none of the forgotten.
I  have not forgotten to breathe
I have not forgotten bloods course,
its taste, its stain.
Hear it, its touch, smell it, its memory.

Churning of seasons, of obstinance

of the unknown/known.
the shifting shift shifting.
I remember what is to come,
which living blinds.
Simple things.