"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Full moon sky, softly /papateyyewh/ /ng/ /bilay/, part of your tongue slowly pulled out, /kalkalnaraan/ /inoyus/, from your mind, /su/ /kakabatan/ /tan/ /kawawayan/, /natan/ /angukabat/ /su/ /diling/ /pag/ /mu/ /maibalikas/ /su/ /anlong/, woman silently chants over a bowl of water, /no/ /may/ /cancyon/, within your inmost self, /unsulieen/ /ulalalm/ /tan/ /lignaan/, /onoo/ /angmulabat/ /nang/ /talusan/ /ta/ /sika/ /sunandiyiay/ /ng/ /boses/, /ta/ /sika/ /tisulakay/ /pangilet/ /ed/ /pangitinglangmet/ /su/ /salita/
_from_ No Measure
It’s bright here, and windy. An expanse, a salt flat, a great basin, low shifting dunes, rocky washes, mountains at all horizons, a near sun, all surfaces radiant, glittering scales of mica and angled quartz, light in my eyes.
We index, mediate this place. What holds my attention? I measure a length. I measure distance.
- - -
An instrument is scored for my measure. That is, it tells me what to look for. Its notches name a distance, its units an account. I have an array of these: wooden and metal rulers, a wound tape, a clicking wheel, a hanging scale, and string, and pencils. I hold a tool up to something still. To measure is to align, to measure against. The string is slack against the grass. The string does nothing. I do.
I spread the legs of the compass, draw a circle in the sand. One thing makes its mark in another.
- - -
- - -
Accuracy is an ideal limit. You see everything from the control room: the desert’s vastness, each measure I make, the clearness of the air, my walk through it, my nearness, the dunes’ array, drought and water. I reach for your arm but you pull it back. Behind glass you’re reaching I see it. Pull me. Let me look out from here one instant.
- - -
What is the grass to the air?
The desert is clear: sun bright, reflection of light off the light sand and rock. Clear—transparent and radiant at once. The brightness is exact or collapses what’s seen now. Not disaggregated, not void. Up, a glassy surface. Out, imperceptible array. It needs collision, no, the wind. Or the wind is it? I see through it? Only in distance is there air here. Only in what the grass gives off or doesn’t let go of.
- - -
- - -
I know the difference between the possible and the actual, the particle-wave collapse. Perception is confined to the present.
I can’t know what glass is. Its formation is liquid not crystalline, the molecules’ positions variable. To know the window is to be wrong?
I see the desert through it. You look at me through it. I want to move through—I want to know what’s behind it, I want what’s behind it, not only what arrangements make it.
The site of the window, the collapse when I look, is my error.
- - -
Quantification, a problem, I walk here.
This implement contains information about things that reflect light, vibrate, or are volatile. By implement I mean my body. It scales the processes of events.
- - -
- - -
The grass yellows. A clear and indifferent sound of weather. It rains.
We run up the stairs. I start to tell you something. The desert grows dark. You go to the window, press your hands against the glass. I try to speak? I have no sound. When the hail settles I’ll go down and clear it out. Now you record the event, set your notes on the table. I try to walk over? Look, I leave no trace. When I move you don’t see. It’s the grass in your eyes, the weather. There is no sound? I take your hand. From here I can see so far. It rains. I have to tell you something. Look. You pull me to you. The desert is dark. No sound, I know. You press your hands to—there is no sound. When I move you see? Close your eyes. The desert is dark, hail makes sound. I don’t try to speak. Out the window, it rains. You press my back to the window. With your eyes? Record this event, no—no sound, the rain, I start to, in your direction, know, it’s clear out.
- - -
I climb the stairs to the control room. You let me in. Bright white desert.
At the window. I picture you here.
You stand at a dial, can handle an instrument. You ask, what would you like to measure?
Desert, white hot, your lattice, what pattern, my direction, glass and water—I can’t answer.
- - -
“Time goes”
Time goes
The story
stays
A city
A landscape
A place to be
This one
true life
Asleep
I shake my head
A seagull
with a fish in its beak
flies over
the highway
Lands
Eats
A manufactured
scenario of safety
The idea
of a country
Lives of the dead
we’ll never know
Mystery
complete
The Promiscuity of Order: _Literally means collapse_ at SculptureCenter
In Alan Martín Segal’s short film Incomplete Disappearances (2020-21), a hand reaches down beside a wooden table and slips an object—a button, a folded scrap of paper, a patina-green die—beneath its uneven leg. The repeated gesture functions as a visual metaphor for the myriad patchwork solutions to systems that, on a whole, have fallen short of their ideal function or, perhaps, were never competent in the first place. My first encounter with Segal’s uncanny film took place at the dark terminus of a long, arched corridor on the lower floor of SculptureCenter in Queens, New York. The film was projected behind a sheet of scratched glass, giving it the eerie feel of a signal left behind from a distant apocalypse.
The exhibition, curated by In Practice curatorial fellow Camila Palomino and on view from May 12 to August 1, 2022, was fittingly titled Literally means collapse. The show featured newly commissioned, site-specific works by eleven artists, all attending to the theme of ruin. Situated mainly in SculptureCenter’s bunker-like lower level exhibition space, the works in the show evoked the precarity of built environments, social norms, and systems of exchange. Yet they invited viewers to think through and beyond the quick fixes we impose on our collapsed and collapsing environment. In the face of entropy, the artworks called for collective maintenance—in the forms of research, reenactment, and reconstruction.
In her writings on the exhibition, Palomino refers both to “the promiscuity of order” and to “the patina of order.”1 Evoking order as a concept both transient and external to form, the curator makes an argument not against the inevitable obsolescence of political and social systems but against those who stubbornly believe in their permanence and authority. The relationships between the pieces chosen for the exhibition were, likewise, more associative and poetic than they were historically or geographically bounded; their juxtaposition ultimately eschewed cohesion in favor of friction and paradox. According to Palomino, “Maintenance and entropy affirm each other. To maintain, then, is a spiral choreography of contradictions.”2 Working from this premise, Palomino and the team at SculptureCenter narrowed down a list of open call submissions to eleven artists whose contributions included:
A hand-carved roof ornament on an aluminum offering table (Allen Hung-Lun Chen)
A cash booth containing twenty-dollar bills and rose petals (Monsieur Zohore)
The doors of safes, jars of water, and a thick hand-bound book (Marco Barrera)
A wall sculpture made of knotted polyurethane tubes (Violet Dennison)
Planar sculptures painted blue and outfitted with minuscule conductors and filaments (Stella Zhong)
A film about rituals of maintenance in the city of Buenos Aires (Alan Martín Segal)
An interactive soft sculpture made to resemble the base of a Christopher Columbus statue in Astoria, Queens (Jessica Kairé)
Wall-mounted assemblages depicting public plazas in Mexican cities and towns where colonial struggles took place (Enrique Garcia)
A collection of wristwatches marking the times at which an event recorded in CIA documents occurred (Ignacio Gatica)
A heated stone bench and a miniature domicile made of drop ceiling tiles (Cherisse Gray)
A film that exposes discriminatory urban planning practices through historical reenactment (Fred Schmidt-Arenales)
Although Palomino’s idea of ruin is far removed from the eighteenth-century notion of picturesque travel destinations, ironic traces of romanticism can be found in Marco Barrera’s installation Reservoirs (2022), a collection of steel doors detached from safes once used in businesses as well as in homes across the U.S. When they were produced at the turn of the twentieth century, the insides of these safes were sometimes decorated by artists—whose identities are no longer known—with miniature paintings depicting idyllic pastoral scenes replete with flowing water. Barrera purchased and transported these painted doors—some weighing up to five-hundred pounds—from various locations around the country where they had fallen into disrepair. On the four doors that made up Reservoirs, the paintings were scuffed and peeling, faded and marred from casual handling and nearly illegible in the dim light of the basement corridor. Although the interior of a safe might be a space associated with protection and preservation, such images of ruin—for instance, two cows grazing by a river in a yellowed landscape beneath a gashed sky—brought into focus the delusion and absurdity of accumulation.
Farther down the hall, Barrera presented a second installation, in many ways a sister to the first, titled Drawing a line backwards (2022). Here, four shelves displayed jars of water labeled with the locations from which they were sourced, including sites around the city of New York such as Empire City Casino, Rikers Island, and a sewer on Canal Street (where the water runs pink). The installation was created in collaboration with—and previously exhibited at—the Canal Street Research Association (CSRA), a roving pop-up founded and maintained by artists Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky, who wrote an essay titled “On Water” for the installation's accompanying publication. This hefty tome rested on a wooden chair across from the shelves, its homey set-up beckoning viewers to sit and read.
According to Palomino, Barrera’s water archive is a means of self-education—an attempt to understand the city in a personal way—and his collaboration with CSRA puts forth a view of research as dérive, or meandering, as method.3 Early on in the pandemic, CSRA occupied a storefront on Canal Street and invited artists like Barrera to contribute snapshots, artifacts, and stories of the thoroughfare’s history, including the pollution and eventual burial of the canal underneath the present-day pavement. Drawing a line backwards is a direct extension of this project. As for why the artists chose water as the subject of their research, Lin and Tatarsky argue in “On Water” that urban development suppresses the way water flows and meanders, mistaking this imposed rigidity for progress.4 When research is conducted for the purpose of maintaining collective memory, the promiscuous patina of order is rubbed off, exposing the fluid forms and living histories beneath it.
On the opposite side of SculptureCenter’s labyrinthine basement—which, for this exhibition, was designed to be circled infinitely, yielding multiple narratives of ruin and revival5—was a single-channel film by the artist Fred Schmidt-Arenales titled Committee of Six (2022). In this film, actors playing University of Chicago officials and community organizers re-stage a tense closed-door meeting regarding the university’s southward expansion that took place in 1955. The neighborhood in question is Hyde Park, where the university sits today, and the members of the “committee of six,” as they are called, discuss an “urban renewal program” that would displace Black communities so as to attract white buyers. The appointed actors, who are performers, academics, Hyde Park residents, and activists, play it straight for the first few minutes of the film: dressed in suits, cardigans, holding padfolios and clicking ballpoint pens, they present the original arguments from the 1955 meeting with convincing candor. One member of the committee, whose name plate reads “Levi,” remarks, for example, “Numbers are not really the issue. The issue is cultural and economic compatibility.” To have Black and white families “knocking heads,” Levi argues, would be “too much shock to the system.”
The exhibition posits this type of gentrification, this supposed lessening of shock and disorder, as a harbinger of societal collapse. On a formal level, this argument presents itself in the film shortly after Levi delivers his searing and epiphanic line: the scene suddenly cuts to a shot of the conference room empty save for the meeting’s stenographer. From there, we hear, in voiceover, a conversation between the present-day actors, which, as we find out, takes place mid-pandemic at a picnic table in a park. The actors deliberate how to best deliver their lines, as well as how to interpret the nearly seventy-year-old script in a way that makes most sense to a contemporary audience. Later parts of the film show the actors in plain clothes rehearsing the script on set. Every so often, they all burst into laughter.
By collapsing time in the film and by letting the present mediate the past via reenactment, Schmidt-Arenales re-presents history with a critical difference, offering visitors a means to think through and beyond ruin. Similarly, Jessica Kairé’s Folding monument (Christopher Columbus Statue, Columbus Triangle, Queens, New York) (2022), a soft sculpture made to resemble the plinth beneath a controversial local sculpture, invited visitors to unfold and, using a system of pulleys and cords, collectively raise the base of the charged symbol. For context, the original—and extant—statue is a WPA work erected in 1941 in Astoria’s Columbus Square park. The statue is bronze and sits on a cast stone base. According to City of New York Parks and Recreation, the plinth is meant to resemble the prow of a ship, and it was this prow-like base that visitors reconstructed at SculptureCenter.
During the Second World War, the statue was removed from view so as to prevent it from being scrapped for metal, meaning that for some time during the forties, the plinth stood by itself in Columbus Square, representing the famous figure without bearing his likeness. In the summer of 2020, when protestors called for the removal of monuments commemorating proponents of genocide, slavery, and white supremacy, the statue was given twenty-four hour protection by two patrol officers from the 114th Precinct.
As in Committee of Six, the collective gesture of raising Columbus’s plinth was not merely a reprisal or return but, instead, reconstruction with a difference. For one, Kairé remade the base using upcycled cotton canvas. The material—pliable and unable to stand without the labor of at least four participants—undermined the height and authority of the monument and, by extension, its cultish power over collective memory. The artist’s choice to have participants raise the plinth and not the figure of Columbus himself also called back to particular periods of history when the plinth stood alone. After meditating on power ad absentia rather than on the obvious face of the atrocities, the next question became, naturally, what exactly the officers from the 114th Precinct were sent to guard in 2020.
Kairé, who quite literally placed the fate of Folding monument in the hands of the participatory public, implicitly wagered that such a gesture would translate into political knowledge: That which is raised, the sculpture suggested, can also be lowered. However, when I first encountered the sculpture, it was hanging like a lopsided spider in the center of a narrow passageway, without anyone to activate it (only during a subsequent walk-through with the curator did a large group gather around the work, at which point four of us hoisted the corners of the plinth high above our collective heads). During that first visit, the sculpture read not as pedestal but as impediment; ducking and folding my shoulders so as to pass beneath the limp canvas cords without disturbing them, I was perplexed by their cold indifference to the space. But when I realized that the deflated form was in fact an action previously completed, I came to understand another kind of ruin, that which exists when the fruits of collective action are abandoned by their publics, who mistakenly believe their creations to be eternal.
Is a sustainable structure, then, simply a shaky table under whose short leg we periodically—lovingly—slip a token of support? The exhibition obstinately refused to give a straight answer. Like the ring shape of the space, the conceptual undercurrents of Literally means collapse called for infinite circulation, analysis, and speculation. Nevertheless, at a time when, day after day, our social, political, and environmental systems teeter on the brink of collapse or actually collapse before our eyes, and when nothing better seems to be coming to take their place, art that records the kernels of difference generated in or in spite of each iteration of maintenance can provide a measure of comfort. If anything, it reminds us that we won’t step in the same river twice.
| 1 | Camila Palomino, “In Practice: Literally means collapse,” In Practice: Literally Means Collapse (New York: SculptureCenter, 2022), 2-3 |
| 2 | Palomino, “In Practice,” 2 |
| 3 | Conversation with Camila Palomino, 29 July 2022; Ming Lin and Alexandra Tatarsky, “On Water,” Drawing a line backwards, ed. Canal Street Research Association (New York: Marco Barrera, 2022), n.p. |
| 4 | Lin and Tatarsky, “On Water,” n.p. |
| 5 | Conversation with Camila Palomino |
Our Cities of Birth
Outside the city of X
a child hid in the fields. He hid
in the fields of wheat, the wheat
grown for the mill that sat at the edge
of the fields where he hid. What languages
did he not speak? The languages he spoke hide
in the fields of language. Here is the mill,
my anti-inheritance.
I’m powering it up for what?
Old, he talked to me about the mystic
economy. He wanted to fill the mill
of his mind with bucks, fund his languages
with bucks as their absence brought him
to sell his printing press, buy thin dresses
to sell at markets in the fields of English.
I can’t money the mill of his mind now, trace it
from wheat to what to ideas we can move into
instead of a homeland. I power
the mill down, am powering it down.
I’m revving the ferry, shooting
an arrow into a past I can explain.
The dead economy of home funds me.
Divorce Poplar
The house was empty by then.
Realtors flicked cards across the table.
Little marketing faces.
I am interested in this house;
I am no longer interested.
The living roof took rain.
She pulled seedlings out of the moss
tossing them on the slab below.
She framed images.
She arranged images:
they protected each other
when he went below.
On return, he let her know
he had forgiven himself.
He followed her upstairs.
I can’t show you upstairs.
Boasting emptiness and light.
Mountain views. Remembering
is private; by “private” I mean
the poplar blows open every May.
Catfished
The stream is someone’s childhood. Or someone’s only child. Next to each other the two seem to mean the exact same thing. The exact same thing has happened to me more times than I can count. But not this. Not this thing. I will speak like Lee McQueen about waistlines and wankers. I will watch his documentary when suddenly alone. “Suddenly alone” is a contradiction when you stop to think about it. How innocent you are. How lucky, my swimmer. Someone’s verse, someone kind and tough, with glitter lips and springy hair. Someone gone, someone again, a sudden end, the just againing. Pay them back, world. Take me back. The hook is in my spine and I am casting anyway.
Dogs; A Dog
It is not wrong that I began to feel in league with the dogs after a while. My pity transferred to identification and I think this is a typical thing. I had become, in the run of my illness, attached to proclaiming my emotions and beliefs and experiences as typical, as usual, as not differing from those of anyone else. This was a cover for my suffering, and penance for a lifetime of thinking that I was, perhaps, unique in some way. Fame, I had learned, did not make one unique, nor did talent, nor did money, nor did sustained, hard effort, nor did any kind of perceived or developed merit. I was old enough now to understand the impossibility of being unique, but not wise or radical enough to savor that, to feel in league with others.
At breakfast the other day I listened in on the talk of three men discussing the various attractions of labradoodles. The loudest had hectored the server into having his eggs prepared in an unusual way: basted with butter, then poached in it. He was now opining: “They’re expensive and so I’ve looked at the breed-specific rescue organizations but they only have older dogs. I want a puppy. I want a fresh start.” I understood his desire, cuttingly so, but for any living creature moving through time a fresh start is no more possible than uniqueness. Breakfast is the easiest meal to eat.
I work with animals who have been strays then taken to a city shelter, or else surrendered by owners in unfortunate fixes, or else discovered behind locked doors of abandoned buildings, or tied to fences. From this shelter, the rescue organization selects animals unlikely to be adopted in a customary way, likely to be killed for reasons of space or behavior. The city shelter people do their strong best. People visiting them prefer small dogs, young dogs, easy dogs, heritage breed dogs, light-colored dogs. Three-legged dogs are popular with liberals. But in the right context, pitbulls are popular with progressives, as well as with people raised in a religious, rural milieu now living godless in the city, as well as with people who believe—trembling—in their own goodness, as well as with most workers who identify with being workers. These people also prefer old dogs and injured dogs and deaf dogs and blind dogs and heartworm positive dogs and dogs with histories of neglect or other types of abuse. They either prefer them sincerely, or think they should, righteously; it is usually all the same to the dog.
The rescue takes in as many of these dogs as possible. It is powered by people who not only have difficulty in their lives but who also identify with that difficulty in some regard, whether triumphant or resigned or wading through the morass of it while clutching the swamp-lacquered clothes of their simpler, social identities. I began, in volunteering, to understand that caring people sympathize but hurting people empathize. Empathy is mobilizing in a lasting way; sympathy never is. It is not revolutionary to know this but it is personally cataclysmic to learn it as a consequence of pain sharp enough to glitter.
Fifteen years prior I had sat in a soup restaurant with a writer I admired. She was well known for her work, which coolly identified the circulatory pain of human life, as well as its acid pleasures. Volunteer, she had said. That is the best thing you can do for your writing. She worked with dogs and often wrote of them in a way that was not precious, nor metaphorical. For me, then, a dog was a celebrity, a magnet, a tool of distraction from myself and my own lacks. In the intervening years this held true, until it didn't, until I needed convalescence of a quality I could not immediately locate. I had done itinerant service and carework, for humans, inconsistently: a sympathizer. I do not think I can really describe, either, the transformation—except through description of illness and I decline to do so.
In this way I am a dog who walks dogs through a glossy autumn neighborhood with dripping trees and large, clean single-family homes, bordered by a boulevard and two main thoroughfares. I am a dog who picks up another dog's shit, who watches mucosal discharge drool from the vagina of a dog in heat; I am a dog no better than any other, a dog who watches dogs discover dead rats under piles of leaves and does not recoil, merely walks along, a dog who can understand, intellectually and romantically, the attraction.
At the facility I prevent danger. I react to need. These are my responsibilities. It is hard and easy, a liberatory onus owing to my thumbs, my height, my ability to process the complication of consequence. All I do these days is process the complications of consequence, with blunder and fear. This is how you care for a newly ill body. This is how you care for a thing living in a world no longer on the terms of their kind. I just wrote the same sentence twice. When I enter the facility the dogs are quiet or the dogs are barking or the dogs are crying staccato, and I am a dog arriving to greet them, or maybe I am just a dog arriving.
Song to the Cypress
The sky is filled with invisible things,
yet I can see the wrecking ball clearly.
We used a meat thermometer
when the medical one broke,
but we didn’t know where to insert it.
Fish scales can’t measure the flop
after everything falls apart.
That’s when we went viral
along with a video of a dancing houseplant
as algorithms drive the meaning,
although I’m hoping it’s only the caffeine
that’s making me sit here and shake.
The feedback loop is mostly static
and drives the boats from shore.
I’m still waiting for the technology that lifts us up,
as the cameras see me on the inside too.
These words have got me around the neck
like seeds in a sparrow’s tiny talons
before making their way to the landfill
along with whatever couldn’t be included
in the estate sale and the backlash
known as Tony Orlando and Dawn
because I’m not interested in nostalgia
when the past was designed to hurt.
We watch a Greyhound bus in the distance
as the railroad crossing gate
bounces off the car’s hood
on a trip to the vet and then the florist.
Anyone could come through the window,
so like me that flock is getting its waddle on.
I have ever only lost what I’ve loved,
but sometimes it was also my fault,
either too close or too far away,
and that’s a bigger story about the world
that I don’t know how to tell.
Some bugs just want to cling to the screen.
Self-Portrait at Forty-One
Through a blank slate of feelings,
I ran miles wondering if it rained
or if it was dew when I stepped
out to light this morning. How
to know when I’ll feel like my
old self or maybe life’s just a new
click of urge and want, the buzz
of an airplane I saw and a stalk
of bamboo split near some
graffiti unreadable. I’d like
to remember today
even though it feels pretty
ordinary. Some purple patch
of wildflowers. The mystery
of everything sudden.
Ribs
What was once a particular cow
decomposes, ribs finger the sunlight, body
now a leather blanket, flesh picked coyote-clean.
What we had earlier labeled “flat tire”
was the thrumming of tumbleweed
caught and locked in a stasis of dragging.
The ragweed is cut low and the garlic
grows beneath magpies. A woman’s voice
lilts slowly cross this back porch
unrecognizable for the time lapsed.
//
Unrecognizable, for the time lapsed
lilts slowly cross this back porch,
grows beneath magpies, a woman’s voice.
The ragweed is cut low and the garlic
caught and locked in a stasis of dragging.
Was the thrumming of tumbleweed
what we had earlier labeled “flat tire”?
Now a leather blanket, flesh picked coyote-clean,
decomposes, ribs finger the sunlight, body
what was once a particular cow.