Fear of the Evil Eye
Rack: This may be behind a pay wall (to the attached NYT link). I think of you in the same breath as all of these people, and indeed in a higher octave because the work is so raw and pure, and I lived with it during impossible days and it helped to save me.
Glad you’re getting back to your first loves. They will help arm you.
Have been strangely happy and perhaps embarking on a whole new chapter that I’m reluctant to elucidate for fear of the evil eye.
And have been enjoying summer more than I remember doing so. It may be that I’ll just take any old season now. ‘I’ll take the lot,’ to quote Mr. Creosote.
Hope you’re well and that the work goes well.
Ruin: No, I could see it. We have a 'New York Times' account. Of course, there is a conjoined bitter/sweet reaction to this article, this late re-evaluation of Aids-related art, these new collectors and talk of inspiring the auction houses to re-think their value. But that’s it really, it is about the market, almost all of the artists being dead, and those of us who are still here have been dealing with disbanding what we have made for fear of it bankrupting ourselves, all that storage, all that preservation. Thankfully we have words still, and these can be collected without much self-sacrifice. Actually, they are the opposite of that, they are a source of some joy, and even a centering device, so that the normal unravelling, that compounding of years and the influence of the disease, becomes neither here nor there. It can supply that urgency to ‘kick against the pricks’, that “embarking on a whole new chapter”, you speak of. I say fuck that evil eye. My impetus is to drag those twin buggers across the coals too, until they give out, like everything else. Bring on your best, bring on your worst, I am ready.
I find the unravelling to be sweet, as it would happen.
There was a lot of saving each other in those early days in New York. I felt as cack-handed as I have always managed to be, there’s very little sophistry there, I know. It was the best I could do at the time, the most honest way I could honour us. Manhattan was liberating, especially after the covert ‘anti-Irish’ racism of London. I say covert, but it wasn’t always so. Sometimes, it was profoundly explicit. I noted somewhat of a change in the 90s, when being Irish became somewhat trendy, but I had left by that time.
You were clever enough to fly over that small island and head towards that other small island, on the east coast of the USA. My first trip to Manhattan was in 1979. I spent three months there, ending with a Joni Mitchell concert in ‘Forest Lawns’. I was hooked, on New York I mean (and Joni). It was also, on the flight back to London, that I read Octavio Paz’s book on Marcel Duchamp, my undoing. London was really over for me, from that point forward, but it would take another 7 years before I could project myself back to the ‘Big Apple’.
I like things taking their own sweet time.
Yes, I am beginning to look again at Boris Vian, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, and of course Duchamp, but all, somewhat, through the influence of David Shields. The other usual suspects will be there too, of course, Joyce, Goya and others, including the hapless Marcus Sarjeant, who took pot-shots at the queen during the trooping of the guard in 1981, with a starting pistol. This somewhat motley crew will take me towards the idea, this description of us evolving from those edges of sexual expression, called homosexuality, through gender dysphoria and fluidity towards the neutered self, possibly as a byproduct of endocrine disruptors. This will also evolve out of a story called ‘Rack & Ruin’, two more hapless spectators, who themselves might be barking mad.
This writer, Rob Baker, wrote two very nice pages about my work in this book, putting me alongside Sue Coe and others. He was one of the earliest writers to recognise what was going on there, relative to the scourge and the making of art.
Did I mention that a lot of this description might take 'email' and 'Immediate Message' form, and even include comments left on this very organ?
Mr. Creosote's "take the lot" sounds like good advice. I am there with you. I am somewhat aware that I am making this thing very complicated, but what can I say? The nature of the beast, and all that, in a try to say it all, and see how far you get, sort of way.
It's sort of becoming a culmination of everything I have been thinking about, making art about, and writing about for the past 40 years. I am not going to worry if it is 'right' or 'wrong'. Shoot one's wad and have done with it, seems to be the recipe for whatever this turns out to be. I will leave the 'double blind' testing to the science bods, in a 'proof of the pudding' sort of way.
www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/t-magazine/collectors-gay-arti...
Fear of the Evil Eye
Rack: This may be behind a pay wall (to the attached NYT link). I think of you in the same breath as all of these people, and indeed in a higher octave because the work is so raw and pure, and I lived with it during impossible days and it helped to save me.
Glad you’re getting back to your first loves. They will help arm you.
Have been strangely happy and perhaps embarking on a whole new chapter that I’m reluctant to elucidate for fear of the evil eye.
And have been enjoying summer more than I remember doing so. It may be that I’ll just take any old season now. ‘I’ll take the lot,’ to quote Mr. Creosote.
Hope you’re well and that the work goes well.
Ruin: No, I could see it. We have a 'New York Times' account. Of course, there is a conjoined bitter/sweet reaction to this article, this late re-evaluation of Aids-related art, these new collectors and talk of inspiring the auction houses to re-think their value. But that’s it really, it is about the market, almost all of the artists being dead, and those of us who are still here have been dealing with disbanding what we have made for fear of it bankrupting ourselves, all that storage, all that preservation. Thankfully we have words still, and these can be collected without much self-sacrifice. Actually, they are the opposite of that, they are a source of some joy, and even a centering device, so that the normal unravelling, that compounding of years and the influence of the disease, becomes neither here nor there. It can supply that urgency to ‘kick against the pricks’, that “embarking on a whole new chapter”, you speak of. I say fuck that evil eye. My impetus is to drag those twin buggers across the coals too, until they give out, like everything else. Bring on your best, bring on your worst, I am ready.
I find the unravelling to be sweet, as it would happen.
There was a lot of saving each other in those early days in New York. I felt as cack-handed as I have always managed to be, there’s very little sophistry there, I know. It was the best I could do at the time, the most honest way I could honour us. Manhattan was liberating, especially after the covert ‘anti-Irish’ racism of London. I say covert, but it wasn’t always so. Sometimes, it was profoundly explicit. I noted somewhat of a change in the 90s, when being Irish became somewhat trendy, but I had left by that time.
You were clever enough to fly over that small island and head towards that other small island, on the east coast of the USA. My first trip to Manhattan was in 1979. I spent three months there, ending with a Joni Mitchell concert in ‘Forest Lawns’. I was hooked, on New York I mean (and Joni). It was also, on the flight back to London, that I read Octavio Paz’s book on Marcel Duchamp, my undoing. London was really over for me, from that point forward, but it would take another 7 years before I could project myself back to the ‘Big Apple’.
I like things taking their own sweet time.
Yes, I am beginning to look again at Boris Vian, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry, and of course Duchamp, but all, somewhat, through the influence of David Shields. The other usual suspects will be there too, of course, Joyce, Goya and others, including the hapless Marcus Sarjeant, who took pot-shots at the queen during the trooping of the guard in 1981, with a starting pistol. This somewhat motley crew will take me towards the idea, this description of us evolving from those edges of sexual expression, called homosexuality, through gender dysphoria and fluidity towards the neutered self, possibly as a byproduct of endocrine disruptors. This will also evolve out of a story called ‘Rack & Ruin’, two more hapless spectators, who themselves might be barking mad.
This writer, Rob Baker, wrote two very nice pages about my work in this book, putting me alongside Sue Coe and others. He was one of the earliest writers to recognise what was going on there, relative to the scourge and the making of art.
Did I mention that a lot of this description might take 'email' and 'Immediate Message' form, and even include comments left on this very organ?
Mr. Creosote's "take the lot" sounds like good advice. I am there with you. I am somewhat aware that I am making this thing very complicated, but what can I say? The nature of the beast, and all that, in a try to say it all, and see how far you get, sort of way.
It's sort of becoming a culmination of everything I have been thinking about, making art about, and writing about for the past 40 years. I am not going to worry if it is 'right' or 'wrong'. Shoot one's wad and have done with it, seems to be the recipe for whatever this turns out to be. I will leave the 'double blind' testing to the science bods, in a 'proof of the pudding' sort of way.
www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/t-magazine/collectors-gay-arti...