well you said a mouthful, “Freedom balanced with an ongoingreflection on ethics. All of this also tellsme little about how to practically sharemyopportunitieswithotherswhoareequallydeservingyetleftout.ForthisIneedthehelpoftheinstitutionsIcollaboratewith,andforthatmanyofthoseinstitutionsalsoneedtochange.” your interpretationhereofthepredicamentofregnummutationemcanadianartists (i’mpurtywellpersuaded thateschewin’ the statusquo isno longeravantgarde.côtégardemaybe!) leadsus rightaroun’ to individual agency inourownpractice. whatwouldyouerilearnifwemadealistofeveryinstitutionthat’sinvitedustomakesomethin’fer‘em?whichinstitutionswerefoundedasaplaceofregnummutationemtowhichtheyknowmy/yourworkwouldcontribute?inwhichinstitutionswasmy/yourparticipationaburpfromabottom feederpresented inanecologically-exactaquarium fer theviewin’pleasureof theirdemographic?ifathousandregnummutationemartistsmadethesamesurveyoftheiractivitieswouldwehavelearnedanythingwedon’talreadyknowaboutourpowertoshiftthedecisionsofinstitutionstoward inclusivity? withrareexceptions iwouldsaymyeffectivenessfersuchashiftiszilch. ibelieveinthepowerofoutsidedgroupstoformcollectivestoforcesuchashift. me,aloner,ane’er-do-well,imeanderinandouttagroups.me,aloner,ane’er-do-wellwishin’shecouldbeatompainetype:writethegloriouscalltoregnummutationemandthen,asdidhe,sinktothebottom fromwhenceshemomentarilyascended. thishistrionic fantasynowexpressed there isanotheraspectofchange,achangetowhichthefinestpoetsofourlocales(nicolebrossardcomestomind;hereinwinnipegcollinsmithandmeiracook)devotethemselves:regnummutationemoftheenglishlanguage.ifsomeonedeclaresideasusin’thedominanttermsoftheday,theideasareindangerofbecomin’objects,billiardballsferamateursandprofessionalsaliketocontestadinfinitum. myallegiance iswith thepoets: if aword, aphrase, ametaphor, a logic is set askewthe reader candiscover theboundariesof their ownassumptions,perhapswish ferwhatever isbeyond thoseboundaries;perhapseven re-interpret their surroundin’s. perhaps make a choice between mainstream representation and regnum mutationem representation–notnecessarilyinamomentousway,butasapracticerunthatjustmightcomeinhandysomeday.fergivethisdigression:–erisitaconfession–erisitself-protection---erisitaggression?whydoiinsistuponspellin’wordsasiftheyarebein’spokenwithasouthernaccent[andavoidanceofupperclass/caseasifiamchannelin’e.e.cummings]?howisitthatihaveretainedasouthernaccentwhenileftthedeepsouthin1962?it’sanalogoustothis:myunclenormanwasabombardierinwwii.hedroppedbombsongermanswhilebackathomeinfloridahisbelovedgrandmotherworriednightanddayabouthissafety,expressin’thisintheonlylanguagesheeverspoke,german.unclenormanwasawarhero(paradean’all).oncewhenhewasdeaddrunk,afeatureofhislifestylefereighty-fouryears, istolehiswings.bythisimeanliterallyistolealittlesilverpin(hehad“earnedhiswings,”thispin,in1943,theyearofmybirth.).theperfectlyengravedsilverpinhadamericaneaglewingswithabombwherethebirdbodywouldnaturallybe.untiltheclaspbrokeialwaysworethispin.asamementostultitia–asouveniroffolly.areminderthatiandanyonewhocaredtothinkaboutthepinareateverymomentinsomewayparticipatin’inthefolliesofthepowerful,livin’inthecontradictionsthattheirgreedsetsup.dumb-asssouthernismsareamementostultitia.

A manifesto has come to light,A NOVEL IN 3 EPISODES. WRITTEN BY BODGAN CHETA, JILLIAN FLECK AND JD MERSAULT. INTERLOPERS & GUEST ARTISTS DR. JEANNE RANDOLPH AND JACOB WREN. THIS EPISODE WAS MADE BY JD MERSAULT. TELEPLAY BY DR. JEANNE RANDOLPH AND JACOB WREN. PRINT DESIGN BY ASHLEY BEDET. EDITED BY SU YING STRANG. RESIDENCY AND PUBLICATION PRODUCED BY THE NEW GALLERY IN CALGARY, AB. A SPECIAL THANKS TO OUR FUNDERS:

The Limits of SincerityA NIHILIST, A STOIC, AN ATHLETE AND AN ARTIST WALK INTO A BAR….TELEPLAY BY DR. JEANNE RANDOLPH AND JACOB WREN | PART 2 OF 3JW:TodayIpostedonFacebook:“Theideayoucandowhateveryouwantinthenameofartisaparticularlypureformofprivilege.”Someonereplied:“Idon’tnecessarilyagreewithyou.”AndIrepliedtothem:“Yes,Icouldprobablyalsounderstandthat.Ihaveoftentriedtohavemaximumfreedominmakingmywork.AtthesametimeI’mengagedinanongoingreflectionaboutartandethics.AndI’mnotperfectandalsomakemistakes.”ItisarroganttosayIcanbasicallywriteanywhere,thatwritingcomesfairlyeasilytomeandforthemostpartIenjoyit(whichofcoursesaysnothingaboutthequalityoftheresults.)Tofeeldelightedbyone’ssituationasawriterisanideathatisperhapsoftenglossedoverwiththeimageofthesufferingartist(Ihavenorighttothisdelight, Imustearnmystatusasanartistthroughmymisery.)Ialsostrugglewithratherseveredepressionandwritingeverydayseemstobethebestwaytokeepthedepressionsomewhatundercontrol.(FormeitworksmuchbetterthananySSRI.)Somanycontradictionsandparadoxes,somanyflavorsofguiltanditsabsence.

Formethebiggestchangeinmythinkingaroundartinthepastfewyearsismyfairlyrecent,yetoverwhelming,feelingthatartistoowhite.Thatothervoicesaren’tbeingheardandthatI’mmorepartoftheproblemthanIampartofthesolution.Iwasawareofthisbeforebutbecauseoftheinternet–thingsIreadaboutBlackLivesMatterandIdleNoMore,somanyarticlesaboutstructural inequality inartandintheworld– ithasreallycometotheforefrontofmyunderstandingandself-questioning.IamtakingtentativestepsinhowIspeakaboutthesetopicsbecauseIdon’twanttoletmyprivilegetrickmeintothinkingIcanjustsaywhateverIthinkwithoutunderstandingmuchmorethanIcurrentlydo.ButafewtimeswhenIhavebroughtupthisissueIhavebeenaccusedoflettingmywhiteguiltrunawaywithme.Inonesense,Ifeelit’sjustawayoftellingmetoshutup.Inanothersense,IfeelIdohavetoomuchof‘thefervorofthenewlyconverted’andsomethingsI’vesaidmighthavebeentoomuch.(Ithinkit’simportantforoppressedgroupstotakeupasmuchspaceaspossible,whichalsomeansthatit’simportantformeasastraightwhitemantotakeupless.)But,tobehonest,I’mreallynotsurehowtothinkinandaroundthisquestionofwhite(male)guilt.IbelieveinmanywaysI’mimplicitlypartofanunjustsystem,andthereforeitisunderstandablethatIwouldfeelsomehonestguilt.Atthesametime,guiltisconservative,itdoesn’tnecessarilyleadtoaction.SowhenIamspeakingoutagainstinjusticesitalsoseemsstrangetomethatIwouldbeaccusedofdoingsooutofguilt.Ireallydothinkitisanongoingtangle.ButmaybetherearethingsIhaven’tyetreadonthesequestionsthatwillhelpmeinthefuture.

Iwonderifthefeelingthatbeinganartistispointlessispartlyawayofcoveringupsomeguiltthatitisinfactanincredibleprivilegeandhasthepotentialtobepurelydelightful.Butthereisthedelightofbeinganartistandthenalltheconfusingcomplexitiesofdealingwiththeartsystem:schools,galleries,magazines,etc.Ibelieveifyoumakeartthateffectivelychallengesthestatusquo(whichisextremelydifficulttodo)thereisafairlyhighchanceitwillbemarginalized.I’veoftenhadthefeelingthattheprizeformakingsomethingreallyamazingistobetoldyou’renotallowedin.So“thesituationwheretheartistcanbehappymakin’thingsbecausetheaudienceishappywithwhattheartistmakes”mightbeforartiststhatareabitlesscriticalofthestatusquothanIhopetobe.Andyet,atthesametime,inrecentyearsIhavebeenstartingtohavemoresuccess.Ifeel,sofar,it’smainlya‘preachingtothechoir’kindofsuccess–myworkfinallyfindingthepeoplewhomoreorlessagreewithmeanyway.ButI’vealsoalwaysbeencriticalof‘preachingtothechoir’asawaytodismisssomething.Becauseevenwhenpeopleseemtoagreeinsomemoregeneralsense,asyougetmoreintothedetailsofthematteryoufindthereareactuallymanyaspectsthey

verymuchdisagreeabout,andthesedifferencesarewheretheproductivedifficultyofpoliticsandartmightbegintohappen.

JR: yes, so many contradictions and paradoxes, so many flavours of guilt and itsabsence!inapioneer,consumeristsociety(e.g.canada,notfrance,italy,englandergermany–thatiknowof,becauseofalifetimeconfinedtothewesterntradition)isitaprivilegetomakeanalytical,experimental,ambiguousculturalproductionsofanykindthatchallengethestatusquo?idon’texpectanycanadianwritertogeta

$500,000advanceferananalytical,experimental,ambiguousbookthatchallengesthestatusquo,erfertheartgalleryofontariotopurchasesuchawork.andimopewhenmypracticeiscomparedto“preachin’tothechoir.”iamnotpreachin’tothe

choir,iamsingin’inthechoir.ivaluethe(sprinkledacrosscanada,afloatonseaweedbutpickedup,notpickled,pickedupbyafewbrainytypesinengland)ohlet’ssaythreehundredpeople(ifitriedibetchaiknowalltheirnames)whoseimaginationsandintellectsareenlivenedbymywritin’andperformances.if any of us aremarginalized that sayswhat it says about the cultural gatekeepers panderin’ to escapism. i’mnotmarginalized. i’mabottomfeeder. anythingupthereonthesurface,and idomeansurface,anythingthemainstreamisofferin’(andthinkin’)doesn’tlooksohottome.andworkin’toattainit?sweetsufferin’jesussparemetheeffort. myprivilege,however, indeed,beganwithmyfamily:uppermiddleclasswhitehighlyeducated.erdidit?bein’toldfromdayone“wewantedaboy.youweresupposedtobeaboy.”myholdin’environment:1940’sand1950sdeepsouth,theepicentreofviolentracismandmisogyny.intheu.s.a.in1961whenigraduatedfromhighschoolthenumberofwomenstudentsinuniversitieswasnineteenpercentofthetotalenrollment.intheu.s.a.in1965whenigraduatedfromuniversityninepercentofmedicalschoolstudentswerewomen.whatdoesthissay?itsaysthatiamoldandtimeshavechangedferwhitewomenseekingcarnivorestatusinthefoodchainofhighereducation.atlastihaveachievedmiddleclassearnin’power.soisquandermyprivilegebyworkin’asfewdaysasicanresponsiblymanage(responsibletomypatients,nottomyfamily’ssecurityertheirmaterialcomfort).thepointofmyblabbin’adnauseumaboutmyownsituation(actuallyiamblabbin’adnarcissisium)isthattheconceptofprivilegeworksinsomelanguagegames(sociology,politicalpowerandjustice,statistics)butisconfusingwhenappliedintrospectivelyandsubjectively.asapsychoanalyticthinker,iproclaimthatconsumersocietyhascompletelydistortedtheideaofsubjectivityandthatmainstreammedicalscientismisindenial.maybethislatterparanoidaccusationisrelevanttothechoiceofpersistentwritin’comparedtossris.whateverelseimaybesayin’ ibequeath to the imaginationsof thepeoplewhoare readin’ this. whatcanwedoabout inequalityandinjusticeinthearts?don’taskme.idon’tanswerquestions.iask‘em.iassumelike-mindedcitizensinallthemyriadwaysoflifecanadaincludes(“ourchoir”)areinchin’alongasbestastheycantowardequalityandjusticeineducation,healthandfreedomsfromprejudiceandprivation.myparttowardtheseidealsistothink.icanthinkrealgood.otherwiseiamuseless.

JW:I’mcompletelyfascinatedbythis:“theconceptofprivilegeworksinsomelanguagegames(sociology,politicalpower and justice, statistics) but is confusingwhen applied introspectively and subjectively.” Yes, confusing isdefinitelyagoodwordforit.Butitisnotaconfusionweshouldglossoveroravoid.Atthesametime,IoftenfinditsodifficulttomuddlethroughthatIdon’twanttoevenattemptit.Privilegeisrelativeanditisaspectrum.Thereisnoabsoluteprivilege,thoughthe1%workveryhardtogetthemselvesasclosetoitaspossibleand,whatdoIknow,maybetheyevensucceed.(Atleastuntilwegetourguillotinesinorder.)Andeveryonehasdifficulties.Mydifficultiesdon’tnecessarilytellusanythingaboutmyrelativeprivilege,thoughmyabilitytoweatherthemmight.Butforme,knowingI’mprivileged,intermsofart,meansIhavetoquestionmyselfasfullyaspossible.AsTaniaCanaswrites,inanothercontext:

thisiswritingaboutithere.Ihaveneverbeenmuchofanactivist.AndImightbegoodatthinking,butIstillfeelmythinkinginandaroundthesequestionscouldusesomework.Another quote,thisonefromCorneliusCastoriadis(whydoIlovequotessomuch):

Freedom is activity, theactivity that knowshow to set itsownproper limits.Philosophizingisthought.Itisthetypeofthoughtthatknowshowtorecognizethattherearethingswedon’tknowandwillneverknow...

Whatbiasesandintentions,evenifyouconsiderthese‘good’intentions,doyoucarrywithyou?Whatsocialpositionality(andpower)doyoubringtothespace?Knowhowmuchspaceyoutakeup.Knowwhentostepback.

AtthesametimeI’mstillmoreorlessworkinginanavant-gardetraditionthatisverymuchaboutbreakingrulesanddoingwhateverthefuckIwant.Morecontradictionsandparadoxes.Freedombalancedwithanongoingreflectiononethics.Allofthisalsotellsmelittleabouthowtopracticallysharemyopportunitieswithotherswhoareequallydeservingyet leftout. For this Ineed thehelpof the institutions I collaboratewith, and for thatmanyof thoseinstitutionsalsoneedtochange.

WhereI’mtryingtogetto,andIdon’tquiteknowhowtofindmywaythere,isthatIactuallydon’twanttogiveupwhateverprivilegeImighthave.AndIdon’tthinkIshouldpretendthatIdo.Iwanttotrytoliveitethically.Iwanttoshare itasmuchaspossible. Iwant tocollaborate (eventhough Ioftenfindcollaborationalmostunbearablydifficult.)ButIdon’twantmylifetobecomemoredifficult.Idon’twantapoliticsthat’saboutgivingupthingsinthenameofjustice.(Though,inanenvironmentalsense,Idothinkwewillallhavetosimplyuseless.)Iwantapoliticsthatsaysscarcityisanartificialconstruct,thereisenoughforeveryone,andweneedtospreadtheword.Thereisenoughforeveryone,butthereisnotenoughforeveryone’sgreed.Forbetterorworse,allI’mreallydoingabout

Somethingaboutpersistence,howtheonlythingthatworksispersistence,alsomakesmewonderaboutlimitsandrules.Oneofthewayswefindthestrengthtobepersistentistolearn

aboutourownlimits,andtosetsomerulesforourselvesthathelpuskeepgoing.(AndnowI’lltrytoeffortlesslyslipfrompersistenceinlifetopersistenceinartwithoutanyonenoticing.)Itrytowriteeveryday.Itdoesn’thavetobegood,itdoesn’thavetobealot,evenjustasentenceorafewwords,butitkeepswhateverI’mworkingonaliveinmymindandkeepsmewonderingwhatitisandcouldbe.Then,attimes,Icompletelybreakthisruleanddon’twriteanythingformonthsandmonths.Andthatalsoseemstobegood.RulesareforwhenyouneedthemandI’mnotsureit’sgoodtoneedthemallthetime.(Forexample:Ibelieve‘donotkill’isagoodruleexceptwhenwe’resharpeningourguillotinestocutthe1%backdowntosize.)Andrecognizing“that thereare thingswedon’tknowandwillneverknow,”perhapsthat’swhatsinginginthechoirisreallyabout.ItremindsmeabitofthisreallystupidjokeIheardasachildandneverforgot:

Q:Whydoesthehummingbirdhum?A:Becauseitdoesn’tknowthewords.

JR: maybe this’llmake you nervous – but i agreewith (and appreciate theway inwhich you’ve articulated it)everythangyoujus’said.castoriadiswasjustthecoolestcat.whaddabrain.whaddasoul.[singin’--]

disisfercastoriadis:ifhehadencephalitisiwantsomemakemehumnothumdruminfectmepleasecorneliushehealiusthesickenin’wellfromsloppythinkin’takethempinkin’shearsmakeabeautifulcutacrosstherugofideologicaltugandtugthatrugoutfromunderthesunstopme,someone!stopthistalk

i’dratherhum...

JW:Itdoesn’tmakemenervousatall,Ialwayslikeitwhenweagree.And,yes,therearenoindividualsolutionstocollectiveproblems.IhavealsohadverylittleluckchanginganyoftheinstitutionsI’veworkedwith,butIdothinknowthereis,onceagain,akindofzeitgeistandsomethingsarechangingintermsofinclusivityinthearts.NotnearlyasmuchasIwouldliketosee,soIverymuchhopethatitallkeepsgoing.(And,thenagain,thereareatleastafewzeitgeists:thereisalsoarightwingandracistzeitgeistthatIfindutterlyterrifying.)WheneverI’vetriedtopredictthefutureI’vebeenwrong:IneverforesawtheendoftheIrishtroubles,ortheendofSouthAfricanapartheid,orthefalloftheBerlinWall,orthatahandsomeblackmanwouldbecomethefaceofU.S.imperialismduringmylifetime.MaybesomeoneouttherehasacrystalballbutIcertainlydonot.

So: Idon’tknowhowtosolveanysocialproblems,changeanyinstitutionsorprepareforwhat’scoming(sinceIhonestlydon’tknowwhat’scoming.)ItseemsIamreally,reallyanartist.Or,asIsometimesputit:toomuchofanartistformyowngood.Backonthetopicofpersistence,I’veoftenthought,almosttomyshame,thatIcontinuebeinganartistbecauseIhonestlydon’tknowhowtodoanythingelseandcan’timaginelearning.ButunlikeyouI’mnotsurehowcontentIfeelaboutbeingexcludedfromthemainstream.I’veoftensaidthatIwanttomakeworkthat’sasthematicallychallengingandformallyexperimentalaspossible,whileatthesametimereachingasmanypeopleaspossible.ButInolongerknowexactlywhyIwant,oratleastusedtowant,this.Perhapsitisonlyambition.Andperhaps“asmanypeopleaspossible”actuallyisn’tthatmany.IfeelmostofthepeoplewhosurroundmehavenoideahowambitiousIactuallyam,partiallybecauseIdomybesttohideit,andself-sabotagetakescareoftherest.There’saMaurizioCattelanquoteI’vealwaysliked:“Whenyou’reanartistyouhavetoadmittoyourselfthatyouwanttobefamous.”BecauseIdothinkit’salmostadefinitionofart:makingsomethingandwantingotherstoseeit.Forme,ifyoudon’twantotherstoseeitthenit’snotexactlyart,it’ssomethingelse,maybesomethingbetter,Idon’tknow,maybesomethingthat’smorepartofthenaturalflowofeverydaylife.Isometimesthinkgettingtogetherwithfriendstosinginachoireveryweekmightbeakindofcommunalartthatisbetterthanart,sinceitmightmakemefeellessalone.Writingoftenfeelsgreat,butatthesametimeitdoesgenerallymakemefeelalone.

Thatweareall“ateverymomentinsomewayparticipatin’inthefolliesofthepowerful,livin’inthecontradictionsthattheirgreedsetsup.”Whatcouldbemoretrue.And,yes,therearenoindividualsolutionstocollectiveproblems.Igenerallyfearthisistheactualpoliticalroleofthecategoryof“art,”toseparatetheartistfromcollectiveendeavorsinwhichherorhisresistancemightbemorepoliticallyeffective.Somuchofmylifehasbeentakenupwithattemptstomakeworkcollectivelyorincollaborationwithothersbut,attheendoftheday,IbasicallyhavetoadmittomyselfthatI’malonewolf.Andacceptsomeoftherelativepowerlessnessthatcomesalongwiththisfact.Privilegeandpowerlessness,contradictionsandparadoxes.Theendless,joyoustangleofbeinganartist.AndthendoIhaveanythingtosayaboutpoetry.Twenty-fiveyearsagoIstartedasapoetandaplaywright.AtsomepointIdidn’twanttobeeitheranymore.TenyearsagoIhadtheideatoreinventmyselfasanovelist(whichhassortofworkedout.)Whydidn’tIwanttobeapoetanymore?BecauseIfeltpoetsweretoomarginalandIwantedtobefamous.CanIactuallyadmitthisinprint?Oradmitittomyself?Inordertostopbeingapoet,formanyyearsImoreorlessstoppedevenreadingpoetry.ButrecentlyI’vestartedagainandhaveoftenbeenmoved,attimeshadmythinkingaltered.IrecentlylovedthebookBodymapbyLeahLakshmiPiepzna-Samarasinha.(WhichIboughtinCalgarywhenwegaveourreadingatShelfLife.)Iespeciallylovedtheselines:

Thisborderisro

ttenmeat,ahallucinati

on,awaveringline

astupididea.Ca

n’tweblinkandit’llb

egone?

Anargumentmightbetoconvincesomeoneofsomething.Butasongisalso,always,justforthepurepleasureofsinging.Andforthepleasureofsingingtogether.

The strangest thing about violently killing someone is that nothing happens. You can eat a good breakfast and walk through the streets afterwards, smiling at young women and smoking a cigarette. You can read Ulysses to your wife at night before bed. You can tell your children not to fear the dark. There is no lightning. There is no blindness.

Y o u d o n o t d i e . Lisa made a film. She put over six-hundred hours into the filming, editing, and post-production process over the course of two years.

The film was critical: it was about the challenges facing the creative economy, politicized youth movements and their goals, the position of the arts in the developing world, and highlighted the privilege of the college-educated artist. By all accounts, the film was well made and Lisa had a lot of talented help. It was screened at major international indie film festivals and favourably reviewed. It created a dialogue about some important local topics on a national, and then an international scale. But when she organized a screening in her home town, about which and

where the film was made, she was surprised that only twelve people showed up, two of whom were in the film. Even less bought the DVD.

Lisa thought seriously about making another film, maybe one that had nothing to do with art.

He was a skilled painter with considerable rendering talent and patience, but it had been years since he’d done any serious work.

Eventually he just got sick of the lifestyle. When he thought about it, most people Jones knew were drunks. He didn’t think he was a drunk

himself, but knew that he had a serious dependency on alcohol. He usually had a six pack before dinner, but he worked a stressful job. The

beer helped him wind down. Jones’ close friends were mostly artists, none of whom were successful, and most of these people, in addition to

their alcoholism, also had drug habits. Cocaine mostly. He didn’t even know what successful meant anymore, because as he got older and

older, his standards for artistic relevance evaporated. He had read a lot of books; he understood the longings of the younger people who were

still trying at this thing, but it didn’t feel the same for him. Deep down, he believed he had a chance at redemption, somewhere, in some way, but he didn’t know how to reach it. Of all his brothers and sisters, he was the oldest and made the least money. He was ten years older than his father was when he married his mother, but the thought of marriage still scared the hell out of him. He looked towards the next generation with a mixture of jealousy, contempt, and lust.

She came in and she was crying already, not because she was upset, because of the hail. It had scared the emotions out of her, ones she wasn’t prepared to express that day, despite what had happened.

I got lucky and finally had a travel grant come in for an artist’s retreat overseas. My practice involves collecting plants and other horticultural

materials and the climate where I live isn’t exactly diverse, so it was a really good opportunity. When I got to Portugal I was surprised to find that all of the other people in the residency were middle-aged women, all white, and all married and raising children. I tried to make small talk with them when I could, but most of them just wanted to talk about their hatred of their jobs back home and the fact that they were so happy to finally be on a vacation. Three weeks later, after exhibiting my work at the conclusion of the residency (it basically just came down to me giving

a lecture about plants in the area) I flew home. When I got back and my residency came up in conversation with my other artist friends, hardly

any of them remembered that I had gone, and none of them had seen the work I uploaded to my website. I didn’t stay in contact with any of

the women I collaborated with. Molly grew up in the north-east part of the city; every two blocks there was a strip mall, a parking lot, or beige, brutalist buildings. Her high school had the highest teen pregnancy rate in Canada, but she

managed to dodge that bullet by being a serious Christian. She came from a broken family, but like most of her friends, she didn’t spend a

lot of time at home, but rather at youth group. When she got older, she wanted to go to art school. Molly was a talented artist, but because of

inherited poverty, her art was always secondary to her two day jobs. She hoped that she could one day work in the arts community, but not

in a deliberate way – she just didn’t want to have to work retail like her father. When she stopped making any kind of art to focus on her

administration job, no one noticed. The fact that she’ll never be able to pay off her loans with the salary she makes at an artist-run centre hasn’t

hit her yet. She still paints in secret, but keeps her canvasses under her bed, wrapped in plastic bags.

“Oh, no, no, I couldn’t go, I don’t want to legitimize it, you know?”

“I know, I know. I sent flowers.”All the anthologies you paid hundreds of dollars for in school sit on your bookshelf. You can’t sell them back, even for a fraction of their

value. When you move to avoid gentrification and rising rent, something which happens at least once a year, each time you think about just throwing them out. Eventually, you do.

Have you actually been to one of these artist talks? Most of the speakers are either so off in their own world that they aren’t listening to anyone else, or so shy and lilting that they won’t speak up and

defend their ideas. I get the feeling that everyone is just waiting to talk about themselves, and if they don’t get the chance, they complain that the other people talk too much. You either speak or you don’t, and either way no one really hears you. Every chance to speak is really just an attempt to seem a little more important. Somehow, everyone has learned to suppress

the reflex which causes their eyes to roll. At the grocery store, I noticed a tin can with an advertisement on the side, and a slot for donating money on the top. It was for the charity for local epileptics. All the people on the front were out of shape, and

looked to be under some kind of hidden burden.Dennis’ art was honest, but it wasn’t good. Unfortunately, Dennis conflated the two. It’s not that he wasn’t talented, but one of his problems was that he thought too highly of himself. He became

obsessed with presenting what he thought and felt in an authentic way, and this focus overcame all others. Everything needed to be real, to be true, to be sincere. Ultimately, what he failed to see was that what he thought and felt wasn’t actually interesting, unique, informed, insightful, and was never particularly well-executed in the resulting artwork. This was obvious to everyone but Dennis. Dennis eventually stopped making art focused on being authentic because of the very vocal criticism of his work: it was self-absorbed, myopic, and entirely vestigial. Instead, Dennis started thinking about challenging social issues and how he could talk about something that mattered. He also started thinking seriously about how his latent homosexuality was complicating his relationships with women. Dennis moved to a different city where no one knew about his past, where he now works at an art school. He teaches drawing.

I’ve never had any formal artistic training, but I’ve always been a creative person. I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl. My

undergrad was in business, but only because my parents convinced me I needed a job to support myself before I could develop my hobbies. Now I

work in the oil and gas industry as a technical writer. I make 70K a year sitting at my desk writing internal memos. The giant bay windows in

my house face east, towards the office buildings downtown. When I get home at night and sit down at my table to eat, I eat in the shadow of the

skyscrapers. When I go to sleep, if I put my head at a certain spot in my bed, I can see the exact building where I work. I tell myself I never have

enough time to write the things I want, like finishing my novel or polishing my short-story collection. What takes up more time than my

actual job is the time I spend hating myself for wanting safety. On weekends I go hiking with my ex-boyfriend.

There is a whole spectrum of real human interactions that is made impossible, or at least complicated and

problematized, due to artistic deceits. The decline in Greek sculpture is understood as the point where

the statues begin to smile and have an expression in their eyes. It was as if when things became more real, they became worse. It was as

if the idea mattered more than the reality. Over Christmas, you decided to sit down and finally do some real reading again. You were in a kind of post art-school slump —

struggling through the mire of who you were as a human — and you figured that brushing up on your reading could give you some purpose. You read the old book cover to cover. It was one of your favourites. You hoped that you’d learn something new, or see something in a different way, but it was really just an exercise in patience. This was to your credit, but the book didn’t care. You didn’t remember that part you used to like so much, that one on page 94 about the sky. Other half-remembered parts, in the dim corners of your memory, you knew you’d never find. The paper felt old and frail as the lines moved under your fingertips. You put the book away and eventually forgot about it.

He was the best painter that graduated from his program. He was selling work, making a lot of money, and ritzy magazines wanted his paintings in the houses they were photographing. But then, gradually

as he got older, nothing. His career lost speed. He started painting houses, and then driving a hearse on the weekend to make ends meet. In old maps the oceans used to surround the world, rather than being contained by it . Most people who are writers want to be writers more than they actually want to write anything. The reason they want to be writers

is because, on some fundamental level, they believe in the strength of their ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, the latter part

anyway, but we live in a culture that thoroughly reinforces the power of the individual – the ideas of the individual, the power of the individual

to achieve and succeed, the relevance of the individual to shape and understand their reality – and often the opposite is the case. Mostly,

the individual is powerless and their ideas recycled, derivative, and predictable. The individual is too shallow and ineffectual to pursue

even their own interests. The individual’s desperate self-regard is hidden under a facile mask of artistic agency. But how can we blame

each other? Self-absorption is a fundament of our society. Capitalism doesn’t work without it. Maybe art doesn’t work without it either.

Someone’s self-absorption is another person’s justice. I’ve been asked how my memory could be so awful. I have been asked, how can I forget entire, wonderful experiences with the people I’ve loved most?

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said. “I’m not trying to prove anything to anybody.” His eyes moved from me to the table, where they

rested. I put my hand on his, but he moved it away. “I’m just trying to be as human as I can get.”

Yesterday, out of nowhere, I had a sudden memory of being in a public pool while my father was sitting on the edge. I believe it is the

earliest memory I have of him, maybe the only memory I have before a certain, much older age. Is it a real memory or have I manufactured it out of unconscious desire? Memory is not much more than that, even when it is accurate.

Art comes from security. I need to be warm and swaddled by my capabilities and talents to produce anything; I need also to be assured.

Once I’m in this state of perfect equilibrium with my surroundings and mental landscape, I can truly get to work. Unfortunately, this means I make almost nothing. Whether what I make is good or true or real, I don’t know. It’s more like a kind of perverse therapy.

The funeral was in August, but during a hailstorm. The deceased was an engineer; he worked for an oil company downtown. Eventually, the hail became so severe that everyone had to find shelter. The religious

people in the mass were troubled about this, but the reverend himself, a monkish man with a long, thin face, stood over the casket, next to me,

unmoved. He turned his head and looked at me as if to say something, but did not speak. We huddled in the hail, the spires of headstones in

the distance. Honesty is not a virtue in art, or in anything else. The KKK are the most honest people in the world. Deceit is not a virtue either. Remember, one must know and communicate the levels of deceit and honesty they

are comfortable with, and then find a person or community that shares their values. The art community pretends to value honesty, but really, as with any closed group, they all sustain the same kind of illusion: they all lie to each other, and to themselves, about the importance of their work, their MFA, and the fact that their practice is sustained by the very private sector they often decry. They lie about the time they spend on their art, the time they spend on themselves.

When a person looks you in the eye and asks you why you don’t want to live anymore, is there anything sensible that you can say? How much

of your lonely, claustrophobic life can you transmit to another person, through speech or otherwise?

The idea is that being an artist is different from making art. Making art is extremely difficult. It can take a lot of solitude, insanity, stubborn

refusal to go out for drinks or play a video game or be tired after work. It takes studio time instead of bedtime, sickening levels of self-promotion and branding on social media, willingness to accept paradox, lack of chrononormativity, lack of a systematic trajectory in life, critique during

the production and exhibition of one’s work, material and monetary insecurity, and of course, ambiguity in these and all other things. Being

an artist, on the other hand, is easy. What could be easier than spreading paint around on a canvas? Writers have it just as bad as artists in this

respect, if not worse – the mythology surrounding the writer is disgusting. Imagine, then, if someone started writing about art:

what could be more perverse? What kind of monster of denial would do that?

You walked home with wet hair. Often I have insights, but rarely can these insights be useful at all. It’s something like when a person is

in a car crash and they lay there, choking, bleeding to death, and they have some kind of insight about

life. It still can’t save them. They feel it is subtle and serious, maybe they understand something

they could have never grasped before, but no matter how important this might be, they

can’t stay there. Jackie talked on the phone with her distant lover, Ian. Most of what he said she couldn’t understand; the

reception wasn’t very good and she was walking in a busy part of the city. She didn’t ask him to repeat himself because there was no guarantee she’d hear it a second time, and the strain of asking him again and again would no doubt highlight the impossibilities of their relationship. She wanted to hear him, but there was no appropriate time to bring any of this up. There was hardly any time to talk in the first place. Ian was talking at quite a clip about something that seemed important, about which he was very agitated. Jackie mumbled some acknowledgements. The amazing thing was that these conversations

didn’t change anything, even if Jackie didn’t hear a word Ian said. Jackie

wasn’t sure if Ian could hear her either, but he kept on talking.

The loneliness and solitude was key to his overall story. Any time

he tried to have an interaction with

another person; the result

was always doomed, or

comical.

All that one can do, in the face of an ultimately unknowable and unpredictable illness, is show compassion. This compassion

however, for all its selflessness and generosity, is essentially insincere. Insincere in the way that one cannot know another’s suffering, only witness it, only cradle the heads of the wounded, only express condolences to the bereaved. This is the limit of sincerity – it only interacts with the membrane. There’s a distance that isn’t covered by this compassion, a thick membrane of isolation around us all. This of course only leads to our increased alienation. Up on the bridge, his two feet grounded securely, but off the

ground, his perspective resembled a kind of omniscience. However, there was nothing practical or real about this omniscience; it was a game of aesthetics. This sensation, combined with the vertigo, produced a feeling of euphoria. Everything below looked like a real-time map. But for once, he was not a part of the map. He was not inside of the structure that held his legs so firmly in place.

I wondered later if he did die in that office, or if his death was just an elaborate, decade-long performance project.Compliance and artistic merit seldom meet. This is may be a cliché idea, but part of its pith comes from the complexity of the

idea of compliance. Compliance is not simply doing what you’re told – so much of it is just being unaware (even if you aren’t being aware of being unaware) of the implied expectations of your surroundings. For example, if you grew up in a sexist and racist culture and you decide to write a novel about a middle-class, straight, white male going through a divorce, that would be an act of compliance, even though studying literature and writing creatively may not be. Part of the difficulty in navigating this level of complexity is that we are not always aware of which, or whose, ideas we are complying with, and compliance itself depends heavily on context. Ideas that we think of as our own, feelings that we think are genuine, experiences that we’ve had and understand as being unique to us, often are, or can be, simply acts of compliance within the wider culture. Many people, many artists, live their entire lives within the bounds of compliance without even knowing. However, where some people get stuck, and a place where so much worthless art comes from, is that little antechamber beyond the winding halls of compliance. Many remain here forever – it’s an attractive place to be. But this is where the real work begins. Just escaping that maze isn’t enough: you have to go further. Non-compliance itself doesn’t translate into artistic merit. In contemporary art, especially within emerging levels, non-compliance is codified and reified in the same stale, surgical ways. In this way, non-compliance without risk is on the same level as basic compliance. There are many galleries that contain only bland impressionist paintings, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any equally uninspired graffiti artists out there. There are many terrible novels about middle-class divorces, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any superficially ferocious punk rock albums that force-feed us bread-and-butter political sentiments. So before you write your next book, plan your next performance project, or curate your next group show, ask yourself: what am I complying with? And if I don’t think I’m complying with anything, is there any risk in my non-compliance? Risk is a valuable concept because in every real risk, there is a real chance. In a final analysis, this means

either radicalism or disengagement. Personally, I prefer the latter. The day after, I got a random, unsolicited email which was just an image attachment, a scene of a car crash involving a taxi and a wall, the pavement stained in blood. The subject line said, “From earlier today?”

I don’t always tell the truth.There was something in her face which was extremely singular, however weathered. This quality, whatever it was, bore the suggestion

of many passions, and had the effect of cementing her anxieties along the deep lines of her lips, between her lashes, and in every motion of her eyes. The death of the child produced a recurring dream.

Legitimacy is a thing which many people seek, but it can simply be manufactured. This can be done in a number of ways. For instance, the idea of time is a form of manufactured legitimacy: the more time you spend on something the more legitimate it becomes, almost

magically. Time is a concept that we afford a great deal of respect. And yet, time is often a casualty of the digital age – if things don’t happen right away, they seem worthless. If you don’t achieve what you want right away, you feel like a failure. One of the very few good things that art can do is transform our relationship to time. In this way, art can also be a form of manufactured legitimacy. This is why people who gaze desirously into Ellsworth Kelly paintings are left alone to think, or do whatever the hell they’re doing.As the downward trajectory of his life began after art school, rather than leave the community that was sustaining his illusions, he simply delved deeper, entrenched himself further, and as a result became less employable, more nervous, and more ashamed of himself.

It’s like we’ve lost another Great War; the war was about everything, and we’ve just lost it.The engineer was a tall, good-looking, seemingly neurotypical man with a lot of expendable income and a little bit of free time. He was in track and field in high school and college, where he got good marks, had a tight-knit social group, and was surrounded by a stable, supportive family. The amazing thing about him was, despite all of that, he turned out to be a good, honest, and compassionate person.

Is the goal of art to make people feel included? And before you criticize my use of the word goal by saying that art has no goals and that it is inherently a directionless process, keep in mind that you attempt, in your entire career and practice, to try to include everyone. Why do you do this? Are you willing to question this assumption you have made about

inclusion? What is the value of having a voice, versus the value of feeling that you have a voice? And in the end, who is listening? Are you actually listening, or just encouraging other people to speak? I’ve never felt included in my life.

How come you haven’t mentioned your office job? It’s like you’re ashamed of it for some reason. Why? You make money through alienated labour, but this is the condition of so many people that it’s nothing to be worried about. Would you have to admit your art practice isn’t profitable enough to sustain your life? Everyone knows that about everyone

anyway. And didn’t you give it up a long time ago?She had a tendency to construe her disappointments with things outside of her agency, timing, chance, and factors related to other people.Art comes from insecurity. I can only work when I feel desperately alone and anxious, because then I can use my work to transform my situation. Because I seek this constant conflict, I’ll always drift back towards it, even after long bouts of security and otherwise contentment. Fortunately, this means I create a lot of content, because my life is essentially a never-ending roller-coaster of anxiety, guilt, excess and longing, but I’ve sort of started to notice that it all ends up being roughly about the same things. Art i s s trong . Art is t s , l ess so .Whatever disgusting habits I have, it’s all in the service of my creativity.Molly was a twenty-eight-year-old single woman. Always shy and reclusive, Molly first became overly anxious at age twenty-three, shortly after her graduation from art school. Her psychiatrist, Arthur, noted these behaviours, and was convinced that she had a simple, undiagnosed nervous disorder and that a small dose of anxiety medication would suffice. Her condition improved initially with neuroleptic treatment but deteriorated after a while because she refused medication of any kind. She didn’t feel like it was working, and more than anything, it impeded her

abilities to make any kind of art. She would compulsively pick at her scalp when in a nervous episode, something which was as harmless as nail biting at first, but as her condition escalated, became a threat to her safety. Arthur encouraged Molly to address her tensions and anxieties towards her art practice, to make some art informed by the things that were bothering her, but this only seemed to make things worse. It was as if any attention towards the source of the anxiety itself – the art – only further compounded her condition. She developed a bald spot on the back of her head, pink and bloody, from picking her scalp. Arthur lost touch with Molly after she ran out of money for consultations, but he still thinks about her from time to time. His daughter wants to go to art school.

Lisa lived in an old house with colonnades, like in a Turgenev novel. She inherited it from her grandparents, and the mortgage was paid off, so she had almost no living expenses besides her vices. Having no motivation to make anything besides what would amount to a small sum of money per month, she of course started to contemplate

the idea that she should be an artist.Truly honest people are seldom concerned with the truth as a philosophical or artistic concept. Honesty is a practice, a habit, not an idea.It seems unbelievable, a sort of utopian leftist righteous death, but he blew his brains out in his corner office — that’s what I heard. That is exactly how it happened, and it happened recently, here, in this city. It

was a kind of protest of a life he never wanted to live.On the morning of the day he did it, Ian gave himself the closest shave he had ever had in his life. He always disliked the feeling of the blade across his skin, especially his neck. The neck is the most vulnerable part

of the person. Running a blade across it seemed like a kind of perversion, a sample of another life, a way to move along the plot. But that morning he didn’t mind. He felt extremely alive in this moment, because he was thinking of just what being alive meant, and what it meant for that to be taken away.

A travelling artist paints the exact same landscape painting over and over for decades; it’s the only thing he ever paints, despite being talented in figures and draftsmanship. Certain variants of the painting contain

different colors, shades, or characters, but the basic landscape is the same: a sunlit mountaintop above a beautiful, pristine valley. The artist travels across the country, the continent, and eventually the world, selling versions of this painting to people at community markets and art fairs out of the back of his camper van. During this time, the artist makes a reasonably good living, and tens of thousands of people see his work. He feels great about this – if the goal is exposure and money and freedom, he has it. What more could he want? However, it is never put in any gallery or collection and after the artist dies, his work is forgotten. He will never know this, however. A catastrophe is a single occurrence. It does not happen twice.

You clutched the book in front of you, arms crossed against your chest. This is how you walked to and from the class where you studied the book. In class, you wrote down what the professor said about the book,

especially the parts he seemed to want you to write down. You knew this because everyone else would write at the same time. When you weren’t in this class, or another class, you were at home, in your small campus residence, reading the book. There, you also took notes from the book. When you wrote your essay about the book, you referenced the book and explained what the book meant, based on one of the circumscribed critical theories that you were taught in the class. But when it came to talking about the book with others or when asked an open question about it in the lecture, you said nothing. Later, you thought about writing a book yourself, but couldn’t think of what to write.

The admirable thing about the man was that he accepted his fate without ever hoping for another outcome.I wondered if he knew the deceased, because he spoke about him with a kind of passion. There was no one to deliver a formal eulogy, so the reverend was appointed to give the regular, scripted one that the church

must have provided. His voice played from within his throat. He started with a deep sigh and said, “It’s a very lonely world and it seems like nobody cares.” I waited for him to qualify this statement with a verse from the bible, but he never did. He simply lowered his head and said, “Let us pray.”

There’s a very specific phenomenon in this

city where you can be executive director of a decades-old artist run center and be twenty-three years old. This doesn’t happen in many other large cities. It’s a dream for a few weeks, but there’s too much work and it’s never going to get done. These people usually end up burning out after a few years, and joining the business class. That’s what happened to him I think.

“It’s hard to show in a real

gallery because I don’t have the kind of name that would make people want to see my show. Most people can’t pronounce it, so I sound foreign, and you know foreigners only make art about social issues. That shit doesn’t fly downtown.”

To escape – planes have passenger lists, and of course

you need to produce a passport. On a train you need a piece of identification when you show your ticket. The only way is to hire a taxi and offer the driver more than his usual rate, and then tip him to not ask any questions.

He had few vices. He liked to paint and write poetry. He treated everyone he

met with patience and kindness. In short, he was not what you’d think of a man of his privilege. This of course entrenched my hatred for him.

Notice, again, the opening metaphor. The cultural anxiety

about what the future holds and our insulation from each other is reflected in our artistic depictions of the world, as well as our actual knowledge. Now the seas are drawn exactly where they belong. Inside, rather than without.

I left the art conference during the lunch break.

It was awful, just a panel of people hopelessly explaining their practices with almost no audience interaction or context. I thought I’d go somewhere else because I didn’t want to stand around with the other speakers eating those little triangle sandwiches that the catering company brought. When I ran into someone from the audience at a coffee shop near the venue, I confessed to why I left. Not only did they immediately understand, but they explained to me that this was the norm with these kinds of lectures – people only show up to network. No one is actually listening. We’ll all face the same existential crises eventually, if we haven’t faced them already. Can’t we be allies?

Often critical thinking means not being swayed by emotion. This of course is a kind of tyranny and should be recognised as such. To be a critical thinker means not being swayed

by things other than pure reason or objectivity, and yet at the highest levels of philosophical and critical thought, hardline objectivist theories are regularly met with ridicule. Everything is just a language game, where words only point to other words.

“ I t r y t o a v o i d m e m e n t o s , ” h e t o l d u s .

Professor August Hydemen was a fearsome figure. He

encouraged this interpretation. When he introduced himself he would not say, “Hello, my name is August,” or even, “Hello, I am Professor Hydeman.” He would simply say, in his stern voice, “I am Hydeman.” One day in his art history class, a first-year student named Molly asked a question: “Hydeman,” she said, “do you think the fact that this painting was made by a woman should change our interpretation of it?” Hydeman, not missing a beat, casually exhaled his answer out of the side of his mouth. “No,” he said simply. He moved on teaching the course. Molly expected him to follow this up, or to shed light on his response in some way, but he never did. The corner office was quiet. We sat in the dark. It was a Friday night. He had never seemed so alone.

It was like when I would stay up late at night to watch TV as a child. I would stare into the screen and try to make shapes out of the static. Later, when I woke up on the couch drenched in sweat, I could see the

shapes in the corners of my vision. Jackie, in a reckless, youthful swell of emotion, got the word “love” tattooed on her arm. This was something she was intensely embarrassed about in her adult life, but the reason she did it remained still, suspended in amber: she aligned herself with

romanticism rather than survival. And it was her failure to see beyond this that led to her constant seduction: thinking it was an opportunity for escape from pain, she failed to see it as it was – essentially deceptive and coercive. Her innate romanticism was strengthened by heavy doses of sentimentalist pabulum, which she absorbed constantly through

contemporary art. She was always happy when the poor and virtuous eventually surmounted the wealthy and wicked. She was always happy when the lovers were reunited in the end. This of course would lead naturally to her eventual detachment and disillusionment. She would become like so many others, but for now she remained ideal, and because of this, perfectly exploitable. The cycle continued. When I saw her for the first time a feeling of hunger came over me, even though I had just eaten.

Strong desire can have the effect of rendering a person into parts, similar to how a talented sculptor

or musician can listen to a song or look at a sculpture and identify every note or stone. Once a person is transfigured in this way, they become at once both visible and permanently opaque: understandable, but ultimately compartmentalized. Perhaps it can be both in different moods, in flashes. The tragedy is that this often falls within the usual expressions of what we can confidently call love. It seems like everything else. It can even go on forever.

It was more of an affirmation than a goodbye of any sort. But maybe that’s the only goodbye we would get.When you write about a person they stop becoming a memory and start becoming a lie.

Because of this, no one could suspect his true intentions.

Growing up in a barren environment leads to individuation in the arts, and highly individuated

art leads to art practices that don’t necessarily lend themselves to dialogue, as well to an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. This atmosphere is also saturated with other interests: careerism, art as entertainment, business co-option, corporatism, heightened risk.

The replication of the self as an artistic practice shares a number

of similarities with fascist ideation. Essentially what is happening in both ideologies is the reduction of a complex identity into a single attribute.

A huge part of you disappears into what you do. What art

administrators seldom ask themselves is how much of who they are, what they think, and what they want are left after a day of total creative diffusion. Or put another way, when you come home at night, what do you want to do? Do you want to think about another person’s sorrows and desires, or your own? What matters to you? What stretches out its roots in the deepest part of your heart?

“That’s all we really want, don’t you think? A mirage with the consistency of fact?” And so in the end, we had vastly overestimated our use. We were people who believed in black and white, good and evil, and who thought we’d all one day be heroes, but we found ourselves insignificant, mining away in our own little holes. And above all else, humiliation. Humiliation, a kind of violence.

Being an artist is like living in a run-down apartment building. In the building, everyone wants a piece of you, everyone is concerned with what you do and when you do it, how much noise you make, whether or not you leave your clothes in the dryer, but outside of the building, nobody gives a shit. You’re just another person.

He was scared of his past. It was the only thing to which he was entirely vulnerable.It’s hard for me to be honest in an interview like this, just so you know that. You must know that this kind of setting isn’t conducive for honesty. I mean, what’s my incentive not to lie to you? I have no personal stake

in your investigation; I might even want to fuck it up the more I think about it. Maybe other people have done this already, and you don’t know yet. And what if I don’t know the truth? Why would I? Who cares?

The reverend used to stand in the local pub throwing dollar after

dollar into the slot machine with his pint of lager sitting up top. He was the fucking reverend, but he only did it as a job. I think he knew that I used to see him there, because sometimes he would look at me in a kind of conspiratorial way if I saw him somewhere else.

The art starts to stand as a symbol for the person who created it. In this

way it effaces the person; it replaces the concrete with the abstract, and then is contextual only to the illusion of this projected art self.

It occurred to her at the moment she took the photo that she held the camera like a gun. Not a real gun, but

a fake gun you would make with your hands – her pointer finger extending outwards as her thumb stood up. When she looked back through some photographs taken of her while she happened to be holding a camera, she noticed her hand doing the same thing each time.

Having nightmares every night doesn’t necessarily classify as a mental disorder. No matter how violent and upsetting they are, nightmares aren’t “real.” There is no cure for this non-disorder, besides, as your mother would say, “talking to

someone.” The problem is that eventually people get sick of talking about your nightmares unless you pay them, and artwork about nightmares, especially – God forbid – poetry about nightmares, is almost always worthless. It got to a point where you would wake up screaming every night, like what happens in horror movies when one of the doomed characters has some kind of premonition before being slaughtered. But you were never killed; the ghosts stayed in your nightmares forever. This would only happen when you slept alone. When you slept with someone else, you didn’t dream at all.

It was the kind of summer where the pavement stayed warm at night. If people are just products of their environment, to what extent do any of us have agency? Perhaps our

agency is scattered – we’re just drifting back and forth between whatever potential artistic prospects we can grasp, not ever really choosing anything, only applying ourselves to the things we think we can’t reject.

Not long after, it was as if everyone just forgot what happened. It was an act of mass amnesia. No one talked about it, even to say

they had forgotten the details. It just became a part of the past, a story that we told ourselves, each one of us with a different ending.

Writing about other people doesn’t give you any credibility, and some would argue is inherently

exploitative. Writing about yourself is narcissistic.The only person I knew at the funeral, besides the engineers, was the deceased’s dealer. Charles

hadn’t always been a dealer; when I met him he was just a scrawny Vietnamese kid trying to make new friends. He didn’t want to work, or he couldn’t, because of his severe social phobias. Now, years later, after many rounds of steroids, protein shakes, and a lot of time spent working out, Chuck was twice my size. When we spoke in the parking lot after the service, he didn’t look me in the eyes. We said goodbye. A sweep of rain wavered over the cemetery.

A lot of people are great at talking about art, but not at making it. A lot of people are great at

making art, but have no idea how to explain what their art might be about, or why they make it.

Isn’t everything we’re doing with art just to be loved a little more? Do you claim to operate without desire?Do you remember when you used to paint your eyes?

Absurdity was death, was tyranny, and was trying to kill a ghost.

These are absurd sentiments. In true absurdity, there is no humour, only spasms of irony.

S o m e t i m e s y o u r b e s t s e l f i s y o u r l e a s t h o n e s t s e l f ; t h e s e l f t h a t a s p i r e s t o b e s o m e t h i n g i t i s n o t .Every story you told about yourself as a child was structured to fit a certain narrative. When you told the story about playing in your grandmother’s orchard to a new lover, for instance, it had a different interpretation than when it was told to a friend. It was different then too, when you told it to an employer, and of course when you explained your

memory of it to your mother. She had a different image in her head of the area entirely, and wasn’t quite sure why you kept repeating the story. In the end, the actual appearance of the land in retrospect became obscured by all the interpretations of it. You weren’t even sure if the orchard was still there or not, as the land had been bought up by the city many years ago for a new condo development. One day on your way home from your office downtown, you stopped by the corner lot where your grandmother’s house used to be. The luxury condo which stood in the place of the orchard was named with the kind of perversity only a tyrant could have. It was called “The Orchard.” In the end, this tyrant was the only one who knew what it had destroyed, and it chose to reify this self-awareness in glass and concrete. It does not help, in the wake of a tragedy, to read obituaries written like résumés. He watched her sleep with her fists clenched. She was having a nightmare again.

There are many reasons why an area gets represented by a map, and the way a map is drawn is different depending on who draws it, when it was drawn, and for what purpose. It is of no surprise, but often goes unnoticed, that maps of the same area can be wildly different based on these perspectives. In cartography, the set of rules for how to transcribe geographic elements on a spherical globe in a flat way is called a projection. The most popular version of the Earth that you’ve seen is called the Mercator Projection. However, there are also other versions of this Earth. Several thousands of projections exist, both new and old. Who decides which version we use is a question of political economy, history, and to some extent, truth. Some of these projections are better for navigating. Some of these projections are better for colonizing. Every culture has a specific way of mapping; every projection has a different layout. The Mercator, for example, distorts the size of objects as the latitude increases from the equator to the poles, where the scale becomes infinite. Landmasses such as Greenland and Antarctica appear much larger than they actually are relative to land masses near the equator, such as Central Africa. But what is the actual point here? Should I tell you? Are you seeing what I am seeing?

She felt like laughing and she felt like crying.You can spend a year’s worth of starving wages on expensive art supplies and make less of a cultural impact than one of those guys driving their Mercs around downtown.

The question becomes, which culture do you want to be a part of, and which one wants you to be a part of it. The answer to the latter question is always none; culture has no agency, and the answer to the former is, more and more frequently, “I don’t know.”

He thought he might go back to school, but not to finish the art degree, why bother, but to get something worthwhile done. In two years he could get an engineering certificate, which would net 100K a year in the first year after graduation. Why bother with art? Literally every facet of society, every social and political aspect,

every normative ethical aspect, his family, the indifference of his friends, and secretly the regard in which he was forced to hold himself was instructing him, tacitly or not, to just be an engineer. In fact, it was also possible that he could maintain his art practice, which when he thought about it, only took up a marginal amount of time in actual production (most of the time was actually spent in a kind of calcified ideation). There was another obstacle though, a certain kind of artistic mythology he would have to triumph over in order to convince himself of the transition.

She began her adult life in a state of such intense anxiety and confused despair that, at least from her own point of view, it seemed the onset of actual insanity. It was almost the norm in the artistic community, or at least it was pretended to be. There was no sympathy because of this inherited idea that suffering somehow

eventually alchemizes into merit. It was in this state that she was asked to consider her ideas important: the ideas of her inherent worthlessness and incompetence competed for the same mental real estate as suggestions, always from others, of her genius and talent. This word was especially hard for her. It was impossible to be a genius and go to bed alone every night.

For us to always talk about authenticity and not define the absolute hell out of it is fundamentally irresponsible, but this is the whole game in art. Nothing is really defined; there are no bibles or rules, only rules of thumb.

So the word lingers, the notion hangs in the air like a spectre, phasing in and out of our critical language. I want to suggest that authenticity isn’t what we should be talking about or focusing on as artistic value, but rather vulnerability. But this is just a different kind of essentialism. There is no real or actual value in any kind of singular

perspective.

“This feels like a bad dream,” she said, to the ceiling.The way it was described as happening was always up for interpretation. Three different people were sent a message, none of whom got it until it was too late. Chuck didn’t want to tell the police anything, because once they searched through the engineer’s message history, the details of the consistent cocaine abuse and

Chuck’s complicity in it was laid bare. The inspector didn’t care, however, about another drug dealer. The man in the corner office was dead. Sometimes, lies are enforced by groups of people. Entire communities will chip in to sustain a lie - entire regions, even countries. What the lie is about doesn’t matter, just the reason for its continued reinforcement. One way to think about art is as a kind of revenge.

They push you out of patient care pretty fast once the withdrawals stop. They want you to get into group as soon as possible so that you can move through the system. The problem is that group is something you can

usually get away with skipping once in a while, and then you just fall back into bad habits. If he was no longer a substance abuser, he was still a drama junkie - a man afraid to be alone with his own thoughts.

I stood frozen beneath the giant, golden, embossed letters on the

building, briefcase in hand, feeling like the scared, sad creature I had been all of my life. The fact that I worked here now didn’t change anything. For me this was always about redemption, but now I know there is none to be had.

“I’ve got to work,” he said.“Okay, I’m just going to lie

here for a bit,” she replied.“Sure,” he said. “You can let yourself out.”

It was a balmy Sunday morning. Late August light streamed through the hearse windows.

Jones turned off the car – the undertakers had arrived. He moved the casket into position and detached the belts. There was no procession for this funeral, no need for a long line of limousines, so he had to show up early and help prepare the plot for the ceremony, a job he hated. Eventually the mourners started to file through the cemetery gates, one by one along the avenue of trees, and approach the small bower which contained the gravesite. No one really spoke to each other besides a few solemn greetings, and most people stood alone. An older couple embraced briefly, but then stood on opposite sides of the casket. The mass was short. Jones knew this was usually the case for the poor or people who had cut themselves off from the rest of society and left their final rites up to the state. However, all of the bereaved at this service looked rich and distant, and there were no holy rites performed of any creed. The reverend, an ascetic, thin man, seemed distracted. His head was hairless,

not shaved for some religious purpose, but scarred as the result of some kind of eczema. The weather

took a turn for the worse and some people waited inside. At the end of the ceremony, a short, ugly man with warts on his eyelids handed out a stack of little blue flyers to the aggrieved. Very few people took one, and the ones who did folded the paper up and jammed it into their pockets without reading. As they walked out, the shadows from the huge stone spires in the distance blended their dark coats into the fugue. Jones, who was the last to leave, picked up a stray flyer that had been discarded before it blew away. It was simply a list of phone numbers. It had a bolded title at the top which read: MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Jones got back into the hearse and lit a cigarette. He checked his mirrors; everyone was gone. A strange wind began to form at the edge of the woods. As he eased out into the sparse Sunday afternoon traffic and drove back to the funeral home, the truth broke upon him.

There was an empty space at his core that had resulted from denying how he spent most of his time. The remainder of his life had become a race to fill in that space before it caused him to implode, collapsing inward like a burnt-out star.

Ian responded to the question slowly.“Uhhhhh….” he started.He wasn’t actually thinking though, about the question that

he was asked, but whether or not he was going to lie about it. Eventually, he decided to tell the truth. There was no reason to lie.“Yeah,” he finally said.“I can tell when you’re lying, you know,” the inspector replied. “Why are you wasting my time?”“I guess, I guess, uh, I didn’t hear you right,” Ian stammered.“I’ll ask you again: did you know the deceased outside of your work environment? Were you friends?”“I mean, I guess, we went to the gym together once or twice, the company gym, you know nothing weird like that. We didn’t really know each other…”“So, sorry, you didn’t know him, but you went to the gym together?”“I mean it wasn’t a big deal, we weren’t like that, you know?”At first the inspector was just pretending he was confused to get more information, some accidental, telling detail, but now he was actually confused.“No, I don’t know,” the inspector said. ”I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you to tell me.”“He was just a weird guy, I guess he was an artist before, or at least that’s what he said. We just didn’t have that much in common and…” Ian couldn’t stop staring at his shoes. He felt like he’d done something wrong, but not because he actually felt any remorse, but just because of what happened. It was all protocol anyway, and Ian honestly didn’t understand the point of it. What was done was done, and none of this was going to bring him back.“Alright, fine. But what’s with the bandage on your arm?”“Oh, it’s nothing. I just uh, I had some color done on my tattoo.”“Do you mind if I see it?”Ian shrugged and peeled off the bandage, his skin paler under the gauze.“I don’t get it.”“There’s nothing to get,” Ian said. On his arm was an elaborate inked drawing of a map.“I see,” the inspector said, his face displaying no genuine emotion.

I used to faint at one time, and have dreams or visions. What would you call them? It was the same dream again and it lasted all night. His corpse would be floating above my bed, bloated and festering and gold, and then it would smile at me, its teeth all black and rotten.

“Can you speculate on what might have been the reason for it happening?”“Because I’m a criminal,” he laughed. “A vicious animal.”“No, not that.”

Of the infinite possible trajectories of a bullet only one happens in reality.