Yesterday, Ellen and I went to a baby birthday; it was nice, but this woman got visibly annoyed that we were talking to her husband. This was really funny; we were talking to him about their baby, and he had started the conversation. No one's body language was suggestive or anything. Ultimately, I felt bad for this unpleasant woman. She was so predictable.
We went downtown and met A for dinner at Dimes. I saw this girl I'd been blowing off for drinks for the last two weeks outside. I'm not sure why I am avoiding meeting up with her so intensely; it's like every other possible option feels more compelling. Not that every interaction must result in the creation of some value, actual-financial or otherwise, but somehow talking to her feels like a massive dead-end.
Ellen and A are both starting medical school this year and it was exciting to hear them talk about it. Ellen apologized for the boring topic and I was like please, no this is so incredible. To work so hard and have to continue to work so hard to achieve this thing, and to have that work and the knowledge that comes from it be so material and indisputable seemed so gratifying. A talked about wanting the knowledge in her body, and I thought that was a great way of distinguishing it. The information she and E will leave with will never exit their bodies in the way that reading some canonical art criticism might pass through me. I generally try to hold onto as much as I can, but it's somehow very different. This information is also subjective, and its use value completely arbitrarily evaluated.
Dinner was nice and then we went to Clandestino and hung out a bit longer. Someone made the mistake of bringing up Oberlin, and Ellen and I were tipsy enough to sink into a nostalgic conversation about school. We talked about this one day in the dead of winter, when we watched music videos all day and researched every rapper we could think of's net worth.
Earlier in the day, Makayla–who was leaving to return to LA in the evening–had asked me when we had time to do our schoolwork in college, if we were spending so much time ruining each others lives and throwing parties. I told her that the schoolwork usually happened while we were doing those things.
Ellen and I discussed this and two things were settled on. 1) That we did a lot of the exciting programming and art things that we did in order to have an excuse for a party. 2) That part of my eternal feeling of professional alienation comes in part from the fact that I was constantly making work alongside friends and now I don't really have that. I'll probably never have it to the degree that I did at Oberlin.
N came and met up with us. I hadn't seen him since I moved to New York. I realized, as we were hanging out, that we have been friends for four or five years now; I also then realized that, to him, this might mean much less since he is significantly older than me. This was all interesting to me because I didn't think I'd have so much to say to him, but it was exciting to catch up and I also realized how much I did actually see him back in LA. He, Ellen, and I talked about romance and the basic logistics of our lives at the moment. He expressed a growing sense of fatigue, which I thought seemed healthy considering his situation in the last few years–a version of art world nomadism. He also had recently fallen in love and been rejected, or so he thought. Ellen and i both felt that he should go after her. At this point in the conversation, I became aware of the fact that I really, really hope things work out for him.
N is very smart and sensitive, I think; but he has a bad reputation. I see why this is, but ultimately he is one of the more rigorous people making art that I know personally. It is hard to reconcile those things, ethically or whatever. His bad reputation is not usually for the rigor–or lack thereof–of his thinking but for how he treats women, or how much he wants to sleep with most women he comes across or something. I am honestly not even sure of how bad he actually is in this arena. Even my logic in this sense is uncool, though, because it's basically based on the fact that he's never tried to sleep with me. Anyway, from last night, it seems to me that he really just wants to be in love and–in the near future–to cease his own personal continental drift.
I found this conversation funny because in all these years of friendship I don't think I'd ever really talked to N about love and it felt suddenly like we were peers instead of him being this older artist who let me hang around with him on occasion. This isn't even the right way of saying this; I didn't feel like he wasn't taking me seriously before. But now, Ellen and I were giving him advice? And he listened? He probably would have previously. I just had the sense that something had shifted. We spoke as three friends who had seen a few iterations of one another's lives, which makes a difference. In all senses, I felt glad for it.
After Ellen left, N and I talked about art and I was pretty drunk so I told him about my show at the big gallery date tbd. I felt weird saying anything about it, and I don't know why I did, though I'd like to think it is because I respect his opinion. Somehow saying something to him and explaining what I was hoping to make made it more real and made me see how nascent the ideas are. He humored me, or maybe he thought it was actually interesting; I don't know, but it was nice and put some gas in the engine.
We also talked about this black artist who I have been dogmatically defensive of over the years, and I can't totally remember what N said, but he made a pretty convincing argument for the artist's overall failure. I argued-slash-conceded that maybe my dogmatism was out of psychological necessity, because if he is bad, then maybe I am too. And he needs to exist in order to give me something to reach toward and away from a particular kind of zombie identity art–art object as a trace of subjectivity, and self expression-that I worry I'd otherwise be kidnapped by and fall prey to in the eyes of critics. We agreed that anyone, any black artist specifically, trying to work on this spectrum has to deal with the fact that David Hammons will always already have bested them. N generously said that my work sat differently; I think he meant outside of these poles–structurally ineffective institutional critique and sexy identity work that dresses itself up in conceptualist drag–and I really hope that is true and remains so.
I had a moment, though, where I worried that I'd digested and accepted N's criticism of this artist with such ease simply because N is a white man. I've pushed back more on others when they've criticized this same artist. I dismissed the thought; N's criticism was thorough and well-informed.
This post now feels like a fan letter to N, and maybe it is. I think he is good, and doesn't get enough credit. Maybe it's mean to say that someone doesn't get enough credit, because it implies that they're doing poorly; but here I mean that he should be written about as important in the future. This is a Lot, but I do really think this. Moreover, I am glad we are friends.
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