AG2026_1211880a is a true thing

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aimed at the living, 2025. Liaigre, Miami Design District Showroom.

The True Things A Conversation with Naghmeh Sohrabi (Bidoun).
These Are the True Things (Substack)

An elegant man
must never be completely elegant.
There’s no man more inelegant than a despot
power is always tacky.
There’s no elegant way to invade, pillage, and kill.
Nothing’s tackier than a uniform.
Nothing’s tackier than a toga.

My Grandfather Is the Future, Victor Heringer, translated by James Young & Justin Greene (Granta)

I have signed two contracts as a poet
which are henceforth no longer binding.

I will sign a third, as a final betrayal.

I will be forgiven by everyone.

I Am Not a Poet, Victor Heringer, translated by James Young & Justin Greene

AG2026ag-091123A_8 or specific subversions of place and time

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Everyday Travails, October 10 – November 7, 2009, David Castillo Gallery.

“The works reveal a structured imprint of the everyday, in the exploration of the relationship of media to the psycho-geographical, social, and political nature of place. Adler Guerrier sets drawing, collage, sculpture, photo, video, and installation in dialogue. His inspired cultural hybrid between color and plane are anchored by fearless, site-specific subversions of place and time in regards to conceptions of race, class, and culture. Often calling upon the districts of Miami and his own backyard, Guerrier examines the contemporary flaneur in an impending post-demographic age.”

Paul Claude Gardere. Flickr, 2009.

[…]

However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.

Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”

AG2026_1211786a or objects by Nature

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Hilton Als on the Whitney Biennial (New Yorker)

Spontaneous Objects A Natural History of Art and Its Others (Penn State University Press, 2026)

—A Virtual Book Launch : Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University), Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna), and Stephen Campbell (Johns Hopkins University). Apr 03, 2026, 12:00pm–1:00pm.

“In the late medieval and early modern periods, European artists, theorists, and natural philosophers imagined Nature not simply as a force of reproduction but as an artist in its own right—a creative power capable of generating images, artifacts, and objects of beauty.”

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In the sinuous folds of old capitals, Where all, even horror, turns to enchantment, I spy, obeying my fatal humors, Certain singular beings, decrepit and charming.

The Little Old Ladies, Baudelaire

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

I wandered lonely as a cloud, Wordsworth

Freud (1928) wrote that an illusion is distinguished not by its falsity, but by its origin in a wish; it is a wish that we have become passionately attached to. Illusions, such as the little bit of trust needed for romantic love, keep us attached to the future and fuel our desire. The optimism of cruel optimism is not only for a better outcome this time, but for a future that we want to keep moving toward. As Berlant articulates, we see the devastation wrought by cruelly optimistic attachments to destructive political and economic objects that offer hope but instead repeat and intensify deprivation and violence.

A cure for love, Sophia Frydman

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Thus in the forest of my mind’s exile An ancient Memory sounds a full-throated horn! I think of sailors forgotten upon an isle, Of the captives, of the vanquished!… and of many more!

The Swan, Baudelaire

The only constant is that we go on walking, that we remain pilgrims of possibility. We would not walk if we had already arrived. We would not write if we had already arrived. Out of our incompleteness and our disorientation, out of our longing and our wanderlust, arises the motive force of every love and every revolution, of our science and our art, of our creation and our self-creation. Every creative act is an act of traversal.

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