“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. . . . Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.”
Convict Lake presents several “found” still lifes, wherein everyday, neglected scenes are limned in fading sunlight: brittle flora and dried weeds are recurrent motifs, saturated in the golden hues and thin shadows of the late afternoon. Here, Schiff traverses into the slippery plane of memory, leaving us hanging between the desire to linger on a hazy thought and the immediacy of spectatorship.
Melanie Schiff, De Soto, 2022.Melanie Schiff, Dry Flowers, 2022
a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.
GRRM
The shuttling between grief and grievance has been lost in pursuit of what is possible within a liberal legal conception of law and property. What is sacrificed in this approach, what cannot be heard, is the black noise that animated Cugoano’s earlier polemic. It is to this sound that the remaining essays in this volume are attuned. Black noise represents the kinds of political aspirations that are inaudible and illegible within the prevailing formulas of political rationality; these yearnings are illegible because they are so wildly utopian and derelict to capitalism (for example, ‘‘forty acres and a mule,’’ the end of commodity production and restoration of the commons, the realization of ‘‘the sublime ideal of freedom,’’ the resuscitation of the socially dead).20 Black noise is always already barred from the court.21
— 20. Seyla Benhabib and Paul Gilroy would term this noise ‘‘the politics of transfiguration,’’ by which they mean a notion of utopian politics that exceeds the frame of prevailing conceptions of political rationality. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge,1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41. On ‘‘black mo’nin’,’’ see Fred Moten, In the Break (Minneapolis, 2003), 192–211. 21. What we call ‘‘black noise’’ Robin Kelley would describe as a ‘‘freedom dream,’’ or Fred Moten would describe as ‘‘the surreal utopian ‘nonsense’ of a utopian vision, the freedom we know outside of the opposition of sense and intellection’’; see Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, and Fred Moten, ‘‘Uplift and Criminality,’’ unpublished manu- script, 23.
Narrative restraint, the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure, is a requirement of this method, as is the imperative to respect black noise – the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity, which are always in excess of legibility and of the law and which hint at and embody aspirations that are wildly utopian, derelict to capitalism, and antithetical to its attendant discourse of Man.
Hartman, Saidiya, Venus in Two Acts, small axe 26, June 2008, p. 1 – 14
Is there a person to whom I could ask such a question and would that person have an answer that would make sense to me in a rational way (in the way even I have come to accept things as rational), and would that person be able to make the rational way imbued with awe and not so much with the practical; I know the practical, it will keep you breathing; awe, on the other hand, is what makes you (me) want to keep living.
Kunsthalle Tbilisi is pleased to present a two-person exhibition, Nested in a Place of Becoming, by Adler Guerrier and Levani (Levan Mindiashvili) at Fabrika Tbilisi, Ninoshvili 8, Tbilisi, Georgia 0102. September 22 – October 26, 2022.
Exhibition is organized with Marisa Newman Projects, NY and is accompanied by a catalog with an essay by Re’al Christian.
