art·ist : a collage
/ˈärtist/
to be able to read thomas aquinas, his writings on grace and look at abel ferrara regarding his take on saints and sinners but also to be able to have the freedom to reflect on the new york jewish artist genius lawrence weiner’s statement in 1968 regarding the work of art and its poetical construction-development, these are essential elements today for me as an artist, working between artist film-making-cinema and painting, all that in Paris 2013 – john lalor
POLYMNIA: I was abducted in the middle.
CLIO: Rye scoots abominably sideways: time a tiny accordion.
ERATO: Meat, the stuff of suffering. The hinge where suffering converges with the body. A conversion symptom. Or is it that we are the conversion symptom of meat? Meat: what fixes the body, what assigns the body to itself. What gives the body its living name. What gives the body a place. It ascribes it; it inscribes it. Someone says: every man suffering is a piece of meat.
TECHNE: Why are you telling us these things?
ERATO: Copy extracts. Casket extracts. Baskets of cracked grizzle tissue.
URANIA: Someone says: meat is the common zone of man and beast, their zone of indiscernibility. Someone else says: indiscernibility is written into meat, and meat is into indiscernibility. Language = meat. Language = the stuff of the spirit. It too a zone of indiscernibility.
TECHNICUS: Someone says: the painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher shop as if it were a church. I chop phrases and chop, chop it back, someone interrupts. Someone else says: Technicus is fire. Prometheus, who brought us fire, made possible the transformation of experience, the difference between what happens to us and what we make of this happening.
CLIO: “To dismantle the face, to rediscover the head.” This is the kind of history I like. A glorious kind of history.
MELPOMENE: I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this world, there are always red ants underneath. David Lynch said that. I discovered that if one pays attention, there are always tusk-white apertures. I said that. There is a window in the shaved atmosphere.
CALLIOPE: I am beautiful speech. I induce a new reality in objects by always trying to say what I feel.
THALIA: You have to hunt down inspiration.
URANIA: Bodies are kinds of texts, shot through with gaps.
THALIA: I open my mouth and a string of quotes come out.
POLYMNIA: “A large box is handily made of what is necessary to replace any substance. Suppose an example is necessary, the plainer it is made the more reason there is for some outward recognition that there is a result.” –G.S.
TERPSICHORE: To play the harpsichord of the unheard while smoking a pipe.
ERATO: “There where you are not: that is where writing starts.” I can’t remember who said that.
CLIO: Writing is a way of returning what has been confiscated. I saw myself the other day in the mirror. A stranger on display. An invalid or a corpse. I was a figure whose contours dissipate like tributaries into air. I was my own annoying friend. The repressed partner. The repressed partner said to me: “censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.” The partner seemed to hover for a long time.
URANIA: The lotus in water. The lotus natural. The lotus no ornaments.
TECHNICUS: I was writing the other day. I waded through the muck of language. Everything I say both too much, too little. The alphabet: a skinny apparatus whose parts never fully come together. Never works properly.
TECHNE: Flaubert used to say, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
TERPSICHORE: I dance my way into tunnels of manic dishevelment. On other days I am the control of a subdued note.
THALIA: Green comes. I take my badge and suitcase. I go through the door. It could be another window. A version of a city. The beginning fissure. A fracture that I turn into the figment of my eye. Little opening.
TECHNE: Will you be the grammarian of my dreams?
CLIO: Art’s difficult to graft onto any border. It roams. Nowhere or everywhere? It is a trace of indivisibility, a shadow visibility, an invisibility shadow.
CALLIOPE: The froth builds around whatever’s uttered.
EUTERPE: Every time I say something, paint something, perform an action, I’m covered in armor.
TERPSICHORE: Capsized bristle. Bristle not sleeping.
URANIA: Vapor in gun out of leg and vapor.
ERATO: Again!
TECHNICUS: These walls smell wild. Or is it wide.
MELPOMENE: The side of something somewhere.
POLYMNIA: Lose is. Love is. Is is. Loam is. Tumescence is. Not thin not water. Not swole. Swollen is.
CALLIOPE: I already miss your voice. Like a xylophone, like an umbrella opening the rain. You said things like: “Because the zoo is closed”; “How many sentences are needed to fill this gap?”; “Biscuits are the anatomy of bread”; “I will put my two eyes together to make broth.” Oh, I miss you.
EUTERPE: Keep saying you’ve got nothing to hide. Time to build something on the hinge of something.
CLIO: My mouth mentions feeling, poor gutter.
ERATO: Here, this is for you.
Simone Kearney is a poet and visual artist. Her chapbook, “In Threes,” was published with Minute Books in 2013. She has been published in Boston Review, Bridge Journal, Ragazine, Post Road Magazine, Maggy, and Supermachine, among others. She teaches at Rutgers, Pace University, and Ramapo College, and writes for Thierry Goldberg Gallery. She has exhibited her art at the Morris Gallery, and Union Hall Community Center in West Cork, as well as at the Boston College Arts Festival in Massachusetts. Born in Dublin, she currently lives in Brooklyn.
