Glimpses of a Mind in Process
It’s not exactly true to say that I always envisioned the Corona Lectures as a method of two-way communication. I never expected a direct response to the work. What I hoped, instead, was that the Corona Lectures might inspire or encourage other people experiencing the disorientation and weirdness of life in the time of COVID-19 to reach out in their own way, to project across the chasms between us, chasms that were always there but which became more obvious under lockdown (whether externally- or self-imposed), something art-ish, art-like, that felt perhaps new, perhaps different, but most importantly appropriate to the situation in which we found ourselves. And that there would be enough people doing this for it to feel like a conversation.
For those playing along at home, these concerns about newness, difference, and appropriateness manifested in my early lectures in the concern about meaningfulness and its relation to form: how form, at least in the extended n-o-w of COVID, seemed to promote meaningfulness (the pretense of meaning) and hinder the seeking of genuine meaning. (All problematic words, none more so than the word problematic.)
This hope has largely been disappointed.
That said, two artists in my greater personal orbit are doing interesting enough things with form that I’d like to draw attention to them. Though I’m not interested in them because they are difficult for me to describe, their being difficult to describe was probably ensured by the fact that I’m interested in them. If they were easy to describe, it would be because they took on a form recognizable enough to me that I could do it with a word or phrase, in which case I’d worry that what I was appreciating about them was their meaningfulness, which is the very thing I am seeking to avoid at the moment.
The first is Lightsey Darst’s Now*ing newsletter (if newsletter is the right word). The asterisk in the title is a wildcard that lets her discuss her participation with the world, the asterisk always being replaced by a verb, participation being represented linguistically by verbs. Now reading. Now eating. Now crying. While it may have started with the intention of being a way for Darst to share her thoughts about what she was reading, viewing, or listening to, the form has proven fecund and exploded past whatever early parameters she may have set, especially in the months after the George Floyd killing. Which isn’t to undervalue her thoughts about art—she’s a poet who spent years writing about dance, and I’m willing to read whatever she wants to write about whatever art she feels like writing about. There are so few treats showing up in my email inbox these days, even if Now*ing were half as interesting it would still be worth getting.
The second is Richard Wheeler Works! This is a case of a title of a project being so appropriate that it almost makes the job of explaining what’s going on harder. For a few dozen minutes twice a week (Wednesdays and Fridays), Wheeler narrates himself on a Twitch stream, working. On Wednesdays, generally, he’s narrating the process he goes through searching for military PR/propaganda videos for one of the art projects he’s working on. On Fridays, generally, he’s narrating the process of seeking out and “making sense of a random government contracting opportunity” (I couldn’t find a better way to say it than he did). His interest in these subjects is, at least for me, contagious, as I have no innate interest in either of the topics he’s looking at. But much as the Fat Man in The Maltese Falcon says he’s “a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk,” I’m a man who likes thinking about a man who likes to think. And Wheeler likes to think, and he’s thought about thinking. A lot.
Both of these artists have reached outside standard forms and generously offered glimpses of their minds in process. That’s something I’ve tried to do as well. It’s what I sought when the lockdown began and so it’s what I tried to offer. If anyone has any other examples of projects like these, please let me know. There’s always room for more.
