Resistance Journal: Feral Thoughts, Sickly
I sit at a windowed corner of my favorite diner watching a middle aged white man who looks guiltily as another man and his two small children pass. On the corner of 77th, he watches them pass and once he thinks no one in particular is watching, he reaches down for a nearly finished cigarette butt. As he snaps it off the street, it rolls between his pinchers and falls between his feet. Still doubled over, I feel, and watch him feel, the utter disappointment of having spent twice as long as necessary to acquire such a disappointing token of his middling and unshakable failure.
I’m still sitting in this diner and I hear the word “obamacare”, a term that makes my blood boil. It’s an obfuscating word that spreads a jelly of negativity over the attempts by one average president who once tried to fix the embarrassing and third world state of our national well-being. As it was rolled back, internet residents stepped out on their digital porches to shake off their carpets, as they are wont to do. Through the dust, we saw that our fellow citizens, grown up adult people with computers, were exclaiming “we’re just ending Obamacare, not the ACA!” revealing their dopey, misguided and racially tinted disdain for something they ultimately valued. I sit here and boil hotter than this freshening of my coffee (“thanks I’ll take the check when you get a chance”). I sit here and feel this familiar film between my feet, on my skin, on my teeth, crawling as if I’ve become a self lubricating amphibian. It’s about January 18th and it just so happens this film has followed me for the last two months. I work out, I shower, I scrub but it persists.
I hear other people talk about sadness, sorrow, surprise at the still in-vogue power of racism and misogyny (these many white people clearly underestimate the power of these feelings, ironic or not). No one is talking about the film, the slime, the slither. It’s what I’ve felt when I’m traveling for too long and have only eaten packaged foods for 10, 12, 20 hours. It’s what I’ve felt the times I’ve handed money to a street or train dweller and they’ve overreached and palmed my own hand as they took the dollar or doggie bag. Sure I feel guilty for my germophobia but it would be uncharacteristic for me to not notice the dirt collected in the creases of their hands, deep below their cracked and bark-like fingernails. It’s a simple fact, the same as my awareness of contact that moves to the front of my mind until I find a place to wash my hands. I’m sorry and I’m not, in equal measure like when you take the perfectly balanced amount of movie theater popcorn and M&M in your mouth. Together and distinct, but a single honest feeling.
I am covered with slime. I am convinced.
Two degrees would hang on my wall, were I the type to pay the additional $10 for printing. A third, the second of two masters, would exist if I had had the temperament to read Marxist feminist philosophy then hold discussions with fellow students whose net worth at 27 was higher than that of my entire bloodline. I could never have survived that. In fact I heard that one student of that program just after my one semester, committed suicide during winter break. I understood that sentiment completely and powerfully. The whole practice of “curatorial studies” was to furnish one’s own burning house as it burned, to repaint white walls white, to add invisible value to the uselessly valuable.
I was to be convinced that art was activism, if this program was to be successful. Art itself was the agent for change. The rich and powerful were the ones who held the tools and resources to change the world. But this is only true to those whose interactions with the diverse and powerless populace are in brief and curt requests made to a service class, a class increasingly removed from the tired chore of human interaction. Inaction looks like action when you lower the bar enough. Regardless of where you are in the food chain, what it takes sometimes is for the cigarette to slip between your fingers and roll between your legs to give you the chance to see the course of your own actions. The ugliness of a reflection is often far more earned than the delusion projected.
The idea of applying for art school in this moment seems more foolish than ever. The idea that there are alternate shortcuts to change rather than change itself, that one can make self-serving, self-aggrandizing contemporary art and examine socio-political dynamics in any important way is stupid. It’s non-fat ice cream, it’s smoking instead of drinking, it’s a slap in the face to anyone volunteering their time toward social causes. “You realize you could be enriching yourself at the same time, right? Don’t you see? This soup kitchen would be a great subject for a photo series.” Humanity is running out of chances. Maybe we can help get some of this slime off of each other.
xo
