ISSUE 05: Death and Taxes
Rothko Chapel (1971), Houston, Texas, USA
In a letter to a friend in France, he reflected on the birth and destined course of the United States, and on what may come of the newly written Constitution:
EVERYTHING SEEMS TO PROMISE IT WILL BE DURABLE,
BUT, IN THIS WORLD, NOTHING IS CERTAIN EXCEPT DEATH AND TAXES.
I don’t know what durable means anymore, much less certainty, but here we are: two hundred and fifty years later.
For old world form—whether carving, watercolour painting, thrown ceramics, or copper etching—to have emancipatory potential, it needs to exceed fetish. It needs to be given breath, legs, a pulse: either internally, within the artist’s body of work, or in conversation with its political consequence, and its peers in work.
I’m Here to Stop captures the libidinal nature of the fiction and images we consume in our homes, the overlapping courses of energy which combine and interfere to create the tensed meaning on which we stake our reality.
Certainly an Act is Pope.L’s first solo exhibition since his death.
Whether it be through our id or our ego, how we read the sculpture—a statue in this case—is based on how someone made decisions into it.
This is why deriving modes of attention and conceptualizing skills matters to me, you know.
Once you see all objects as placeholders for the encounter with the world, as organizing the process of moving through the situation of the ordinary life, they become enigmas alongside the ways they gain specificity through use, over time.
You can rely on them and have curiosity about them, and not only be scared of the way you don’t understand them.
The fact that a thing is an enigmatic relation means not that the thing is replaceable, because it isn’t: but that it changes when it’s close to other things.
Your honor, I am here for a refresh.
A renewal of self.
I consider this act to be a poetic gesture and a birthday gift.
I am ready for an update.
An intervention into my life.
I am here to be born again as myself, or at the very least, the most current version of myself.
I am prepared to let go.
To empty my cache.