Putting in the work.

Echo Park, 2021

The art of escapism. 

Half-frame light play. 2018.

Ballad of Distances

There’s nothing smart to say about COVID-19 that hasn’t already been said. We’ve all read the think pieces. Followed the news. Dropped out from the news. Gone back to it. We’ve gone through the phases collectively, individually. 

At first things felt new, the furniture of everyday life had been re-arranged. Then boring. Then sad. Then angry. Nothing ever changes. It’s the same thing over and over. 

Outbound and Returning

I sold my car two springs ago. I had been walking to my new job, so it mostly just sat parked on my block for weeks at a time. I could walk to get where I needed to go on a daily basis and rely on public or mass transit for farther-away destinations. 

Now in week five of COVID-19 social distancing measures, I’m really missing that car. For all its perks, South Philly leaves us wanting when it comes to natural beauty. Would love to hear some leaves rustling together, maybe the splash and static fuzz of the waves down the shore. But for now its concrete, discarded latex gloves, wind-tumbling litter.

The days, weeks, seem to pass by faster and faster. On our walk back from the pharmacy this week, Dani talked about how return trips always seem to go by faster than outbound ones. 

In scanning some of my highlights in John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, I stumbled upon a quote about time that seemed to reinforce her point. 

The density of input, novelty, new things to see, dilates our experience of time passing, slows it down. Things seem to be moving quickly because we’re running out of novelty, just like the return trip seems to fly by. We’ve been there, done that. We live the same day over and over. The only real newness is the magnitude of horror and sorrow taking place in the outside world. Let’s get out of here. 

2018

Tile floor of the billiard room at The Breakers mansion. 

Newport, RI. November 2019. 

Big Boulder Mountain, Lake Harmony, PA. 2020.

On Twombly’s 50 Days at Illiam

“Good photo op, right there,” Patrick says, gesturing at the museum attendant in Gallery 284. It’s president’s day. We have the day off. And so we’re meandering around the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the unspecific goal of getting inspired.

The museum attendant, framed by the doorway and silhouetted by a piece from Cy Twombly’s Shades of Night series, stares blankly at an empty wall. The Twombly’s rudimentary blossom of paint and scribbled text create an illusion of halo and crown around the man’s head.

It is a good photo op, but I’m slow on the draw. Through the next doorway is Gallery 285, where hangs the Virginia-born modernist’s galvanizing opus, Fifty Days at Iliam. And instead of lining up a decent capture, I start to wonder: what’s the wall got that the Twombly doesn’t?

I get it. He makes art look too easy. But come on. During a previous trip, in almost the exact same location, a museum attendant directed my companion and I, unprompted, to a gallery at the far end of the museum. There, he said, we could find the beautiful stuff. The masterful, enlightening stuff. The Renaissance. The Biblical. (Read: not this shit.) I’ve seen twelve year olds roll their eyes, middle aged men in fanny packs chortle, and school teachers audibly scoff in the presence of Twombly’s work.

So again, I wonder: what the fuck?

You pass by a lot of incredible art on your way to Illiam. As you split off the main hall on your way to the contemporary galleries, Degas’ Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen flanks you immediately to the right. You cross paths with major milestones of European Impressionism, the blurry and familiar pastels that fill kitchen-wall-thumbtacked calendars around the country.

As you head into the Contemporary galleries, you pass by Ellsworth Kelly’s monochrome works, neon 1980s VHS kitsch, cast sculptures of light bulbs and shoes, confounding white gridwork canvases, pre-cubist Picassos, and a sky-blue wash of paint that crawls up the arched ceiling.

That’s when the Twomblys really start.

There are sculptures: a half-formed block of cast bronze that tapers into what seems like a chariot wheel. Another features two of that same circle shape, one tipped over, broken diametrically, leaning against the other. Are these wheels? Coins? Pizzas? Shields? More circular forms, paired with triangle shapes, create thrones, chariots, wheelbarrows.

There are paintings: messes of canvas and oils with more canvas layered on top like the detritus of a complicated feeling.  

These are icons delivered to the world courtesy of id and super-ego. They are thought’s blurred anatomy. They are body parts of our collective unconscious clawing at surface, unable to breach. Not, at least, in any directly intelligible way. These are smatterings of a shared natural language. They are the symbology of a western canon, of all that we call “Classical” sidestepping the brain altogether and to be shot straight from the gut.

Continue past Gallery 280’s Geometric Abstraction, and through the meditative foyer of the aforementioned Gallery 284. And finally, Gallery 285. You are surrounded on all sides by Fifty Days at Iliam, the artist’s ode to The Illiad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War. This is Twombly’s Trojan War. Gestural, gutterall, violent. There are dick-shaped chariots. Blooming scribbles of carnage and chaos. Misspelled character names. The scale is massive. The compositions are coherent, perhaps, only in their sense rhythm.

Tucked away in this chapel-like gallery in the far corner of the modern wing monstrosity and beauty, meaning and pure stupidity. And at the center of it all: a single bench, or perhaps more of an altar, from which to take it all in.

This is where people go to sigh.

keep the change Philadelphia, 2018

Our automated future won’t be sleek. It will be filled with error and malfunction as the sutures that bind our natural and digital worlds grow tighter and tighter. We’ll plug away at glossy interfaces with our cracked skin. Our brains will feed on auto-generated media that chop and blend our cultural tropes to hijack our internal dopamine reward systems. And our music... will sound like this mix. Auto-tuned vocals melt into film soundtrack pianos then sizzle into reverb-soaked risers to set up blistering trap beats. Top 40 hits are re-skinned with a crumbling cybernetic sheen. Nothing is off limits. It’s all in the blender, then it’s stitched back together, haunting us forever. That’s our future. Maybe it’s not so bad after all. 

Peace Prayer of Saint Francis  

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Taylor took this on our trip to San Juan.