coming sometime soon-ish: until further notice untitled unnoticed noteworthy “Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city…” –
Jeanette Winterson
Hour zero I’ve smoked one hundred thousand cigarettes. A rather conservative number. – I smoked half a pack in Gan’s studio. When was this? Last month? – One hundred thousand in a decade, too much, too much of the same, which comes at a price. By now, I could have bought a painting by Agus Suwage, non? But that’s too literal – monetary – I meant, actually, the price of addiction to same same sama sama is the numbing of the senses: numb & unable to distinguish between same and not quite sama…difference and also différance sensually puncturing the intellect, the soul too, and postponing judgment, ethical as well as aesthetic. One drunken night, an artist in Manila asked me: when was the last time you went to a show and felt touched, turned on even? I DO NOT RECALL, which is rather depressing, nein? A pertinent question, it pushed me to deal with indifference – and cynicism. [It is also the last thing I will recall in public of that evening – absinthe made a presence.] Jeanette Winterson writes in Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery that we would not be able to spend an hour alone with Mona Lisa. It would be too painful. Mona would stare back. We rationalize the pain away. Trivialize it. Overintellectualize it. Killing eros in the process (re: Susan Sontag). And turn art discourse into disinterested, disembodied discourse. Hour zero: I had my last smoke on Monday 28 August at 12 am.
Scattered thoughts and other withdrawal symptoms, yet a promise to write an essay for Meeting People is Easy – Gan Siong King’s open studio project. Odd title though. But, yes, hopefully Gan gets to meet plenty of friends, strangers, fellow artists, some oddball curator, a few collectors, a talkative gallerist slash dealer, a few strays who come for the free booze, and etcetera etcetera. And he gets to talk and do the talk, talk about his work, talk about himself, and talk some more and after a while, after repetition makes a swirl and bites the story gently in the ass, the story might permutate into different directions (become fictional? co-authored?). An open studio as a series of conversations: Could it also be a way to slow the heck down? And look. Touch. Be touched. And attempt to articulate. Articulate in an open-ended way. Also allowing for contradictions to seep in and through. The artist studio as an attitudinal space: where thoughts move from body to body, re-touching us sensually, re-touching the unfathomable geography of our bodies. Hour twenty-four I haven’t smoked a cigarette in twenty-four hours. I want to smoke. Badly. I checked everywhere – in bags, in between books – for leftovers. But no, not a single cigarette found. I went to a restaurant for lunch, I ordered bratwurst. Comfort food. And I read the texts in the two catalogs Gan gave me the first time I went to his studio: The Pleasures of Odds and Ends and The Horror, The Horror. But my thoughts kept on trailing off. I made notes. Notes in need of footnotes. Notes about zombies. I also jotted down this question and I don’t know if it refers to Gan or myself or both: why do you do what you do? I was alone in the restaurant. Depression slapped me hard in the back of my head. It was a beautiful sunny day. All I felt was fog descending. Meanwhile, I thought of pipes. If Magritte’s pipe isn’t a pipe, then what is it? The image is not a pipe because it is merely an image, a representation but not the real thing. But if we agree on this, then a second ‘reading’ is possible (‘reading a painting’ as if a painting is an open book, drained of mystery): the text is not text but an image, an image that isn’t a pipe, an image that’s just paint on canvas. And so we loop back to where we begun. Hour fifty At hour fifty to hour fifty-five I was in the company of nine artists, seven of these: chainsmokers. Fidgety. Ticks took over; hands in the air. Yet, apart from second-hand smoke, I did not smoke that cigarette. And how often has painting been declared a zombie entity? And has anyone told the painters (and the auction houses)? We need some worthy zombies though. We need to be haunted. Day & night. The horror, the horror. Answers in need of new questions. And vice versa. Hour seventy-five I decided to self-medicate: whiskey. A body in need of a reset button. Self-flagellation didn’t help much. [Random thought: what does Zizek mean when he titled one of his many books Organs without Bodies?] After a couple of shots I messaged Gan and told him about a dream: getting lost in KL and ending up in his studio (I also mentioned the withdrawal symptoms and scattered thought in need of scaffoldings). I’ve only seen Gan’s work once in an exhibition, a series of videos, first shown on Instagram and made during a residency in Japan, is part of the exhibition ILHAM Contemporary Forum. The work was displayed in such a way that it looked like it was attempting to sneak out by means of an emergency exit – in search of a new home, perhaps. (I visited Ilham before the rehang of the show.)
I visited Gan’s studio twice (I’ve only been to KL two times). Studios are intimate spaces. Both times the artist-host entertained his guests. He served coffee and ice water. And placed an ashtray next to my chair. We smoked. He told stories. I listened. I asked a question here or there as punctuation marks. Mostly I listened. I listened to stories about copies, hard-cuts and sequencing; also, editorial decisions: what images to copy, when to stop painting, when to erase & re-start, how to combine with other images/paintings. Space is very much part of the artistic processes that go into the physical manifestation of ideas. And the body too. In between sipping coffee and smoking, I walked around his studio, zooming in on a painting hanging on the wall or standing aloof on the floor. Lollypops, bunnies, telephones, a rocket, a flower, and much much more. A directory of restless things turned into images turned into paintings turned into conversations. I do not have ownership over the words I use here. And if images are anything like words, then we could consider images public and if we consider images as public we could take the right to hack images, to improve upon images, and to re-distribute images. As artist/poet Kenneth Goldsmith has it: “Plagiarize your plagiarizers. Bootleg your bootleggers. Pirate your pirates.” Kenneth Goldsmith attempted to printout the Internet. He, obviously, failed. And Gan will never paint all images – temporarily – stored online. Hour one-hundred-and-thirty-two I had lunch with K., the restaurant we wanted to go to was closed, the re-opening was announced with this sign: “new concept coming soon.” She updated me on the gossip landscape. I zoned out. Minus the snow, this withdrawal Scheiße resembles the Groundhog Day scenario. Time turning liquid.
AWAS!?! A paradox of repetition… Same same sama sama slowly slowly m u t a t i n g .
Look. Look. Look again! And see, the riddle of never being able to step twice in the same river. Or – horror, horror – to paint the very same portrait over and over again to only end up with a series of slightly different portraits (a series that only makes sense as a series). Ask Gan the same question a couple of times. Lets compare notes. (This reminds me of my grandmother Elise. A story for another occasion.)
I want to smoke. I am not smoking.
Roy Voragen is a poet and curator. Bandung, 2017