How spectral is vision? On one end of it, I see a clean room, oil paints that don’t reach the ground, the empty middle. I see seven palms lined up against one window, and can picture daylight drawing veins on the round leaves. I see The Artist pull out a lime green canvas on a charred frame.
“Tonight we are making something, all of us.” He runs his hands on the frame, then stripes the canvas. “Who’s next?”
And there it is, the other end of the spectrum: braille. On almost every canvas, every sculpture, paragraphs of it. The Artist sees. He does; one of the guests lays down his sweatshirt, which The Artist places a stencil of a braille phrase on, then spray paints. This is the moment when I see it: everyone around films the transfer, the owner of the hoodie hides big teeth behind a small hand, elated, like those videos of Virgil Abloh signing Off-White.
Standing in front of the key piece in the studio, a massive canvas that’s hanging from a 10-foot ceiling, I’m trying to see. Am I ignorant? There’s an essay in front of me that I can’t read. Yet looking isn’t how you do this; and even if I could read braille, the letters are so massive I’d need two hands and someone else to guide them, assuming I was blind. Then the oil paint would turn directions on the lines, thus to read is to destroy.
Art must be for the seeing. It must, but then what of those who can’t? The Artist makes art about accessibility, then makes it inaccessible to everyone. No one reads in this world, my need for words leaves a hole where my eyes should be, I almost jump at the canvas. Has The Artist found a way to turn himself into god? Stripping language from braille disintegrates it into a pure aestheticism of squares over an image. I think about the pictures of people in Asia wearing t-shirts with profanities in English, or Americans with ‘water’ tattoos in chinese characters. The wine suddenly tastes rancid.
In another room there is a painting unlike all the others. There is no braille, and it wasn’t until I got close that I saw it wasn’t a picture. It’s a grand portrait of a black man from the neck up with his eyes closed, and The Artist confirms my suspicions: the man is blind. Maybe I’m averse to talent but hyperrealism doesn’t turn me on, and this piece replaces all tactility with irony. It does take incredible skill to paint what feels like a photograph, I imagine the subject to say.
In this room I see the angels of art playing in their plastic Eden. It’s not oily, it’s not messy, the cleaners came by today and left the DJ booth spotless. The women have lip fillers and the men have big rings, everyone smokes cigarettes. I feel like an angel too: I see myself dressed up for the occasion, these places only excite me for a picture, I speak these languages, I also don’t know braille. The Artist talks about filling great rooms with blind things, I hold my face in my hands as they talk. Oh man, it’s wonderful to be so warm in SoHo, where the short buildings let the wind down from the clouds. But in the reflection of a crown there’s a face turned black, haha. I spent the whole night with my ash hands and not even for a second I looked down to see—
11/21/19 6:37PM