Tiny Inspos: Wordless Experiences
beijing artists, viet thanh nguyen, soccer
wordless experience
I’m collecting inspirations which is how I always know the “thing” is coming. Bubbling up. “It” may not necessarily be a zine. (this substack might be “the thing”?)
Last night, I clicked into PBS to finish an Art21 doc (I’m a PBS stan); it was meant to be. I’ve been asking: what do I do next with my creative Self, where are my efforts best spent, and why am I scared to start? Then:
This (translated) quote, from Beijing-based artist Guan Xiao, about her art (specifically three-panel, video installations):
“I don’t want the audience to focus on any single image […] Rather, I hope they can take in all these fragments and sink into an abstract, wordless experience.”
I instantly felt her words, like the sentence has been floating near my head my whole life. No matter when I was making zines, that thought was there to varying degrees of acknowledgement. Experience it wholly, walk away with a feeling.
Xiao’s succinct wording is a goal post to get me past feelings of suffocation, fear, or worthlessness. Time to source and stitch my fragments together.
Life is about the combination of information and experiences, and I think about how we communicate our essences, how we remember people when we no longer hangout with them day to day, when they’re gone, etc. Liu Xiaodong’s segment starts with him expressing how much the artist loves the world. They paint to show how much it’s stimulated them and to leave a lasting impression behind when they go. Even through translations, he has an exceptionally beautiful way of speaking.
He’s a live painter who is shown painting a Texas sheriff in his front yard with his family. He paints from photographs when conditions aren’t ideal for portrait sitting, like at the Mexican border crossing. Stunning, large-scale works.
His art is not about deflating or mocking people. He’s about real people, and connecting people to each other through his lens of the world.
I caught something akin to falling in love when he said this:
literature in crisis
I can’t stop consuming news (not a flex, og). Good to be informed, but also a good idea to do a hard reset, before I overheat, force quit, and power down for good.
Ahead of that, I’ll continue to try to strike a balance. Today’s overload of info brought me the informative gem below. I saw a clip on IG and ended up watching the full 48 minutes. I never do full-lengths of anything, even music videos are too long most of the time. But, I’m inspired to start more mornings this way: Watching informed conversations between two intelligent artists. My brain felt so ready after this. Not podcasts. I like to watch the engagement between them.
A highlight is Viet Thanh Nguyen’s statement on genocidal intentionality: “There’s a text that’s being said […] and yet there’s a very clear subtext.”
“I find that so absurd, that somehow those of us that can see the subtext are supposed to ignore it and just focus on the text.
And that’s provocative for me as a writer, to think about the capacity of literature, filmmaking, art […] And in the immediate moment […] it can be very debilitating to think of the insufficiency of something like literature to respond to this moment of crisis.”
Raoul Peck is the director of Exterminate All the Brutes, a 4-hour documentary on colonization, white supremacy, and genocides (very much at the top of my list now, but again, I’m at system overload warning). Nguyen has a lighthearted laugh when he mentions it’s available on HBO, very much not the first place we’d expect to find it (David Zaslav! Booo!). Nguyen’s adaptation of his book The Sympathizer is on HBO Max (show’s decent, book’s in my top 10, maybe my 5! EVER).
links: Art21 Guan Xiao segment | Art21 Liu Xiaodong segment
snake in the grass
Nothing happens, but when it does it’s at CVS. In line with someone from high school’s mom. She remembers me from sports. Me. Sports.
HA! “I must’ve been, like, eight!” I said in the car to my mom. “More like, five! By eight you’d have been old enough to know it wasn’t your thing.”
She said I was very done when I found out I couldn’t keep kicking the ball, that I had to go to the back of the line and wait my turn.
I have no memory of that, but I remember watching a guy’s pale yellow boa constrictor shed its skin across the grass once.