To hear to view

Excerpt from To hear to view by Anthony Elms

Some days the messenger gets lost. This winter at a memorial for influential poet Lyn Hejinian, a writer — Laynie Brown? Syd Zolf? Should have taken better notes — remarked on Hejinian’s language as drawing focus through difference. Difference, neither slippery slope toward skifflewiff chaos nor plurality as homogeneity. Underlining a fact: that chaos and homogeneity are not in opposition, differing poles, but rather synonyms. Difference, in Hejinian’s distinctions, is a lack of eased agreement in tense or syntax or emphasis or tradition, is essential. Distance and distinction, even at its most jarringly dissonant, defines and coheres a relationship with edges, unlike chaos. I am me and you are you. Chaos here understood as absolute lack of distinctions. “I am he as you are he, as you are me and we are all together...” Closer to overcooked oatmeal, homogenous baseness, in chaos nothing comes to fore nor distinguishes. Everything sticks around. “Goo-goo g’joob.”

Difference nourishes and distinguishes and churns. Difference as a three-course and more setting for real change. Difference between makes language mean. This preamble on its way to a ramble is a way of underlining the fact that nothing directly connects the 27 artists assembled in this exhibition except for an overlapping period of time spent within the MFA program at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. And to see any lack of coherence as a strength, allowing for some sympathies and

resonance in their individual intuitions and intentions. To name a few: Appeals to timelines beyond the human, crafting durations that register a planetary scale. Belief in the power of small adjustments, tweaks, and shims to hold enough weight to redefine what and how value is determined. To hum in counterpoint with the ambient noise of routines. Exploration of material labor as a way of recognizing that the world feels our actions to a greater degree than we register our feeling the world.

If there is any clarity in their multivocality, it is in tuning to languages that resist speaking with the emphasis of those oppressive and exclusionary forces that declaim so easily today with undeserved volume and consequential frequency. Given the current tsunami of crises and confrontations facing the artists, attacks on sovereignty, identity, impartiality, humanity, and given they are each beginning on a path, I’d like to extend the chance for each to band together with writer Enrique Vila-Matas. Within Insistence as a Fine Art, Vila-Matas declared “...I repeat myself in order to move forward. It wasn’t for nothing that I decided to join the Brotherhood of the Insistent. To project myself into the future, forever with the motto, ‘When I get it right, I’ll stop doing it.’” Naturally each to each will find their own brotherhood, sisterhood, communalhood, queerhood... perhaps even resisterhood.

Among the 27 here to view, beyond the major chords strike microtonal vibrations connecting particular artists and individual works, at times these minor countermelodies soothe, other times they sing conspiratorially. It is in that moment of needing to reset balance and shift your weight that collective becoming blooms.