019. ⬛And Void Reliquary⬛
Hello friends,
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Hello friends,
June is a strange month. In the beginnings of summer, on the tail-end of the school year, there is a certain stagnancy that arises —an unnatural stillness in the air, a sagging heat that makes your body feel as though it has been hollowed out, long stretches of quiet, humid mornings when nobody in the house speaks to each other, interrupted only by the odd smattering of birds and the faint thumps of flies flinging themselves against the insides of glass cups.
Perhaps, it's fitting, then, that I bring you the second part (after a prolonged newsletter disappearance of my own) of my "null and void"-themed letter. Despite the masses they produce, atoms are mostly empty space. As we look out into the gulf of the night sky, it might appear as though nothing—or barely something—is out there in the farthest corners of our ever-growing universe. Of course, that is not true. Voids are always occupied by something, even if it's just the void itself.
So now, I bring you a reconsideration of empty spaces, of lapses in knowledge and communication, of missing people, missing creatures, missing thoughts, and memories. Enjoy.
TOUCH
If we’re going to talk about void, why not start with the black hole that is corporate campaign donations from far-right billionaires? Jane Mayer published this book last year and it’s been an equal parts terrifying and fascinating read. Her book grapples with the growing financial inequality in our country, the influence right-wing extremist families have had over different facets of our political system long before Trump got elected. These people and this information are by no means easily accessible to the public (not by a long shot), but you can tell just how much time and journalistic energy Mayer has put into bringing the lives of these secretive families (such as the Mercers, the Koch Brothers) and covert meetings to light. Written with the eloquence of a mob movie script, it’s quite unnerving having to remind yourself that all these stories are far too real. If you’re interested in learning more about Mayer’s process and research for the book, I’d highly suggest listening to her interview on Democracy Now.
I first picked up Wendy Xu’s poetry collection, Phrasis, at the Brooklyn Book Festival last September. The word “phrasis” is an Ancient Greek word, meaning a “manner of expression” or “diction”. Her language throughout this book is fragmented, sparse, precise, a constant edge of a knife’s blade. She balances between calmness and pain, pinches and pulls her poetic narratives into all kinds of directions. These poems are delightful, unexpected unravelings of ordinary everyday life, of the body encountering feeling, playing with physical and emotional landscapes. Before you know it, she strikes a match and lets it burn down to its black quick. It is difficult to explain why I wanted to include her in this letter but trust me, it fits. There is something in the spaces she leaves on the printed page. Just a few of my favorite lines: “We had all manner / of speaking not in bodies / splayed likewise lurch / and stutter. But tenderly / a finger set / to music”; “a cough / swells white space proportional to its source”; “This thought that lodges: venture capitalists / of America kill yourselves”; “The poem vandalizing my original face, so let it / work / ever against my body”; “I lick the greening verb to rest”; “Moved all the way here to watch / television alone, swallowed by the grim / news grinning”.
Last weekend, I finally got to see Survey, Zoe Leonard’s first large-scale exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Her work covers a large spectrum of different mediums from photography to sculptures constructed from found and collected objects (one of my favorites is a piece titled 1961, a row of old blue suitcases—one for each year of her life—that juts out from the white gallery walls). She frequently relies on repetition—whether it be stacks of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time or a pile of old fruit littered across the floor—to examine the construction of identities and histories, but there’s a certain emptiness to be found there. Arial photographs of Niagara Falls and cityscapes and pictures of New York City storefronts—places full of matter, of people—feel strangely vacant, distanced, displaced. Almost everyone walking through the gallery around me fell silent, not commenting, not joking, just seeing.
LOOK
Ellen Gallagher’s figures are disembodied. What I’m referring to is pieces such as the one above, a “wiglette” from her grid-like collage, “DeLuxe (2004-2005). There is a certain loss of humanity as the eyes of the figures (taken from advertisements from black-owned publications such as Ebony, Sepia, and Our World), a person’s identity reduced to a body. Her pieces, whether it be collages, photography, silkscreens, paintings, all rely on repetition—and disruption of that repetition—to scrutinize the emptiness and the superficiality of American society. She wrestles with stereotypes, racialization, the ways in which the experiences of black Americans are erased through the “ordering principles” of a white supremacist society. The strongest weapon in her artistic arsenal is her cutting tool, slicing into canvases, papers, abstracting, filling the holes with meaning. You can learn more about her artistic process here.
One of my favorite ‘void’ artists has got to be Ruth Van Beek. Somewhere on the corner of abstraction and figuration lies her collages. She splats these huge cutouts—blobs? patches?—across the front of the page, simultaneously filling up and emptying out our flattened field of vision. I adore the way she plays with color and texture to create such delicious images. You can check out more of her work here .
Let me preface this by saying that I’m not really a Damien Hirst fan (there’s a whole host of reasons why, but I’m not going to get into it now). That being said, his pieces The Asthmatic Escaped and The Asthmatic Escaped II, which were produced in honor of the painter Francis Bacon the year he died, are part of his larger “Vitrine” series. Inside each transparent vessel, made of glass of steel, there is a camera on a tripod, a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, a pair of sneakers. Both have an inhaler tucked among the fabric, while one also a saucer, biscuits, a plastic cup with a lid (Bacon himself was an asthmatic). Death is a persistent theme in Hirst’s older work, but what fascinates me is his desire to capture the absence of a life. On one side of the sculpture, he gives us the bare bones of a person’s existence—their clothes, their inhaler, perhaps their cup of tea—with enough space for the viewer to fill in their own idea of a narrative. On the other side, you have the camera on a tripod. This reminds me not only of the role of the viewer (both as audience and artist, seer and interpreter of images, of people) but of those really cheesy ghost-hunting shows. The very act of trying to capture a split second in time, an ephemera manifested inside steel and glass. As though someone was there, sucked in a breath, and was gone.
The past few pieces have focused on the absence of material space, but what about the addition of materials to produce a void-like effect? I thought about this when looking at the work of Wangechi Mutu. She is most famously known for her representations of black female bodies, explosions and hybrid mutations of form and flesh verging on something out of a science fiction movie. However, I’ve been thinking about some of her other lesser known pieces, particularly her sculptural wall installations. She currently has a commissioned piece up at the ICA in Boston (I’m going there at the end of the month and hope to see it) titled A Promise to Communicate. Mutu constructed the work out of the gray, rough-textured blankets commonly used by humanitarian aid organizations and emergency responders. Mutu builds up layers of fabric on the wall to form an abstracted, misplaced map (like a reverse Pangea). The landmasses are spread out, lumped up almost like human bodies. The gaps between these countries emphasize the abstract emptiness and unknowns of border spaces, implying a kind of gap of communication, a lapse in helpfulness during times of international crises. Mutu’s piece challenges this lack of ‘communication’ through direct public engagement. Writing utensils hang down from the ceiling, urging viewers to come up and share their voices with other visitors, bridging the distance between the individual and the collective public with the hopes of instigating change. You can learn more about this piece here. You can also learn more about her secretive performance pieces here.
LISTEN
A while back, I came across Death in Ice Valley, a podcast co-created by the BBC World Service and Norway’s NRK broadcasting network. This investigative series takes a look at one of Norway’s most unusual cold cases—the Isdal Woman. This unidentified female body was found in Bergen in 1970 burnt to death and with over 50 sleeping pills in her stomach. Over time, they discovered suitcases, a trail of different aliases and fake identities across different hotels in Norway, and Norway’s police are still not able to determine who killed her, how, and why. Over the years, many theories have been circulated: that she was a sex worker, a spy (Norway’s secret police was involved early on in the investigation and it appears as though she was not born in Norway), that it was suicide, or it was not suicide (there were several witnesses that claimed to see her with different men). It’s a mystery with a lot of different threads. Death in Ice Valley seeks to unravel these different threads, taking us across Norway to follow in her footsteps, to secret police files and documents, to testing the remains of the woman herself for genetic clues. If you’re into true crime and you want to learn about more international cases, I’d highly recommend checking this series out. You can listen to it here or on the Apple podcast app.
A few months ago, I went with my dad to listen to classical German music at Lincoln Center. The opening of the concert was John Luther Adam’s composition, Become Ocean. It’s a 42-minute long piece yet I don’t remember feeling that length of time drag on. There’s a kind of rolling harmony to the work, swells of instruments coming together in a precarious balance between minimal and maximal sound. It presents nature with a kind of sonic intensity, a lush soundscape of slow-building tides. I remember the piece ending and, for a moment, the audience was struck silent as though recovering from hypnosis and processing what we had all just listened to. It’s so beautiful and dreamy. Adams actually won the Pulitzer Price in 2014 for this piece. Listen to it here.
Another true crime podcast series about those who are missing is Missing and Murdered: Finding Cleo. Produced by CBC Radio, this particular series is the second season of the Missing and Murdered program. It follows the story of particular Indigenous family in Canda and their quest to learn about the fate of Cleo, a young girl taken away from her siblings by Canadian child welfare authorities in the Sixties Scoop. Like the rest of her siblings, Cleo was seized from her birth mother and adopted out. However, all her family knows about her fate is that she was sent to the U.S. and died there. Rumors have circulated over the years that Cleo was raped and murdered while trying to get back home to Saskatchewan, however, the real answer has remained lost for decades. This powerful series, hosted by Connie Walker (who is herself from the Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan), looks at the ways Indigenous people, their lives, their histories, have been systematically oppressed through colonization and the ripple effects long after. Oftentimes, these traumatic experiences and painful stories never make mainstream news but, through Connie's work, Cleo's story (and that of her family torn apart) are brought to light. I would also suggest listening to the program's powerful first season, which tells the story of Alberta Williams, who was murdered along Canada's "Highway of Tears", and looks at the Canadian police force's blatant disregard for the high rates of Indigenous women who are abducted and murdered along this very same stretch of road. If you want to learn about an instance of the disruption and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and their culture in America, I would highly suggest this episode from Criminal.
LICK
After seeing many gifs and screenshots pass along my Tumblr and Instagram feeds, I finally watched Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), which was adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel of the same name. If you, like me, have only ever seen images from the film but aren’t familiar with the plot, I’ll explain it briefly: a group of boarding school girls in 1900 depart on a—you guessed it—picnic on Valentine’s Day. After some of the girls mysteriously vanish when they decide to go hike up a mountain, everyone and everything spirals into an unnamable chaos, a Victorian fever dream. This movie (and I assume the book as well) locates itself within many different ambiguities from symbolic meanings to the personalities of the characters. Underneath the film’s gorgeous visual façade, there are suggestions of queer eroticism and sinister, violent behavior that you can never fully pin down. This is a film of many silences, of many mysteries and unanswered questions. The film was recently re-done as a six-part miniseries (although I have yet to see it). I’d be curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve seen both adaptations. For some extra post-movie reading, may I suggest this video essay about chaos and order in the film, this 1993 essay about the film’s relationship between gender, aesthetics, and the environment, Megan Abbott’s essay on the different “gazes” in the film for The Criterion Collection’s blog, and this essay about different themes of religion, the use of Aboriginal tropes, and sexuality in the movie.
An idea which has persisted in the development of this 2-part newsletter series is that of visibility, or rather the emptiness that is produced by invisibility. This is why I want to include this piece by Hito Steyerl titled, How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic.MOV File (2013). “Whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible”, a computer-generated narrative voice staggers out. The video raises questions about the role of digital technology in surveillance, ways of rendering oneself unseen before the camera’s eye and in the physical world. It’s a strange piece you ought to experience for yourself. I would highly recommend watching the short film with this interview Hito did with the Tate Modern about the development of the work and her thoughts on digital image-making and visibility.
If you're like me, your familiarity with Maya Lin's work only extended so far as her famous Vietnam War veterans memorial in Washington D.C. when she was a student at Yale. Recently, I came across another project of Lin's, one that exists purely in the digital realm. Called What is Missing?, this website is like a massive educational archive looking at the effects of climate change around the world at different geographical and temporal time scales. Lin describes the piece as a "global memorial to the planet", using science and data collection to mourn species that have gone and will go extinct and different forms of habitat destruction. You could spend hours on this site clicking through timelines, learning about animals, different stories of environmental loss and pollution. Lin also invites people to add their own 'memories' and stories to the global map she has created as a way to foster more direct engagement with environmental issues. You can check it out here.
While we are on the topic of digital death and destruction, I invite you to check out this work by Penelope Umbrico titled All Catalogs A-Z 2002. The webpage compiled all 15,194 mail-order catalogs listed on the internet in February 2002. She lists the links in alphabetical order, allowing the user to click through until they end up on a random website. Umbrico deliberately decided not to update any of the links in the piece so now, when you click through it, many of the links are dead. This piece is, in a way, dying. An archive of an old form of digital commerce that is quickly being lost to time and shifts in Internet communication. Overwhelming both in its scale and in its absence of information, you can check out the piece here.
Serial Experiments Lain is a short sci-fi anime series that came out in 1998. The show follows Lain, an introverted teenage girl who immerses herself in the Wired (the show's version of a virtual-reality style Internet). After one of the students in her school commits suicide (suicide is something that happens more than once in the show, just want to give you a heads up), her peers receive a message from her. The dead girl claims that she is not dead, but rather she has abandoned her body for a virtual life in the Wired. After that, Lain's life becomes increasingly surreal as she becomes more immersed in this digital world. There is a sense of constant disconnect from one's self and one's reality. This is a show with many unanswered questions, long stretches of isolation and silence, instabilities of physical matter, and absences of identity. You can check it out here.
If you grew up in more suburban areas like me, you probably remember walking around malls with your families on the weekends, after church, etc. However, with shifts in retail business practices, many of the malls built in the 80's-90's 'mall boom' have begun to die out, ending up either demolished or left behind as abandoned ruins of a golden age in American consumerism. The story of the rise and fall of dead malls is one that's not really discussed now (many of these malls simply fade away or are obliterated out of existence), but it's one worth sharing. Dead malls have attracted many urban explorers over the years, but I'd highly suggest checking out Dan Bell's Dead Mall Series where he visits abandoned sites and malls on the verge of extinction. Equal parts informative and kinda creepy, you can check out the full Youtube playlist here. If you want to learn more about dead malls in general, check out this informative video from Vox and this website.
CLICK
If you couldn't tell, forgotten histories and systematic lapses in collective memory were a point of interest for me when developing this newsletter. One such example is The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness by Michael Marder. The book is constructed out of narrative meditations and recollections on the destruction caused by the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, this book reckons with the trauma of nuclear disaster both on individuals and on the environment. Coupled with images of plant samples from the contaminated zone, the book is designed to "[illuminate] the meaning of the remains, and [help] us envision a kind of testimony that respects absolute silence." You can read the full book here.
Another brilliant work is Solmaz Sharif's "The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetical". This piece, a hybrid poem-essay wrestles with modes of erasure and language in relation to the U.S. government. The systematic, state-sanctioned erasure of people, cultures, Sharif argues, stretches far back into American history, merging the poetic tactic with contemporary history. You can read it here.
Previously, I spoke about erasure and silence in relation to the refugee crisis. I want to continue this conversation with this work by Patricia Nguyen. Nguyen is a performance artist and one of her works is crafted out of her mother's experience at sea as a refugee from Vietnam. Since I couldn't find the performance online, I thought I would include Patricia's brilliant analysis. She reckons with the void of the ocean, waves of memory, and the statelessness (quite literally a void of social identity) many refugees are subjected to when they flee. You can read the article here and if you don't have institutional access, let me know and I can send you the PDF.
I thought I would also include this essay from the New Yorker called "When Things Go Missing". Katheryn Schulz writes about what it means to lose objects, the emotions that surface when searching for what is gone, both the things that can be replaced and those that cannot. A refreshing look at loss and grief. You can read it here.
Then there's this powerful poem by Elena Wilkinson titled "After the Loss of a Limb" from the Spring 1974 issue of The Paris Review about what it means to become disconnected from your body.
On the subject of the void of grief, there is also "The Night Where You No Longer Live" by Megan O'Rourke. She lapses death between the line breaks of the poem with such sadness and grace ("Was it like a virus / Did the software flicker / And was this the beginning / Was it like that / Was there gas station food / and was it a long trip"). You can read it here.
Here is a review of Anne Carson's Sappho translation, If Not, Winter. Dimitrios Yatromanolakis discusses the use of brackets in the fragments, the poetics that emerge through the scraps of writing that have survived and have been translated over the years. He balances between the history of Sappho's work and role of aesthetic gesture to create a sense of emptiness rather than to fill in the gaps in her writing. You can read it here (and if you don't have institutional access, let me know so I can send you the PDF).
Lucie Brock-Broido died earlier this year and I thought I would include a poem of hers to honor her poetic legacy. "A Girl Ago" plays with the language of negation ("No feeding on wisteria. / No pitch-burner traipsing / In the nettled woods."). I love the power that arises from Lucie's use of rejection to produce a revelation rather than denial. You can read it here.
Another investigative story, courtesy of GQ , about Chris Smith. Smith, who grew very rich, told his friends and family that he was going to charter a yacht and sail around the world. While a few people who received this email thought this wasn't surprising, it quickly became clear that Smith had disappeared, and something may have gone terribly wrong. This longform piece looks at the strangeness of Smith's life, the mysteries that surrounded him, and the unanswered questions that continue to surround the crime. Vlahos does a solid job of weaving together all of the different strings of the story and it's worth checking out if you're looking to read more true crime. Read it here.
Another poem is by Patricia Kirkpatrick, titled "Vision Test". In it, Kirkpatrick negotiates with a brain tumor and the toll it takes on her eyesight. With such gentleness, she unravels the ties between body and mind, the blind spots that emerge both in her field of vision and her memory. You can read it here.
Lastly, there is this powerful investigative essay by Kiera Feldman for ProPublica about the hidden world of private garbage collection. Since so much of the work happens in the darkest hours of the night, the danger and precarity of this work go unseen. Feldman brings these stories to life with such brilliant and informative writing. You absolutely must read here and check out her interview with the Longform podcast if you can.
//
Long time, no read. My apologies for my digital silence the past month (although quite appropriate given this letter's theme). Between moving into a new apartment, finishing my semester, and going home for vacation, it felt although I was never quite in the right headspace to jot down my thoughts on the digital page. Now that it's summer, I've gotten back into the swing of reading, consuming, and seeing as much stuff as I can so expect us to get back into (more-or-less) our regularly scheduled programming.
"Void" is such a vague word, but perhaps that vagueness is what makes it such a rich subject to explore. Negation and absence can play out across physical and digital spheres from dead links to forgotten histories to lapses in physical interaction. Something can be reclaimed within that emptiness. Something can be built out of that erasure, something stronger. I can't just finish this letter without including one of my favorite pieces from feminist artist Audrey Wollen:
Until next time!
Love,
Ellie