On Maggie & Roland & Me. — Small Night Projects

I love real artists. I love how they assert themselves very early on to dream and then brave the economic and psychological shortfalls of forever becoming an artist. I love how, undeterred by systemic obstacles and cruel responses to that dream, they continue on in education, in life, in love, in family, in frustration, in rage, in their unfurling to a defenseless openness where senses and memories, theirs and culture’s, leave them petalless to assaults that wound and scar from the inside out. Not unlike the closet of sexuality—with the addition of an ironical winking light bulb—artists come out in their assertion of life, of A life, as something to be lived not denied. The real artist’s destructive capacity equals that of the workaday accumulation of everyone else, and that, if you think about it, in terms of numbers of artists vs. everyone else, is superhuman-destructive. I came out as an artist—that is, came out of childhood finding myself clinging to the artistic affirmation I’d received as a child from friends and family, to find myself stranded between the naive dream of being an artist and the workaday reality that my father represented to me as a coal miner, a forester, a security guard, followed by his forced early retirement due to a DUI that ploughed grill-first into his unfurled car and body at 5.55pm—five minutes from home. From that dinner time on, that GBH borrowed holes in the workaday ethic of my father—cats have nine lives but don’t live on with eight traumas; humans carry on with carry-on. For the last week I have been reading three memoirs: Jean-Bertrand Pontalis’ Love of Beginnings, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. The good difference between eyes meeting across a crowded bar and ‘I’s’ meeting on the written page is the the possibly lack of performativity and the psychic excess in the latter. Here I am riding passenger to these drivers in boxer shorts and T-shirt in bed beside my wife. The Word can give all-access to the private you. Reading you—Jean and Maggie (my mother’s name which I have learnt to repeat here without sadness) and Roland—I am the most unflinching and attentive and assertive me without being conscious of the fact. Reading—like Proust wrote and is read—coldly attends to life and intimately denies it. Last night, in my boxer shorts, it was Maggie Nelson’s turn. I came across this passage—this ‘fragment’ in Barthes’ terminology—where Barthes is referenced in one of those embedded quotations of Maggie’s wherein she somehow manages to ventriloquize with a megaphone whilst still keeping her voice. The Argonauts is a novel, a memoir, an essay spilling out on the page with Maggie’s family looking on and Maggie looking in, wielding assertive language behind her back with a gaping hole in her chest. Here she writes and thinks and shares as if her parents will never read it, even though, in so many words, they wrote it, or, at the very least proffered the experiences that activate the white space between Maggie’s words. Here Maggie is breaking the rules laid down by her parents—and all the other mothers and fathers we appoint and anoint over a lifetime. Here Maggie is putting her body on the line en route to putting her relationship, family, privacy and other writers on the line. Her quotation-dropping is not a case of ‘Look what I’ve read!’ but ‘Look how I have read you, them, me!’ Excerpt: [Afraid of assertion. Always trying to get out of “totalizing” language, i.e., language that rides roughshod over specificity; realising this is another form of paranoia. Barthes found the exit of this merry-go-round by reminding himself that “it is language that is assertive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s assertive nature by add[ing] to each sentence some little phrase of uncertainty, as if anything that came out of language could make language tremble.” ] Reading this I start to think about the unassertive languages of the art scene, not just the press releases and art writing but the body language of the artist as s/he retreats back to the closet where the light bulb is full of want not need—need being the ingredient for action. I realise what I’m missing when reading Maggie. Her invocation of Barthes is not a theory extinguished in some ideology of want to leave the grey plume of the poetic; she is not fleeing “language’s assertive nature”, she is letting language fold through her in her contracted and bold prose that, without arrogance or closet-sightedness, just is. Be assertive, but not too assertive! The artist finds herself in a environment lacking in resources, just the bare minimum. And that’s okay—to want more is to need less, act less. Questions at professional skills seminars go something like this: Should I contact a curator? What should I say? How long should I give them to respond? Should I attach my CV? Should I ask them to meet for a coffee, dinner, desert? And so on. As I read Maggie I notice no ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybes’, no apologies for thinking or opining or repurposing in a certain way. Maggie opens up with the exclamatory joy of anal sex and anticipatory pleasure of dildos in the shower. This is not to say her prose is arrogant, vulgar, there is vulnerability here in the boldness, wounded, and not the castrated wounded woman—what my son at four years after catching my wife naked in the shower severed with “You have no willy! Poor you.” The male ego is not assertive, it is established by an external riptide that carries it along without the choice of getting drowned in it. Poor him! Maggie’s ego is a wounded one, whether that wound is inflicted by society or her mother, who knows but Maggie, but woman, for whom putting her body on the line is nature, not nurture. “I nodded, shyly lifting my breast out of my bra. In one stunning gesture, she took my breast into her hand-beak and clamped down hard. A bloom of custard-coloured drops rose in a ring, indifferent to my doubts.” Just now I received an email from mother’s tankstation Dublin. My feelings about it are fizzing so I thought this the best time to be assertive in my feelings about what I think is an assertive verbal gesture on the part of Mothers’ writer that, in this current press release for the solo exhibition ‘Jessie Homer French: Paintings 1978 - 2018’ comes part way out of the closet with the light bulb winking again: “The Dublin gallery of mother’s tankstation has a sort of hallway or cuboid antichamber from which one enters directly from Watling Street, positioned pretty immediately below the desk from where most of these writings magically appear…” Alchemy? Assertive? Assertive Alchemy? I’ve always enjoyed MT's press releases even if I thought I didn’t (like a lot of people) in the very act of reading them, sometimes re-reading them. They create consternation, and are always assertive in their support for their artists, obvs, wielding a manifesto (that was rewritten recently) but in its first edition proclaimed what “Mothers” did not mean, which probably meant just that, or that and more. As the weight and lightness of images topple the physical art scene online, MT’s assertive language here gives me hope that I am in the right game, writing for art. That writing, that language, can be assertive where artists cannot, and it shouldn’t be tamed because, as Barthes reminds us (and Maggie performs), language doesn’t tremble, we do.