Interpretations and Revelations
On a jam-packed day of art and New York City.
I.
It’s been months since I last wrote a newsletter, but it was weeks ago I started gassing myself up to write something-anything, because grandiose thoughts pervaded my functional work of being an arts administrator-parent and it felt imperative to share My Very Important Takes. Or not. I dunno.
The stakes of this mealy newsletter rose unnecessarily as I convinced myself whatever I was going to say next had to have a strong positive impact. I could no longer afford to be mundane.
On the other hand it wasn’t very long ago I was just talking about being horny. It was all I wanted to do and it felt revolutionary precisely because it was mundane. *Shrug* I’m still horny, thank god. I guess I just feel bad I’m not actualizing anything beyond the hilariously pubescent nature of impure darts I look and pierce, surreptitiously at any kind of anybooty. That’s a trauma response el oh el but I’ll have more to say on incubating fantasy later. Soon.
For now, the point is that it took me a while to motivate to write because I’ve been so preoccupied with “doing good” in the face of so much bad. I’m sure you all are feeling the same way. It’s bad enough Elon Family Guy Musk is giving our social security numbers to a bunch of zygotes but now with Emilia Perez to add to our woes? *Sigh* Whatever we do next better be really fucking good, amirigiht?
I had drinks with a colleague the other night on a rooftop bar in lower Manhattan. I said to her, “I have a confession. I love rooftop bars.” She guffawed. “I thought you were going to tell me something really scandalous!” I realized that I was confessing to being susceptible to bourgeois trappings because it’s embarrassing as someone trying to live righteously “in this economy” but to her, it was so obvious that the view of Manhattan from 20 stories up should delight anyone. So I made a note to self, not to “confess” any longer—not to assume guilt or shame over the mundane malapropos.
I’ve added high protein snacks to my mornings so I stop binging high carb snacks late at night. I’ve dyed my hair neon yellow because I’m tired of being me, but I also don’t want anyone to confuse me as a blond. I got a corporate gym membership because I need a better locker room. I went to the Russian sauna in Northeast Philly a day after that plan crashed on Cottman Ave. My kitchen is full of shelf stable foods I have stocked up on to survive potential fallout—whether medical, ecological or military. If I had a cache of antibiotics and steroids I’d make a great prepper. I am feeding my paranoia. I bought four blank notebooks and an orange highlighter to document access credentials, recipes for the apocalypse, and other fantasies. I am drawing the shape of the body I wish to inhabit as a person and lover. Let’s go.
II.
I went on a very long Art Day yesterday. Started with a walk down the High Line to the Whitney where I saw a preview of Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day All Night” exhibition, and caught “Edges of Ailey” before it closes. From there I walked into Chelsea and met Janna for lunch. We talked about crisis communications protocols and strategies. The woman sitting next to us had had so much work done on her face I considered her a piece of art. I went from there to the Met to catch “Flight Into Egypt” and specifically, a performance by Sidra Bell in collaboration with Immanuel Wilkins. After the Met, I got a massage with my sister in TriBeCa and caught a rush hour of NY Fashion Week street pageants on the boulevards, tainted with petrochemical blueberry and mango vape smoke new to me. A grizzly middle-aged man walked through one crowd smoking a “regular” cigarette and when I inhaled that second hand smoke I practically exploded with joy. The galleries are bloated with money. It is terrifying how moneyed they are now. It terrifies me the same way that I’m terrified by replicas of the Eiffel Tower in Tianducheng China; by the McDonald’s designed by Richard Meier or whoever. It could be the towering 19th century banks gilded with Renaissance era vignettes turned into a CVS only to be decamped and gutted once we’ve had our way with locked up toiletries and FSA benefits. Tampons inside architecture should be free.
III.
I can’t stop thinking about the dual Whitney exhibitions of the Christine Sun Kim oeuvre and Alvin Ailey universe. I start on the 8th floor at Kim’s show, planning to walk down to Ailey after. Disembarking the giant elevator at 8, the musical notation decorating the floor make me smile. Notes chasing graphs. An apt metaphor. Works designated “All Day” and “All Night” (physical tracings of ASL signifiers for “all day” and “all night”) are compelling psychic anagrams of our adaptation to Circadian rhythm. What a “Timely” (to the third power) exhibition, I keep thinking. And then. I am completely bowled by one particular piece in the first inner gallery, though I doubt this piece is being broadcast much on Instagram. It’s just not that kind of print.
“How to Measure Loudness” is—and I’m taking a guess but—it’s words in charcoal? on paper. A list of phrases. An index of loudness made in descending order of musical fortes. The longest fortissimo (a fortisisisisisisisisisisissimo) is described as “VOICE LOST IN OBLIVION.” The next is “95 DECIBELS AND ABOVE” and so on until about eight lines down it says:
ffff: ASIAN FLUSH
I stick to this phrase like hair on gum. I don’t visit the Whitney often, but I go through my mental database searching desperately for evidence that this is the first. First what. I conclude some time later that this is indeed possibly/probably the first time I* have seen an Asian American neologism inclusive of the actual physical word “Asian” articulated in art hanging at the museum in a primary context.
*note my emphasis on this being “my” first time seeing it. Of course the word may have appeared boundlessly so many other times at the Whitney, as it has been printed in so many other smaller museums, but I just haven’t seen it here.
Asians abound in the arts, but the phrase “Asian Flush” is one hundred percent Asian American. Elsewhere she writes the phrase “stuffing our faces with kimchi while we sign.” Reading that strikes the same key on my brain grand piano. Dingggg! I can’t believe in 2025 this is the first time I’m feeling…..
s e e n
Language art is fascinating. In the stairwell of the museum are works by Lawrence Weiner. Elsewhere Glenn Ligon. I’ve sent numerous Barbara Kruger postcards to friends and make everyone visiting Philadelphia go to the Comcast building just to take in the Jenny Holzer marquees. My preferred way to consume letters is in comics, however. The long hand of Anders Nilsen’s existential dialogues, Michael De Forge’s experiments in universe through font, Liana Finck’s neurotic scripts. But Big Museums prefer mechanical type. So I am overjoyed that Christine Sun Kim’s show stays obsessively in the information of the hand itself. Playing with musical notation and irony, her work edges (and I mean this as a relationship with perimeters and of course in deference to slang signifying attenuated orgasm) in and out of the importunate. There it is, also: the show is funny and sweet on top of didactic.
I am so grateful to be alive for this synthesis, this syncretic language of what it means to hear and be and see and interpret. To interpret. She writes a lot about interpreting. Dingggg! To be an interpreter. To inter- polate. To be an explainer. To explain. To put it on a plain. Ex- Plain.
I make my way down the stairwell to the fifth floor and walk into “Edges of Ailey” and immediately start crying at the feeling of being enveloped by bodies. The floor is organized in such a way as to feel like you are a blood cell traveling inside the core membrane of movement-based art. The blood-colored drapes and walls reinforce the organic holism of the show. Whoever designed this exhibition deserves a prize of some kind. Is this the first time I’ve seen the floor of the Whitney from stem to stern and back and forth? The room is lined with a video projections of archival footage of Ailey, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. While hemmed by the footage, spectators can wander the gallery and learn about Ailey’s accomplices, friends and partners. So much movement, so many people. I see pure delight in the faces of many young people seeing this work for what may be their first time. O, Providence!
The letters from his mother make me laugh. She tells him to lose weight. God knows we’ve all been there. How bold of them to run that though. But then his own treatise on the homosexual man is bittersweet, too. Something about decrying his own narcissism and vanity. Mostly I’m stunned at how much paper material has been kept and maintained by whomever is responsible for Ailey’s belongings. They’re immaculate. Someone is a hoarder. I mentally compare the elision of vitrines on this floor to the bombast of large format sequential framing three floors up. This is not to protest that letters and diaries deserve more attention but just to say it is funny what you find when you are shown what to find.
Things that stuck with me: the AIDS quilt; his patch. Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea.” Footage from Southeast Asia and Afro-orientalism. The company’s European residencies. Black Women. Revelations on screen. These pieces affect me into the floor. I am floored. I got to witness any of this. It is living art. I finally get it. I finally think I understand why I like art. In fact I think I finally decide I do like art. It is because art means we were here. We are here.
IV
I’m going to Brooklyn tonight to see Liz Phillips perform electronic sound art. I can’t wait. I’m hiding in my apartment till the last minute because every time I step foot into New York City I spend a godforsaken amount of money. Last night I had a cocktail that cost $22. “What is this, made with eggs?!” I complained. I thought I’d gotten one over on NYC when I went to Whole Foods and bought a bag of rice to eat over the weekend (see, I’m saving money!) but the joke was on me when the cashier rang me up for fourteen fucking dollars. Four teen dol lars for a bag of rice.
I love it though. I can hear the whistles of the buildings and laugh at the mega-taupe wealthy, nannies are pushing around their future oppressors, and ethnic culture is printed on polyurethane so it outlasts the trend it’s selling this time. And I am unapologetically robbing myself by going to the highest point of this building and freeing my breath in an art city designed to end the world.
Let’s go.
