It should be useful that I find myself, the weekend before this show opens, lying down in a cold sweat feeling deeply nauseous, the victim of some kind of bacterial attack likely caused by insisting on cleaning up a huge pile of garbage my neighbor left out, which caught on fire revealing and melting all of its contents. I love cleaning up trash, and it finally came back to bite me. Still gotta write this damn thing.
Whats most clear in this horizontal place, however, is that extracting anything from this immobilizing feeling of ailment is nearly impossible. It is this way with the physical reality inside the body when a violent state change occurs. There is always great difficulty in interpreting the present. It can’t be made metaphor, it can only be literal so not fully describable... at least not for right now.
So I attempt to enjoy my symptoms, and cultivate a logic around making them useful towards feeling control of the next moment. This need for control, yet another pathology :(
In making art and speaking with other artists about their work I will often trust the conversations most that tend towards the physical condition of the making of the work. This can take many forms: a discussion about the identity of the body making the work – and its material conditions, an idea about what one is physically attracted/repelled by, a skill and deskill dynamic of what someBody is and isn’t capable of doing, and perhaps most important the physical transformative power of creativity, in its ability to invert a destructive force into a constructive one, or even just from red to blue.
The work I chose for this show in collaboration with Lubov speaks to a spirit of strength, and power of artists. I reject the suggestion that artists must be resilient, must make do, or must compete with one another for anything. I propose that this work hover in this realm above this one maybe even a realm closer to death than life, in a state which cannot be instrumentalized.
—Me (Jacques Louis Vidal), June 2021
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