3:51

💥✍It's 3:51. We just lost one 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 to another 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 due to a virus. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 we once knew, when the things we did every day, came & went every day, & we moved on, day after day, so every day became 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺. First time I heard the term 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 was in art school. Then there was no IKEA "Wonderful Everyday" promotional campaign to offset the shock that art wasn't about some fantasy. Artists were here to show you what you were missing right before your eyes without the razzmatazz of the mainstream. This was art: unsheet 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 whilst retaining the veil of art. When I was an exhibiting artist it was common for artist friends to say in response to my forecasted misgivings regarding the location or timing of a forthcoming exhibition that, "At least you'll get good photos!" This response, which was said without an ounce of irony, but I felt a ton of defeat, somehow helped. However, if the location & timing of the exhibition was in sync with my grand ambition or fantasy, then takeaway images were not as important, because the cycle of desire had reached a height from which other experiences were yet to be measured. Speaking of height: did you know Giorgio Morandi was six feet four? To fantasize is to wonder higher than 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺, not romanticize the ground underfoot, something I never trusted as a thing to romanticise about. It always seemed forced to speak of 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 in art parlance, like trying to be mindful of present reality & its fantastical shortcomings, even though we cannot experience 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 as something important until it's past. 2-inches taller than Morandi, Michael Jordan's gift (we are told in The Last Dance) was not his athleticism or ambition, but mindfulness in motion - past, present & future fused in a dunk. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 is never a substitute for fantasy, no matter how much we elevate 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 in our artist statements or IKEA promotion. Images of art promote fantasy; art in the physical setting promotes 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 is always harder than fantasy. It's 3:51

May 23, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Rage

💥✍ Sometimes, as Philip Roth📷 said - “a habitual sense of prose decorum” is not nearly enough. Since March I've never written as many words since the last time I wrote as many words. Last time was the financial crisis of 2008. I seem to revel or repress in times of crises. Either words are spilling out because I enjoy the novelty, anxiety or fear; or words are spilling out because I am repressing the novelty, anxiety or fear. This week I stopped writing - first time in 6 weeks. The curve of novelty, anxiety or fear had levelled. Instagram had become repetitive: Zoom screenshots; artist support pledges; arts blackout; a saturating sameness, predictability & inevitability devoid of any new energy or insight, just the proliferation of nostalgia that once had life but not enough life leftover to inject new life into a lifeless present. Just when we thought the online world was sufficient, it seems the online world needs the real world producing at pace or it will become lifeless. Still, we try, we move on, post another post, even though we know everything we wrote or made before all this will be experienced & questioned in a new light when the new light comes. The other day we walked the same 2km circuit down by the river Suir that surrounds the splendid isolation of the island stronghold of Waterford Castle. My current mindset was not a good time to confront 4 teenagers joined at the hips in a walking wall of inevitability. Assumedly a dare, passersby backed up against hedge & bank with no room to avoid or think or respond to seethe in anger later. The wall kept moving, eyes forward, no acknowledgement, just sideways smirks. I saw the smirks coming. Rage is a strange thing. Philip Roth's words are marked by rage; that's why I like his words. When rage comes, it flows, like the speedboat that just clipped the surface of the Suir to create wave after wave & sizzle long after the boat is gone. My rage usually starts calm & succinct - "Move!" Then other words spill out - "Move, or I'll move you!" These words coming from a 6.6ft elevation under a handlebar moustache usually work. I'm 𝘶𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 happy words work because when words stop working, release takes over🖤

APRIL 30, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Quit

💥 ●𝗘𝗗 𝗥𝗨𝗦𝗖𝗛𝗔, 𝗤𝗨𝗜𝗧, 𝟭𝟵𝟲𝟳, 𝗚𝗨𝗡𝗣𝗢𝗪𝗗𝗘𝗥 𝗢𝗡 𝗣𝗔𝗣𝗘𝗥 💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💣💥 #onlineexhibition #quit #edruscha #mood

APRIL 26, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Bare Necessity

Bare Necessity 🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻🐻 #markwallinger #sleeper #2005 @neuenationalgalerieberlin #bear #bare #imissart #barenecessities #bearnecessities #🐻 #😢

In Our Time: Sven Sandberg

💥✍ In a period of resignation & listlessness, Sven Sandberg's paintings of poseurs are good company to look at: they reflect the resignation & listlessness right back at us. An exhibition cut short (like so many others) was scheduled to end last week at Rathfarnham Castle. Two directives are expressed in the text that foots the vertiginous slideshow online at Berlin Opticians, directives I will disregard (including the castle environment) due to 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵: 𝟏, "small details, noticeable only upon close inspection"; 𝟐, "intended to be viewed in natural light". Hat tips abound here, from "early renaissance" to the shifting mood of the 1920s & '30s - & not to forget the rolling carpet of "contemporaneity". All said & done, nostalgia presides here, plus a reflexive vanity in Sandberg's sitters. Cateract'd loungers lounge around in scumbled & open brush work. Reflexive portraits, they are sitters painting themselves in mirrors or in mind. Heads wriggle out of three-quarter convention & definition as if avoiding prosperity - Snapchat captures. One painting in particular - John Singer Sargent in title, 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘟 (who was a fin-de-siècle socialite & painting I copied over a decade ago), but James McNeill Whistler in treatment - exposes her kissable neck to reveal a flash of buttercup light that opens up a portrait that ripples the slow & still waters of the present. Sandberg's paintings are not held together by drawing or tone, but by colour: combos of burgundy & pink, pink & viridian, pink & naples yellow. Like nostalgia, pink also presides. A canopy of colour shelters a wan café sitter caught in a juggling orbit of white cup, dislocated arm, baby-red hair, slit eyes, black jug & back again. These silver screen & Great Depression archetypes recall other archetypes by Edward Hopper & Alex Katz, & lesser known paintings like Ivan Gregorovitch Olinsky's 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘺 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 (1939). Here their gaze is more somnolent. They slide back in time & space, eyes sometimes pupiless or jaundiced as if just born into a world of soft interiors that cushion their fall at every misstep. Safe as houses they say. Fuck - I miss real exhibitions🖤 

APRIL 22, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

2KM Lockdown

💥✍ “Loneliness is collective; it is a city,” Olivia Laing writes in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘊𝘪𝘵𝘺: 𝘈𝘥𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘉𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘈𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦. We live in an ex-Centra (ex-shop). According to Google Maps we 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 live in a Centra. Friends on first visits always drive past. When we first moved in, the shop possessed deep-green lacquered walls & clouds of black mould; shop counters that, when we shifted them, cities of gooey jellies & pennies sprung forth. We gutted Centra, we magnolia'd Centra into what became one big room divided with furniture rather than walls. We sowed a runway of lights on the ceiling. Our kids cycle laps & throw hoops under this constellation. Until yesterday we ran laps of it every second day; for the foreseeable tomorrows I will run laps everyday - *laps of luxury* I call them. It is a territory that we have made into the image of our lives. Sometimes it proffers new images. It's social. It's home. I run to unpack my writing. Writing is a physical act, like making & experiencing art is a physical act. This physically confined territory in which I run helps to elbow & knee dumb & circular arguments into submission so I can begin to write. Like "Zooey & Franny" in J.D.Salinger's 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘡𝘰𝘰𝘦𝘺 the arguments can become bigger than the room that contains them. The bigger the argument the smaller the room the sweatier the run becomes. The days before the 2km lockdown we had escaped to remote forests for hours on end wishing to get lost & lonely so time would surprise us when we returned to the car. Since the 2km lockdown our kids have ventured into the walled & overgrown corners of our garden for the first time, to shout to the kids' voices next door... also homebound. The kids next door were there 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦 - we could hear them - but now, for some reason, kids need each other, especially when there's walls between them. My son Noah asks, "Can they come into our garden after the virus?" I reply, "Yes, after the virus, Noah. After the virus."🖤

APRIL 19, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

The Sitter

💥✍ The sitter sits. Gloves of patent black & shiny, shorn of personality like prosthesis, is first; lumberjack shirt, skater garb in the light of day 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘥 "that-type-of-thing-doesn't-happen-round-here" chic in the basement fluorescence, is second. Next the planed timber, clean & pale as scrubbed bone, bolted at the knee, rests on a workbench, slightly lifting its hamstring, waiting for the rubber hammer to pop the knee jerk. Deep in the Chardin shadow of the foreground, gumtaped MDF cuts one diagonal, the workbench another, the timber another. The sitter's body, slack, hides beneath this architecture of strong-armed angles & lines with hands as inhuman as Pinocchio's nose but somehow telling the dark truth. One glove & arm separated from the body, a phantom limb playing dead; the other caresses the hip of the sitter (& knuckles the rim of my phone) without feeling, just vogue. Without the fetish of the glove, a substitute for something other & amplifier for 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 something other, the image is as quiet as a Chardin without the splayed fish & pampering paws of the killer cat, the black jug or prim & anaemic schoolmistress. Gloves here are the Law, the order, the eyes. In a time of limbs & organs & masks & whips, when gloves register before faces, turned away, this image from yesteryear circa 2006, when things were good & bad before they got worse circa 2008, when 𝘖𝘭𝘥 𝘋𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 Died 𝘏𝘢𝘳𝘥, says something about now, holding time with numbed senses that awkwardly, like a black beetle on its crunchy back, articulates its quandary by rolling back & forth on the hunch of it exo, waiting, watching through the pincer sockets of its gripping gaze. 📷 @helmsbrink/Instagram

APRIL 16, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

The Trampoline

💥✍ "mind-wired to distant things" Don DeLillo writes in 𝘜𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥. The trampoline. Sitting there. A hunk of metal & net. Ever lie on one? On a clear day like yesterday? The heat against your back, on your face, sinking towards the ground where taller grass holds crystal ball moisture in the half shadow & eclipse of bouncing bodies. And there before you: blue. A perfect blue beyond the mouth of green netting & tree tops budding. Everything and nothing. Nothing. I first started to lie on the trampoline on days like yesterday, around the time my son was one. The trampoline. A freeplay prison. A piece of clothing. Harness strapped to your back & tied shut like a slack-spined bodice from where you can parachute upward, elsewhere, without worrying where the kids might escape to. Just up & down… up & down..... up & down. The trampoline helps to shutter & peel away the domestic world that lies in waiting when you stand up. The 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 view. Straight ahead. Eye-level. The 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 view. The trampoline is such an empty thing, a husk of a thing. Empty trash emptied of aesthetic that takes up too much space & obscures too much 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 view. It looks upward, always upward. A cyclops' lidless eye. You 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 view it from the kitchen window when washing another dish, another bottle. Step in & lie down. The trampoline screams through that maw of netting, so vast & silent on a day like yesterday. I try to get my kids to lie with me & look up at the blue. They are jumping. They can't get a good bounce because my dead weight dulls the spring so they mostly stomp on me. It's comforting. I direct their attention to the tree tops that crest our view like eyelashes to talk about beginnings & what's to come. I direct their attention to a seagull that circles & think of vultures but don't answer their questions sufficiently as to why the seagull is circling because I have just thought of vultures. And then I think of planes; streams of shaving foam dwindling in the blue. Nothing. Not a wisp🖤

APRIL 12, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

COVID-19 CRISIS RESPONSE AWARD

💥✍ So who's applying for the 𝘯𝘰𝘸 amended & less competitive COVID-19 Crisis Response Award? I've always shamefully wished for a silver rabbit-eared art market in Ireland, where artists could break more rules under the support of some eccentric patron with more money & irrational desire for art (of all creeds) than sense. "Art raises its head where creeds relax." (Nietzsche) Alas we don't have such a private alternative, we have the Arts Council, a publicly funded institution that funds artists based on *good* & quantifiable reasons. These good reasons + reputational muscle are totted up in boxes with dots & crosses & ticks, where the reactionary forces & unstable desires of the moneyed market are nowhere to be seen. Two months ago I would have welcomed such a reactionary award, which, like the lovesick art collector, puts up money without due diligence or conceptual rigor, just drive & urgency, which I find perversely exciting. But not now. This award suits artists who are conditioned to curate content on-the-hop in what Claire Bishop calls our project-based economy in 𝘈𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘴 - now complicated by our network-based economy. This award is for artists like me! (I was even contemplating applying - however my proposal was communitarian, including 10 other artists, €3,000 evenly spread, ending up an empty token for an empty gesture.) In a time of separation & isolation such a highly competitive award with artists separated from their places of work & from peers who help them think & sustain what is a lonely & thankless task, this award will only engender further feelings of isolation & segregation at a time when *kinship* is needed. Come the day when every artist, with their own relative agency, contributes their time & energy & limited power outside of their own concentrated circle to other circles & other circles & other circles until the sky is teeming with *white noise* & the liquid field is flat & unified by recessed centres—lots and lots & lots of centres of influence & the tide of artists is the thing that comes to shore & inevitably razes what has gone before & what is to come. A reproductive community. Lambs lambing. Unity🖤

APRIL 10, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Robert Adams for Now

💥✍ "Is art a sufficient consolation for life? Can beauty make suffering tolerable?" Art is being affirmed here in the positive register, life in the negative, one of struggle, suffering & survival, something that applies to third-world countries before & now & tomorrow & tomorrow… Worlds where the luxury to reflect is never proffered in the day-to-day, never mind in art. But here we are, photographer Robert Adams doing just that in the context of the New Topgraphers who saw beauty and Truth (with a small 't') in the social intimacy under the silent vertices of the American suburban landscape, in black, white & the splendour of light; far, far away from Warhol's jittery world of what now? what next? In reviews of Adams' work from the 1980s, when his book 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘺 𝘪𝘯 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘺 was published, the word "tradition" is continually ascribed to his way of thinking, writing & making photographs. He is self-conscious about this fact, titling his critical essays "In Defense of Traditional Values." Adams is as erudite in his writings as he is eloquent in his photography, having a PhD in Literature before he turned fulltime to photography. Words came to his defence, but not ideas. Contra to poet William Bonk, Adams believed "Ideas are [not] always wrong" but rather in William Carlos Williams' formulation "No ideas but in things." I don't know why Adams' photography & writings have become so important to look at during the rise of this crisis. His photography seems to register something of now, albeit set in the past & elsewhere. Adams writes that art is only partly sufficient consolation for suffering. A photographer sent me a DM sharing concern "that old work I’ve made won’t have the same standing in whatever new-world emerges from this crisis". I think Adams' example proves that partly wrong. Some of those exhibitions that are on pause or delayed indefinitely will suffer a future viewer that has been irreparably changed after all this ends. Art cannot be viewed so cheaply as distraction. Most of the time art is not reflective of any particular time, but dips in & out of temporal consciousness when the time is right. Art's legacy is 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘴🖤

APRIL 5, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

On Optimism & Alex Katz

💥✍Optimism sometimes looks desperate in times of crisis, especially in the now intensified proliferation of yesterday, today & 𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕝 𝕥𝕠𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕣𝕠𝕨. I came to artist Alex Katz in a roundabout way about 20 years ago: through images of his paintings in books; through an essay by Merlin James entitled 'Painting per se' (that doesn't discuss Katz's paintings just nods optimistically to their brilliance); & via an art tutor of mine who brought Katz up only to violently put him down - I was sold. Katz calls his paintings "up paintings". He is interested in optimism, colour imbued with light, surface, and most of all visual dominance. Art historians always lob him in with Warhol & Pop because he's going for instantaneousness like Warhol did, and like Warhol he is not interested in narrative, but is interested in Now - the present, the presentness & the prescience of painting. Katz has collected Vogue Magazine for years & uses the pictures to dress his cast of characters for the occasion of Now - right Now, in all its rightness and nowness. It's his whole philosophy (which is not a philosophy) on colour as light that gets me most. As a teenager I read one of those books that reveal the tricks of painting realistically with oil paint. The painter with the tricks was good - not putting mimesis before paint. But like all painters he had his rules. One such rule is to focus on painting light or colour, never both in one painting. So when you painted a vase smeared in impasto light, pure colour could only exist beside shadow. Light obliterated colour in his rulebook. Katz throws his rulebook out through his "reductive system" where detail gives way to fields of fast colour &  s l o w drawing to ultimately become light. You don't get Katz secondhand in books or essays or via disgruntled painting tutors; you get him in the fleshy flesh, full & large, as I finally did at the Serpentine Gallery in 2016. Katz's paintings are all surface up close; the paint laid down without second-thoughts. 𝘗𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 - as Edwin Denby wrote - 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘴𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵🖤

APRIL 2, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Handmaiden's Trip

💥✍ Maria Walsh wrote The Uncanny is something that erupts in the present from the past. The verb "erupts" is too dramatic; the Uncanny rather 𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴 in your consciousness. It's not so abrupt in its hypernormal return. Walsh also suggests The Uncanny is dusty unlike its wet & lively cousin, The Abject - I've always liked that comparison. Freud defined The Uncanny as old & familiar; Jentsch as new & unfamiliar. In Freud it's repression of the old; in Jentsch it's alienation from the new. What both agree on is The Uncanny strives & survives in the home. The Uncanny is translated from the German 𝘶𝘯𝘩𝘦𝘮𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘩 "unhomely" - a paradoxical architecture wherein something disturbs the dusty familiarity of the home to make it strange. Jentsch's definition is externally motivated, especially at the turn of the 19th-Century when the industrial revolution was all shiny brand-new. So new that people retreated to their homes where Freud was waiting in his armchair with cigar (that wasn't a cigar) & evince what you were feeling was something internally motivated, that may have been triggered by the giant metal insect you saw emerging above the Parisian horizon, but beneath its foundations you had your past, a past through which you were feeling intellectually uncertain via some repressed gaze. 𝗜.𝗘. The Uncanny is when you wake up in the morning and realise there is no bread, and you have to go to fucking Tesco! The "fucking" in "fucking Tesco!" takes on a shiny brand-new resonance NOW because you know what that means, a Handmaiden's Trip up to fucking Tesco! where other speechless and crestfallen Handmaidens line up, evenly spaced, except for the "space invaders" - narcissists trapped in their own reflection and making a beeline for the bread aisle to bulk buy. The Uncanny is the service trolley that awaits you at the queue with the disinfectant spray. The Uncanny is those who wear masks and those that don't. The Uncanny is swerving in the aisles where two shoulder-to-shoulder staff members separate & clasp each other in some gesture of support to then turn to me wide-eyed & say "There are too many people in here. Too many. Fucking Management don't care!"🖤

MARCH 29, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

The Rub

💥✍ Every year I share a 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘦𝘯 clip with students to set the bar for pitching a film. I'm half-serious about the Don Draper pitching-bar, because even though the scene is not to be read as a daydream in the 𝘔𝘢𝘥𝘮𝘦𝘯 narrative, it comes off as a daydream, innocent and idealised. Don, pitching an advertisement for the Kodak Slide Carousel, uses memories sealed in his family album to represent "nostalgia" ("a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone") learnt from his "Greek" colleague Teddy (from the past). Freud had a term for such idealisation of memory… what is it….. "screen memories"... "when an early memory is used as a screen for a later event". 𝘞𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 they say. It's a strange thing to "make memories". Saying it aloud is to confirm or validate the present as if the present will never be enough; the present lacks something that the future values. Yesterday I met with students online to discuss how we could use NOW in a productive way - "keeping busy" (another phrase suggesting we are trying to survive the present). I told them that all the images that we confront today are NEW - and that art is made in times of crisis. At a panel discussion at IMMA, when we were coming out of recession, I said something that alarmed the audience, and me, when I let it slip out - "We need another crisis." I said it in the context of a deep nostalgia felt for the art that was made during the crisis. Art made during crisis is always wearing the veil of crisis. Amidst a crisis artists needn't make up a theme, explore some hidden history, or marvelous & nebulous subject. The crisis is so present, so unavoidable, so virulent that it covers everything, like grief. Two weeks into homeschooling my kids I've noticed my son Noah, aged 7, rubbing out his drawings when they "go wrong". I advise him to wait, turn it over, and look at it again in a few days. "You can't see it now. You will see it later." This of course is impossible for a 7-year old, so he ends up rubbing it out anyway. Today he found a drawing that had evaded his rubber. "It's good Dad," he said, qualifying his surprised look with, "I knew that already though."🖤

MARCH 27, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

The Moth

💥✍ 𝔸𝕣𝕥 𝕘𝕒𝕝𝕝𝕖𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕒𝕣𝕖 𝕔𝕝𝕠𝕤𝕖𝕕 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕠𝕧𝕖𝕣 𝕒 𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕜 𝕕𝕦𝕖 𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕡𝕒𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕚𝕔. The night's city lights find their way through the glass ceiling of the art institution, to fall down down down into the atrium, where a moth flits here & there & up up up like a fist of fossilised news sheets. A light flickers in one of the first-floor galleries & the moth punches to the right to alight on a wall & unclinch. Flicker, flicker, flicker, the light goes on & goes off, illuminating one husk of an object among a graveyard of others set at eye-level on the gallery walls as far as the moth's eye can see in the flickering darkness. The moth lays there in constant low-level anxiety, heaving under the winking light's attraction but unwilling to get lost in the drift of darkness. Under the beating light a synaptic fire flickers in the moth, bright in association & dark in sentiment, as the parts of the image that comprise the photographic plate that comprises most of the husk behind which the flickering light transmits, collapse into a red-green-blue tartan jumble of an insect-man poised on pearlescent cones straddled painfully on a floor wearing a jumper - an asymmetrically patterned orange & cream & black & square jumper - against a lime-green rubbery stage like skinned waders. And then there was Light & the Word & names of artists & lives lived: Robert Mapplethorpe (42, 1989), Peter Hujar (53, 1987), Félix González-Torres (38, 1996), David Wojnarowicz (37, 1992), Craig Owens (39, 1990), Jimmy DeSana (40, 1990). The moth likes the DeSana cones, the Brillcream'd mass of Mapplethorpe's head of hair that is hard to imagine a face behind, but it's not too gone on the Dianne B jumper even though it helps plant an orange rectangle centrestage so the rest of Mapplethorpe's body can contort on the floor in the dark, in the light, in innuendo. The image also frightens the moth, noticing the meta in the metamorphosis of both portraits, insect-turned-man-turned insect & one story about a salesman that starts with the sentence: "One morning Gregor Samsa woke in his bed from uneasy dreams and found he had turned into a large verminous insect.”🖤

[In response to Alan Phelan's Fiction & Folly at the Royal Hibernian Academy, 2020]

MARCH 25, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Social Distancing

💥✍ "What I hide by my language, my body utters. I can deliberately mold my message, not my voice." (Roland Barthes' 𝘈 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳'𝘴 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦) Roberta Smith once said in conversation with Isabelle Graw that Peter Schjeldahl "would say you have to live someplace where you can lose a friend a day... a certain amount of density where you're sort of buffered". The audience laughed; Isabelle Graw too; me three. "Social distancing" is something the real art critic is practiced in. Those "art critics" that are entangled in the social networks or "social economy" via institutional association or friendship, as Isabelle put it back in 2014, are just telling themselves through some affirmative or empathetic action that this is the only way to go, especially if you want to get paid or avoid "social death" (Isabelle laughs). The term criticism comes from the Greek 𝘬𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘬ó𝘴 [Isabelle posits to Roberta] which means separating & distinguishing... But how do we negotiate this difference in an economy which entangles us? We are implicated in this market whether we want it or not as critics." Last May in Venice I read curator Ralph Rugoff's title for his Biennale as ironic fake news. As Ben Eastman put it: "MAY WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES… is a Chinese curse fabricated by Western scholars to reinforce a caricature of the East that might be interpreted as a warning: don’t trust everything you read; beware binary narratives; remember that identity is a cultural construct". CNN questions Bernie Sanders this week "What consequences should China face for its role in this global crisis?" We ventured out to the beach today. Everyone was giving everyone else a wide berth. We asked our kids "not to run straight towards people, especially old people" - "65" being, according to the news reader, the new "old". A group of teenagers 8-strong smother each other comparative to the 2-sword lengths separating everyone else. Our kids, who soak up viruses all the time & dish them out a la petri, *get it* like a game. We stayed on the beach for 3 hours because anything less would have meant more stewing at home, where more news & more mixed messages, opaque & facetious, awaited🖤

MARCH 23, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Tulips for COVID

🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷#covid_19 🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷🌷☕ #davidlynch #bluevelvet #uncannyvalley

MARCH 21, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Uncanny Valley

💥✍I have always liked the term "Uncanny Valley" due to the image it projects in the landscape of a V with slopes too slippy & steep to climb & too acute at the join where a community is found heaped on top of one another. Especially now. Paddy's Day night I found myself between The Twilight Zone (TZ) & the Taoiseach's TV Address. The "go green" buildings took on an association best described by my wife as "Mars Attacks" which we watched with the kids the other day with new intensity. Chris O'Dowd (CO'D) from the IT Crowd & Roscommon, stars in the last & probably worst episode of the rebooted TZ on the Sci-Fi Channel. The day had started out Uncanny (see previous COVID-19 Art Chronicle) with Paddy's Day cancelled which led me to Freud's paper 'The Uncanny' from 1919 (numerical repetition like "1919" is a sign we are entering the outer regions of The Uncanny, although we are not exactly in The Uncanny). CO'D plays JEFF, an anthropology professor with a full Irish accent who just witnessed his hippie dad shoot himself with a golden gun with blue scorpion on its white hilt which, we discover later, is a gun that "finds you" & is connected to Chez Guervara. Later JEFF finds a Lynchian love heart case that held his dad's gun & a bullet inscribed with the name JEFF. Was this bullet for JEFF? Did the gun find his dad the same way? Was this the start of the endgame? Then the name JEFF takes on a new life in the following interactions: when JEFF tries to sell the gun to someone named JEFF; when JEFF's estranged wife hires a divorce lawyer named JEFF; when in an attempted mugging JEFF shoots a burglar named JEFF. This is what Freud terms *involuntary return* or *involuntary repetition* in The Uncanny. However the use of "uncanny" around, let's say, twins, is not in Freud's Valley. "Uncanny Valley" is also an hypothesis by Masahiro Mori (1970) that predicts that "an entity (robot) appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers". Enter Leo Varadkar: "This is the calm before the storm, before the surge… The Government is now moving to put in place systems to ensure that elderly people who are asked to *cocoon* will have access to food and supplies"👽

MARCH 19, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

2030☘️

💥✍ It's 2030. 10 years ago Paddy's Day didn't happen. At the time I was self-isolating with my kids who are now teenagers & whom I never see at all in the house anymore because they are teenagers. They were good & bad times, because of the intimacy in the home vs the distance playing out on the streets. We joked at times at the exaggerated gaps that walked & talked between people as if a new race of "invisibles" was one outcome of COVID-19. The joke was another way of creating distance from the unfamiliar world that would never become familiar. I was prompted by the image & comments above to read Freud's paper "The Uncanny" the morning of Paddy's Day. The first page goes like this: ☘It is only rarely that a psychoanalyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling. He works in other planes of mental life and has little to do with those subdued emotional activities which, inhibited in their aims and dependent upon a multitude of concurrent factors, usually furnish the material for the study of aesthetics. But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and then it usually proves to be a rather remote region of it and one that has been neglected in standard works. The subject of the *uncanny* is a province of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror; it is equally certain, too, that the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of a special name. One is curious to know what this peculiar quality is which allows us to distinguish as *uncanny* certain things within the boundaries of what is *fearful.* As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject in elaborate treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime, that is with feelings of a positive nature, with the known to us, once very familiar.☘

MARCH 17, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

Alpha-numerical

💥✍ 20-YEARS ago the alpha-numerical SEPT11 ended up defining the decade. I was in 2NDYEAR art school living with my then girlfriend & now wife. We lived in a bedsit in Ranelagh D6 [2ROOMS that should have stayed 1ROOM]. The landlord had taken what was once a 10FTX10FT box & split it into a 5X10FTROOM & 5X7FTROOM leaving a 3X5FTCORRIDOR for the entrance proper into the bedsit & then bedroom with sliding door where the bed was slotted like a matchbox with no floor space on either side so you crawled onto & into bed every night. Being 6FT6INTALL it was comedy night every night in our sitting room-cum-kitchen as we choreographed our movements so I exclusively sat on the floor like Gulliver & my wife behind on the Lilliputian couch (we purchased with glee at Rathmines' Market D6) where we baked in TV light & food smell. On SEPT11, I returned early from art school, around lunch. It was Tuesday. Our fridge, which had a freezer box that could only fit fish fingers (out of their box) was miraculously connected to our cooker which was caked in a Salem of burnt & blacked something. I was cooking lunch - no news yet. Our TV held an image inside that was grainy & distant like looking into the eyes of someone behind jam jars. The TV had no remote, just a plastic dial that clunked into place. We had 𝘢𝘭𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 3 stations. I *clunked* it. The news. Clunk! News! Clunk! Looks like news… eventually committing to 1 news & there it played out - SEPT11. The following years in art school SEPT11 was all around even if it wasn't obviously visible. In 3RDYEAR we had a seminar on artists, mostly American, & how they treated SEPT11 in their art. At the time it felt more like therapy than art - something you had to expel as a trauma rather than express as a privilege. Today we exist inside jam jars where everything is grainy, like the dots that swarmed the Twin Towers & then vanished. SEPT11 was a TV programme, for most. COVID-19 is also a TV programme as we cling to news media not one day in September but successive & future days as info is drip fed & fails to dramatise the threat because it's not skyscrapers & planes. For now art is not art anymore; art is capitalism in crisis.

MARCH 16, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night

C

From Guardian review ‘Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson – travels with a solitary soul’, Aug 2015.

💥✍ So. Our children & their sole grandparent have become lethal enemies with only one casualty 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘺 𝘴𝘢𝘺. What a witchy world! Of all creatures to carry a disease - better than religion's plague or propaganda - creatures that taste & interpret the world at the whorls of their fingertips where, in those deep spiral valleys 𝗖 hides without wanting to hide, needing to hide. We have no real images of 𝗖 to go on, just the under-the-microscope images where cellular invasion plays out in a galaxy of celestial pink & pretty, writ large & red by news media & mapped onto a world like it's already too late. Incy-wincy with water sprouts won't do. I rub my thumb & forefinger together - Did you know a sliver of space exists between skin-to-skin due to gravity? "Rub" is the word of the moment, in its obvious action sense but also phraseology ○ rub someone up the wrong way ○ rub shoulders ○ rub noses ○ rub it in ○ rub one's hands ○ the rub of the green ○ rub someone out● Not since the recession can such eerie quiet be imagined in closed galleries or protracted exhibitions. I think of Genieve Figgis' ghostly gentry with mascara'd skull sockets at IMMA & how Rousseau defined the bourgeois mentality by their "terror of death"; Or Neil Carroll's “Brocken Spectre” at RHA waiting for that lone individual to catch her own shadow & godliness in the sublime grey of nature but feel miniscule in its eye like the viral life that lives in the valleys of our embossed identity on the tips of our fingers. Isolation is the temporary antidote although exposure will be the final cure for good or ill. David Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress' is a tour de loneliness of experimental fiction with an afterword by David Foster Wallace that other tour de loneliness. The novel tells the tale of Kate, a painter & aesthete who drifts in a kind of Einstein space-time of lucid reality or psychosis as the last person on earth who visits empty museums & sometimes leaves messages in the street. I search for a review of the novel after completing & there, at the top of a Guardian book review from 2015 - 30 years after its publication - is an image of a typewriter & make 𝗖■

MARCH 14, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night