“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Painted by Death

Prudence Whittlesey is doing a series of paintings of philosophers and I sat for her before the show began. Her paintings of Jane Bennett and Graham Harman were incredible. She caught how Jane looks like she is on fire, and how there is vision coming out of Graham's eyes.

I realized when she was painting me, holding me with her eyes in that way she does, and letting the paint do its thing and have its agency on the paper, and letting the paper speak too, that after I die, I think I'm going to be in a studio being painted.

The painter is Death. She is trying to get a likeness. I think that I'm being judged. Or condemned. Or joined. Or danced.

Death has always been trying to get a likeness of me, I notice, since I was born. If she ever got the ultimate, perfect likeness of me, that would be the death of me. A perfect translation. My essence would coincide with my appearance, and I would be dead.

When I arrived at the New School, I felt peeled open and eaten, in a nice way.

But untangling 100' of ethernet cable? Now that is hell.

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