A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.
Molière
So here’s the thing about watching someone saw a table in half at what amounts to an art salon in someone’s basement or warehouse or wherever the hell these things happen anymore: it’s the most honest thing you’re gonna see all night. None of this precious bullshit, none of the “let me explain my process” hand wringing. Just: here’s a table. Watch me destroy it. The violence is the point, the sweat is the point, the doing is the point.
My snail film I showed, and fuck me, the hubris of thinking I can direct gastropods, that’s the kind of beautiful failure that keeps this whole thing from calcifying into another dead scene. I tried something genuinely deranged. It didn’t work. The snails didn’t give a shit about Conrad or Orson Welles or my vision. They moved at their own pace, left their own trails, fucked up my whole symbolic structure. That’s not failure, that’s collaboration with chaos, which is the only kind worth having.
Richie Rhombus doing his thing, fine, great, we need our reliable practitioners, the ones who show up and deliver. That’s the backbone. But I don’t remember the backbone. I remember when Angrette picked up that saw.
And it ended early. Of course it ended early. What does that tell you? It tells you that someone’s energy ran out, or people had church in the morning, or a thousand other mundane reasons that art happens in the cracks of regular life and not in some hermetically sealed cathedral of pure expression. It tells you this stuff is fragile and human and not particularly sustainable, which is exactly why it matters when it happens at all.
Showings by by the Brilliant sisters (Nathalie and Breille), Richie Rhombus, Green Tooth Girl, Angrette McCloskey, Niki Ulehla, and Jamie Lyons.
Navigation:
“A learned fool is more a fool than an ignorant fool.” Molière nailed it. By #12 we’d learned enough to know better but kept doing it anyway. The fourteen-night arc shows how fragile this whole thing was.
Salon #13 is next. Only two left. Almost at the end.
Or go back: Salon #11, when “completed work” became the death rattle.