April 28, 2016

Hannah Black Quote

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Down in Atlantis the curator showed me around the space, gesturing to invisible artworks that will soon be expensively shipped from far away to fill the room. I am the least famous and the least rich and the least well paid artist; I am paid partly in the fame of other artists. I am paid pyrrhically in the currency of my desire to be seen on my terms. My desire has almost as many social claims and credit operations on it as a straight man’s sexuality; both are supposed to justify the movements of capital that provide the basic infrastructure of contemporary art. Overdetermined, my art-making suffers the fate of all socially appointed agents of desire; it becomes intermittently impotent, and terrorized by the threat of its own softness.

- Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party



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April 24, 2016

Hannah Black Quote

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From Los Angeles I write, “Perhaps getting to know a person is like getting to know a city.” The plate glass windows of downtown, the way you are with your friends; the dull suburbs of a half-hidden unhappiness. On the East Coast I’m an animal and on the West Coast by a miracle I am changing back into a woman. But what kind of woman? At night I’ve found a wall inside myself and I try to describe it. I can’t stop crying! I hate myself! I’m a real girl! The wall inside is stone, it doesn’t have a body or a part time job. The person I’m considering falling in love with just as soon as I can stop crying, which should be any year now, brings me a book called Architecture without Architects to distract me from the luxury of my tears. In the book, white colonialists describe the buildings that seem to them miraculous, built invisibly, built by no one. I touch a black and white page to show that I love the image of an ancient city in the desert in Morocco. But imagine, I say, thinking of labor and domination, how terrible it was to build it. My person says, with certainty, because she is always sure, “They built it only at night.” By what light? I ask, looking at her. I can feel my eyes, which are nothing. She says, “They built it only on nights with a full moon.” My inside cracks, now it’s outside and I don’t deserve anything. There is anxiety in my touch but we are comradely now and then, both surprised for example by the thought of Hegel as a baby. Yes perhaps even Hegel can grow up to be a woman from time to time.

- Hannah Black, Dark Pool Party 



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April 23, 2016

work that dares to remind us

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"Rich and Poor is art in resistance, a work that dares to remind us of our capacity for revolutionary love..."

- Jade Colbert in The Globe and Mail
 


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April 15, 2016

The Stopping Number

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I feel five books is the perfect
number of books for a
writer to publish
I have published five books
I want to stop at this perfect number
I want to stop before I ruin it
but I won’t stop
I will ruin it
five books is a somewhat arbitrary
symbol of literary perfection
but I have so much anxiety
about everything being too much
everyone doing too much
moving past strong youthful desires
continuing only out of habit
for one moment
you’re in sync with the zeitgeist
or so they tell you
then the moment is gone
one cannot simply fly into the air
to have some perfect overview
of one’s entire life and practice
one is down in the trench with it
in the muck of it
unable to fully see
what is coming from where
if, like me, you have no desire to kill
only to survive
take the risk of being where you are
you can feel the number five
is the stopping number
yet cannot ground this feeling in anything
or for that matter actually stop
the stopping number
who wants to stay in this trench forever
I finished five books
without ever looking back
and wish
as I now look back
I could turn
not to salt
but to stone



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