IOU

It is such a fleshy delight, seeing paintings, in the FLE$H with my mice pies (eyes). I forget sometimes that I am not a data cloud. I wish I was, but I am flesh and bones and skin and hair and sometimes that disappoints me (that I can’t open up a door in my belly and look down at a stomach full of wires and sockets and a lil engine). Paintings always remind me I’m H£R£, in meatspace, by reminding me that they are tHeRe, there like a little window into another Capital S: S-P-A-C-E (This is the bit where we are all meant to contemplate some Foucault-ish heterotopia ting, I’ll give u a lil break to think about that all in a post-digital context ye e e e aaaa a hh)

This show was meant to be a kind of homage to RSS and its creator, Aaron Swartz: the guy who hacked jStor and was indicted for thieving it like he was some Wikileaks terrorist hoe and not just a guy who thought information and knowledge should be free so we can ALL be clever, not just rich ppl. A comment on money and the internet, privatisation of digital space, Anti-Google, post-capitalist, pro-creative commons, ooh. The lady running the space told me the paintings were on heat sensitive paper like the kind they print receipts on. It’s meant to be all money and internet, metal and wires, CA$H and FLE$H. Like making a thermal print all of a sudden represents transience and immateriality in a material way? I didn’t really buy it. I think this show is an exercise in my eternal philosophy: Don’t read the writing on the wall. Don’t read the press release. Let the space speak to you; let the work speak for the artist, they shouldn’t really matter here. The paintings look like wrinkled skin, like on the crook of your elbow when you bend it; but also not firm, like the kind of skin you get on the top of hot hot milk all flimsy and delicate and aching to be touched. They’re so fleshy and material and if I’m honest, I don’t really care that they’re about Aaron Swartz or money and digital property. I just care about what immediately hits me, and what I feel when I think back on it. The lady running the space had a beautiful accent and she also told me they turned off all the lights at the opening and just filled the space with candle-light instead. I thought it was nice, but in a kitsch way. That’s not how I met the work when I walked in and so I think it’s kind of not-important-anecdotal. However she also said they would fade in a few years and be all-white again. Which is not irrelevant; it actually makes the material encounter that much more delicious. Things are so fleshy and meaty and I shouldn’t forget that. I want to upload my brain onto a circuit board one day, but it’s not yet, not yet and when I do and I lose my sense of touch I will think about these paintings and how they made my eyes feel like I was touching skin and I will miss it for a small moment as my brain waves fly through the wires, sending sparks out of the plugs.

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