The poet is a fake.
His faking seems so real
That he will fake the ache
Which he can really feel.
—Fernando Pessoa, “Autopsychography,” 1931
This is a love letter to Mousse. Love letters after twenty years may not shiver with the same lust as the first blushing poem of a new encounter. Long relationships are hardly unbruised—pitches unanswered, deadlines missed—but they are sometimes unbroken. The sheer endurance for Mousse, with or without me, is worthy of applause: keeping an art magazine going is really, really hard. As for it surviving with me, well, given the fragility of all things, I’m glad that we both endure. And here, endure together.
Twenty-odd years ago, I went to school not to be an art critic, but to be a writer. I stumbled out of an MFA at CalArts and into the junior-est gig at Semiotext(e), where Chris Kraus’s radical subjectivity was traipsing out of Sylvère Lotringer’s hardcore continental theory, all looked over (then as now) by the loving, melancholic grace of Hedi El Kholti. Most of all, I was possessed with a truly ravenous desire to compose beautiful writing, to make something meaningful, to at least attempt to summon literature. Perhaps I fell into art criticism because I loved artists too much not to. But art writing, and Mousse, gave me the space to experiment, to grow, to become.
I’ve been here now for about nineteen of the twenty years of Mousse. We grew up together, and ultimately what I’ve done has been an experimental arc of what I thought art writing could be: an aspect of literature.
I’ve read too many reviews that left me more confused and hollow, cold and alone, altogether further from the work and its maker. I wanted writing about art to be so much more than a journalism that choked without its subject, advertorial copy designed to unctuously soothe the advertisers, or theory so mechanically applied it arrived at the artwork with its conclusions already written (slot art A into theory B).
Good writing of course responds to its moment with honesty, like journalism. It acknowledges power for those forced to chase down resources. It doesn’t exist in some imaginary aesthetic zone cheerfully free of politics. And it is often backboned by the serious consideration of ideas and philosophy. But it also refuses to reduce art to a bloodlessly reductive summary language, to treat art as just another handy tool for other agendas. It deserves a poetry that is as messy, unwieldy, bedraggled, liberated, and beautiful as art can be—this strange thing that helps us to both enjoy and endure life. Writing about art needs to be as alive as art is. I want each word to drip down your back, sigh into your ear, snake through your guts. To make you laugh when it can, tingle your skin if it might, help you cry when weep we must.
I wanted to write so you could see and feel as I had. To have seen it and experienced it as only a body in space embedded in time and power and all the rest could. And if you never actually saw it, or if the artwork ceased to exist, you could see it truly with these words. I wanted to arrange words in a way that you never needed to see the thing to be moved, to really feel it in your body, challenged by its charms or lack of them.
As a writer, I’ve long daydreamed about those wonders of the ancient world that we will never see, that we only have writers’ accounts of, or all those artworks where we only have the author’s reflections. Or like something out of Borges—a review of an artwork that never existed, or maybe only needed to exist for this work of literature to take form. I wanted to make writing that could exist both alongside, in conversation with, but also independent from its subject. I didn’t want the obtuse, performative, anachronistic Greekery of the ekphrastic. I wanted something new, and had all the arrogance of youth to try it out. And so much more importantly, a place that let me.
Language is cheap, portable, replicable with the greatest of ease. More likely than not, an account of any given artwork has a decent chance of surviving longer than the work itself.
Of the wonders of the ancient world, most of what we know comes from people writing about them. Some scholars think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon might only have ever been a poem, while others argue that Nebuchadnezzar built them in Nineveh and the location just got scrambled in transmission, a geographical error that calcified into myth. Which is, if anything, more interesting: the wonder that persisted for millennia as a wonder without a fixed address. The Colossus of Rhodes stood for fifty years before an earthquake tumbled it into fragments, and the Rhodians left it lying in pieces for nine centuries because an oracle said not to rebuild it. That is, until Arab merchants finally hauled the bronze away—nine hundred camel loads (one for every year, perhaps), if you believe the number, a specificity hard not to appreciate. The Lighthouse at Alexandria is now mostly underwater; you can sort of see the stones of its ruin if you hire a dive boat and know where to look. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was burned down by some rando who wanted to be famous—perhaps the most contemporary story of all.
But we have the words. Strabo’s account, Philo’s—travelers standing and gawking before these things, reaching for language and coming back with something that wasn’t the thing and wasn’t nothing. Those wonders are mostly gone. The words remain.
If the Mona Lisa burns, we’ll at least still have Nat King Cole’s song to smirk at us.
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.
Nothing, that is, but Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem.
This is what we owe to art, what we owe to writing. To endure even when these fragile things and the creatures who make them cannot.
That slip of Pessoa up at the top introduced the first piece I ever wrote for Mousse, in the December 2007 issue—the first of something like forty-eight stories in ninety-six issues over nineteen years. (I put them all together as a personal retrospective to write this, a lurching ninety thousand words.) The first was an essay on Slater Bradley, an artist who made fake films of dead rock stars—Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain—performed by a friend, with an exhibition that season at Blum & Poe (RIP) in Los Angeles. I was twenty-five. With me in that issue were many I would come to know, respect, and admire: Eva Fabbris, Edoardo Bonaspetti, Michele d’Aurizio, Luca Cerizza, and our current fearless editor, Barbara Casavecchia. Though I’m pretty sure I was then the only contributor not an Italian from Italy, my last name didn’t add much ethnic variety, but I do hope that from my threadbare perch on the far shore of the Pacific, I added something.
That Andrew was a little bit of an asshole: “The work of Slater Bradley looks like a well-dressed schizophrenic arguing with himself.” Sorry, Slater. But there was something else, too, namely the roughest sketch of the writer I’d become, that Mousse would help nurture. Pessoa, more than most, became a patron saint.
Here is the whole of that poem:
The poet is a fake.
His faking seems so real
That he will fake the ache
Which he can really feel.
And those who read his words
Will feel in his writing
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they’re missing.
And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart.
The only way I can give you an idea of what it feels like to be me—this struggling human, standing in an exhibition or with an artist—is to create a construction, like this, of language. I must build an artifice through distance, a space that isn’t merely my feelings, but a version you can also feel, that it might create something new and specific within you—your heart, your mind, your body.
The artist doesn’t give you their heart; they give you a machine that helps you build a heart inside of you. The only way I can get you to feel the truth of this humanity is to put on this mask of words. It is this artifice that keeps the mechanism going, circling the track, the clockwork train of the heart in constant motion, a machine that doesn’t stop beating till it does. It is only through artifice, through art, that we can share those real things between us.
Those earliest pieces were overstuffed, if alive. I stacked them with references, an accumulation earning credit when my inchoate prosody couldn’t quite artfully reach it—Baudelaire by the second paragraph, Benjamin not far behind. Earning your trust not as authoritarian declarations (at least), nor yet purely on my own spellcasting, but with a little help from the poetry of others. I have a memory that holds that poetry with love, and truly, certain turns turned with such grace, it is not worth staining language with a lesser attempt. Even so, as any algorithm can tell you, lean too much into a good thing and you just end up churning out a worse replica of it. More and more of a lesser same.
My second piece in Mousse, my truer birth in these pages, I called “Cruising Richard Hawkins.” There my bright, bitter, arrogant youth started to strut its voice in the slow pass, the lust of the wandering eye, the refusal of destination, the openness to what presents itself, all of it in a body that could really feel. And a prose that became a body, fingering each sentence, its mouth on every word. I thought I was describing Hawkins’s practice—the way he moved through art history, pornography, desire, pop culture, and ancient Rome without a fixed itinerary, each encounter generating the next. Without fully realizing it, I was also describing the method I’d spend the next fifteen years trying to learn, with slightly different lusts perhaps (I never got quite as excited as Richard about Tom Cruise). And Mousse let me, issue after issue, even when this diligent discovery of my own voice might have looked like an aimless meander rather than a focused cruise, even when those essays arrived somewhere nobody plotted.
Los Angeles shaped this the way it shaped me. The moon rising over smog-smothered sunset drives down Sunset Boulevard. Palm trees bowing their shaggy heads in the hot lick of Santa Anas, the air tasting like fire. Though I started to wander outside of LA for Mousse, pitching essays from far-flung sojourns across a planet and history, even when they weren’t Los Angeles artists or I wasn’t in LA, the city sun-bleached my every sentence.
I have quit famous magazines that fed my prose through their deflavorizing machine into a flat if breezy house style. After I got sick, a few quit me (I’ve heard a lot of chatter about disability rights in art, but buy me a drink and I’ll tell you exactly which magazines kicked this cripple when they were down).
I almost quit writing about art entirely back in 2010. Beaten down by bad editors, feeling like I was just writing spirited copy for way too little, I planned my exit. On my almost way out, I made a final raw attempt to acrobat with language exactly as I wanted, leaving with a bang, not a whimper. A piece called “The Letter Writer, Frances Stark.” It started with grids and erotic quotes, fessed up front exactly what I loved about Stark’s work, and then began to write a letter to that letter writer of an artist, a feeling of affection and literature and poetry, a body that could feel things. This was exactly what I wanted to do, without compromise, and if it didn’t work, I might be writing sci-fi novels or copy for Google or, hell, just bartending somewhere bleak. But it worked. Mousse loved it, they put me and Stark on the cover. The magazine felt like home. It kept saying yes.
El Kholti, whose editorial longings deserved writing that danced the way his collages moved—by association, accumulation, the ache of half-remembered things. Mark McKnight, whose photographs of queer male desire required prose as naked and flinching as the curves and cuts of his images. Mare Vint, an Estonian artist whose spare architectural drawings held silence, and who deserved writing that could hold that silence without filling it. My essay on Kathleen Ryan put a goddess in Los Angeles and trailed her through the city at night, touching ivy into silver thread, touching palm fronds into iron. The essay on Helen Lundeberg walked backward through her entire career and arrived at an open door in an early painting and passed through it and found her at the window, summoning planets. Betty Woodman marches past Matisse’s armchair as a queen followed by an army of irrepressible pots. And then the titles started doing the work before the essays even began: “This Thin Skin Covers All the Rough Pleasures of Being Alive.” “Punk Pagan Trickster Feminist Sci-Fi Shaman.” The latter essay moved the artist Kris Lemsalu to invite me to co-curate her Estonian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The title became the first line of a poem the essay then had to earn.
I got sicker and sicker. One illness became another. The body that was always the instrument became its impediment.
This fiercely prolific writer—broke enough that sheer volume was the only means of survival—started to move a little slower, began to falter, white-knuckling, failing to pull through. The illness arrived to enforce a lesson I was taking too long to learn: to trust that patience could find what velocity couldn’t. Probably both. The illness was clarifying in ways I was slow to name. It changed me—not only how much I could write, but what I wrote. I found artists who helped me.
I was drawn, over and over, to those artists who understood the body as both material and condition. Nairy Baghramian’s sculptures that lean on walls and one another, that can’t stand without the architecture of the room and the presence of the viewer—as I couldn’t. Ann Greene Kelly finding worlds inside abandoned things, the spiraled hearts of old tires and stained mattresses, the tenderness available to objects that have lost one purpose and found another.
The personal swaths of my story entered the essays late. This voice was always personal; the body arrived slowly. When it arrived, Mousse had already made a room large enough to bring it into, built over years of being given space to fail in specific and accumulated ways. The attempt has been the point. The failures have been mine, which is the only kind worth accumulating. Mousse kept me anyway. With a patience and loyalty I can only call love, it kept me.
It still will have me. I am still here.
I wasn’t alone. Others found literature in art, too. I picked up one issue of Mousse a couple years back and understood instantly that this magazine had become a magazine of writing—writing about art, but also really about writing. There were a few issues in the old days, back when it was especially curator friendly, where it felt like I’d contributed the only piece of prose in an entire issue, the rest being curators interviewing artists.
These are related facts—the magazine finding itself as I did—and I hold them together with a gratitude that doesn’t have a depth, or not one I’ve found yet.
Pessoa wrote that the poet is a fake whose faking seems so real that they can counterfeit even the ache they truly feel. The ache was always real. Artifice was simply the bridge that let one body carry feeling toward another.
What this cannot contain is the endless emails checking in, with frustration and care, that the editors have sent me; the frustrations and failures that could only sometimes find a resolution years later; the editors who left in confusing ways, who I still miss; what it feels like to do a thing over twenty very long, full, difficult, glorious years.
Inadequate, as all love letters are.