Darren Bader
He
"He cuts down the lakes so they appear straight".
He is surprised to find the period missing in every reprinting of that first line.
He dates his missive, "January, five days after sucking cock at Splash".
(He found the body epic, saw no reason to resist whatever it offered, and paid for it.)
He worries about memes.
He finds everything reduced to a self, the root of our ongoing context of no context.
He admires, therefore, the artist's moves with common objects that question if anything can be any longer
common.
He considers the moves neither self-referential nor citational.
He likes that everyone knows what a cat is. Ditto cows ruminating in a field, horns, heroin.
He smiles because cats will continue, long after the Kardashians, which is why they were gods in Egypt.
He wonders if works by other artists can ever be common objects or like common knowledge, and
whether we want them to be.
He asks his friend, Do you crave what was called art's "aura," hate that it's too often now a bill of goods?
He tries to remember all the heteronyms and semi-heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.
He dotes on the mystery and powers of names, naming.
He is pretty sure "Common Objects and Their Semi-Heteronyms" would always be a suitable title.
He-let's be frank-often prefers the language for things to things themselves, but
He maybe even more prefers when art, as a special kind of thing, causes anyone to shut the fuck up.
He vacillates between jerking off or going for a run.
He burps, scratching himself.
He pulls on his Puma peds and ties his Brooks's laces.
He cruises various Tumblrs, blogs, and such.
He points to these modes of image dissemination in relation to actual objects, "sculpture".
He is convinced this is why the artist has nothing to do with surrealism.
He finds himself in a pickle.
He uses his noodle.
He thinks thinking means something to chew on.
He, i.e., ruminates.
He ponders the real in Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise.
He proposes Haim Steinbach's propositions as a reason to relate display to grammar.
He fingerbangs "relational aesthetics".
He slips formalism a roofie.
He ditches the curatorial.
He checks his e-mail on his iPhone.
He farts.
He tweets that he farted.
He and it go viral.
He admires décolletage of every gender.
He cries at the sentence near the end of Search when the narrator sums up the great love of his life:
"Profonde Albertine, que je voyais dormir et qui était morte".
He has fallen, many times, into the slough of that "profonde".
He recalls that one of the earliest of the artist's works has (a picture of) Dürer's self-portrait staring out
from racks of glossy flesh, twat and manpussy galore, eager on the newsstand.
Bruce Hainley