Richard Siken “GLUE”
I stepped out so things could progress without me.
The knot of the self; take it out. The know of the self:
what is the rope? The ability to nullify the self
in favor of the landscape, or a lover, or a bowl of fruit.
What happens when I no longer want to meet you?
Something interesting. A legitimate answer, but
it leaves a hole. Nothing lasts forever: we know this.
Looking changes the looker: we know this. It’s easier
to talk about one thing at a time: I know, I know.
Mortal love? Sure. Lovers abandoned and desperate?
Sure. Longing and suffering? Of course, of course.
You want it to mean something. Sad pink cakes.
Five strange blue things. You want to have it glued
together. The days were short and the halls were long.
Something like that. Crawled up the pleat of my coat:
a shadow did. Shut the basement door: a ghost did.
It accumulates. Grounding the abstract offers several
pleasures: certainly. Love, maybe love, maybe
bathtub: certainly. Grabbing the throat of it: that’s
what we always do. You can disconnect it or you can
try to glue it all together. He could glue it all together.
I could. Who’s speaking anyway? Not really a problem,
says the moon. Since y’all look the same from up here.
We could pull it apart, spend our whole lives pulling it
apart and have no time left to do anything smart with
the pieces. The wrong things have been wired
together. Things that shouldn’t touch. The sooner
you embrace it, the sooner it will leave you. Okay.
The bruise: milk yellow. You are what you cover up.
Okay, okay. These damages are connected. I glued
more pictures to it: doctored, rigged, unverifiable.
There were boxes in my head and I moved them
around, pretended it changed something.
It didn’t work. I plugged my cord to see
what kind of a lamp I was. It didn’t matter.
What is a ghost? What is a painting? Yes and yes,
the same answers. My mind wanted a reward, so
it filled in all the gaps it found, smoothed it all out.
I lost the important parts and I set about restoring.
Wanting to show and not being able. Sometimes
the wing of the bird and sometimes the bird
trying to fly. The bird eats worms. At least that
one pure thing. Put yourself in the painting:
you are responsible. Broadcast from a smeary place:
you are responsible. Wearing your dead face,
your man face, your real face: you are responsible.
Clomp clomp down the mines of thinking–
the compromise: where the thought wants to go
and where you want it to go. Truth is relative
to the model: big deal. Mathematicians extend
the natural language: big deal. Precision is necessary
so we can know what we are investigating. Yes, yes:
show me. What holds it together? Glue, some kind
of glue. The image remains as a body would. I turned
the image over like a rock, but then the worms.
FLⒶT$ is very happy that Richard Siken has made available his poem “GLUE” to be shown in conjunction with the exhibition “Glass and the Ocean” with works by Anne Neukamp, David Attwood, and Esther Kläs.
Anne Neukamp diverts the vocabulary of the contemporary visual language that surrounds us: icons, emblems, 3D models, pictograms, and signs by rendering them fundamentally ambiguous. Her paintings produce a floating state between intelligible motifs and an abstract, incomplete, and loose cosmology. They destabilize the viewer’s perception by creating unusual situations that are stretched between reality and illusion, challenging different painting clichés or contradictory “styles” and collapse multiple senses of space into one visual surface.
Anne Neukamp lives and works in Berlin. Her work has been shown at Leopold-Hoesch-Musem, Dü- ren, Gregor Podnar Gallery, Berlin and Vienna, Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels, Ludwig Museum, Bu- dapest, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Marlborough Gallery, New York, the 5th Prague Biennale, and many more.
David Attwood is an artist based in Perth/Boorloo, Australia. In 2016 Attwood received a PhD from Curtin University, and in 2019 completed the SOMA Summer program, SOMA, Mexico City. Alongside his studio practice, Attwood directs the independent project space Disneyland Paris.
Esther Kläs has developed a distinctive visual language that challenges contemporary sculptural norms and discourses. Using malleable materials that can be worked by hand, Kläs is an artist who maintains an intimate physical relationship with her work. She is attentive to her inner experience as well as to external reality, and her sculptures appear at once as mysterious presences and projections of a poetic imagination.
Esther Kläs lives and works in Barcelona. Her work has been shown at Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Kolumba, Cologne, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Proyecto AMIL, Lima, Fondazione Brod- beck, Catania, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Marino Marini Museum, Florence, MoMA PS1, New York, and many more.