November, 2017
The following text was conceived for and performed at Mass II, The Topography of Chance (organized by The Performance Agency/Yael Salomonowitz), Archivio Conz, Berlin, December 15, 2017

November

Deader than or being liked like Hillary. Hi. Or hilarious or not so hilarious. How do you do? She was her most charming in her dream in a Will Benedict press release back in 2014. Will anyone read her lips now. Will you read mine? My hips, sighs? Your thighs.

I don't eat.

Dogs shit. I read.

I am delicate, pure like a shy winter-blue sky. I remember this sky.

We greet. I believe Josephine Pryde already photographed meat.

You might say that my pictures are rather vegetarian lately, sometimes vegan, even. Even then, you cannot eat them. How do we play out social embarrassment? And as adults? Who are they? Who's hungry?

I don't even eat.

How passive aggressive are tears, is money? How passive aggressive do they make me feel? Us? Do money and tears have things in common? I more often think about money on Mondays. Is being vegan passive aggressive? Do I write about things being passive aggressive because I try to find an ok way of being aggressive. Am I aggressive? Is photography passive aggressive? Is being passive aggressive ok? Or only helpless. Come on. Or might all the above be and not be passive aggressive depending on circumstances, context, or mood? I come in you. Is being passive aggressive linked to or symptomatic of wading in deep late-neoliberalism? And almost happy? Are you sure? Or how symbolic is this violence and with art?
Anger and sadness live in suspended relation. They do get mixed up.

Hillary is probably fine. We still complain.

This text might fall.

Walk away.

You would. But you don't.

How to go on? Walk? Talk? Walk away? Park? In a parking lot? Is there a parking lot? You? Or Reverse? Run? Turn around? Food? Again? There's not much movement to expect. Or fitness. Business? I'll take pictures of chocolate sauce, maybe milk rice. Mayo? Milk rice! Salad wouldn't work. I'll do milk rice. Because it's creamy off-white, gross, vomity, but also sweet and innocent. And easily, thickly 3d. Bulky. Ketchup, maybe. My mind is busy with pictures by Riuji Tanaka. And still Jean Fautrier. What restricts me, or why do I restrict myself, or much more, finally, better I will no longer restrict myself. I don't want. I am stormy. Strong. A sea of energy. And still, I feel cheesy, moody, needy, ashamed as an artist. Porous like a door. A hustler? Art and decadence end in paradise. Or in songs of other people.

Sometimes there is no border/edge/verge (Rand).

And under the table. We're falling, sliding down. These stairs descend.

A hustler?

And I'm shy, if I'm not sure. But how can you be? Or naïve.
They/you/we are high and/or helpless.

Picturing how it feels helps. Or me.

I did pictures of white sugar icing and puréed lentils. And later their party sequels, coloured sugar icing and puréed peas, and mashed potatoes, and puréed black beans, and carrots, all in shapes inspired by Morris Louis' 1950s Veils series, or freer interpretations of his Veils shapes (what do they obscure?), transferred to portrait formats, in the size of torsos-plus-aura. The puréed lentils evoke concrete and shit. The mashed potatoes pictures are a little too pale. They are all framed but impure or porous. Vulgar? The puréed lentils and white sugar icings came first. They sweat. Some puke. Their sad colourful party sequels came later. They cry and puke.

I sweat.

I cry.

“… weeping 'is an affair of the eye.” and, as Andrea Fraser noted in Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?: “Tears not only represent affective discharge and emotional relief, but also a kind of cleansing, a purification of feeling and particularly Löfgren argues, of critical thoughts and aggressive feelings. ...weeping may serve as a way of avoiding the guilt connected to aggressivity as well as allowing for a purer expression of love and therefore, perhaps, a truer experience of loss.”
And later: “Could it be that when I encountered Sandback's work I was able to discharge, in the form of tears, some of the hostility to art institutions - perhaps even to art itself - that turned me into..”.1

Social embarrassment or the paradisiac lack of it. What do I look at?

You're rotten.

I didn't ride in on a white horse declaring surrender or that I am electric. Would I? Trisha Donnelly did. I am shining. Nor is it my birthday and this a club and I didn't do anything wrong (I love animals) like Bianca Jagger. Hi. I would have loved to be them then. The blond version. We're not in New York. I guess I'm not brave or maybe I will be? Anyways, I don't have a horse. So, I thought, I try to be all sensitive, maybe describe how it all seems or feels. I am delicate, pure like a shy winter-blue sky. To touch you?

If it get's boring just enjoy my voice. It is sexy enough. And my accent! I'm from Vienna. That is if amplified. Contrary to my pictures, they luckily look so much better life than online, and are sexy as well. Just sayin'. What did you think I'd satisfy? Or go away.

Everything! It's so fucked up that it is paralyzing. Or elastic. Too drunk.

It smells like rotten food. Chocolate and shit. So dead. A wan yellow void to avoid.

What chocolate? Or is this camembert? What do we share?

Dirt of old works on new ones. My mascara is smeared or theirs. Runs, literally. Did you see? Did you see me?

Drives drive. They rarely change directions. Am I getting bitter? Am I better?

The feelings we are having, have been binning.

I've no idea how you feel. I've no idea how you feel.

Fuck Hillary. Do I care?

What did I expect? Why do I feel disappointed? What does disappointment do, and to me? Fuck. Or disillusioned. Then I frustrate. I'm less fun or flexible. A bowl of worry. Wan. A wan mother. Moody, loving, disillusioned, good. Fuck. No. Wan. My face when it remembers all those cigarettes I clouded it in. And it seems that there's very little happening if you don't fight for it. I'm no fighter. Not everyone is a fighter, or fit. I'm nice. Fighting beside other things means you have to exactly know what you want. Which might not be what you want, to be someone who knows what she wants, or not always at least? Cause knowing what you want is dead and wan in another way. And who is fit? Are you? Am I? What does this even mean? Here I fail. And for you. What do I know? How dead or wan is this? I am much better than you think.
Be bland. The fittest. I want a gallery in Japan.

I cut my hair like Kate Moss. Not everybody sees that though. But I like to talk about it. Unfortunately I'm less good in partying. I might lack things to celebrate. I ate my/the/your cake already. I guess I need more cake. Kate?

Jean Fautrier's cake-like finger-thick primed paint. Jean Fautrier painted in the 40s and before it and after as well. I can feel his paintings' sometimes grotesque yearnings. His urge to sabotage. Or I am very touched by them. I guess it's the time, or rather a certain attitude towards their time, the 1940s. They are, in their very own energy, cheesily seductive and both tender and violent. Mean? They/he understands something here or tries. He “... sported snakeskin shoes at the opening of his Otages2 show...”.3 He's longing, angry. Poisonous.

Snakeskin shoes.

One of the things I remember from being a child in the early 1980s in a grey Vienna very close to an iron curtain was that the streets were filled with lonely old women, one of the more visible traces of the second world war. Even if you not consciously knew or thought about these old women's men's youths and their deaths it still, if faintly, was everywhere. As a leaden weight of the unsaid, buried in these wan and loose old bodies. It was tear-sprouting repellent, sad, cruel and endlessly boring and tragic and bad. There was something about the end of the world there then as well, but a simpler one, a stale and silent one.

I guess what I love about pictures is also their silence.

There's nothing you can say.

Berlin, this huge grey whirl-pool of supposedly like-minded people, and still I feel alone a lot. Happiness is a skill? Or bare decision? Like partying. Toilets sweat, cry. Talking to people you find interesting, as well. Well, I will. I will not be shy tomorrow. I will shine. Be this shining me.

This text falls.

Falls down the stairs. Poorly.

I don't eat. I don't eat shit.

I like refrains when they are porous.

The only edition of Texte zur Kunst concerning Love is from 2003.

What happened in 2003?

You didn't eat me. Eat me!

2003?

This text.. it might fall down the horse, hungry.

Anger and sadness live in suspended relation. And do get mixed up. Or consumed.

It's all about love or the lack of. Off-white is such a satisfying, calming, bland non-colour. Soft fatigue. Milk-rice is cheap warmth. Kinda nude. Droopy. Anonymous. Like dead wan yellow. And then it gets cold too soon, wet-heavy chill and nothing evaporates.
Confidence.

Love eats trust and time and laughs.

Fautrier is also said to be using chthonic colour schemes at some point, as being muddy as well as magical.

I want to take pictures of chrysanthemums, the flowers of November and death. And milk-rice. I'm late. Fautrier painted chrysanthemums, yellow and orange, on lots of black. In Japan white chrysanthemums symbolize adversity, lamentation and/or grief. They'll fit together well.

Pictures of lush drooping Chrysanthemums and pictures of large lumps of steamy and also heavy cold-wet milk-rice dirtied with hints of artificially coloured sugar in pastel and brown hues, looking subtly sweet but mostly off-white warm, gross in its torsos-plus-aura spread size, yet timid. Subtly abstract, I guess. Can you say that? They'll become an experience, hopefully. Magical? I hope.
And maybe I'll also want to wildly finger-doodle food, salaciously doodle-finger warm and steamy and cold and sticky food. Is this work? My arm will be so tired from stirring. Is this ok? I'd love to be a stand-up.
And this, I feel, all my regressive painterly expressiveness, stands against the clean technical process of photography, which is withdrawal somehow, kind of cancels each other out, me.

What happened in 2003?

I love to begin sentences with And. I like a capital A in beginnings. And And gives me a calming feeling of connection, connectedness, context, wholeness. Cause this is all me. And Ands seemingly produce a text not just a row of sentences. I don't separate. And And sounds nice, calm even, and like the end, I guess I'm not calm, or sounding calm. Calm sounds calm, and And sounds calm and certain and conscious, conscious of the narrative, in control of a seeming narrative, even if there's none.

Hillary? Is this a sandwich? Or a relation you can read? What ends? I mostly stopped wearing high heels.

Did I slip on tears or is this saliva drooping with November? Or at least some kind of November-promise? Tiny gesture. Chrysanthemums are the flowers of November. This text was written in November, is drooping with November, is titled November. Someone invite me in spring, please.

I drop..

.. cheap chicken meat when it rains. Or something else.

This text fails.. while I/you read.

Dogs shit all over the place. Old men look like dogs, soldiers are treated like dogs. Buy 'em pig's ears, them fuckers.

Paradise!?

Death.

And how do you shine? Apart from the rest. Is it shining? It is still and time and time more problematic, and ridiculously destabilizing for me to look at my work within the context of an art fair, and it's not or is it the corridors? I feel alienated or downright lost. Last time it took me almost 4 hours to understand where I am. How I am. And then suddenly there was some sunlight shining in on my pictures and they looked so alive and I was shining. And if it had been cloudy, and if it had rained?

Down? Comparisons. Death? Hillary? And if we did it for each other?

Now it, this text crawls deadly. Home?

I am shining! I am shining! in wan yellow, deadly.

Paradise?

Thank you and Fuck you sound all alike. More so at the end of something like a speech. See? Me?

I'm shining.


-Lisa Holzer, November 2017


1Andrea Fraser, Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?, Grey Room 22, Winter 2005, pp. 30-47. © 2006 Grey Room, Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2Les otages (The hostages): Peintures et sculptures de Jean Fautrier, Galerie René Drouin, Paris (October 26-November 17, 1945)
3Yve-Alain Bois, The Falling Trapeze in Jean Fautrier 1898-1964, p.59, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2002

Thanks to Trevor Lee Larson, Chiara Minchio, Yael Salomonowitz and Supportico Lopez.