You have to really want to get to the island of Naoshima. A bullet train from Tokyo across five hundred miles in two hours. A sluggish taxi ride along a coastal road with five thousand stoplights. A ferry among the islands with muted freighters on the horizon, cutting through the fog.

Squid ink curry is my new favorite food.

Eliminating photography at museums is a righteous policy, although I was initially vexed by the need to take pictures to prove I had witnessed a piece of art. Nowadays, taking a picture is how we see an image or event, an amplified echo of Susan Sontag’s declaration in ’77 that “today everything exists to end in a photograph.” But this phantom twitch quickly faded as we moved through Tadao Ando’s severe concrete halls, and I was delighted to discover I was experiencing art with strangers in a way I hadn’t since the early 2000s. We weren’t ducking out of the way of each other’s shots. We lingered longer. Even the roomful of Monets held my interest.

But how to deal with a gigantic marble orb on a concrete staircase surrounded by dozens of golden three-pronged statues? To start, we moved around it slowly. We hunted for patterns and imagined the rituals that might occur in such a place. We lingered long enough that its strangeness became familiar, and soon we were dealing with it on its terms.

I enjoyed the ritual of removing my shoes before entering a gallery. It was somehow both formal and intimate. And quieter.

James Turrell's room of hyper-blue light gnawed at my peripheral vision until I was on the edge of a big-budget hallucination, unsure if he meant for me to be seeing what I was seeing.

We walked through a tiny silent town that smelled like a sauna. The wooden buildings were elegantly charred, and a sign above a shuttered door said Fortune Favors a Merry Home.

Fifty-two degrees is the threshold between a light and a heavy sweater.

For the first two nights, we dined next to a stern young couple who were always holding hands. The boy wore an oversized black coat, she floated within a billowy skirt, and I never saw them speak. They looked like they stepped out of an Aubrey Beardsley print, and I’m surprised how heartened I was to see that Romanticism is still kicking.

I was moved by a hunched boulder that appeared to pray before a glossy sheet of metal.

A line from Tatsuo Miyajima caught my attention: Keep changing. Connect with everything. Continue forever. I purchased a copy of his sketchbook, and C. bought a letter-opener shaped like a bird.

I always get drowsy on ferries. It’s such a fight to stay awake. The amniotic rocking of the waves, I guess.

Japan has the best coffee, especially the cans of iced black charcoal.

On the island of Teshima, we took a long rainy walk down an empty road to get our heartbeats archived for posterity at Christian Boltanski's Les Archives du Cœur, where a lone lightbulb in a dark hallway pulses to the beat of any one of the 90,000 archived heartbeats, generating the effect of a sinister rave in a forgotten factory.

You’re given two attempts to record your heartbeat. My first recording was a slow industrial thump that made me grateful for all the time I've spent running, but there was a slight scuffle against my shirt, so I tried again. The second recording was a disaster, and now the sound of a microphone snaking through a noisy forest of chest hair has been archived for eternity.

I believe the function of art is to create a situation where language falls apart, and this happened at Teshima. An absolute hush came upon me when I stepped into the strange curves of Ryue Nishizawa and Rei Naito's Matrix. Beneath the oval of a cloudy sky, droplets of water darted across the concrete to join larger rivulets that fed into a puddle. It's a remarkable feat to make water look alien.

But is there a correlation between the effort required to view a work of art and the degree of my appreciation for it? Perhaps this is why I've never felt anything close to the sublime while flicking through images on a screen.

Is a digital sublime possible?

In America, the men's restroom is typically a site of unconscionable body horror. But in Japan, even the public restroom at a far-flung bus station was immaculate. My home country is fucking barbaric.

A resonant moment from Bruce Nauman’s One Hundred Live and Die says "Try and live."

And Candy Chang made this delightful collage of me walking through London three years ago. The graffiti behind me says, "Money is being made from Covid but whose pockets are being lined?"

This brings to mind a line from Rakim: "I'm hard to read like graffiti but steady, the science I drop is real heavy." Perhaps a more interesting question is whether Eric B. & Rakim's "Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em" or Eric B. & Rakim's "Follow the Leader" is the best hip-hop performance of all time.

There are many reasons Francis Bacon's Figure with Meat bothers the mind. It's a crazed smear of flesh, velvet, and bone, but I think it lingers mostly because the screaming bishop inhabits a zone that cannot be determined, a room etched only by a few ghostly chalk lines. The ambiguity forces us to supply our own nightmares that pulse in the murk just beyond the grasp of language. Which is the whole point of painting, I think. And perhaps horror, too.

See also: His Faces Melt in the Rain

Boston. Eleven years sober and another year older. Spent ten hours wandering the galleries of the Museum of Fine Art with C., which is my favorite thing to do on this planet.

I fell in love with John Singer Sargent for the first time, I savored the tranquil light in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Woman in an Interior, and I admired the paintings of François Boucher, who disliked nature because it was “too green and badly lit.” As for natural lighting, I’ve always appreciated the phrase ‘civil twilight,’ which describes the moment the sun sinks 6° below the horizon and perhaps the moment we’re living through today.

When I came across an artist whose placard mentioned “his untimely death at the age of 35,” I resisted a mad urge to look up the cause. Why do I crave this detail? Does it come from a decent place of human curiosity, or is it rank rubbernecking?

I love Catholic art. If I take a mental step back, it looks like Europe was absolutely out of its mind: little winged people flying around the heads of men who beat their chests and stare at the sky, zombies awakening after being nailed to posts, and so many elaborate portraits of breastfeeding. Or consider Francesco del Cairo’s portrait of Herodias with Saint John the Baptist’s decapitated head, “swooning in ecstasy as she mutilates the tongue that spoke against her.”

In the African wing, I was struck by a Kongo nkisi nkonde, a power figure that served as a healer of conflicts, its body studded with nails, each signifying a problem or a vow. “The figure’s open mouth suggests the uttering of judgment, and the abdomen and eyes contain mirrors to deflect danger.” I’m determined to work this detail into the new story I’m writing.

Sabine – Painting Portraits

Wurlitzer Jukebox, 1994 | via Southeast of Saturn Vol. 2

C. and I spent the day wandering through museums. There’s a game we play whenever we enter a gallery: after spending a few minutes looking at every painting in the room, we guess each other’s favorite. This wager forces us to slow down and consider each image more closely. But sometimes, the game feels risky. After all these years, how well do I know C.’s taste? How well does she know mine?

How do we define favorite? Over the years, we’ve landed on three criteria, which sometimes overlap:

• Which painting do you like the most?
• Which would you like to live with at home?
• Which draws your eye?

The last question has become the most interesting. I’m more aware of the images that magnetize my eye even if—sometimes especially if—they do not match my sensibilities. An uneasy blotch of color or the shine in some dead countess’s eye will leave me rethinking my default preferences and spiraling into existential terrain: what is taste, anyway, and where does it come from? Do I even know what I like? And so on.

In gallery E203 at the Getty, we both selected Jusepe de Ribera’s stern portrait of Euclid. Two rooms later, C. thought my favorite painting was a tranquil Madonna, but it was a dark picture of a pope. I’m glad I can still surprise her.

I’ve been stuck on the last 20% of a story I’m writing about a haunted frequency, so I went to the museum to shake some ideas loose. When the student is ready, the teacher appears: I’m learning to trust this ancient axiom when it comes to finding inspiration. 

As I wandered the Columbus Museum of Art, my brain was gunked up with doubt and bad adjectives. Then I ran into Berenice Abbott’s portrait of a magnetic field. Its cosmic pattern reminded me of fireworks beneath the eyelids and my childhood conception of God, which came from the opening scenes of It’s a Wonderful Life. My thoughts turned to the moment dots become a recognizable pattern, the phenomena of stray bursts of electricity in our heads cohering into shapes, ideas, and loops that can seduce or horrify. And I was unstuck. For a few hours, anyway.

Known for her dynamic portraits of New York City, Abbott also pulled signals from the air and made them visible. Between 1958 and 1962, she documented magnetic fields and captured the interplay between prisms, water, and beams of light. She photographed wave patterns crashing into a piece of glass. “The artist through history has been the spokesman and conservator of human and spiritual energies and ideas,” Abbott wrote in 1939. “Today science needs its voice.”

London. Sunday gloom with small bursts of sunlight, and after six weeks here, I still find myself stopping in the street, stunned by how low the clouds hang on this island as if they’re climbing over the horizon after being buried somewhere. The sun went down at 7:37pm, and there’s a sliver of a waxing moon.

A line from John Berger’s analysis of J.M.W. Turner’s paintings has been rattling around my head for days, how it unexpectedly harmonizes with the shocks and indignities of our pixellated age:

“The light which he thought of as devouring the whole visible world was very similar to the new productive energy which was challenging and destroying all previous ideas about wealth, distance, human labour, the city, nature, the will of God, children, time.”

Berger suggests the violent light and calamitous seas of Turner’s landscapes were his way of dealing with “the first apocalyptic phase” of the Industrial Revolution. I wonder how today’s flux might be rendered into something approaching the sublime.

London. A damp weekend of clouds and mist. The sun goes down at 5:51pm and the moon is waxing. Yesterday I saw the birthplace of William Blake, now a strip of concrete between an Indian restaurant and an expensive handbag store.

C. and I stepped out of the drizzle into St Paul’s Cathedral, where a choir was preparing to sing the daily evensong, a sunset ritual that “is identical to the canonical hour of vespers.” God, I love the cadence of the church, how it renders everything into hushed and mysterious phenomena. Today’s language feels harsh and overlit, its contrast cranked into a black-and-white binary that echoes our machines: like/dislike, follow/block, save/delete, and so on.

Looking up at the constellation of arches around the dome inspired a sense of vertigo that was almost too much to bear. Perhaps this is how faith is supposed to feel. Most of all, I was struck by Gerry Judah’s memorial for the First World War, a pair of mammoth white crosses with destroyed cities clinging to their beams. Photography was not permitted in the cathedral, and I appreciated how this rule preserved the dignity of the space. Even if I spent much of my time thinking about how badly I wanted to take a picture.

The sun might come out this week. I sent a newsletter a few days ago.

Brian Eno & Robert Fripp – Evensong

Evening Star | EG, 1975 | More

A sunny Wednesday morning with highs in the 50s, the sun goes down at 5:30pm, and I’m recovering from Francis Bacon’s animal paintings at the Royal Academy. The introduction on the wall said his paintings speak to “our current predicament”—an elastic phrase that set my mind wandering through today’s calamities and disasters, wondering how they might connect with Bacon’s figures that flicker between human and beast.

We inspected these grisly images on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Some of us wore masks, others were bare-faced, and all of us were confused about how to behave while the pandemic zigged-and-zagged. Our screens were wallpapered with headlines about new viruses, military incursions, disrupted gas supplies, and economic sanctions. Or as Bacon observed: “The whole horror of life, one thing living off another.”

He described the crucifixion of Christ as “just an act of man’s behavior,” yet his depiction of it looks more alien and magical than anything the Catholics conceived. Bad weather fills Bacon’s canvases: damp and clammy, the faces of his subjects melting in the rain. But it’s more than body horror. There’s reverence for death here. His ghoulish scenes float before me, demanding to be taken seriously. “I think most artists are very aware of their annihilation,” said Bacon. “It follows them around like their shadow.”

What is it about a Bacon painting that yanks me back into the gallery each time I’m about to leave? The mouths. More specifically, the teeth. His detailed grins and snarls provide an entry point into the surreal, for the dissolution of logic into something even more real. My eye struggles to understand the face before me, even though it already makes sense, for it exists deep in the basement beneath words and speech, somewhere among the limbic muck and heat of being a panting, living mess.

Bacon believed in “an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything else.” I think he’s right.

I’m reading P.D. James’s Children of Men, and the novel is a remarkably different animal from the film, particularly in how it so richly grapples with faith. In a childless world where humanity quietly fades away, the protagonist tours Europe’s museums. James’s description of the Pietà captured my own brief glimpse of it three years ago:

“His keenest memory was of Rome, standing before the Michelangelo Pietà in St. Peter’s, of the rows of spluttering candles, the kneeling women, rich and poor, young and old, fixing their eyes on the Virgin’s face with an intensity of longing almost too painful to witness. He remembered their outstretched arms, their palms pressed against the glass protective shield, the low continual mutter of their prayers as if this ceaseless anguished moan came from a single throat and carried to that unregarding marble the hopeless longing of all the world.”

Almost too painful to witness. This phrase hammers the scene home and sparks absolute recognition. But where is the pain located? Is it a knee-jerk empathy response to another person’s weeping? Or does it stem from jealousy, a craving for my own focal point of devotion and a world made sensible through myth? The image of the Pietà occupies such a distinct place in memory that I often forget it translates to “the pity.”

Tim Hecker – Virginal II

Virgins | Kranky, 2013 | Bandcamp

This morning I wandered through the museum with reverberated gloom in my headphones. I wanted to visit my favorite statues and paintings before things begin closing again. The galleries were mostly empty and I felt a little shady, wearing a mask while my footsteps reverberated through the silent halls of Greek marble, European oils, and Asian scrolls.

I always find solace in the depictions of Venus mourning the death of Adonis, the way she cradles her lover’s body while gazing into the heavens for answers, her face flickering between longing and defiance, depending on my mood.

Saturday afternoon at the museum. 25% capacity, masks, and decals on the floor reminded us to keep our distance.

I’m always captivated by Louise Nevelson’s monuments built from pieces of furniture painted black. They remind me of childhood, conjuring dim memories of playing among the legs of tables and dressers, of my first intimations of death. It’s a specific feeling that I cannot quite connect to words, and perhaps this is why her work moves and reassures me. More and more, I admire this quote from her: “I have made my world, and it is a much better world than I ever saw outside.”

Flipping through an old notebook last night, I came across a page dedicated to the first time I saw a painting by Hubert Robert. Such beautiful cadence in that name: Hubert Robert. Say it out loud and you can’t help but smile.

I remember walking through a gallery at the Art Institute in Chicago, hurrying past portraits of the royal dead. Then I saw three massive paintings of ancient columns and arches stained with moss and time. The green-pink skies felt like the uneasy atmosphere just before a tornado. I nearly overlooked the tiny figures among the broken stones, their bodies dwarfed by architecture that had been designed for gods. A kerchiefed woman crouched over a puddle, scooping water into a pail. An elderly man groped among the rubble with a cane. A young man leaned against the shattered torso of a statue, flirting with two girls in bonnets. A mother cradled a bawling child. A floppy-eared dog gnawed a bone.

I studied these faces living among the ruins of a civilization that once belonged to giants. The label next to these paintings offered no information beyond the titles: The Old Temple, The Fountains, and The Obelisk—dispassionate names that gave them the force of fact or documentary. They were painted in 1788 by Robert, who was known for his capricci, a genre of architectural fantasy where scale and time are disregarded. He is now one of my favorite painters.

Standing before Robert’s ruins, I tried to understand the hum in my belly, the sense of longing. But it wasn’t that mysterious: everyone pines for a fictional past sometimes. Whether it is childhood or the romanticized splendor of Rome, nostalgia for a better time is hardwired. Preparing to tell the tale of Odysseus, Homer had said, “Come now, let me tell you stories of better men,” and the poet Ovid mourned the loss of the noble ages of gold and silver in the year 8.

The woman with her pail of water, the blind man, the flushed lovers: they were dwarfed by history, eking out an existence in its shadows. I wonder if Robert was mocking our desire to retreat into the past. Although his paintings are devoted to the relics of a grander age, they also feel like prophecy, a vision of future generations fetching water among the shattered cinderblocks of discount department stores. Such dystopian scenes once sparked a dark little thrill. But these days, the idea is no longer a remote entertainment or a weather report from a distant land.

Vatican Shadow – Inherit the Ruins

American Flesh for Violence | Hospital Productions, 2019 | Bandcamp

A world so quickly and thoroughly changed. I find myself frequently returning to a century-old line from The Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along. Events will not tolerate your interference.”

In the wake of the world’s first mechanized war, the Dada movement ferociously rejected institutional logic before fading into the dreamlife of Surrealism. Some of us turn outwards, others inwards. Which direction will dominate after this crisis?

Went to an exhibition about the countryside that felt like walking into a Wikipedia entry written under the influence of heavy-duty stimulants. A robotic Josef Stalin meandered through the gallery, a reminder that nothing matters anymore. The paranoia of arch-conservatives mingled with snapshots of Slab City, Arcosanti, the Shakers, Buckminster Fuller’s utopian dreams, Black Bear Ranch, and the Garden of 1000 Buddhas. The walls said things meant to be taken seriously: Expensive minimalism cannot save authenticity. And: Rigidity enables frivolity. My favorite, written on the floor: Things? Space? Things in space?

Although it’s easy to dismiss this exhibit as the self-aggrandizing mood board of an architect in his twilight, this garbled portrait of rural life does capture the current mood: “The village is becoming the voice of reason.” Because what’s the alternative? Our cities have become homogenous, humiliating, and financially untenable—unless you can land a job that consists of writing emails, rearranging pixels, or trolling for clicks. Meanwhile, the New York Times is running articles about something called “cottagecore.” My fantasies about retiring in a double-wide somewhere in the Mojave are burning brighter than ever.

Visited the annual Armory Show at Piers 90 and 94. Ticket prices were outrageous but I managed to slip inside with somebody else’s credentials. The brittle energy of coronavirus anxiety commingled with ritualized decadence. Face masks and champagne stations. New York declared a state of emergency this morning, yet no matter where I walked I ruined somebody’s selfie.

The Armory is an art shopping mall. Nothing can be contemplated, only absorbed as spectacle. Aerial photographs of Texas slaughterhouses with chemicals draining into bloody pools. Claymation creatures engaged in rough sex. Op-art with humming colors on sale for $350,000 a pop. Large-scale acrylic paintings of internet memes. Marie Kondo gripping a pistol. And so many garbled images stuck in the past, relitigating national memories: George McGovern and Gone With the Wind, Jackie Kennedy and vintage supermarket logos.

A gilded sign asked, “What’s happening after the apocalypse?” A crowd gathered around video footage of a flooded museum because we like to watch things get destroyed.

Neon letters near the bar spelled out believe and lie. Gallery owners sat in mid-century chairs, heads hung over their phones. I pondered the posture we acquire when looking at art, hands behind our backs and chins slightly tilted while saying things like derivative and contrived. This felt like the last days of something.

John Maus – The Combine

From Screen Memories | Ribbon Music, 2017 | Bandcamp

A reverberated voice intones I see the combine coming, it’s gonna dust us all to nothing to a big synthy 1980s beat. Also worth highlighting: a screen memory is a distorted visual memory; the term was introduced by Sigmund Freud in 1899.

New York. Cold today, the kind of cold that has people cursing in the streets. It’s the first day in weeks that’s felt like winter. Ducked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to visit one of my favorite sculptures on Valentine’s Day: Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space from 1913. A vaguely human-shaped slab of bronze staggers into a ferocious wind, its body on fire, determined to walk. Thigh stretched, calf flexed as it lunges into the future, sheared and massive.

In 1909 a manifesto appeared in the pages of a French newspaper like a flamethrower ready to reduce history to ashes:

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents—

Such overheated language, the cadence of a fist punching through the sky. The Futurist manifesto crackles with juvenile ego and spite, naively celebrating destruction and dogma five years before the world’s first mechanized war made these things a reality.

—factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

There’s something infectious about this purple writing, and it tints my thoughts as I circle Boccioni’s bronze figure. A body warped and wefted like a terrible dream dredged from the sea. Its face is an anvil, maybe a crucifix. The end of religion. A new faith in the electric storms of the modern world. The Futurists believed museums were cemeteries yet here’s this statue a century later, captured and displayed beneath timid gallery spotlights. Sheared planes and a knight’s helmet, venturing into a final crusade. A portrait of humanity marching into the heat of tomorrow.

Kraftwerk – Heavy Metal Kids

K4 Bremen Radio, 1971

Fifty years ago, Kraftwerk more or less invented heavy metal during a live performance on a radio station. Further reading: the Futurist manifesto; Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. See also: Futurism and Italian Fascism and When Futurism Let to Fascism—and Why It Could Happen Again.

At the Rijksmuseum, a crowd gathered in front of a plexiglass box to photograph a robot scanning the fading canvas of a Rembrandt. A glimpse of the future. Looking at the tiny figures chatting and fishing in the shadows of moss-covered arches in Claude Lorrain’s Harbor at Sunrise from 1637, I realize it’s a genre as old as time, these wistful scenes of people living among the ruins of a romanticized past. There’s a straight line from the paintings of Lorrain and Hubert Robert to the set design of Blade Runner 2049.

Meanwhile, the debate continues across six centuries of oil painting: did Jesus die as a man or a god? The image of the crucifixion did not emerge until a thousand years after his death. People sweep through the galleries, looking at the paintings only through the screens of their phones. Taking pictures is how we see now.

Everything is garbled. I think about ways to meld the personal, historical, and philosophical with each day’s disorienting headlines and events. Can this exercise be shaped into something worthwhile? Because this is how we think and live these days: everything at once. Maybe we have reached the end of grand statements, singular works, and distinct styles. The tides are turning towards snippets of atmosphere, personality, and mood. (I’m rediscovering the obvious and reinventing postmodernism for myself.)

Fog in Amsterdam. Jittery energy in the Friday night streets. People from different nations stagger and bump into things. It’s an uneasy convergence of Bourbon Street and Times Square with picturesque European architecture. We found the electric red Chinese restaurant where we started this trip forty days ago. Over fried dumplings we talked about returning to America while our telephones buzzed with footage of the House prosecutor delivering his impassioned closing remarks to the Senate, urging them to acknowledge the evidence in plain sight: “If you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters and the truth matters. Otherwise, we are lost.”

Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Sag Mir, Wie Lang

From Patchouli Blue | Ipecac Recordings, 2020 | Boomkat

A new album from Bohren & Der Club of Gore arrived today and it’s the perfect soundtrack for these days of pandemic anxiety and political sleaze.

I was shaken by Helene Schjerfbeck’s self-portraits at the Finnish National Gallery. Taken as a series, these paintings grapple with mortality, isolation, and disappearance. They do not flinch. In the last two years of her life, Schjerfbeck painted twenty pictures of herself, each one progressively warped and blurred until she begins to appear alien. The final image comes just before her death at the age of 83: a simple charcoal sketch of her face, half illuminated and half in shadow.

Our art and literature are fueled by the desire to capture and archive the self, to untangle the mess of dealing with being a person who knows they will disappear someday. Do these same impulses drive today’s culture of the selfie? Can a series of Instagram snapshots be viewed as an extension of Schjerfbeck’s inquiry? Today’s social media inherently coats any image with the gloss of performance rather than something earnest, curious, and raw. I wonder if these spaces can ever be rewired into something beyond approval-seeking or developing a personal brand (such a chilling phrase). But perhaps the screen itself has become too tainted by the nervy energy of distraction and craving to allow for moments of contemplation.

Meanwhile in America, impeachment and pandemic anxiety fills the airwaves. An entire political party has been infected with cult logic, refusing to acknowledge the evidence we can see and hear. “I feel so sorry for what is happening in your country,” an elderly Swedish man told me in the sauna. “The whole thing started out with such good intentions.” In China, forty people have died from a new virus that emerged on New Year’s Eve. The headlines are more apocalyptic than usual: The next pandemic will come. Here’s how to prepare, etc. And perhaps more reflective of our times: Stocks close lower on news of deadly virus spreading to USA.

Helene Schjerfbeck; exhibition at the Ateneum; A Neglected Finnish Modernist is Rediscovered, The New York Times