Permanent Collection

February 3, 2019

Dear Agnes,

Thank you for taking the time to read my letter. My reasons for writing this are complicated. I think it’s always important to be honest – especially in personal letters. Seeing your work over the years, I’ve had reactions that could probably be characterized as “ambivalent.” Usually that term has a pejorative tone. It probably sounds rude. It isn’t meant to be. I don’t mean to say your work “leaves me cold.” I mean it involves variations in response. I find the work simply shows me myself in the present, not in the sense of a mirror, but in the sense of an imprint, where you and I share contact with your work (even in your absence). At times, this means that the experience of viewing your work, for me, could be described as: “oddly chaotic,” “frenzied,” or “exhilarated;” but, at other times “dissociated;” or even “depressed.”

We haven’t met (yet) so I can introduce to you – with humility – a model for analyzing artworks that has been helpful for me. I call it “frottage,” which has a connection to graveyards. Will you “meet me in the graveyard?” Graveyards are for me places of ambivalence, and places that have tombstones, which are suitable for one of my favourite ways of drawing: frottage. This letter is another moment of frottage, even if you will never read it. A drawing that is frottage is made by placing a slip of paper across a textured surface and pressing another mark making material into the paper. Similarly, I bring myself to your work and take an impression, like a graphite rubbing of a tombstone recorded on a thin sheet, which often takes the look of a shroud. This shroud is, right now, mostly about me, but perhaps if others were to read these letters they will see their purpose.

Connected to shrouds and acts of frottage, you should know that Tammi Campbell has been writing to you, but she may not have the correct address. She also is engaging in frottage. Her “letters” are also drawings, mark-making that includes her handwriting but also your handwriting – that is, your mark-making, or an approximation thereof. I am told that she writes one every day. That could be misinformation. I wonder how long this will continue? Some collectors have been gathering entire weeks or months of her letters. If your mark-making and pattern-making offers records of, or sparks for, an affective state, I wonder about the affect of her letters, but also about the potential to imagine each of your images as “letters” written to self, written to me, written to others. If they are letters to me, I am so glad to have such a faithful correspondent. In what graveyard are these impressions made?

Sincerely,
M

Dear Tammi,

This letter is composed of a grid and it is a drawing.

When I first read your letters to Agnes Martin, because I am somewhat a narcissist, I thought of a series of love letters (not fan letters) I wrote to David Hockney in 2001. Since I was “in love” with David Hockney, and since my fragile queer identity was still emerging, I never mailed the letters. As an intergenerational attempt at communication, I can see now that this letter was an attempt to cross what seemed an impossible distance, even if my letter was written to an artist still alive. This series of letters-never-sent was a symptom of my (somewhat self-imposed) deep alienation from queer culture in the early 2000s – and Hockney seemed somehow the right person to write. After all, he had founded a fantasy of West Coast American gay culture within his paintings and within his peroxide blond hair. Maybe my letters could have a similar power. I also bleached my hair to convene and make a coven with Hockney. I have enclosed a photo. My letters were projections of fantasy, and places to hide and feel seen – ultimately only by myself. Three years later a curator I worked for advised me to publish the letters. I did not publish the letters. Now, when I see an image of his work or his work or a news story about him or his work I think about what I wrote. I suppose that is narcissism too? Looking at the Dear Agnes letters is exciting for me because I see these drawings/letters as membranes that involve (at least) three points of contact: you, me, and Agnes Martin. This “me” could be anyone looking at the work, thinking about it, and is only singular within the context of this letter I’m writing to you. Since your letters to Agnes Martin are graphic (and gothic) in quality, and involve mark-making, they highlight the autographic quality of lines, forms, and colours in Martin’s work. I should mention that I’ve also written a letter to Agnes Martin, but I’ve kept the nature of your project (mostly?) private for the sake of discretion. Then again, your reasons for writing “Dear Agnes” are yours, and not mine to wonder about. But I do wonder because I am always curious about other people’s attachments to figures from art history, being an artist dressed as an art historian myself. I suppose she has seen the letters, since… you have addressed the letters to her? In the letter I have written to Agnes the salutation is “Dear Agnes,” but only because I want to maintain the form you use in your artwork – not to be overly familiar and certainly not to repeat the patriarchal trap of art history where male-identified writers refer to female-identified artists by their first name only. “Dear Tammi” is also not intended to be presumptuous. You use a visual vocabulary that Martin will understand, and maybe even recognize as a dialect based on her vernacular. I wonder what decoding will occur. I wonder what irregularities she has detected between her hand and your hand-following-her-hand. What elements of interpretation? That in turn has changed the way I think about Agnes Martin’s artwork, which I had never thought of as having any linguistic or translational value. It makes a relationship between hand and communication that I find very exhilarating and oddly chaotic. Surely these letters are not only written to “Agnes,” but like all good letters not sent to their recipients, these could be letters to yourself. Or is “Agnes” a surrogate for someone else?

Sincerely,
M

Dear Sarah,

To pillage and distort the ideas of Rem Koolhaas, if the story of art after modernism had fifty letters, this letter to you could be one of them. The letter would start with a proposal to discuss your work in connection to the architectural renderings of Italian Futurism, and plans for floating cities, but then that would be redacted and a second sheet of paper would be added to the letter that would talk about the static and dynamic qualities in your work and Futurism. Then this would be redacted – to make a volume that is a line. I have included the second redacted sheet.

I have circled your spindly, skeletal work. Both by walking around it, and by turning this redacted sheet of paper into a drawing. To use another architectural scaffold, there is volume here, rather than mass. There is humor in this work and joy too, I think. Can you guess which of your works I have nicknamed “the colon?” That’s a reference to the gut, where so much feeling occurs.

Line has a feeling, like the snaking contours of the gut. I would not tell the line what to feel.

Sincerely,
M

Dear Sarah,

Futurism thought speed was beautiful. Remember that Marinetti claimed that a moving car is “more beautiful than the Victory of the Samothrace.” Boccioni hoped sculpture could learn something from the beauty of a moving vehicle – a lesson not apparent in the Victory of the Samothrace. But it is a lesson apparent in your work, which is so slow moving but not static as it appears at first glance.

Sincerely,

M

Dear Jen and Magnus,

Water is the “line” that seems to connect several of your projects.

I remember asking you about water, and inquiring what has drawn you to water and containers for water, lines for water (water treatment plant, drainage system, cistern) repeatedly as sites for investigation, thinking about how the human body is a container for water and a line for water. Water is the conduit by which the sound is formed and transmitted in your work, and a human body of water then makes this sound legible again. The cistern gives the sound of something ancient. Within that cistern, a space rarely accessed by human bodies, is a world of acoustics and a world of consciousness.

Sincerely,

M

Dear “line”,

When a letter is typewritten on a keyboard, rather than written by hand, the relationship to “line,” to you, changes. Since I’ve written a collection of letters that address you by apostrophe, I thought I should also write you directly. My uncle, who studied technical drawing, explained to me once that when one wants to draw a straight line, one should look not where the writing instrument touches the page, but where one wishes that line to end. I am looking to that endpoint. A letter to you, “line,” is really a letter written to the device of writing letters to those most absent. You should know that Tammi Campbell is also writing to you, though she has only indirectly addressed you in her letters.

Sincerely,

M

Dear Tammi,

I have a letter here addressed to “line,” but I think it’s actually written to you.

Sincerely,

M

Dear Tammi,

Perhaps it is an unwelcome line to draw in connection to your work, but your use of trompe l’oeil immediately brings to mind the work of several colonial American still life painters who use their virtuosity to play with depth, and the real. Citations are disagreeable in letters, but have you read Hanneke Grootenboer’s book on still life and its rhetorical properties, particularly in terms of depth, and flatness, and deception? I’ve enclosed a copy for you. This is not meant to be teacherly, it is a gift, but it was the first thing I thought of when I saw your work. Following her argument, your work that looks like bubble wrap but is persuasive but not seductive (even though I am totally seduced by the juicy, wet aspect); it is persuasive because it presents itself as such a simple, plain, object (bubble wrap), that there seems to be nothing hidden, nothing deceptive or confusing about its “fact” of being. Hanneke and I worked together during my graduate studies. Her approach to supervising me was so entirely “fact”-based that there was nothing to contest in her Socratic assessments of my progress and of my arguments, and no feelings got in the way of our “facts.” With your work, there at first is no reason to ask “why represent bubble wrap / cardboard / packing tape / masking tape?” because instead the question people seem to ask here is “how have these materials been so painstakingly mimicked?” The “why” of representing the shells, the emballages, of handling and shipping art reminds me of David Joselit’s writing about “surface.” Joselit writes about Foucault’s claim that “the soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy: the soul is the prison of the body.” The citation is: David Joselit, “Notes on Surface: Toward a Genealogy of Flatness,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung, 2^nd ed. West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell (2012). That quote is on page 108. The body becomes a (flat) surface upon which identity is written. In your work, the “body” appears to be encased in plastic, or in cardboard. This body is never revealed. Instead, you only show me the surface, the shell, (the wrapping) that your work represents – itself. This seems to me a potent metaphor for the institutional emballages that are instruments of political anatomy mobilized for the sake of formalist painting.

Sincerely,

M

Dear Hanneke,

I have enclosed a reproduction of a work by Tammi Campbell that will interest you.

Sincerely,

M

Dear Agnes,

I remember the first time I saw your work in person: it was a painting with graphite. I had seen many examples of your work in reproduction, in textbooks, in magazines, and I was struck by – disquieted by? – the raw, mildly tremulous quality of your mark making. It’s trite to write this now, but it made me sad because photographic reproductions had taught me to expect a kind of mechanical quality from your work which would have removed everything that is fragile and human about what you do. It reminds me of an anecdote I heard in my undergraduate studies that the Regina Five learned about Barnett Newman by seeing his work in black and white photographic reproductions in magazines, and based on that he was invited to the Emma Lake Workshops.

Even if my encounter has been with “line,” I hope this final “line” will reach you in our graveyard. I have enclosed a photo.

Sincerely,

M