amor wall

Desert Island, Brooklyn

Man of hats

Clearing the decks was the painter Philip Guston's expression for devoting several years of his studio practice to drawing. It comes to me via a curator's note in the rapturous exhibition Guston Works on Paper at the Morgan Library. Clearing the decks for an artist can mean throwing a lot away in order to begin again. In this context, the blog - material that is something of an archaeological phenomenon in its indestructibility –leaves me uneasy and wondering. More invincible than the most insidious plastic, words in this form exist forever. They are not contained within machines; permanent erasure would mean the destruction of all mechanic forms of accessing them, the destruction of language or the loss of ability to decode their language. I’ve been thinking about the desire to clear the decks, and its counterpart desire to hold on to some things (like this postcard of the road runner my grandmother sent to me from Palm Desert, California 30 years ago). My roommate is also a painter. His work is stacked against most of the available walls in the place, and occasionally in the hallway just outside the apartment door. Many of the occupants of the building leave things out like this, in a sort of limbo with the dumpster. Furniture, rolls of carpet, paperback books, suitcases, even paintings left in the hallways of my building may suffer from a lack of commitment to ownership –signs in the building entry threaten removal - but for close to a year I've never seen anything thrown away against the owner’s will. This is the funny thing about these limbo spaces - they present the possibility of having it back again. I've asked my roommate about his paintings out of concern that they’d be stolen or damaged by resident bikers or dogs, but he isn't bothered. It feels good to clear the decks.