This blog is a living archive of published and unpublished writing about contemporary art (and everything it is made out of) featuring finished pieces and works-in-progress. Sometimes it will be just one line or a paragraph, at others merely a quote or loose dialogue . Dynamism, transformation, growth and accretion are integral to the blog form which is why I’m finally turning to it instead of making a physical book.
My title is drawn from Yvonne Rainer’s 1979 film Journeys From Berlin/1971.
Risk–to steal from Matthew Barney—is my hypertrophy, the term he uses to describe his aesthetic system. It is drawn from medicine and is used in weight lifting to describe the enlargement of a muscle via a process of tearing, healing and scarring. I regard writing as another form of hypertrophy.
This is an experiment in risks between you the reader and me the writer; between me the writer and you as in language. Between you the artist or subject and me the art writer. In sum, between all the variations of the you we encounter everyday in our roles as me’s.
Along with my own writing, I will produce a living archive, consisting of an ongoing series of written conversations produced only here. For years I have been using the interview format as an alternative to writing an essay. They are pieces of writing not transcriptions. Rooted in intense research, followed by a recorded conversation with a subject or subjects, the transcript is then passed back and forth as a piece of writing. Unlike the journalist for whom exposing the finished interview to the subject before publication is either unethical or no longer an interview in the proper sense, for me, the initial conversation is only the beginning of an end product that is intricately word-woven by two people. The point is not to trick the interviewee or force spontaneous answers (which upon reflection are awkward or incorrect). No, these are constructed conversations that depend on the fussiness of the editor and the written word.
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve 