This is the first book of The Webs of Doubt: Vinculum- and Verfallen-Codes for Anomalies, which I know is a long and ridiculous title, but it is also exactly what I mean. I consider the overall project a literary montage, or a sequence of ‘obliterature,’ and the conceptual structure of Approaching Capture set this growing archive in motion.

I was briefly a worker at the Brooklyn Museum in the summer of 2012, and was tasked with creating more space in their physical file cabinet system by removing excessive, duplicate copies of artwork documentation. It became quietly enthralling to pull these black-and-white records, like they were signals from another time. Over the course of a single workday from 9 to 5, I extricated 516 photographs from A to G. I walked out of the museum with the stack in a Canon bag.

The alphabetical categorization of art makes no sense from the point of view of the content of the art. Evidence of the process of collection and the shifting marks of marginalia seemed like the minor literature worth exposing in this work. And the different levels of incompletion were charged with significance, the remaining letters of the alphabet lost despite an already considerable set. Incompletion has shaped the course of my life in profound ways — in 1998, my mother passed away in a car accident that I survived.

For the first 99 pages of the book, beside each of the Brooklyn Museum versos, a poem exists in mirror image and can be read through the page when the page is held up to light, turning the margin into celluloid. The writing has 29 sections, and it was there that I took on the first pseudonym of George Gilbert, a photographer trying to reach the instant of capture which is his home.

Velázquez’s c. 1620 painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I visited the work many times before I was struck by an epiphany standing before its secret disclosed. In the lower left corner of this bodegón is a brass bowl or pot, and hidden within the concave reflection is a silhouetted self-portrait of the artist, in his studio in Seville, 400 years ago. The shadowy head and torso diagonally cross the middle, and over his shoulders are several arched windows and the slant of an illuminated wall.

None of the major Velázquez books mention this detail, from the painter who 35 years later included a mirror in the core of his master paradox picture, Las Meninas. I could then trace an entire minor thread of self-portrait reflectivity through all his work, including the creased empty paper that he inherited from Titian and El Greco, as well as his signature on the cartellino held by Pope Innocent X.

Kitchen Scene balances on the knife’s edge between abstraction and representation; its vision of self oscillates in and out of focus, is submerged, and is difficult to notice. I wrote a long paper on this topic, but my research was insufficient, and for the 2021 exhibition at Soccer Club Club, I entered into the difference and repetition of recreating the excerpt of the bowl eleven times, working on two or three at once. In a way I was practicing the disappearance of the artist. The inevitable uniqueness in the row of figures was enhanced with unique shapes of actual garlic skin adhered to the surfaces of the oil paintings. This was a nod to the head of garlic that appears in Kitchen Scene but outside the frame of my excerpt, and gives a vampiric connotation to the long life of the slumbering Sevillian ensconced in the metallic membrane of a poetic object, shaped like a retina.

Wenzel is an epic experimental effort. I was acting and writing in parallel, stealing textures from the air and embedding them into text. The reconfiguration of the paragraph unit naturally emerged and made sense — if there was a dream, then the paragraph began in parentheses to document the night. A sturdy unit of measurement in which to wield translation of the humming field of potential. The rhythm of ending and beginning again allowed for improvisation, ambiguous detours, and precise missteps.

The novel begins with Section XXX to follow from the end of Approaching Capture, with the sections obliquely based on the artists and artwork titles of the Brooklyn Museum ex-archive, so that the movement could still be read within the file cabinet categorization. As new elements of the overall sequence appeared (photographic flags, short stories, letters, translucent abstract drawings on vellum, entire exhibitions), I realized that the pseudonyms became guides through a mutative structure. It’s really a private, experimental organization of experience.

I love László Krasznahorkai’s novel Satantango for its cascading effects of insight; the book opens with a desert-sober visionary imagining of an acacia branch changing through the four seasons in a single encounter. Tarr adapted Satantango and collaborated with Krasznahorkai, so in a way the Nietzschean monologue in The Turin Horse has passed from silence to sound and now back to silence, where it originated from. It is the neighbor’s soliloquy on the apocalyptic corruption of the world that paradoxically feels like hope, for its articulation of real truth in a godforsaken land. This small painting lives on a wall by my chair in my studio, as loud as Judgment Day, I suppose.

I think artists decide on where and how to position their practices. There is productive risk in letting the world speak through you, a bit of friction through the background and through unexpected interactions. This time the metaphor felt loaded at the edge of the city, and then a bit further, with a sculpture floating and drifting in the lake, off the territorial map.

My primary guests at the planetarium beach were about 30 geese, plus a stranger from west of Venice, near Padua. The sun was direct, and the situation morphed into a parable of unknown reason. My documentation looked like it was set within some ancient foundations, like a Natural History Museum diorama, a wild goose chase amid an incongruous protest of signs.

I was aware of installs by Marcel Broodthaers and David Hammons at the beach, a place suggestive of play, building castles, the unreachable horizon, primordial mixtures, and the end. By setting actors and political works there, the periphery became a plotted point in relation to the gallery exhibition.

We’re deep within the society of the spectacle now: its pressure of attraction, its harvesting of more and more information from the secret interior, the ramified theater of the self.

When I study the virtuosic efficiency of past masters, their work and process either branch out into or bind together a socioeconomic embeddedness in networks and a capturing of the piercing glint of life, which surpasses its own artificial rendering.

There is something crucial achieved in the withheld substantiality of Velázquez, Manet, Cézanne, Picabia, and Tuymans. The figure in limbo, in a loading zone, tells us about workers and their contradictory states of being. My paintings are best achieved in a concentrated event lasting several days. In this series the bodies are slightly larger than life, the proportions of the canvas door-like. I’m continuing the idea of depicting actors or hunters with dogs, sourcing from found or taken or algorithmic photographs. With things like contrapposto, diagonal vantage, subtle disjunction, and the seduction of folds, it becomes an adverse genre operating within and beyond its appearance as either portrait or advertising.

Long ago Gaylen Gerber told me that I should make a haiku, but I misremembered his advice as being to make an egg. What is hidden is also eminently present. And what’s interesting at a second level is that the negation of the image also becomes an image — the surprised look is like the cat in Manet’s Olympia. Julian and I hung it very low in the corner of the wall.

Frank Zappa, Ulver, Colin Stetson, Aphex Twin, SQÜRL & Jozef van Wissem, Isao Tomita’s version of Mussorgsky, Caterina Barbieri, William Basinski, Massive Attack, Miles Davis, Pat Martino’s Think Tank, Emerald Web, Death (from Detroit), 2814, and Johnny Cash.