Borrow + Never Give Back
Jun’22 – Sep’24
Computational Poetry, Book, ExhibitionKickstarter Book
Silo Gallery, Santa Barbara
Borrow + Never Give Back operates on multiple frequencies. Each poem in the project appropriates a different literary form: a job description, a movie synopsis, a song, an art critique. The project's title performs its own double movement – immigrants and refugees, "accused" of stealing nationals' jobs and never returning home, here become agents of literary appropriation. I borrow these forms unapologetically and never return them.
Literature surrounds us, yet we forget what constitutes literature. Is spam mail literature? A job description? A text message? Wherever text exists, language finds an opportunity to reconsider itself, to shine, to pervert. Our overwhelm stems from competing languagings of reality: An instruction manual, a motivational quote, a scam email, a sensationalist headline. Nature is attractive precisely because it refuses to language reality – it offers space for improvisation.
This work observes language in its various uniforms and disguises, hunting for attraction. It dumpster dives and catwalks. It confronts the fundamental misuse of language – especially in motivational quotes – where concepts masquerade as speaking to the heart when only story and senses do. Writing demanded literacy in multiple languages: chart readings, job descriptions, jokes. Understanding each language's terms to better pervert, amplify, modify or preserve it.
Exhibition
Borrow + Never Give Back sought to give a physical visual body to what I had started calling computational poetry. Hey you, a language collage based on found language in my scam mail, was showcased as part of Art and Cake’s online exhibition during the pandemic. Other pieces were displayed as part of a solo show at Silo gallery in Santa Barbara.
Creating each of piece meant “dumpster diving” into my scam mail, excavating language, printing it, cutting, collaging. It meant invading an invading language and remaking it anew. What emerged are pieces like Babe tht read “Babe, I Really want your 112,000 9,2 inch NAKED monsters to Impress On me their secrets a couple extra times”.
Book
In Deep & Fast, every poem is an answer to a question found in a blog or an article. Alone the questions seem trite: What motivates you to do more? Do we have guardian angels? Can certain exercises really lead to better sex?However, each answer is a reminder that no question is an orphan. Like us, questions have roots. Ancestry. Depth. Every question can be prefaced by every other question ever asked. Where do you see yourself in five years? can only be answered when prefaced by How did your mother relate to her mother? and What is your relationship to your love handles? And so every poem in the book is a defiance of practicality. Every question begets all questions until it’s clear that the mother of all questions is not an answer but a longing to grow closer, earlier. Deep & fast.
In Deep & Fast, I stopped writing and started finding. During pandemical informational excess, my intellect grew increasingly fatigued. To be asked to read in a gallery felt like a chore. Every piece of writing seemed to weave argumentative narrative or toy with its deconstruction. Deep & Fast took shape as my taste grew for texts without the assumption of construction or starting anew. In that context, found text carried as much voice as written text – the writer became editor rather than creator. The practice introduced introspection subtly, like a Trojan horse, smuggled the new in vessels of the old.
I stopped writing in part because the activity felt pretentious. I experienced the looming heaviness of post-modernity like a silent meditation on rampant cynicism that can't take anything seriously. There, found text became a vow of silence. I understood Glenn Ligon. Found text was humility brought about by deep fatigue. In a loud world, I couldn’t shout louder. I could only erase. I stopped writing and the humorour veneer that pervaded each piece wasn’t Maurizio Cattelan's. It seemed more inviting to me precisely because it lacked certainty. It wasn’t shy but it was less performative. It wasn’t a large humor seeking to incinerate society. It was a a small, slow humor.