Yes, I’m still here.
When he goes off, either on a trip or on a set of blogposts (and sometimes both at the same time, cf. Seeing Scores), I prefer to leave him to it. A librarian without a library (or in the case when he was in Dayton at that Bergamo Curriculum Theorizing conference, while Zooming in to the Disability Studies and Art Education (DSAE) conference – a librarian with a mobile library).
Like the library ghost I am, I have been crouched here on his shelves all the time; slipping through the books, thinking which one I can turn him and his typing (dancing?) fingers towards (cf. Pelenakeke Brown‘s presentation at DSAE called A Traveling Practice project)
I may be the ghost here, but he is the one who betrays a sluggish thingliness and so I like to use this dynamic space of this here blog – this daily set of words, images, sounds, videos – to nudge him towards a more kinetic activity. And no I am not in cahoots with Nazi Heidegger’s spirit, in case you were wondering, more with The Friendliest Black Artist in America, Pope. L and his attention to a language of illegibility (cf. Rosette Cirillo‘s presentation at Bergamo on necromancy, the problem of making the dead legible, and Kanye’s hologram for Kim)
I’m making him do his typing dance barely legible writing thing (it is ok if you have trouble understanding him, too) here from the pages of Proto-Skin Set: Pope. L (New York: Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2017). You have probably encountered one or two of Pope. L’s Skin Set series in a gallery or museum near you (here in Columbus, OH, they were included in two exhibitions at the Wex – Blues for Smoke and, most recently, Climate Changing; and there was a splattering of them, among the whispers, at documenta 14 in Kassel).
In the Proto-Skin Set book, Pope. L describes the Skin Set sequence in relation to what he calls his own illegibility as follows:
I believe blackness – for example, racializing as a kind of ‘as if’ marking on a thing or surface – produces an over-writing, a palimpsest of meanings, that may obscure or delete or redefine who or what a person is as a person. I have tried to problematize this state of affairs via several strategies. Here are a few: making things difficult in which case I make something more complex or harder than common sense says it should be; or autobiography and inappropriate sharing to create a person-to-person connection; or contradiction where I insist, for example, that illegibility has its own value or humor used as a lubricant to loosen up, make wobbly or even instrumentalize legibility for my own uses.
Turning to the Proto-Skin Sets from the Skin Sets (proper), Pope. L returns to the thing and illegibility in the form of troubling understanding:
Protos relate to SS [Skin Sets] proper in that they share interest in language, handwriting, foregrounding or bringing into parity the conceptual with object-making – how to teach a thing to speak…. Protos are understood, at one time, as one thing with no sense of system except the desire for a system – whereas SS proper is produced within a system of relations and duration. This system is also a system of understanding because I am always attempting to better understand what I am doing and at the same time trouble that understanding and push the limits of what constitutes a Skin Set thing – at the same time I am always operating within the limits of my life and time…
