Maybe he senses that the end is near and that is why he has brought me back. I don’t know. He is fickle and so part of me felt, even though he kept taking books from my shelves and posting about or around them, he had moved on and past this daily project (he uses this word for absolutely everything!) that he dubbed Our Library of the Future: A Ghost’s Story. So much of what he does is unfinished and he prides himself on that. The classicist in him (and even though the books from his formative years are buried in his basement; my former life) wants this word ‘unfinished’ to do double duty – both to mean ‘not complete’ as well as ‘un-refined’ and even ‘incoherent’ – the latter he gleans from a phrase written by his beloved Apuleius, in his potted biography of Plato that prefaces his dry handbook On Plato and his Doctrine, wherein the Platonist living in Roman Imperial North Africa imagines his ancient Greek philosophical master as taking the opinions (sententiae) of predecessors which are ‘unrefined and ‘unpolished and unfinalized’ (impolitas…et inchoatas) and licking them into a perfect form with the chisel of reason and the dress of skilled speech. There is a section of his blog – this blog – that is called ‘Ongoing’ that he will rename ‘Unfinished’ when all this is over, in just over a month from now. But what does his impolite, incoherent unfinishing of things, whether exhibitions that he keeps on going back to (e.g. documenta 14, now five years old, which is simply ancient in contemporary artworld terms) or a methodology of resisting the relentless privileging of the polished and shiny new thing that keeps the gears of capitalist production turning through the bones of the past. The mere mention of these bones, like a small, heavy rock in the hand of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Ovid’s Metamorphoses or on Amy Sillman’s iPad, opens up onto what he knows he needs to whisper here. But not today. Come back tomorrow and his secret will be released into the air.
To be continued…
