Non Sequitur III.A, Aubergine Rafter Makes a Bid

Art is and isn’t my inheritance.

I like fat globules of paint, smeared and coagulated, that resolve into a face I might encounter in wandering Primrose Hill.

I like entering the Louvre and standing in front of diaphanous lily pads as crowds of tourists stream past me, none of them the wiser that I stand there, ascendant, in equally diaphanous lingerie from a Parisian atelier that hugs tight to and traces my body’s lines and creates a form that is worthy of the view and that costs more to create than my fellowship’s stipend might bear.

I like worshipping more-or-less squared color hovering over more-or-less squared color in a chapel that is a refuge from the suffocating swelter of Houston summer and the sundry homeless men who leer at me with a hand out.

I like renting a Jeep at the airport in Salt Lake, trying and failing to differentiate the officially famous spiral from the anonymous spirals down which all infamy drains away, and then – as recompense or absolution, who knows? – taking pictures on a vintage Polaroid of road-kill snakes smeared across the highway, shaking them between thumb and forefinger with as much signifying patience as I can muster.

I like watching and rewinding and watching again that video of a man who stands, ready willing and able to be shot, and who – once the bullet breaks the skin and passes through like a miracle without shattering his humerus – embraces that absurd burden of resuming the life of an artist, of violence’s self-appointed victim.

I like the tall Muppet singing the song of Lewitt.

I like to read about the moment when the artist in delectio flagrante with the collector – this fucking and being fucked by, the art itself – starts to cry out, hot bothered ecstatic and coming, knowing at some point this will all be shown within four walls of some institution. Some day I hope to see it with my own two eyes. My pulse quickens at the thought, I confess.

But – the rub – I also like having pocket money to buy espresso on Houston Street and walking down the avenues, armed with artisanal cheese made by freedom-loving people who raise freedom-having cows or goats, as the case may be, in the Hudson Valley, with my camera documentation machine in tow, taking pictures that I might later develop and mount to canvas I’ve left back at my hostel, which (I promise) I will leave outside the Frick for some passerby before I go off on another saunter.

All of which is to say that my interest in this fellowship is mercenary, in the sense that it offers a bank of time within which to make things and a bank of money by which I may buy more time to make things and see and consume things that make me want to make more things. I want above all to be liberated, but I will settle for these mutually reinforcing banks.

And, because I am the unclaimed love-child of artworld monarchy, I feel it is time to claim my inheritance. Or my dowry. If there is a difference. .

So, I humbly request not only that you admit me into your program, but also that you go into the vault of whatever largesse is at your disposal and gather up a wad sufficient to underwrite the graduate phase of my education that will (I hope) culminate in my coming-out-party.

I will be your debutante. Do not be stingy.