#live work

"Well, for a start, I don’t have a studio practice. Like, studio practice? In this economy? Instead, I have a kid and some reading groups and a lot of physical rehab and a teaching job and one or two friends and lovers. The art world is a deathly world which provides nothing needed for the production of art. It gives no life back. So I began to do things that will give me life and divest from the rest because I’ve been doing this for a long time, and it’s not getting better. You asked me about the red writing on the wall in Enclosures at Camden Art Centre. It’s called Writs (2022), and it’s a kind of counting or accounting.  I think about all of the lives that go uncounted, uncanonized by “the institution” in its broadest sense. I recommend you visit the Covid memorial while you’re in London; I couldn’t have known it, but all those red hearts, all that asemic accounting, has some parallel with Writs. It is a public monument at the most incredible scale. The unalienated heart of art itself is buried too damn deep in the art-world corpus, or corpse, to remember that such a thing exists, but it’s there on that wall. It’s not the fact of the work itself but the fact that somebody made it. And don’t let the conceptualists fool you: that in itself is a whole politics. It’s the best artwork you’ll see while you’re here."