Nihil: Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas)
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico
In the five occasions I’ve come here over the past three years, I can find no evidence of anyone else having been here. Half the roof caved in long before I stumbled upon it. I would guess it was built around the time New Mexico became a state, in the teens or twenties. The year 2005 is carved into the blackboard, the most recent date I can find evidence of in the room. It seems likely the inscription preceded the collapse of the roof. The mural I discovered here remains unchanged, unvandalized. I often wonder about the artist, these blue dashes on the blackboard, the array of red triangles spraypainted over the old bulletin board, all in a kind of encoded language. I imagine the blue marks kept a tally, the red contours and triangles another kind of account. I don’t see it as tagging or graffiti; there’s a unique mind at work here. I have my notions, but I’m hesitant to get carried away with false narratives. These days, I find myself more skeptical than ever of narratives of all kinds, which must have something to do with why I began the Nihil project in the first place. For me, all stories are rendered false when they lose their intimacy, when they become too insisted upon, too convenient to audience or teller. I know neither this author nor the story, yet I’m arrested by its presence and, eventually, compelled to respond. There is an instinctive desire here, I think, to reach through a veil of some kind, seeking contact, however impossible. I tend to think of this kind of instinct as religious in nature, and that I must be as religious as the world’s first artists. This is more a notion than a belief. It’s enough that it makes me feel less alone to imagine.
Original Panel As Gathered From Abandon Bible School
It's been years since I was nervous or hesitant to begin a painting, but here I am nervous again. I know that I have only this one attempt. If I bury all traces of the original layer, the original hand, as I almost always do in my own work, it will feel as if I’ve merely stolen something. This I want to avoid, if possible, so that it might be closer to an actual collaboration. I want the original hand to speak though whatever trouble I cause the surface.
The piece comes easily, naturally, in part, I think, because all the surprises are welcome ones. Scraping out my own layers, I accidently efface parts of the original surface. I am using a lot of cold wax medium which gives the object greater body while maintaining a certain amount of transparency. The original artist’s red marks speak through the whitish mud. The brown of the bulletin board emerges in flecks from before that artist’s painting of the surface. All the cracks that grew over the years remain. Time is my other collaborator.
I make the painting in my studio, and, in the course of my own life, with all of my ordinary concerns and daily obligations, not in the abandoned school or with reference to the artist’s life or intentions, all far out of reach. Yet as I continue to work, the quality of my awareness changes. This is always true in painting, of course, but what I mean here is something more specific. Ever since I read Allison Benis White’s poem “Please Bury Me in This,” I’ve had a greater epistolary tendency. I seem to be serious about this need for contact, and the metaphor of the veil (between points in time, space, one’s own life, the lives of others) is a metaphor precisely because it stands for something very real to me, if ineffable.
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | Mixed Media on Found Bulletin Board, Ossified Shoe in Collaboration with Anonymous Artist | c.2000-2022
Among the categories of things in what I call the Tenets of Nihil is the “Archaic Brother.” This term has, in part, to do with the childhood loss of my own brother, which was possibly the most important precursor to the growth and development of my own imagination as I matured and as I continue to make art today. I believe it’s mainly this experience that has influenced my tendency to seek communicating with those who are out of reach, which might account for why the poem was so instructive to this instinct. It is in this always-present absence that my imagination finds the metaphorical veil so useful for bearing a visual language.
I began the Nihil project with the hope of avoiding meaning or narrative, and yet, so early on, I find it again and again, everywhere I look. The remnants of years gone by are always strewn about the studio, and I mean this quite literally. An ossified shoe I once found in another abandoned space, for example, sits alternately on or under my painting table, and continues to take on layers of paint. For a while, it rested on top of a plastic piece of car fender. The relationship between the shoe and fender brought about a memory of a boy I went to middle school with when my family lived in southern Illinois. His name was Lucas.
Lucas was a sixth-grader in my chorus class. My friend Mike and I were in seventh. My middle school years were plagued by bullying; I was routinely harassed and occasionally beaten up because it was thought among some of my classmates and teammates that I was gay. My cleverest nickname was Fagler. I will often describe these years as being governed by a kind of trickle-down cruelty or prison-yard mentality. I fell in line. If I was ranked in the bottom quarter, in terms of social status among the other kids, Lucas was at the bottom. If I was probably gay, Lucas was the gayest. Mike and I, sitting behind him in chorus, took many opportunities to remind him, making each other giggle with our own clever puns and jokes. Lucas never once looked back at us that I can remember and sat in humiliated stillness toward the front of class, where our teacher wouldn’t have yet entered. This is how I passed down my pain, frustration, fear, and shame. Though I no longer remember how the quarter or semester or year passed, I do remember what soon happened to Lucas, that he died in car accident.
To this day, I can’t think of him without tears, which encompass all the feelings one could imagine might come along with it. Mainly, it’s to do with regret, with the knowledge that every day of this boy’s life at school was hell and that I contributed to it. That what happened to him was so deeply unfair and grotesque I cannot appeal to any compensatory sentiment to give it meaning. How can I ask forgiveness of a boy I never really knew and only barely remember? I can’t shake the feeling that the significance of the story, in terms of my being pulled toward it for so long, is to do somehow with the loss of my own brother, that both boys call to me out of the profound silence and invisibility cloaking their memories. I think again of the anonymous artist and associate the silent anonymity around the mural with consciousness itself. In the last paragraph of The Stranger, Camus writes “…for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really…”
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) (Detail) | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico
It was a spontaneous decision to put the shoe beneath the painting, yet as soon as I did, I was overwhelmed again with this memory. This is the twenty-fourth work in the “Out of Existence” series, and its title was always meant to contain two opposite meanings simultaneously, both negating and affirming a subject, which is also inferred by the process of adding and removing paint, layer after layer. Though I am a skeptic in practice, my skepticism is often undermined (or perhaps benefitted) by instincts that seem to erupt from somewhere deeper. On one hand, I do not believe the title’s inscription “for Lucas,” can ever be received by him. I know that he has long since ceased existing. And yet, as we are now experiencing the spring season, I watch everything in its return: the blossoms on the peach tree, the throngs of pollinating bees, rabbits in the mornings, colts and foals among the bands of wild horses that pass by our house each day. As one horse dies and another is born, something like horse consciousness never seems to cease; each horse does as its predecessors did. The bees seem governed by bee consciousness, the fruit trees by tree consciousness. This feeling doesn’t violate my skepticism. I am more skeptical of the absence of mind than I am of its presence. For although I know the word for horse, and observe the movement and behavior of horse, it is not enough that either the word or singular animal it describes should be understood as a reality independent perceptual bias. It’s as if horse cuts across time and place and awaits all the signs that comply with the idea of horse even as the science of horse is contingent on a body of human knowledge. Gravity is an explanation for why we don’t float into space only to the extent that we understand gravity, and, finally, we do not. Yet we have a word for what binds us to the ground. What, after all, binds gravity to law?
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) (Detail)
This is true, too, of Lucas, and of my brother, and of the anonymous artist (for unknown reasons, I imagine is not living), that consciousness as they experienced it, at its best and worst, is bound to time itself, to their nature, to its nature, preceding and proceeding their names. At the smallest scales, through this veil, between my life and theirs, consciousness seems to me co-emergent. I want to believe that what has been given to me, deserved or not, I meet halfway, and from this boundary between us is another quality of consciousness made possible. The same consciousness, it seems to me, which bound them to the earth while they were here is what, to this day, binds their memories not simply to my own imagination, but to the consciousness in which I swim, theirs, mine, and of all the imaginations which stir deeply in our exclusive and mutual experience of life. This confession is an expression of faith, I suppose, like mathematics, which I experience as truth because it works. It works toward the purpose of an ever-expanding opening of my own life toward its call. If I didn’t believe in consciousness, I wouldn’t believe in the work.
Camus’ “gentle indifference,” at face value, appears to be the negation of consciousness, and yet it is gentle. I have to ask what makes it so, if not that with which the prisoner meets the night, his brother. And if Camus’ individual consciousness does not itself infer consciousness more broadly, then the contingency with which he meets the absurd relates not to existence itself but simply to more ideas about existence. To believe in the absence of mind (as Marilynne Robinson put it) seems to me a kind of figure-ground reversal regarding the world and its contents. Existence itself is Camus at every moment, as it is Lucas, as it is myself, a brother to the one who is lost and waiting. This is how the absurd is sanctified, not simply in language, but in a healthy skepticism of it, in an increased awareness of where it’s useful and not.
Lucas, I would want to say, when you are ready, there is a painting for you, for the consciousness that can receive it is Lucas consciousness. It is alive in others now and will be alive in those not yet born. Lucas is the name for brother, the name I wish, for his sake and for mine, I had treated kindlier when it belonged to a boy. It is my work now to open a conduit through which this redemptive yearning might find a place in the world. It is my hope that the consciousness arising out of this need will live in the object that can’t be received, though I offer it, by any but the night itself, a brother too, no less for its gentle and anonymous indifference.
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico
When the day comes that I return the painted bulletin board to the abandoned school, it seems to disappear. At first, I don’t know how to understand that. Does the piece fail? One always has to allow for the possibility. Perhaps it failed and there’s nothing left to say. It seems obvious that the space itself is what is most important here, the light coruscating in specks and shards along the wall, the blackboard with its hand-written confessions obscured by the blue dashes of the anonymous artist, the rows of fold-out seats half-engulfed in the detritus of ceiling fallen to floor. The painting is barely a fact.
Then it occurs to me I should have expected this from the start. I’ve become more and more skeptical of the painted image, and, indeed, of paint as tool for self-conscious narrating. Isn’t it that I’ve been trying to find a way out of painting by finding a way through it? Isn’t the presence of an object all that remains of my belief in the value of art? Here, it occurs to me, I have been rescued from making yet another painting. In fact, I’ve barely made anything at all. I touched an object, and that’s about it. The object, for me, is the metaphor of the veil made tangible, if barely more visible. It is what has made these sensations regarding Lucas, my brother Danny, and the anonymous artist possible. It literally gave me something to cling to. I’m rescued from the futility of horizontal communication with something like an art world with its set of assumptions, biases, and artifice of all kinds. Joan of Arc said in her trial that nothing she had to say in the context of court could “touch its process.” My usual projection of an unkind jury governing the contemporary world vanishes from the room. Here I’ve offered something which no one will ever see in life in this way, momentarily reclaimed by its place of origin. My photograph of it isn’t the evidence, as it can’t place anyone in the room. My evidence touches no process, and that’s its rescue.
Out of Existence XXIV (for Lucas) | Installed in Abandoned Bible School at Fort Sumner, New Mexico