Malevich felt the artist urgency even from the grave, the dust of him settled and still, and he floated away from the tight deathbox up through the soft soil, smoothly ascending right past the walking surface, up to about hot air balloon altitude, where he joggled and dipped until he got his astral treading legs.  Three times he floated round the earth, over the Indian ocean, over the strangely peaked mountains of Asia and across waters green and grey, over lands like wheat reefs, and others like jungle terrariums, for weeks at a time, three rotations Malevich made until he saw my thought of the plump orange caviar and sliced brown bread, and the cloying port wine, the regular studio respite of Sasha, whose sculpture apprentice I was, when he would take time to sit down from the work table and complain to me about my clumsy sculpting hand, and push my eyes impatiently to see what they couldn’t reach yet, hard boiled egg crumbles lighted on his beard, his fat hand lifting and lowering the glass, waiting for him to stop talking for long enough to toss in the gulp.  Malevich could see Sasha’s drawings, displayed salon style all the way up the picture walls of my memory, and took a seat at the bench in front of them, ‘and that one too, и етот тоже,’ he said, of the one I never suspected, and took another draw of his port wine.

We have been working together for 4 years, ‘maybe longer,’ he mutters.

I lean back in my squeaky chair, and look around at the studio, the furniture and materials, at the partly made artwork, looking heavy and unliving as a stage to a janitor.

Re-minded that it comes together, cut and paste, and the best I can do for the art is to not think about it.  Machine can see that we have travel mug, work apron, and no huge finger rings, because it’s around the wall we go, pretty soon, as soon as the writing gets the energy moving right.  I look out the window and tap my thumb on the back of my other hand a few times rapidly, in place of typing. I feel the pieces ready to go, they can’t be bothered with any more thinking.  And then, the making day, with Machine, placed on the rolling scaffold, up and creakity down we’ll go, our ticket to seeing.

I have to let it show me.  I have to do the first thing.

I do the first thing – that’s put up the obviously necessary third support wire, Muse nitpicks  me, seemingly aimlessly, remove this optic, add that piece, mirrors, lenses, like trying on shoes, this object d’art tries every round piece of glass I’m willing to fool with. I feel completely undecided except for the smallest knowings – not the charcoal colored optic, the remaining little glass objects are lain out in a row, artifacts at the base of the installation wall.

All the seemingly aimless pacing and selecting glass optics, shining the loose LED on them this way and that, making them look like planets, and paperweights, and pacing and eating Nilla wafers, when I suddenly see the selected components assembled on the dust cloth like newly recruited superheroes, with special powers like transparent reflection, believe-it-or-not-re-sizing focus, lenses that let  light hover at the upside-down flipping point, and one that is a powerful portal for lights from outer space that come in when you aren’t looking directly at it.

It is to begin

Turns out objects d’art are ready to emerge, they are leaping from me, relative studio time, but I can’t see them yet, i know which ones are done, and i know which one i think is weakest, the one so middle of the road it will end up as worst, since all the worse ones at least get remembered.  here comes a little mobile, so simple, I’ve been waiting for it.  i look at this coke bottle x-ray nimbus, and I say quietly to myself, uurah.

mid-installation, on a reset after 2 hours of sleep, which, since they occurred between 5 and 7 am, count as my night’s sleep. I look at the room, at what was brought to me, not moving too slowly.  How the wire stayed at the least possible expression of a recognizable self, the line, the writing, the light, the lenses, everything else is the viewer’s idea.  What the work is materially, a little wire, some corralled light, squozen and redirected, it happens all the time, why not a little bit here, for an experiment, nowhere else in the Universe.  the mirror door, the trapezoids, the rectangles, Malevich is gloating, the LEDs make it possible, and how I had to do all the other works in order to get to this one, which has two possible names, depending on how it’s recognized.

‘it takes two lifetimes,’ says Malevich, ‘you will see’