Betraying Gestures #20

a gesture waving

I have a ten-minute presentation about my practice to prepare. My practice is Betraying Gestures. The amount of text I can read aloud in 10 minutes overlaps my presentation and this week’s letter—I’ll read as much of the letter as I can, starting with what Betraying Gestures is. Betraying Gestures is a publishing enterprise that includes Vinícius Maffei. Betraying Gestures is a publisher's writing practice. Betraying Gestures is a newsletter because in one of the first conversations around and about Betraying Gestures, a newsletter was suggested. If Betraying Gestures writes a newsletter, Betraying Gestures doesn’t have a newsletter, Betraying Gestures is a newsletter, and it has to be weekly—every Monday—I decided, trusting persistence and being had something for me. I was proposing a conceptual publisher, not for the first time. I've written about previous attempts and projects to write a publisher (Editora Polinésia in Betraying Gestures #16, for instance). What I call a conceptual publisher is a publisher that exists only on paper. “The text has agency,” I heard last week. From writing the newsletter, a model for a publisher, as I was putting it at some point, Betraying Gestures took up other existences (not only on paper but also in paper). I keep trying to find both the word and the gestures that antagonise the conceptual of a conceptual publisher. Physical? “Relating to the body as opposed to the mind” and “tangible” are definitions of physical that point me in the direction I’m trying to go. As a physical publisher, it involves designing and printing, folding and binding; recording, doing cassette tapes, or inventing other listening and publishing devices. As a conceptual publisher, Betraying Gestures publishes itself—it was from “publishing writing and writing publishing” that Betraying Gestures first arose. Becoming physical, Betraying Gestures began to not only reflect on its own existence but also conceive others. So Betraying Gestures publishes Betraying Gestures; Betraying Gestures publishes Vinícius; and Betraying Gestures publishes others/with others. Reading up to here must have taken me almost three minutes. In these three minutes, I hope to have given an introduction. From my introduction, I expect to have let an atmosphere of closure slip. Betraying Gestures, as it has been carried through these twenty weeks, ends today. I anticipated to some of the readers that the email they receive today would be the last of its kind; that they'll no longer receive an email every Monday at 23:45 and that they shall no longer, as I know some did, as I did, count with Betraying Gestures for their Tuesday morning coffee. In last week’s edition, I forged an edition #0. A foundation. A foundation was the newsletter's main purpose: to invent (or forge) Betraying Gestures, construct a territory, and believe in a readership. It was reading Betraying Gestures #19 over breakfast that I started to notice signs of something being complete. Such as the puff between an email I sent on a ferry (published in last week’s letter) and its reply I only received last week. The reply told me this period didn’t just enact Betraying Gestures: “While writing you there’s a curious sensation that it might also have been impossible for me to answer you earlier, because you have been the you of a piece of mine that I exhibited in this Museum in Italy and that maybe the show had to finish before you could become a person again." Now that the exhibition in a Museum in Italy is finished, I’ve returned somewhere I’ve departed from. Last week was full of conversations. There's one that still amuses me, and even though I was skeptical when I heard it, I haven’t stopped thinking of it: the correspondence between prefixes and angles. In this logic, “re" is 360 degrees, “co” is 90 degrees, “per” is 180 degrees, and so on. A return then means I’ve travelled 360 degrees. Other events signal a 360-degree movement, revealing a conclusion, but, first, I have to pay off my debt: in Betraying Gestures #18, I promised I would write about Pruess Press. Online records about it are sparse, and the available information appears rather fabricated. What I’ve learned is that Pruess Press was created by artist and former gallerist Joel Mesler when he found himself sharing a huge space in Los Angeles with two other artists and, not wanting to open another gallery—he’d had Diane Pruess Gallery at the beginning of the 2000’s—opened a copy-shop called Pruess Press, reviving a newsletter he'd had with writer Mark von Schlegell. The newsletter, titled Rambler, was distributed by hand in the streets of Chinatown, Los Angeles. Pruess Press doesn’t seem to operate anymore, but their website is still running. Its header quotes C Magazine: "A MEDIA CONGLOMERATE ISSUING FROM A SINGLE ROOM”. The available inventory includes DVDs, CDs, artist books, and limited-edition artist prints—10 dollars each, and any purchase comes with a free copy of the current Rambler. I wrote them an email with the intention of buying something. I most wanted a copy of Rambler, but I didn't receive a reply. I wrote quite a few editions around reception. But before using the term reception, I was using interlocution. On Betraying Gestures #4, I wrote about the lack of a waited-for interlocution. Of a particular interlocutor who was key in the scenario that called for Betraying Gestures: Will Holder. The score that conducts Betraying Gestures (which went through a few adaptations in these twenty weeks) is: “Every Monday before midnight (UTC+2) a new letter of between 702 and 1705 words is published with a photo.” I finally met Will Holder in person after a performance where he was introduced as a person to whom words don't come easily (the sentence "words don't come easy to me" was repeated at least four times). “Words don’t come easy to me” is a lyric from Words, a song by pop 70s musician F.R. David, who shares names with Will Holder’s journal, F.R. David, “dealing with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practises”. It was Will Holder, and a fabricated will holder in lowercase, whose gestures set me to think of writing, performance, and publishing, to encounter the kind of writer, artist, and publisher I want or can be (as Julio Plaza’s sentence I stole and made into an aphorism, “each artist makes the art they deserve”). Will Holder, by email, sent his continuation of the text I wrote about him. He said it wasn’t that spectacular; that he “didn’t want to get carried away (again)”. I spent the week negotiating between getting carried away and not. I wanted to get carried away in this text. I projected a beautiful letter, as it's the last, I wanted it outstanding. But it was easier to get carried away by other things. I kept avoiding the writing, even though it was also preparing my presentation (I’m now probably out or about to run out of time). I didn’t start this edition with “Dear Readers”, which I started doing after realising from Elif Batuman’s newsletter that Betraying Gestures had no manners. I will return in the next few weeks to rescore Betraying Gestures, with what I can fit between "Dear Readers" and "Thank you for reading”. This channel is still open and very much alive. This past week, I received on WhatsApp the painting

my dear and talented friend Pablo Brazil is working on. Betraying Gestures is its name. I want to thank Betraying Gestures’ readers for their patience, company, and correspondence since May, in inventing, nurturing and betraying, gestures learning how to move.