Betraying Gestures #4

the visibility of gesturing correspondence

I have more than one friend whose name starts with the letter M. Without putting much thought into it, in Betraying Gestures #1, I started using the initials of people who are close to me to refer to them. My friend who got the M got it because she was the first person with the letter M to come up—we do talk a lot! M told me that using initials reminded her of Gossip Girl. I’ve never seen Gossip Girl. Last week, in a conversation completely unrelated to Betraying Gestures, someone asked me if I had ever seen Sex and the City. I don’t remember who or why; I remember being a bit drunk, and I remember my answer. I answered, "Of course I have, why do you think I’m a writer?". Writing my answer down, an answer that I only gave because I was a bit drunk, made me think of a sentence in Roman Mirror, the novel I’m writing. The sentence: "One night I was drunk, I was sharp, I answered, exactly, I’m the world’s biggest liar, an artist." When M read Roman Mirror, she underlined this sentence. She liked it, I knew she would. She didn’t like the sentence that followed, though. The sentence that followed was: "What I was doing was bragging about being called the biggest liar in the world because I believed it made me the biggest artist in the world." M was right in not liking it. I have to trust the reader, I don't have to explain the previous sentence in such a didactic way. I erased it from the novel. But I now realise that I wrote it not because I didn’t trust the reader, I wrote it because I liked its language. I appreciate the explanatory tone, so I revive it here. And I even use the same structure again: what I was doing when I said I am only a writer because I watched Sex and the City was referring to the artist Heman Chong. I used to love Heman Chong. I still do, but I used to look at photos of his piles of books and cups every day and watched and rewatched an interview in which he says that writing is like preparing the perfect negroni, there is a fine balance of how many words are necessary. "Not too much, not too little, like making the perfect Negroni". It is also in this interview that Chong claims to be addicted to seeing clips of Carrie Bradshaw (in case you haven’t seen Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character) writing. In most scenes where Carrie is writing, she sits at a desk by her window and types on her MacBook. Through Heman Chong’s addiction to the image of Carrie Bradshaw writing, I understood that being a writer is also pretending to be a writer. Researching Carrie’s image of a writer, I came across the following headline, which has been stored in the bookmarks of my web browser for years: "Young Writer Moves To NYC, Discovers Carrie Bradshaw Was A Fictional Character." This weekend I went to a gallery opening that "took" me to New York. The gallery, Milky Way Gallery, New York, is a friend’s project in which she invites an artist to do a show in her studio, transformed into a gallery. Milky Way Gallery, New York, provokes the visibility structures of the art system; it is a strategy of hacking into the artist’s CV to create an appearance of internationalisation while giving an artist the conditions for showing their work. On Wednesday I had a meeting with D—the other friend whose name starts with M, so I’ll call her D. D is also an artist and a writer. We discussed conditions for circulating our works. As we grow closer, it is natural that we start thinking about collaborating. Is collaborating the right word? Co is the prefix of some words I’m not good at. Collaborate and cooperate, for instance. I used to be good at them, but at some point in the last few years, I began to do everything by myself. Co is the prefix for together. Betraying Gestures makes me believe I can go back to being good at these words. There are two words with the prefix co that are among my favourites: correspondence and complete. On Tuesday, I saw a lecture about quantum physics. The physicist was trying to explain correlation to a class of artists. She said correlation doesn’t exist, and nothing we call correlation is actually correlation. What she was doing was criticising the appropriation of terms from quantum physics, especially by the arts and humanities. As she explained what a Bra-ket notation is, I imagined that nothing I call complete or correspondence is actually complete or correspondence. Ana Cristina Cesar, the poet who always finds her way into Betraying Gestures, has a publication called Complete Correspondence. Artists and scientists think very differently. I don’t care if what I call complete or correspondence isn’t actually complete or correspondence. For some reason, I have been surrounded by projects that try to create a conversation between these two fields, the sciences and the arts. They don’t seem to be working. My conversation with D works and goes places. I met D almost a year ago. When we met, I wrote a paragraph about all the coincidences in our trajectory—there are many. This paragraph is in a text I never finished, a text I’m still writing, a text called Tender. I started writing it when I fell in love with a beautiful man who called me tender. Tender has many meanings in English. I asked him, "Why?", and he said it was in reference to my affection. Last week was busy, and I only cooked one meal at home: broth rice with broccoli, chicken, spring onions, tomatoes, capers, garlic, pumpkin, brown champignons, and the juice of one lime. The chicken was so nice and tender. Tender can also be used to describe a nice piece of meat. On Thursday, I wrote an email about a text I was going to show at an exhibition, and I mentioned the chicken broth rice I cooked. This text is called will holder. Will holder is a text about writing and publishing; it is a text about correspondence. I printed the text

on fine art paper. I printed it many times until I got the right tone of green—the Carlsberg green. A can of Carlsberg beer plays a role in the text. I showed the print on a wall. Again, I found myself trying to show text in an exhibition on a wall. I think of this text as a letter. It sat there on the wall, waiting for an interlocutor. It has a particular interlocutor, WH (two initials). Tender also means naive or ingenuous, something I may be, expecting the interlocution I expect. This week I was told about a work by Croatian artist Mladen Stilinović. The work is a sentence; the sentence is: "My sweet little lamb". I was told of it in relation to the Lamby/Sally story. I asked L, whose lecture about Yugoslavian conceptual art I once saw, what this "sweet little lamb" meant. L told me the continuation of the sentence: "My sweet little lamb: Everything we see could also be otherwise". She also mentioned another of Stilinović’s sentences: "An artist who cannot speak English is no artist". One of my conflicts with writing this newsletter is writing it in English. When I told D about Betraying Gestures’ newsletter, she said she also had the idea of starting one, but she never did because she couldn’t decide whether to write it in Portuguese or English or if and how she could make it bilingual. However, D did make some sort of newsletter. For her exhibition, The Voice of My Own Echo, she wrote weekly letters for the exhibition, for the visitors, and for the institution where the exhibition took place. I went to an event where we read the letters aloud. The letters were in English. I read aloud one letter that said, "Do you already notice my accent?" Last weekend, at the exhibition I showed will holder, I observed how people saw it. I thought of A, who was also showing work last weekend in São Paulo. A and I once tried translating a book called I See/You Mean. It is a novel by Lucy Lippard. We barely started the translation, and we gave up. Spiritual approaches to quantum physics—approaches the physicist would certainly say have nothing to do with quantum physics—are based on the belief that if you think of something, you attract it. I stood at the exhibition waiting for something to happen, believing in interlocution and thinking that everything I saw could also be otherwise. I see/you mean. Betraying Gestures?

From this week on, I will post a photo (related or not to the letter) with the weekly letter.