Loving Description

LOVING DESCRIPTION, 2023-ONGOING

A collaboration between Lindsay Reckson and Jack Isaac Pryor, Loving Description is a long-form project that aims to move art and cultural criticism into the public sphere, mirroring the publicity & ephemerality of the event which it describes. We take our cue from Susan Sontag’s infamous “Against Interpretation” (1966), in which she advocates for surface readings (what she calls “loving description”) over analysis and deconstruction. Written from the point of view of spectator/listener/audience, these 1-page responses to contemporary works are then posted on site where the event took place, and archived here. The inaugural Loving Description took place on Monday, June 19, 2023 (Juneteenth) in Haverford, PA.

Note: In an effort to emphasize the writing over the writer, essays are not formally attributed; rather various authors’ names are tagged with their initials, alongside the date of publication and total word count.

Families for Ceasefire Action

Love Park, Philadelphia // October 5, 2024

The names of the dead, printed in Arabic, on a spreadsheet thousands of cells long. Each page is taped to the next, and the next, and the next, then folded, accordion-like—a stack.

It is the sound of paper dragging on concrete that gets me. It drowns out the preachers on their blocks, the traffic on 15th Street, the beating of my heart. One person pulls, another holds—thumbs feeding paper like a many yards-long spool of thread, unraveled. This happens twelve times with twelve stacks until the plaza is covered in paper and ink. Women with cloth sacks emerge, each filled with weighty stones. They walk between, anchoring paper to ground.

At the head of each scroll, a red placard—monument-like—announcing the ages of the dead: 0-4, 4-9, 9-14, 14-18, 18-22, 22-26, and on and on. Children place stuffed bears, sippy cups, baby shoes: things their mothers brought. I place a yellow flower next to a name I cannot read. Golden hour: plastic tealights flicker on—701 in all (one for each of the slain under the age of 1). Mourner’s Kaddish, song: “Palestine will be free, Palestine will be free, we will not avert our eyes, Palestine will be free.”

Unceremoniously, we clean. We take back our stuffed bears, sippy cups, baby shoes. Stones back in sacks, we refold the stacks. What we can leave, we do. Beneath the eponymous park sign that reads LOVE in blazing red, with iconic tilted O, we hang the letters G and A and Z and A, our G slanted in likeness. “LOVE GAZA,” it commands, a city park renamed.

I know what it means to love God, mother, cat, ocean, freedom, first fruits, last rites, dirt, rain, sleep, the sound of the voice of a woman I love. What does it mean to love Gaza? I walk home, alone, across river and bridge.

JIP // October 7, 2024 // @ 313 words

Dia: Beacon // Rosh Chodesh Elul  

I arrive by accident. The space is grand and cool, as in cold: ceilings high, floor gray, more empty than full—a warehouse. I think of Claude, age 10, at the MOMA—wandering without a map. Room leads to room, art to art—trust the design, trust chance, trust God.

I know these works intimately: when I was 36, I slept at Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field and waited for it to strike. I danced in Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; wandered Donald Judd’s kitchen; camped beside Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, days on end. I walked Robert Smithson’s craggy Jetty by day, dreamt of black-necked cobras and dead pigeons at night. I read Smithson’s essay there, about site and non-site, the impossible task of transferring works of art to gallery from field—ex situ, ex tempus. At its core, a theory about the difficulty of moving.

I turn a corner. Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Loverboy) frames Robert Irwin’s tall windows with iridescent blue cloth that gathers gently on the hardwood floor below: heartbreakingly sheer, pale, light.

When my father had an infection of the lung, I sat by the fountain and read Lindsay’s copy of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, T. Fleischmann’s memoir about Gonzalez-Torres, and gay life. Two years later, Lindsay’s father would be dead; mine would be tending my mother, his wife—her brain filling with spots.

On Kawara’s Today Series holds me the longest. On view are 36 of the nearly 3,000 paintings that the artist made between 1966 and his death in 2014—each a small, monochromatic color canvas, overlaid with a date in white, block lettering (FEB.14,1967; JAN.1,1993…). I search. Later, I’ll learn that each records the date on which it was made. For now, I’ll worry, wide-eyed and wake—something unspeakable must have happened then and there.

JIP // September 16, 2024 // @ 304 words

A Memorial for Douglas Crimp: Mourning and Militancy

St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery // November 2, 2019

A gathering of queers enters the Sanctuary. We walk through different doors. Douglas Crimp is already in the ground, but his death collects everyone here. I never met him, and we were not even strangers. I settle into a blue plastic chair. It’s my first time in a queer public space. Around me is stained-glass light, the swathe of a scarf, a resting of hands on cross-legged knees, an embrace: so many ways to hold a body. I hear my heart leap but where I couldn’t say.

We start with a moment of silence, then another, and I think how breath marches. Then the eulogies start. Some friends and lovers of Douglas speak, others read poems, dance, or perform music. Douglas’ husband Yoshi goes last and plays Richard Wagner’s Elegie on piano. It’s a sparse song with as much silence as sound. In every note, I hear the weight of his finger on the key and the sound’s impression on my acoustic nerve eclipses the slant in my stomach for a moment. I sense how little I’ve known my body, its gnawings, pleasures, and possibilities.

Morgan sings, “There will never be another you,” with a sharpening tremble in their tenor. As they call others into song, right hand splaying the air, I glance around. No one is the same. I think the “you” is Douglas—and all of us. Each person leans on and into those around them: arm to arm; head on shoulder; hand and thigh. In their intimacy, everyone melds into another.

Later in the afternoon, my aunt will say, “How is it you seem a different person every time I see you?” I shrug and feel my shoulders for the first time since July. The memorial is an exercise in listening, in rehearsal. We plan for an openness to sense, to the textures of our bodies, to the constellations of objects around us, and to the stain of no-longer. That day, the grey carpet was red.

SCM//August 10, 2024//@329words

Carolyn Lazard // Long Take  

ICA Philadelphia // Mar 10 - July 9, 2023

How a body sinks in. That surprising softness, a kind of holding in the dark. How softness signals what a body hasn’t known before in this kind of space. Sinking in, I know suddenly, bodily—in my spine and glutes—how familiar I have been with hardness. How acculturated to the museum’s rigid inaccessibility, its implicit address to a body that (with)stands. How I could sit here for a long time, gently held.

In Long Take, the darkness is expansive. As we enter it, the senses adjust: the visual becomes spatial, auditory, tactile. The floor is black vinyl (Surround Sound, 2022), signifying we have entered a performance space. From a grid of speakers, the frictional sound of a body as it moves across and against a surface; breath as it gathers, holds, expends itself; voices in tandem alternating between instruction (what emerges as a score for performance) and audio description. The texture of the air as it fills with sound. Here and there, gentle pools of light.

It matters that we do not see the performance (Leans, Reverses, 2022)—a collaboration between artist Carolyn Lazard, dancer Jerron Herman, and poet Joselia Rebekah Hughes—in any straightforward sense; rather, it surrounds us, decentralized and collective. And from the moment we enter this space, our bodies become part of its project (we breathe; we walk or roll across the black vinyl floor, leaving a mark; our bodies absorb the sound waves as we move). At the center of the space, a three-channel video installation, white words on a black background: a resonant performance score (“hold up,” “rest,” “unravel”), captioned sound (“[labored breathing]”), and text of the audio description (“Jerron smiles, breathes heavily”). Each monitor amplifying and revising the other. In front of the monitors, a museum bench (Institutional Seat 9-12, 2022) modified with cushions and a backrest. A space to rest.

Long Take approaches access through an expansive poetics of sense, inextricable from its exploration of Black performance that refuses visual capture. A few grainy images in my photo app signal the stakes of this refusal. The performance (and through it, Herman’s body) is nowhere in these images; it cannot be arrested or consumed or circulated. Instead, like sound, it reverberates. In this sense, Lazard intervenes at once in the visual regime’s hold on exhibition space and in the exhibition space’s hold on Blackness. Loosened from the hold, something different emerges; new possibilities for being (together) in (institutional) space.

And don’t we need this. To be surprised by softness. To be otherwise held.

LVR//August 30, 2023//@421 words

Mark Menjívar, Lindsay Reckson, and Rickey Cummings, 190 + 1

Founders Green, Haverford College // March 1, 2023

Lindsay presents me with the score—191 dots. Mark explains how this system of notation is a citation to Harvey Irwin’s words that open the exhibit: “The beginning of something can punctuate time like a dot.” The next day, on the phone, Lindsay will explain her reading of “dot” as puncturing time and punctuating time, but to my eyes, on this cold overcast day that itself marks the start of the month that marks the start of spring, they look like tiny clocks, or phases of the moon.

We gather at the bottom of the steps, and I remember the class I taught on queer kinship here, how it was warmer then. “In 1863,” notes Lindsay in the giant white program we hold in our hands, “formerly enslaved people used plantation bells [. . .] to spread the news of emancipation. [. . . ] Today we mark the closing of Currently [. . .] by ringing the Founders Bell 191 times: once for each of the 190 people thus far exonerated from death row [. . .] and once more as [. . .] an appeal to abolitionist futures.” I close my eyes.

As Mark begins to sound the bell—taking brass hammer to brass drum—we hear sirens in the distance. I think “police”: how profoundly apt for this carceral song. But then I think no: an ambulance, announcing its flightpath. Its urgency on cue and on point. (Later, I will learn that this is duet with very real stakes: from his 6x9 cell on death row in Livingston, Texas, Rickey is also tapping 190 + 1 times—taking spoon to cup.) I imagine Mark counting in the tower which allows me to stop counting in my head—to trust the numbers will add up. This takes time. 10 minutes and 28 seconds. And then: a rest, before the last resounding note. The final peal is quiet, cautious, clear. The sirens have stopped. In their wake, birdsong.

JIP//Juneteenth 2023//@291words