Audio: Read by the author.
Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibility of defining
nothing without speaking of absence without speaking
The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to seem
an uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinite nondescript discreet
But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the canvas if it were to speak
as we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugar and cocaine,
chalk, marshmallows, and salt
and even that a betrayal of substance
Would it not privately murmur something about the white simmer of stars
Would it not speak of something not nothing would it not
Perhaps here then is the problem
of the art not the art but the reflection the world cut in a pane of glass
or rather being as it is latex paint on canvas
Here the artist invites questions from the audience
The girl in back who asks if this is the moment before being
The man with glasses who asks if this is a room called grief
The boy who asks waveringly if this is his fear if this is his sleeping
in a dreamless night
The artist calls them clocks and here another problem to consider
for the art to know time like any other, ordinary thing and we may ask
of the knowing can we wear it on our wrists can it pulse with the seconds
One more question from the crowd
Can the artist perhaps tell us something of the future
And here the artist politely demurs
Thank you and good night everyone may exit to the left
And when the gift shop is closed we’re saddened to leave empty-handed
but consider it a comfort the pressure
we feel when we press our palms together
That night we dream of a bounty of images every color at once
The artist dreams of something like god but completely the opposite
