This is the third, previously unpublished version of “an endlessly revised essay” that Amy Sillman started in 2009 during a residency at the American Academy in Berlin. The first version was published in the O.-G., v. 1, “Zum Gegenstand / Das Diagram” (2009), which Amy Sillman elaborated in parallel with her solo exhibition “Zum Gegenstand” at CarlierGebauer, Berlin, May 2–June 13, 2009. The second version appeared in the O.-G., v.1–2, “American Edition” (2009), published on the occasion of a presentation of drawings by Sillman at the Sikkema Jenkins booth, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2009.

In this sense, a subject is “a nothingness, a void, which exists.” (Lacan)

—Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies

A virtual particle is one that has borrowed energy from the vacuum, briefly shimmering into existence literally from nothing.

—David Kaiser, American Scientist magazine

The Higgs boson is apparently the most powerful particle on Earth, but it has never been seen.

—2009 Wikipedia article on the Higgs boson

Look who thinks he’s nothing.

—Punch line of a joke about a priest and a Jew

One paints when there is nothing else to do. After everything else is done, has been “taken care of,” one can take up the brush.

—Ad Reinhardt, “Routine Extremism”

I can swim like everyone else, only I have a better memory than them. I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it, my ability to swim is of no avail and in the end I cannot swim.

—Franz Kafka

What happens next? Of course, I don’t know. It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

—Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing”

In 2009, I got a grant to live in Berlin, arriving with barely any German language under my belt. An old friend, who seemed in the know, warned me: “German is a spatial language.” I have no sense of space, so it sounded ominous. I got what she meant fast at my first German lesson, when they said that in German you can’t just ask “where?”—you have to specify where to or where from. And German grammar went on from there, a thicket of specificities. And German history was a veritable morass. I was an American: I hadn’t read Hegel or Schlegel! But once I got into it, I went into an accelerating state of diagram fever, going a little crazy thinking about how everything in the world is a diagram. I took a seminar on diagrams at the Freie Universität with Danish diagram expert Frederik Stjernfelt; I got new diagram study-buddies, my mind stretched out with increasingly dizzying interconnectivity; everything started to make a weird kind of sense, and I got it: everything was related to everything else. The Enlightenment, Romanticism, Symbolism, modernism, Bad Painting, it was all locatable on one big map. I also sheepishly realized that I was probably the last person to figure this out—that this diagram thing had already been laboriously theorized by many others. But thinking about the diagram liberated my work. Abstraction itself suddenly seemed like one big diagram of moving time and space. The process of making something go away from “realness” to abstraction seemed like a big memory-diagram—things seen and then registered in the mind’s eye undergoing a process of being stripped clean, or becoming a bit tattered and distorted as they move off into your past. I was planning an art show at the time, and I also thought, if everything is everything, then why not hang things all together: satirical diagrams next to figure studies next to abstract paintings? I would just need some way to explain it all, a kind of translation device. And what is a zine if not a slapdash chance to present one’s own epiphanies? And what is a diagram but a way of holding disparate ideas together?

So I began planning my exhibition with everything in it, from abstract paintings to comical seating diagrams, to figure drawings to a zine on a table. Let jokes be paintings, paintings be memories, and memories be meaning. I decided to write an essay about diagrams for my first zine (and I’ve been slowly adding to it ever since). Read More

Dear Reader,

Do you know what a snow dome is? I believe you do not so I will tell you. It is this: a snow dome is an object, dome-like in shape, resting on a flat piece of material that is fitted to it and sealed perfectly to its base. The entire structure is made of a material that is easily shattered. Inside, the dome is filled about three quarters of the way up with water. Scenes of one kind or another are created and fixed to the bottom of the dome. Flakes of something white made to resemble snow are settled at the bottom of the dome, and when the dome is shaken, as it often is by a playful hand passing by, the flakes rush up in a flurry around the scene that has been fixed to the bottom of the dome. All the figures and objects are lost in a blur of the pretend snow, they are consumed by it, and for a moment, it seems as if this will be the new forever: they will never be seen clearly again. Then the false snow slowly settles back to the bottom of the dome and everything returns to the way it was. The scene remains just as it was before, fixed, fixed, and fixed! The snow dome is usually found at the destinations of grim family vacations: Disneyland, the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the area of airports near the gates of departure, places you very well might never visit again because you never wish to visit these places again. Such is the existence of the snow dome.

For the past four years, starting sometime in early November 2016, I have been living in a snow dome that resembles the United States of America. I have been a figure in this snow dome. The color of the water in it was sometimes orange, sometimes a rage red, and the color of the snow was never white. It has been a shameful experience. I have been trapped here. The United States of America is to me the most wonderful country in the world, and it really is, but only if while you live there you attach yourself to the best people in it and the best people in it are Black people, African American people. If, when you go to the United States, you attach yourself to the group of people who call themselves “White” you will consign yourself to misery and minor and major transgressions against your fellow human beings and also greediness and everyday murder. And more. Here’s how you live in America: your children must go to the best schools and the best schools are always for white children and you’ll completely forget the best schools have never helped anybody be a good person (see George W. Bush, just for a passing reference). With the exception of most likely John Adams (second president of the United States for one term) and most certainly Barack Hussein Obama, all the presidents of the United States of America were racists and their racism was especially and particularly directed at Black people of African descent. The great Abraham Lincoln, a president I am so deeply attached to I grow roses named in his honor in my garden, was a racist but he abhorred slavery and that’s good enough for me, being that I am most blessedly descended from the enslaved (I say blessedly but I really mean accidentally because blessings are so random, they are in fact accidents). The United States of America, before it even became such a thing as the United States of America, was a roiling unsettling snow dome of transgression, and from the beginning that transgression was caused by people immigrating from Europe.

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Ann Quin. Photo: Oswald Jones. From the Larry Goodell Collection. Courtesy of And Other Stories.

Three is the second of the four brilliant and enigma-ridden novels that Ann Quin published before drowning off the coast of Brighton in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven. The mysterious character S—the absent protagonist or antiheroine hypotenuse of this love-triangle tale—dies in similar fashion … or perhaps she’s stabbed to death by a gang of nameless, faceless men before her body washes up onshore … or perhaps the stabbed dead body that washes up onshore is someone else… It’s difficult to tell. And the telling is difficult, too. And I would submit that it’s precisely these difficulties that make this gory story normal.

A British married couple, a dyad of faux-boho normies, provide the other two points of Three’s ménage. Their names are Ruth (sometimes Ruthey, sometimes just R) and Leonard (sometimes Leon, sometimes just L). They take up with this young woman referred to only as S, who comes to share their summer-vacation cottage and their lives, her family role ever-shifting from boarder-daughter to sister to lover.

The novel opens with the couple talking over the news of her recent death, in a conversation that flows unimpeded into the one-sided conversation of surveillance. S’s most salient remains are her journals and sundry recordings, both audio and film, which document her relationships with and impressions of R and L, who greedily read and listen to and binge-watch these artifacts in the dark and dreary mourning season that follows. In addition to these artifacts, whose contents seem constantly to rise toward narrative or plot, and then, like the tide, recede, R and L pore over their own diaries and compare their scribbled confessions with S’s: S had an abortion; R and L are trying, or claim they’re trying, to get pregnant. S had, or might have had, a drug habit; R and L prefer to lose themselves in drink, and so on. As this posthumous surveillance of S continues, R and L are themselves surveilled by stranger-neighbors, who are constantly poking their blossomed noses up against the glass. Read More

On Amazon, there’s a used copy of the triple-disc set from 1985 for sale, the first version issued on CD, in one of those chubby old double jewel boxes. Supposedly, there’s a Verve Master Edition version from the nineties that added a fourth disc, I guess of alternate takes or rarities, but I can’t find that anywhere. On eBay, I could get the original vinyl box set from the fifties or sixties, but it’s really expensive. Plus I have the first LP already. I could try to track down the other LPs one at a time. But what I really want is that fourth CD on the Master Edition version.

This is how my nights unfold as the days get shorter and darker in these uncertain times. After the dog’s last walk, after heaving my son into bed with the Hoyer lift and attaching his CPAP, after the third time my daughter comes out of her night-lit room to share another phrase she’s come up with that contains all the vowels, but before my smoking time on the back deck, before the anxious and rambling conversation with my wife in my little book-and-record-crammed office, and certainly before the Hour of Enforced Unplugging when I finally roll into bed—I scour the web for out-of-print CDs and vinyl. They’re artifacts from a lost time when I was young, and not so poignantly terrified, or from an even more distant past I never experienced, a past that was gone long before I arrived. It’s easy to imagine that those times were simpler, better, easier than the interminable weeks of COVID-19 in Trump’s wrecked America.

Of course, last night interrupted this pattern—I gave in, like any sane person under the thumb of this insanity, and spent the hours on the opposite end of the couch from my wife, the two of us refreshing counters, screaming at virtual needles, in the thrall of our fear and hope for this election. And today, as we’d dreaded and expected, we wait, and I call on one of my time-tested coping mechanisms for, if not solace or even distraction, a kind of anxious business that might help pass the hours between now and the end of forever.

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I had planned for weeks this trip to the ocean, to think about birds. And I did go. But the night before, police officers lynched a man in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. Then came the insult of low and constant helicopters, and cops terrorizing our streets, and curfew, and troops deployed in the city, again. So maybe I did not think about birds the way I had intended—though I did think about birds, impossible not to think about birds on the ocean where they take up all the space, where even air and water they push out of the way. Laughing gulls, herring gulls, great black-backed gulls, Ross’s gulls; terns, oystercatchers, sanderlings, sandpipers, plovers. Ospreys. Brown pelicans.

Why birds? Because to make sense of things this desperate fall I have been rereading the Greeks, and the Greeks say birds tell us what is to come.

In ancient Greece and later in Rome, augurs foretold the future by interpreting the flight patterns and calls of birds. Augury, in Greek ornithomancy, from ορνις (ornis, fowl) and μαντεία (manteia, divination): reading birds for the will of the gods. Pliny the Elder says Teiresias, the seer in the court of Thebes, invented augury. (Teiresias told Oedipus that the king was his own father’s murderer.) What birds said, went. The bird-savant Calchas prophesied that Agamemnon must sacrifice his daughter in order to sail his ships to win his war at Troy, and so, by most accounts, the maiden was put to death. Taking the auspices—discerning divine will from the flight of birds—makes sense because birds fly closer to the empyrean, where gods dwell, which makes the bird’s-eye view closer to God’s.

How to read the birds this year, this fretful year pierced by planetary sorrow and the siren call of ambulances and police cars? In the American Southwest, autumn began with migratory birds falling out of the sky, dead. It could have been the West Coast wildfires that caused the birds to deviate from millennial routes and lose nurturing layover grounds, and polluted their lungs with toxins. It could have been an unprecedented swing in air temperature, a token of climate change. It could have been a combination of factors: the Anthropocene has been killing North America’s birds for some time. A year before the mass die-off in the Southwest, ornithologists reported that three billion wild birds (one bird out of four) have vanished from the continent’s air in the last fifty years.

And not only on this continent. On the last day of 2019, I pilgrimed to the wetlands of Djoudj, one of the world’s largest sanctuaries for migratory birds, many of them Palearctic, where a longtime game warden told me that fewer seasonal birds come each year to the Senegal River delta, and entire species no longer come at all. Cities and deserts swallow their habitats, men hunt their kin, pesticides poison their eggs. Climate change uncouples the timing of resources from the timing of migrations, syncopates their traveling cycles, puts the birds out of step with themselves. The birds are confused.

TEIRESIAS [to KREON]: I hear the birds they’re bebarbarizmenized they’re

making monster sounds

—Sophocles, Antigone, tr. Anne Carson as Antigonick (I am using the translator’s spelling here and below).

This September, after it rained dead birds, a Ph.D. student of ornithology and phylogenetics at the University of New Mexico collected and photographed 305 bird corpses representing six species: 258 violet-green swallows, 35 Wilson’s warblers, six bank swallows, two cliff swallows, one northern rough-winged swallow, a MacGillivray’s warbler, and two western wood pewees. Laid out on a grid and photographed from above, the birds make a pattern like a page of text, each bird a word. The breasts and abdomens of the warblers beacon a startling yellow alarm. Read More