Mitch Speed: Permanent Head

Can no longer ... afford ... the time ... to write ... art ... criticism. But can't stop ... taking ... notes!

Notes on Mitch at WAAP. 

(What follows are two times of writing. The first three paragraphs were written at a café a half hour after visiting the show. The last paragraph the following morning.)

Speed’s expressive, adverby exhibition text in relation to the economy of his critical writings has me thinking of this text as a construction, an actor’s improv (today’s audience prompt is -- literary!), as opposed to the artist who made the wall works. Or is this written construction a frame, a Baroque frame that carries the literary equivalent of sea monsters and heating ducts, ironing boards and severed heads -- what gets thought up in the castle [see exhibition text] that the artist keeps in his parent’s basement?

(re-read D’s “Parergon”?)

And what of the difference(s) between these two genres of writing? Is Speed’s current exhibition and its accompanying (parallel?) text made with the awareness of an artist who writes criticism? Can these two Speeds be kept separate (from the public)? Is it important that they be kept that way?

At a time (foreseen by Groys) when the 21^stcentury artist mounts her persona before her art (as Babbage did his cow catcher?), is Speed suddenly in a Ken Russell film, seated at a card table (borrowed from his parent’s basement) in the middle of a wheat field, doodling on paper, watching the trains go by, cutting out those parts he likes, arriving at the idea that these drawn (and quartered?) drawings require a particular kind of frame, and that is, then, the signal work of this exhibition -- these frames? Frames that look like the kinds of things one finds in the basements of family homes, that look like nothing more than modernism, weirdly contoured monochromatic resin forms that mom or her mom or her mom’s strange brother “Uncle Pat” put bowls of cream cheese and canned olives on, surrounded by crackers?

There is something about this difference between writing styles that suggests the style and shape of the frame Speed arrives at for his show. The difference between the expressive text and the critical expository text is a cuticle, the form we know from our bodies as the place between the flesh of our finger and the death that is its nail. And like all cuticles, these things crack, splinter, break, and then things get messy. I think this is what Speed gives us before things get messy, unlike the                   (re-)organized mess that is the assemblaged/found/collaged drawings these frames were built to support? Or were the drawings made to fit these frames? There’s a difference, right? Doesn’t matter what it is, it’s just enough to know that it is.