What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. This is why modern art will continue, because this condition remains; it is the modern human condition. (…) [Modern art] is about the hurt of not being able to express yourself properly, to express your intimate relations, your unconscious, to trust the world enough to express yourself directly in it. It is about trying to be sane in this situation, of being tentatively and temporarily sane by expressing yourself.

-Louise Bourgeois

In the middle of spring—a kind of threshold—one realizes that one cannot take the world into one’s lap and hold it, while this is perhaps our desire when we are our most tender and best selves. The oxygens are important, but the oxygens are also small parts of the whole universe. I mean the seen and the unseen, the preferences of horses—the shade or sun as well as their standing as they do wrapped in the mathematical shape of this could go on forever without you—and also the world that resists ingestion,speculum, observation. This is the bird-like nature of the world. A landscape is simple, but you approach it and it is coy. And even as your best self, you are energized by the world’s destruction, wishing it could happen more swiftly, brutally, and observably than its imperceptible sloughing of fine dust and small children. If you are one who has exchanged personal comfort for the deep exquisite that eddies in the unknown, you are heroic. You are extraordinary. You must participate in the inevitable corruption of the material world and also to love it recklessly.


J'Lyn Chapman