Introductory Statement

Here in Buffalo we are concerned with the state of things. Tree stumps and empty buildings exist in grand disproportion with the potential for fruition and habitation so that we are confronted with an abundance of material objects resonating with the memory of a vibrant past and the anticipation of an indefinite future. When a chunk of granite from a demolished bank is moved to the beach of Lake Erie we name the place and take pleasure in it simply because it is there and because we have named it. And the palpable fact -- the sound, color, shape, and elusive symbolism -- of the dark, blank spaces between the piled-up granite pieces guarantee our questionable affections.
The poet George Oppen writes in Of Being Numerous:
'You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the
ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to
those times -- it is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot
imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the
salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it --'
Fragments and debris attest not only to the cagey details of our local history but to the very moment in each of our pasts at which that history has become local -- when the narratives of prosperity and promise began to matter personally -- when we were first able to say "You remember..." -- so that the question becomes whether I will allow the object to stand for itself or will it remain a testament to lost time. If I choose to let it stand the infinite unrequited potentiality with which it is charged will burn my eyes even as I turn them from its look, its excitement in waiting increasingly electric as impossible consummation draws nearer. My choice renders the object as art rather than testament, and then, paradoxically, induces my desire to testify to its presence.

So the purpose of the object is lost to the annals of local legend and as it waits impatiently for its next implementation it becomes noticeably excited so that we experience its desire as art and then seek to capture it and remember. The task at hand is to write about art. Can the word on paper both record and reiterate the temporal experience of the indeterminate art object? Perhaps it would be more appropriate in print, considering our uniquely rust belt relationship with the object. Or, since the internet is itself a temporal experience which leaves behind no concrete traces, would the fact of art's happening -- its electrically charged lying in wait; its animated inanimateness -- be better represented via the web?

In any case, this project runs the risk of transforming the unnameable moment in art at which the thing begins to become something else into a nameable epoch that can thus be added to the annals. When a bloodied and beaten Christ-figure pulls himself across the expanse of an abandoned train station before an audience, art happens at the brilliant intersection of the recorded history of the Central Terminal and its sense-memories ignited within the barely accessible sectors of the minds of those who are old enough to have been there and its physical deterioration and its simultaneous resurrection as spectacle and the hurried clicking of dress shoes on a waxed floor toward the prospect of a lucrative future and the faint brushing of the fake-bloody skin of the actor along a floor blackened by disuse and the glaring silence of its shabby environs no longer "Central" and altogether lacking purpose. No record should be left. I would then find my motivation at the intersection of observer and observed, acknowledging that this dimension exists within the very form of the art object and asserting my place as participant in the happening rather than critic. Selfish perhaps, as my goal is to make sure that the moment keeps me wanting. And what I want is nothing. Let us be satisfied by nothing.