Blind Alley

Blind Alley

  • Statement
  • Projects
    • 2020
      • Liminal Space, April 11- June 3
        • Francisco Josué Alvarado Araujo
          • mah cualli ohtli
        • Dario S. Bucheli
          • Out of Reach
        • Sierra Forester
          • A Mass Well Dispersed is the Hardest to Confront
        • Hector A. Ramirez
          • ENTRE PIEDRAS Y COPIA
      • Richard Wentworth, June 12- July 16
        • Press
        • There's no knowing
          • notes
      • Gene Owens curated by Patrick Kelly, July 24-August 28
        • Letters from G.O.
      • Betsy Coulter, Sept. 4-Oct. 2
        • (A Fridge-Sized Asteroid is Heading Toward Earth) One Day Before The Election
      • Kelli Connell, Oct. 9-Nov. 6
        • Embace
      • Fraser Stables, Nov. 22 -Dec. 20
        • removed name Taj Mahal
    • 2021
      • Annette Lawrence Jan. 18 - Feb. 15
        • August
      • IDES OF MARCH March 13-28
        • March 13 -20 prompts
          • March 13 prompt
          • March 14 prompt
          • March 15 prompt
          • March 16 prompt
          • March 17 prompt
          • March 18 prompt
          • March 19 prompt
          • March 20 prompt
        • March 21 -28 prompts
          • March 21 prompt
          • March 22 prompt
          • March 23 prompt
          • March 24 prompt
          • March 25 prompt
          • March 26 prompt
          • March 27 prompt
      • Liminal Space April 11 - June 3
        • Clint Jerritt Bargers April 11 - April 22
          • BEASTFINGERS
        • Ashley Stecenko April 25 - May 6
          • Half Way Home
        • Chris Wicker May 9 - May 20
          • Channel Scan
        • Zeke Williams May 23 - June 3
          • Sky Hook
      • Cheryl Donegan curated by Gavin Morrison and Lucia Simek June 18 - July 23
        • Doomscrolling
      • Yafei Li July 30 - Sept 3
        • Geomegalomechannibalism
      • Frances Bagley Sept 10 - Oct 15
        • Oklahoma
      • Patrick Kelly Oct 22 - Dec 3
        • Layers of Brutes and Innocents
    • 2022
      • Audrey Travis March 12 - April 16
        • Audrey Travis
      • Liminal Space 2022
        • Corrie Thompson, June 4-June 16
          • Forward and Backward
        • Doug Land, June 18-June 30
          • Gray Rainbow
        • Fernando Alvarez July 2-14
          • A Place to Mourn
        • Adrianna Touch, July 16-28
          • 13
      • Aileen Harvey, August 2 - September 10
        • Lag
    • 2023
      • Hiroko Kubo March 18-April 22
        • Street Amulets
      • reading the stars: a group exhibition, May 7 – June 9
        • images
      • Liminal Space 2023
        • Sheryl Anaya, June 17 – 29, 2023
          • Tres Femme
        • Sarah Theurer Hunt, July 1-14, 2023
          • Convergence
        • Benjamin Loftis, Blind Alley, July 15 – 27, 2023
      • Chris Powell, August 19-Sept 23
        • through this window
      • Matthew Bourbon, Sept 30- Nov 4
        • THE WEATHER INSIDE
      • Celia Eberle, Nov 11-Dec 16
        • godhead
    • 2024
      • Marshal Thompson, Jan 20-Feb 24
      • Lucia Arbery Simek, March 2-April 6
      • Curated by Jamin An, April 13-May 18
  • Living Roof
  • Contact
    • Address
  • Doomscrolling

post cards

Notes from Richard Wentworth


Questions or prompts for thoughts


... the difference between or perhaps the relationship between knowing and interest -- as in seeking knowledge or pursuing an interest. Terri


Thoughts


That expression ’know how’ has got caught on my mind screen since you asked me ‘the question’, it all seems to hover in the gap between how we are compelled and propelled.
I like co incidents, and I’m certainly attracted to them as much as they are to me. We have a fertile conversation.
I heard a popular programme about a Hannah Arendt this week, how we live ‘in language’.
I guess I am amazed by the accidents of perception, the speed with which we think we see what we see, the swiftness with which things are named and actions are credited. Assumptions.
The world chatters at me.
Stuart Morgan said I ‘have a nose for it’.

Whatever ‘it’ might be, I think it’s quite argumentative, clever at escaping categorization, resisting becoming ‘knowledge’.

It’s untidy stuff.

I’m not tidy... Richard 


post cards
email note from July 9

From: Richard Wentworth

Date: July 9, 2020 at 2:46:57 AM CDT

To: cameron schoepp, Terri Thornton

Subject: Must Blind Alley

...always appear in the middle ground of all my thoughts?
X



postcards

Questions and prompts for thoughts


Terri Thornton

July 4, 2020

I am truly delighted to be back to our exchange. But I have to say, there is so much to address at the moment that I was, paradoxically, drawing a blank for a while. Finally, in seeking focus, I've landed on the concept of attention.

Thinking back, you've talked a good bit throughout this project about the importance of intention, and how we see it in each other. I believe the quote is "intention, humans recognize it in each other." With that, I am struck by your capacity to perceive this human behavior/connection. Like so much else you seem to notice, I think it is due to the attention you give the world. This might in fact be your superpower. You see and engage at a higher frequency than most. In turn, your work requires attention and even challenges our attention. You use the familiar as an element of surprise in terms of the how and what of your work which peaks attention, balancing it on its heels. Sometimes it feels like you just pointed at something, but that that seemingly simple act changed everything.

For this postcard, can you address the role and significance of attention in art and elsewhere? Or perhaps dispute my stated observations and assumptions...

Thank you for humoring me with these thought prompts. You are a very good sport. That said, there is always the option of declining participation. No hard feelings, I promise. xo, t

Richard Wentworth

July 4, 2020


Down to make sure Miumiu the cat is on the right side of the door...

...to find your tenderness.

My intuit (typo for intention) is to attend to sleeping now and awake w a fresh cerebellum for

your fine inquisitive enquiry....


Thoughts

Richard Wentworth

Giving attention

July 16, 2020


Perhaps the most demanding ‘personal’ question I recall being asked...

I think I have about two thirds of a reply. Will check in the morning and add a final third.

Have been thinking about the circular postcard aspect of our exchange and whether we should consider a small publication . Not a vain thought, more a sense of reportage of such a strange historical episode/ coincity...

Xx

Richard Wentworth

July 26, 2020

via Jane Wentworth

...long, long ago I once met Christopher Hitchens.

I’m reminded of this because of a remark by a cleverer boy at school talking about another pupil…’He has such a good mind’.

We are programmed to recall such things because they inform us about who we might (or might not) be.

When I was a father of young children, I remember being an anxious part of an assessment.

Eldest son as primary client, wise South African dyslexic specialist, my wife and me.

“Stand to attention, face me, put out your hands, put your two thumbs together extended, stand on one leg.” I did. “Yes, you’re dyslexic”

Thirty years after meeting Christopher Hitchens, I happened to hear a BBC radio interview with his brother Peter. There was an emphasis on their childhood and Peter described 1950s English boys’ education as being no different from that which was performed in the 1930s.

I burst into tears.

If you ask me a question, I will probably give a discursive reply.

When a ball point doesn’t function, we often move it around vigorously, skater style, on the paper to see if we can wake up the ink. The figure this leaves, a sort of progressive looping where half of each loop is running backwards, but the whole figure is processive, is probably a two-dimensional schema of how I ‘think,’ how I give attention to things.

We say ‘pay attention’ as if it were a formal transaction, when I think that for most of us it’s much more fragile, shifty, strangely incremental.

I realize that I have an abiding interest in how things are wrought, as much how a tree grows as the politics of how and where it enjoys the freedom to develop itself.

Some long words will have come to me quite late- etymology, anthropology, demography. Recently I was comforted to meet somebody of my generation who reads more than a dozen books simultaneously. We haven’t yet discussed this variety of self-distraction, but I recognize this mental flightiness, the feeling that everything is fugitive, prone to reconvening unexpectedly. Where wonder meets wander.

In French there is the wonderful ‘meninges’ for the workings of the mind, the piece of kit we are each given which we then have to employ to understand our own mentality. We have fine words for the acts of considering things- mulling, ruminating, ’brown study’ was something my father would say. You might say that ‘ambition’ in its proper sense, a cousin of ‘amble,’ the act of walking around something considerately, is the daily hymn of sentient beings. becoming a good sailor, so to speak, where the ‘port’ in opportunity is exactly that – the place you hope to sail towards. Twenty-five years-ago I was briefly friendly with the experimental psychologist Richard Gregory. Richard had a great sense of fun to match his intellect and had been recruited by the US Airforce to pick suitable sites for a moon landing. Armed with binoculars he had spent optimistic months in the American south west, scanning the heavens. Knowledgeable looking. One day last century, very much the junior on a board of grant givers, we sat together interviewing teams of hopefuls. Following some passing remark of mine, Richard turned to me and said, “you have the most remarkable instinct, I can feel it coming off you.”


Richard Wentworth

July 26, 2020