"I Have Staved Off Disaster for Another Day"
story by Michael Helsem + photographs by J R Compton

 

Notice was paid to the xoanon; time's foreclosure, deferred. But what really happened to the left-over wine? Soon as i find something to write on, i will tell you. That old poser, Jacques Derrida, once said: "One must perhaps ask oneself whether the spectrality effect does not consist in undoing this opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other." And his words, once uttered, still hang in the air. Can there be an Arch for the Anti-Triumph?

"Already at the gates men brag of rout."

— Plumptre's Æschylos 

 toylike

To be honest, i had forgotten about Calatrava... In Dog Days grown to Dog Years, revision followed revision, while the City itself no longer ran riot at the cutting edge of pretentiousness. Now the Golden Corridor was chockful of potholes, whole sections of the roadway removed seemingly at random & without warning. What was this huge white toy, an arch i couldn't even get close to? I connected it, in my mind, with the toylike blue overpass in Addison. Not, anyway, with a monument to finishing on a downsized budget.
 

 

Entropy has its own agenda, & some humans. Now that the wires are up it's possible to see the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge as a harp for hands the size of SUVs. Though in practice we would sooner play Weimar than Gorbachev, this white writing in the sky evokes a defunctive cursive, the artist-hero's cape unfurled against the fall of night. (I still would rather have seen it spent on improved homeless shelters.)
 

John Adelman   45,328 (nails)   2010   white gel ink/mixed media on canvas wood panel
48.25 x 30 inches   image courtesy Holly Johnson Gallery
 

More Tobeyesque shenanigans feature at the Holly Johnson Gallery on Dragon Street. This other white writing, iterative rather than (per John Adelman's statement) "rule-based," produces clouds of almost-forms that mesmerize the way shapes in the fire do. When math was an art, & painting was a science, it seemed less quixotic to attach a title such as "45, 328 (Nails)" to the product of one's leisure moments.

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More stories by Michael Helsem.

xoanon
Jacques Derrida
spectrality
Edward Hayes Plumpre
Aeschylus
Santiago Calatrava
dog days
The Golden Corridor
entropy
Mark Toby
iterative
John Adelman
Adelman's show at Holly Johnson