Allison Katz, The Proposal, 2011, oil and rice on canvas
Weirdly, when I first saw this painting I felt the desire to sketch it. It was one of those literary/kitsch impulses that make you feel like a young artist traveling through Italy in a BBC adaptation of a Victorian novel. My actual surroundings were a concrete storage facility in Newark, N.J., so instead of drawing I took out my phone and tapped photos until the feelings subsided. But again they burbled up, these atavistic hiccups, and I made some notes in an attempt to circumscribe them. However, this linguistic tourniquet also proved insufficient—I never got deeper than writing “Turquoise” and “Circle” and one phrase that I don’t really understand now, which says “food’s insane.” Ultimately I succumbed and began to sketch a few light marks, eyelashes really, before I stopped, mildly embarrassed. Like the best art, this painting caused a cramp in my mimetic faculty which compelled me to ask that most basic question: how should one relate to objects?
Let me double way back. One of the favorite narratives of modernity—a movement whose propensity to self-narrativize is matched only by its proclivity to categorize—is the story of the creation of its categories. In this tale, fields of knowledge and production are verbally differentiated from one another. Fences are erected between science, philosophy, art, religion, and then the layer of shale beneath the newly autonomous fields is hydrofracked into still more distinct sections. Each segment, qua segment, is then used to expound the atomized cosmology which made it possible.
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