COLLOQUY

Rooftop install shot with "romance fabrics" and chime constructed to my 'Fantasia' tuning

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Our Longest Days

An Introduction

I heard Grace's voice before I saw her. I heard her words before I beheld her face. A lightly vocal-fried, seductively laconic Midwestern drawl spoke but few hesitant inquiries mediated by a lofi speakerphone. We spoke on the phone about music after a mutual friend recommended her for an exhibition I was curating. Really, it was initially a self-serving event, I just wanted to hear some new music compositions in a real venue, but then figured I should invite other artists and not be so self-absorbed. My friend Esther suggested Grace, a young performance artist who did a 'noise burlesque' thing. As I was interested in the erotic — for aesthetic reasons alone of course! — I thought it would be a good fit with my sensuous drone composition. So we arranged a phone conversation and talked about what I was thinking. She mostly listened carefully, asking thoughtful questions, I tried to get her to say more, but she played it cool, a little skeptical of this stranger. Probably we both were. I was sincerely interested in hearing about Grace's experience as an underground noise musician/performance artist doing something rather unique, even though I don't particularly like performance art and performativity in general. She seemed to have a curious and new kind of trajectory. I was, however, phasing out of experimental music though, so I was also naturally skeptical. I was pretty much preoccupied ~ even overwhelmed ~ by my own pursuit of beauty, my nascent forms. For this event it would be a radiant, beautiful drone experiment in the dream house format. And I had a nice venue overlooking the Mississippi in a vacant part of north St Louis to amplify it as voluptuously as desirable. I had gathered Grace and a few other friends to stage this one-day exhibition of painting, performance, and music on a Saturday afternoon in the spring. Omair Hussain hung his colorfield paintings. My dear friend Pam Nogales ~ an American historian with refined aesthetic taste ~ had chosen to print a large image of a young, virile Walt Whitman, and offered a selection of his writing as 'takeaways' in the style of Felix Gonzalez Torres. So there was a large image of Whitman overlooking our collective installation, approvingly. I had also recently read some of his nature writings, and found his writings on the droning sounds of bees particularly relevant.

As I write, I am seated under a big wild-cherry tree—the warm day temper’d by partial clouds and a fresh breeze, neither too heavy nor light—and here I sit long and long, envelop’d in the deep musical drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me by hundreds—big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings—humming their perpetual rich mellow boom. (Is there not a hint in it for a musical composition, of which it should be the back-ground? some bumble-bee symphony?) How it all nourishes, lulls me, in the way most needed; the open air, the rye-fields, the apple orchards. The last two days have been faultless in sun, breeze, temperature and everything; never two more perfect days, and I have enjoy’d them wonderfully.

- Walt  Whitman

I thought this was exactly the kind of languorous beauty I was striving for in this springtime afternoon drone environment. Socially, this event was also a way of challenging the overly institutional pretensions of the millennial artworld and music industry. I've worked in and out of museums and galleries for decades, and found much lacking in them, not least of which was an overwrought, calculated, and bureaucratic situation which seemed to block the pursuit of aesthetic excellence and exciting new forms more than cultivate them. I thought that maybe in 2022 artists should begin to organize their own shows again, and not passively leave their fate in the questionable hands of curators and arts administrators. I hoped this event could be an inroad to that end, perhaps augur some much needed change. Pam and I specifically had long discussions on creating these kinds of events, and aspired to manifest them internationally and in an organized way. There was an apparent need. Locally, I was eager to embrace the 'DIY' scene — although skeptical of their standards and taste, I admired the way they take control of their own artistic fate, not waiting passively for cultural bureaucrats to approve before they did their real work. There is a vitality in the DIY scene that is lacking in the artworld ~ but there is also an element of taste in the artworld that is lacking in the DIY scene. Perhaps this separates them too artificially, but in early 2022, in the first functional days of art after contemporary art, I thought that this kind of synthesis might be needed in the arts, which had generally become both tasteless and bureaucratic.

I arrived early in the sunny spring morning to install in the musty, cool basement of the event space — a unique historical venue that was apparently once a bath house, but now a green building amidst St Louis's forgotten and decayed waterfront, nestled between dead brick factories slowly crumbling over the shifting caves underneath the wretched city. There were twenty or so usable black pedestals, so I turned them over on their sides and arrayed them in an irregular grid for listeners to sit on, allowing the sine waves of the prismatic drones to ripple through the hard wood, picking up sympathetic vibrations, effectively turning them into passive subwoofers. Whitman-approved, of course. The other artists came in and set up, and Grace pulled up in a rugged old pickup truck that afternoon, looking like a movie star dressed in casual clothing, carrying a bin of candles, wearing dark sunglasses and ravenblack hair pulled back. She said she wanted to get flowers too, and I mentioned that Pam also needed flowers for her Whitman elegy. I was helping someone pull his audio equipment in, and Grace went straight to the basement, my designated space, where she proceeded to set up hundreds of candles and mirrors in a vaulted stone alcove, painting the rustic stone arches in shimmering silvertones. Someone asked me, "Are you just going to let her do that in your installation?", and I shrugged it off, I figured there was space enough to share. It was only a corner anyway. But this would be the first of many future instances in which our artistic sensibilities overlapped and created something larger than the sum of its independent parts.

The day passed lazily, slowly, it was sunny and many of us, when not chilling in the dank basement, lazed around on the roof watching barges laconically drift. My daughter came and we walked up the road to watch a train roar by up close. Esther, another performance artist, washed a tire while wearing a self-crafted minotaur's headdress, roaming through the prismatic labyrinth of my splayed dulcet tones. Pam calmly arranged flowers. Later on the dancers did a cute performance, where one of them threw watermelon rinds at a cluster of naked dancers. Splat. Grace performed a very seductive set, reading an erotic poem she had written, passing it through effects, lighting her silvery shrine, very elegantly arranged, and then laying on the floor asking the audience to bury her with a bucket of dirt she brought, to be reborn, and inside a somewhat witchy looking circle drawn on the concrete floor, made of ash, flowers, earth, and salt. Pam said it reminded her of Ana Mendieta. I thought it was beautiful in its simplicity, ripe for further installation experiments and sculptures. After the performances we all hung out on the roof, and I was pleasantly surprised that Grace wanted to hang out with us, I was pretty sure we weren't cool enough for her. It really made me respect her as a person that she was so candid with such suspicious strangers. And then she took Pam dancing while I went home and showered. They showed up at my apartment a couple hours later, Pam talking with my brother, me with Grace, sleepy and painterly Omair dozing in a chair. All in all a nice day. A long day. A long, languorous, halcyon day. Faultless, beyond the typically low turnout and lack of local support. But we did the work regardless, as artists do. Whitman would have been proud. The next morning though I had to cleanup, so Grace and I returned, the messes were mostly ours and she knew the drill at this particular venue. It was a tranquil cleanup morning, efficient collaboration and halcyon silence, and she drove me back to my apartment in her truck, in which we discussed religion, Catholicism and ritual. Pam was perched on my stoop, and Grace hung out too, again, surprisingly, wearing a very stylish black and white sheer shirt now. I kept thinking, that for a DIY noise performance artist, this girl really had an eye for beauty. I felt a kinship at least in that value, trying to do something dissonant, but not being 'anti', or pseudointellectual or theoretical, or overwrought, about just trying to create something beautiful. Simple, alienated beauty. A gathering of friends in the resplendence of their independent creativity, and now on the sunny-spring morning of their dispersion.

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Clarified Beauty

But the memory of past sorrow — is it not present joy? I have much to say yet of the things which have been.

- Edgar Allen Poe, The Colloquy of Monos and Una

Four years later, and it's now tradition for us to iterate our longest 'halcyon days' at the Kerr every late April. Each year is a different variation on the theme. We've featured painters, performance artists, sculptors, you name it. This year we decided to focus on our own collaboration. After Grace inhumed herself that first year, I read her Poe's The Colloquy of Monos and Una, a beautiful dialogue between two lovers reflecting on their own burials and passage into some tranquil and mysterious beyond. This meditation on transcendent love ~ but also a profound reflection on the historical conditions of our species ~ was one of Baudelaire's favorite stories, and mine too. We thought grounding our own collaboration in this kind of 'colloquy' might be creatively meaningful for this year's iteration of our long days. Especially considering our relationship has much to reflect on and make sense of retrospectively. We've passed through infatuation, passion, longing, profound support, triggering alienation, personal crises, transcendent erotica, mania, and everything in between. For years me and Grace have tried to pin down the biggest question of all in our relationship : — What is our connection? What is the meaning of our connection, the spirit of our connection beyond those mundane and fleeting things such as shared cultural values and practical life goals? Why do we keep coming back to each other? What is the significance of our charged tension? The mystery of electricity perhaps doesn't need an answer. Yet, we have speculated that our connection is a pursuit of beauty. If Kant conflated goodness with beauty, we also conflate love with beauty. The beautiful is the good — The beautiful is love. A mutual pursuit of beauty may or may not be the ultimate answer to such a spiritual riddle, but it has conditioned our relationship to a significant degree, and at very least our collaborative artistic efforts. Over the years we have sung together, performed, and created installations. But we have anchored our relationship in writing. In elegies to our love. In pursuit of a particular kind of beauty that is also founded on clarity. Beautiful Clarity. When we speak of beauty, we do not mean innocuous prettiness, but a sincerity of trying to understand, to get to the bottom of things, to hack away the inessential weeds that inevitably grow along our new, lush verdures. That is, a kind of beauty which is by necessity working against the extant, against nature and in pursuit of a new nature, a second nature, a more natural nature, dissonance as a means towards profounder consonance and resolution. The dissonant may be beautiful. A kind of aesthetic excitement ~ childlike ~ of overturning rocks to see what hides beneath them. A clearing a view towards ~ hopefully ~ expansive vistas. True, some of those expansive vistas are voids, the abyss. Much of what lay under those rocks is not pretty. Slavoj Zizek says that when we are in love and gaze into our lovers' eyes, we see not God or the miracle of life, but the true, unfathomable abyss of life that is otherwise occluded. If orgasm is the "little death", then so too does romantic love present an encounter with mortality. Love would then be fit only for trailblazers and explorers, and perhaps even the blind! Grace and I have encountered our abyss and our abysses, we have recoiled in horror and disgust, we have risen up to confront them, and will continue to encounter the inchoate voids. But they are also not ours alone, the abysses behind life are humanity's to encounter, and that may instill in us a sense of radical gratitude for the beauty that does exist, where it does exist. And where it doesn't, to create it, to boldly turn one's back against the ugly calumnies of reality, and to court alienation in the process, even to be at one with this necessary alienation. Encountering such abysses may stimulate in us a responsibility to create such beauty that may not be simply found already intact and readymade. Love can be a way of seeing that unseen, even unseeable. And art is a way of giving it form. And so we offer an overturning of our rocks for this, our fourth celebration of Spring, a sharing of our love garden perched at the edge of an abyss.

- Bret

April 16, 2026