A musical love letter for Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s 1971 video installation, Swamp:

SWAMP

(A country song by Tammy)

Chord progression: Em, A7, F #

__________________________ 

Bobby bossed his Nancy around

She ran into the swamp

He said keep your camera eye on them catkin stalks and the other eye on the ground

Nancy whined she hated Passaic and Bobby got irritated

He mumbled hang a right with that camera lens but her focus became sedated

They say you should never shoot with your wife

In the toxic swamps of New Jersey

You could wind up in a real bad fight

And both end up with the scurvy

Nothing good never happened down there

In the warm warm swamps of Jersey

Catching stickers in your hair n’ losin’ your footwear

Will getcha hookworm and make the neighbors stare

Bossing each other like two old bull frogs

In public’s kinda tacky and worse in a bog

(kazoo solo)

Lucky Bobby and Nancy had each other

A love letter to Anthony McCall’s You and I, Horizontal:

Dear You & I, Horizontal,

I love you so. When we met I loved your dark and your light.  My tunnel vision for you brought me closer to the source of that light.   

As we experienced each other I know I turned your one dimensional world into a 3D experience. Still, I fear that the minute I left, you were exactly the same as when I found you.

Although I know my presence in your life changed you at the time, as you changed me, I couldn’t really touch you.

Our time together was marked by droplets, I thought they were tears of happiness.  Now I think not.

I see the reel you but you only see your projection of yourself on me.  That isn’t love.

A love letter to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “Untitled” (Golden):

Dearest “Untitled” (Golden),

I love your mischievousness, the way you stand up to all those stuffy “do not touch” signs.  I love your sensuousness, your desire to touch and be touched. And I love your sophistication, the way you drip with opulence and grace.

XOXO,

Jeff

A love letter written to Belle and Sebastian, a print by Justin Walsh and Nissa Ellison-Walsh:

Dear Seymour Stein,

Have you considered that we should be seeing other people? Maybe the stars of track and field? I know, I know… you’re just the boy done wrong, again. But I’m sick of waiting for the moon to rise when we’re together.

I’m the wrong girl for you. There’s too much love, but I still feel like I’m always wandering alone. You see, you’re always wrapped up in books, and with the state I am in, that leaves me feeling the loneliness of a middle distance runner.

So I’m waking up to us. Put the book back on the shelf, because there won’t be any more words written about you and me.

I know you’ll probably be hurt by this (is it wicked not to care?), but when I’m with you, the blues are still blue and in the state that I am in your expectations are just too much. I just want to be myself completely.

I wish I could say that my wandering days are over, but the truth is I don’t love anyone now.

You’ll probably tell your friends that I’m just another calculating bimbo. But I can see your future and if you, too, stop, look and listen, you’ll know that I’m right.

So don’t leave the light on baby, or at least not for me. But one day, if you find yourself caught in love again, remember that once you were mine, my funny little frog.

Stay loose,

Mary Jo

“Damn,” I thought silently as I opened the envelope from The Curious Scholarship of Dr. Bedcannon. It’s going to be embarrassing if I can’t figure out what to do next…

(via thachr = Playing in the Museum)

Dear Zim Zum I (or, my weathering steel),

You are aging, and so am I. Yet you are older than me, a decade more spent on this earth. You have seen much more of this world than I, and have witnessed its changes as they’ve beat themselves onto your surface.

Sometimes, I wonder whether my eyes, which themselves have started to crinkle at the edges, seem so naïve to you. I become uncertain in the presence of your certainty. I doubt myself, because you seem without doubts – all knowledge, all confidence.

So grounded you are, whilst I, I flit and am ever changeable. You are changing too, but remain more constant than I. Sometimes I wonder at how it is that you can stay so steadfast, and not be swayed by the whims that move me; how it is that you can find all you need in the one location, and not urge to be everywhere else, and experience all other places and things and people.

But your beauty comes from your still slow changes, and the constancy with which you face the world. And for that, my heart remains as true as you are.

Your thoroughly human, and ever changeable, lover

paige-e-h-blog:

Please help me
Morandi
this singular temporality is
manifest through unvoiced screaming
but your composition, it provides only premise
i search for absolution from nothing to be absolved.
I am coming to see you soon on the 18th
and your work had better offer something more
i had better wretch from it acceptance in delicate cold paint
or at least, you had better defy my wishes.

on Natura Morta fixing Depression

A Crush to the Fountain

and Marcel Duchamp

breathing from my diaphragm

pent-up to see u

self-flushing liver i go

goat farm over carnations

choosing me over him

bare & stiff at times

face to face the steam

a crush i don’t flush 

readymade otherwise

-Mike Fernandez 

Love letter to Edvard Munch’s Starry Night:

They say you never forget your first.

We met at the Getty, a lifetime ago. I wandered into the small gallery off to the side, and there you were, waiting for me. Sitting on the bench in front of you, I got lost in your skies. And then, I wept. You touched me so unexpectedly, yet I knew nothing about you. This place on the water, it is peace. It is serenity, it is love. I fear that I’ll never find this place again, but how lucky I am to have found it once.

You haunted me.  Did I haunt you? Do you even remember me?

I went back to visit the next week and you were gone. I’ll find you again someday.

 In Imagen de Yagul, her earliest silueta, Mendieta’s face and body are covered with white flowers, creating a poignant contrast between her young body and the ancient, rocky Zapotec grave in which she lies. The other photograph in SFMOMA’s collection, an untitled silueta from 1978, exemplifies her later work as she turned towards more abstracted female forms, the outline of the body nearly invisible in the Iowa grass…

Read more: SFMOMA | OPEN SPACE

Love letter to John Gutmann’s Promenade Deck, M.S. Brimanger, Pacific Ocean 1933

How did I find you? Why did I choose you?
You are so small and colorless. But you are filled with light and space.
I guess that means I should beware of shadows.
You show me an edge.
A place to bang into…  possible conflict.
A place to jump off of…  Is it a beginning or ending?
Moving forward toward a horizon, traversing sea and sky.
But you remind me there is always the chance of colliding
with the black hole of a broken heart.