The Unseen Archive: Art, Authorship, and Subjective Translation
by Laura Horne, July 16, 2026
Inspired by Sei Smith’s project The Painting's Journey, I launched this experiment to explore the question: what happens to an artwork when we strip away its visual record?
From the results of an open call, three visual artists sent original pieces to a writer under one strict condition, that their art would never be photographed or publicly shown. Authorship is decentralized. Three artworks went to three writers each, who lived with the art in their own home for nearly a month. Rather than trying to produce objective criticism, they documented the deep subjectivity of their own gaze: how the object altered their domestic space, mutated under daily observation, and lived alongside them.
Now, the physical artworks have returned to the artists' studios, leaving these texts behind as the sole evidence of their journey. The goal is to challenge the boundary between the material art object and its translation: Can a linguistic description truly replace the physical artwork?
By navigating this archive, you enter a secondary layer of authorship, reconstructing the unseen art entirely through the lens of another's experience. Read their responses, trace the silhouettes of the missing objects, and ask yourself what do you see?
The Artist
Justin Orvis Steimer
The Writers
The Artist
Jasmine McGlade
The Writers
The Artist
Sono Kuwayama
The Writers
Taylor Bielecki
Art response - “an Elemental Nature”
Spending time with this piece was very nice and tranquil. It’s as if I joined the artist on a journey
alongside the work. At first I took it home to interact with it - the lightness of the frame, the
stitching, how it was pieced together to stretch over the frame- each detail looks considered,
deliberate. Fabric overlapping- symbols and colors placed on top, as if in their own area of the
canvas, allowing their own space to be.
The floating symbols at first took me down an elemental path, but upon studying the shapes and
flow more, especially the white and light yellow shapes, I felt as if they could be light, an
illumination or reflection. While the red symbol shared the same flow but built upright, strong
and sturdy, like fire or lava emerging from a depth. Both still coincide with light and all three of
those shapes hold their area of the canvas.
Upon taking it back to my studio, where I studied it on breaks between my own works, I noticed
the white shape and the darker grey shape were treated. They were perhaps burned, to carry a
darker edge of charcoal to them. With a white drop of something overtop on the form on the left.
This layering of additions adds more mystery to the symbols, but still leads me on my path of
believing in light or fire behind it.
The sense of materiality and varying layers and textures is wonderful. In studying this piece
longer, I was brought back to foundations : form, color, value, shape. Foundational aspects that
drive most of us artists as we create. And while the theme of this piece for me still remains
elemental, those elements are still foundational in their existence as well. The shapes are
building blocks to start with, and anchors with which to continue building upon. A flow of creation
on many levels, hovering just over a wooden canvas frame.
Joanna Seifter
In Death of the Author (1968), Roland Barthes discourages readers from letting the proverbial Author’s life and views impact their interpretation of the text. Instead, Barthes argues, no one person has ownership of a text’s meaning, not even the Author. It is the reader, a depersonalized “man without history,” whose inferences of the text are equally significant to those of the Author or fellow readers.[1] Here, Barthes frames his appeal for the individual, either the reader or museumgoer, to make their own meaning of a work of art rather than attempting to “decipher” it from a perceived definitive explanation, as at odds with the practice of cultural criticism.
Barthes characterizes the efforts of cultural criticism as frequently misguided, an attempt to impose a singular viewpoint, or “ultimate meaning” upon a work of art and thereby disempowering the reader from drawing their own conclusions. For the record, I disagree with this assessment as a critic who regards herself and her peers as individual viewers offering our own inferences and not as the ultimate arbiters of interpretation. However, it speaks to the critic’s role in the life cycle of a work of art under the public eye, during which a work of art is exhibited, viewed and analyzed by museumgoers and critics, reproduced in gallery checklists and catalogs, and then returned to its owner. But what if an art critic is one link in the chain separating, and ultimately replacing, the Artist and the art itself? That is the question posited by Laura Horne’s collaborative project When the Artwork Disappears, adapted from Sei Smith’s The Painting’s Journey, wherein participants contribute a work of creative writing inspired by a work of art without sharing an image with readers.
Beyond serving as the sole basis from which I will make my interpretations and comment on its context, my description of this artwork’s subject matter will serve as more than merely florid details, a poetic translation of visuals to text - they are the artwork itself. For, unlike every other exhibition or film review I had previously written, this article is not in response to an exhibition and will not be accompanied by any captioned images. The artwork is, by design, decontextualized and left entirely in the hands and through the lens of the few who get the opportunity to see it. Horne and Smith’s exercise is reminiscent of Surrealist games, collaborative exercises in symbolic association, visual distortion, and iterative creative ideation. The Painting’s Journey, like Surrealist games “exquisite corpse” and “text montage,” places greater emphasis on the final result of a collective combining and recontextualizing artwork than the initial work of art that inspired it.
Here is the work of art, Justin Orvis Steimer’s painting Schoolhouse (2026), in as much detail as I can paint with my words. Five oblong shapes float across a tattered, bruised vertical surface resembling an emblem of aged material, anything from distressed vellum to pale tanned hide. Not quite canvas, not quite drumskin, fully a nonrepresentational painting. The first form, slender and black, smudged with a seemingly errant splatter of grey paint, stretches across the upper half of the stretched frame. The center of the painting, slashed and reconstructed with crude zigzagged embroidery, features two other forms - one butter-yellow, with petal-like limbs leaning to one side, and one white tinged with ink in its crevices, both angular and oral. The final pair of red forms stretch their tendrils across the painting’s base, meshed together like puzzle pieces.
Steimer, a contemporary draughtsman and painter whose impressive portfolio balances ethereal nonrepresentational dreamscapes with beautifully precise experimentation of form and media, did not provide me with any information about this artwork beyond its title. Taking the work in isolation, all the shapes appear vaguely reminiscent of oceanic forms: the black one looks like an elegant lobster claw, the yellow one a sea anemone, the white one a clam, and the red ones an octopus emitting a jet propulsion. Anchoring the shapes together is a distant, hopeful pale fingernail-sized circle, a full moon before it sinks into the horizon or a pearl at the bottom of the ocean. There is a primordial or unearthly sense imbued in every mark, reinforced by Steimer’s title, which conjures images of aliens, vaguely threatening entities, or creatures of folk horror scribbled on handheld chalkboards in pioneer one-room schools.
While this exercise is unorthodox and innovative, as a participant, it also exposes my own predilections for holding an artwork and its descriptions and analyses with equal importance. As an art historian, my insatiable curiosity for decoding historical context and iconography sometimes translates into reaching for the museum label before giving myself sufficient time to form my own immediate impressions. Here, with the artwork divorced from context, I have nothing to lean onto but myself, which empowers, as Barthes writes, “the birth of the reader,” or in this case, the museumgoer.
However, from the reader’s perspective, or those who will only experience Steimer’s artwork through the prism of myself and my colleagues’ analyses, this exercise challenges them to exercise their own agency as viewers and readers in making their own meaning from a creative byproduct, a distorted photocopy of the missing original. A work of art can inspire a viewer, a writer, an artist, to form too many readings, recreations, and manipulations to count. These creative offspring will assume lives and inspire myriad interpretations of their own right, long after the original artwork disappears.
[1] Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc, 1968. "The Death of the Author."
Jason Carey-Sheppard
Monday May 25, 2026
I love the fact that doctors pinpoint the start of a pregnancy to the first day of a mother’s last
menstrual period. This means that the early part of pregnancy technically happens before
conception. So, at one point you really were just a glimmer in your mother’s eye.
On May 21, I got an email from Laura Horne, the editor at Tussle, telling me to be on the
lookout for an artwork that had been shipped to me. It’s part of the magazine’s When the
Artwork Disappears project, in which a single artwork is sent consecutively to multiple writers.
Each writer lives with and writes about the work for two weeks before sending it on. The
artwork hasn’t arrived to me yet—it’s a bit like that pre-conception glimmer—so at the moment
it feels more appropriate to call it When the Artwork Appears. Will the arrival of the artwork be
like a conception? Or like a birth? It’s also possible that when the it appears it will feel like
nothing special, just an object to be reviewed, and then later when it disappears I may
experience a welcome return to my usual endeavors. And yet…becoming a parent did break
apart my ego, exploding my self-imposed notions of purpose into something a bit more
magnanimous—so, who knows?
Friday May 29, 2026
It’s here. I don’t know what it looks like yet, and while the box is labeled with a few instructions
it doesn’t say which way is up, just that its contents are fragile. That should mean at least that
I’m not receiving a hinge-mounted work, which is good; USPS doesn’t often follow those
instructions and I’ve seen too many rumpled drawings and and dented photos. My previous life
as an art hander comes to the forefront: I get my studio razor, extending the blade just enough
to cut through tape, leaving cardboard, packaging, and the work untouched. Maybe this care is
part of a growing parental instinct? The unveiled work is a small painting, measuring only 7x10
inches.
I have barbecue sauce simmering on the stove, I’ll have to get back to this when my mind isn’t
so divided.
Sunday May 31, 2026
It’s been a busy weekend. My son turned a new age, we threw him a party, people stayed over,
there was cake-making, grilling, and gift-opening. And while I’ve hung the painting in the most-
used room in our home, on this unusual weekend I haven’t been there much; I’ve been too
preoccupied with fathering to do the parenting this writing and artwork require.
Monday June 1, 2026
Sewn nylon serves as both the substrate and background of the painting; the nylon is slightly
transparent and an off-white, almost dirty-grey hue. It’s seamed together with wide and airy
stitches that bisect the painting laterally, with a smaller back-pocket-sized nylon piece stitched
to the top center. In what seems to be at least partially oil paint (there’s a slight dispersant
effect around the painted areas) there are four abstract “figures,” two on the flanking sides of
the painting and two smaller ones stacked vertically in the center. The figures are mostly
monochrome—red, yellow, black, and white—and rely on subtle shading and hue variance to
give the illusion of volume. What’s funny is that the work feels so obviously landscape in
orientation without any overt indicators; three of the four figures seem to be rooted by gravity,
like they have an definite top and bottom. The two flanking figures are tall and standing up into
the emptiness of the painting; the third kneels in a crushed near-fetal position. And yet the
fourth figure seems groundless, floating, even though it’s within the pocket-sized collagedelement. It’s separated not just by its airy nature but by the compositional effect of its exclusion
from the rest of the picture plane. A kind of time-out? A rarefaction?
Wednesday June 3, 2026
I’m not quite ready to give up the metaphor of parenting, but it does seem to me that my earlier
musings were made more in anticipation of the artwork. It’s now clear I have no parental
instinct towards the work, but I still very much intend to do my best to give it a good life until I
send it on its way.
I was telling a friend the other day about this project and the process of reviewing art in
general. She was enthusiastic about the idea of writing without the need to create one’s own
details; to be addressing something real and concrete and using it as the scaffolding to create.
It’s true, it is really nice, but art is about relationships, you have to give in order to receive, and
even in order to create a reflection. Then again, the art needs to give something, too. That’s
why some pieces work for some people and not others. What I’m getting at is something akin
to the baby-schema (Kindchenschema) effect. Kindchenschema is a mammalian phenomenon
in which infantile features—big head, big eyes, round face—are perceived as cute and trigger
the desire to nurture. Now, of course art doesn’t need to be cute, but it needs to have that
initial hook. Babies and art are the same in this way; they need to gestate in the eyes, mind,
and body of the viewer so that they may become an individuated person, an individuated
aesthetic experience. That, in my estimation, is the goal of an artwork, to hook you so it can
grow up. It’s like a parasite, but one that enriches your life.
Friday June 5, 2026
Earlier I wrote that the forms in the painting seem rooted by gravity; this is because they are all
expressing various kinds of movement, almost like yoga poses. The red form on the right could
be “Campfire Tossing Moon Pose” and the form in the pocket could be “Floating Bag Pose.”
Musing on how my own body could contort to make such shapes, I can’t quite figure out how
to do “Floating Bag Pose.” In my mind, I inevitably end up as a crumpled mess on the floor.
“Floating Bag Pose” is happening in that special pocket space which, I’m now wondering,
might make it rarified in some way. This raises a very far-flung association with the alchemical
text Splendor Solis. Bear with me. The illustrations in that text are of surreal scenes in which
landscapes and cityscapes are often ruptured by a central oddity, like a glass jar with a
peacock in it. And while I can only guess at the illustrations’ meanings they’ve got a kind of
poetry that feels interpretable. I know that alchemy was—and maybe still is—a practice
oriented towards transforming matter through spirit and intent, and that these illustrations
could be viewed as instruction manuals for the thoughts one must cultivate while turning lead
to gold, for example. This is similar to yoga, which instead of transforming elements unites
body and breath through intent. Perhaps the painting’s forms are a sequence of yogic alchemy,
whereby the viewer’s mental movements culminate in the exalted pocket stage? A kind of
floating bliss? But that’s the problem with interpretation: We humans are essentially meaning-
making machines; we can find meaning anywhere, even in a floating plastic bag.
Monday June 8, 2026
This project has flipped my natural way of viewing art: Usually, if I either like or hate an artwork,
I’ll sit with it for a long time. It will ride in my mind and body and work its way into unknown
areas of my consciousness. That was always my gold standard for the magic of art. If,
however, I’m apathetic, I typically keep on moving, leaving the artwork behind. That’s not how
this project works; I have to keep coming back to this painting. Keep writing, keep living with it.And in the space of my ambivalence the painting has become not a child but a womb taking on
my thoughts and turning them into a text to be decoded. Like the entwining of a mother’s and
father’s DNA to make something new. I don’t think of myself as the parent anymore—there’s no
nurturing, just a kind of evolutionary survival. Like all living things, the painting announces itself
as it is, and strives to live regardless of adversity.
Wednesday June 10, 2026
It has been my practice for almost two weeks now to sit with and find something I can relate
to, discover, or simply enjoy within this painting. And I haven’t been able to do this using my
usual methods for art-viewing. Instead, what I have found is something unexpected, a kind of
compassion, not because I think the work isn’t likable, but because we don’t get along, and
that’s okay. It’s been the kind of slow negotiation that leads to an amicable separation. When
this artwork disappears and I’m left to my own devices, I won’t miss it, and I think it won’t miss
me. Something in this has struck me: The nature of both yoga and alchemy are the same as
art-viewing; they all require surrender. This project has made me a witness.
Friday June 12, 2026
Today is the day. I’ve packed it neatly in its packaging and am about to ship it to its next
destination. Wherever it’s going I know it won’t stay there. Art is indeed a parasite, and its
traces are left on everyone that comes into contact with it. As I said, I won’t miss this work, but
it has done the artful thing and changed my mind many times. And I think it might continue to
do that. So then does the artwork actually disappear?
Jonah James Romm
In front of me hangs a pasta strainer small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. A plastic
colander for a child’s play kitchen set, perhaps. How much real pasta could really fit inside of it?
I would approximate about 12-18 pieces of penne. Of course, if you were to use it for real pasta,
the boiling water would likely melt the colander completely away, or turn it into a warped mess
of steaming chemicals. No, there isn’t pasta in this colander, but a pair of miniature boxing
gloves. The gloves are just the right size to sit at the base of the colander, cradled neatly by its
curved walls. One lies face up towards me, the other face down, as if they had been strewn by an
exhausted toy boxer. Imprinted on their presumably plastic surface I can make out the impression
of laces on the glove’s interior, connecting to a bow tie on the front. It’s remarkable, upon close
examination, how much detail there is in such a mundane toy; a simulacrum.
The gloves are attached to the colander by some adhesive; connective tissue between
inanimate plastic flesh. Together they are coated in a shell of golden spray paint, erasing the
boundaries between them. Its golden hue contrasts what I recognize to be a cheap commodity,
purporting a hidden value to a cast-off thing. The colander handles point up and down on a
vertical axis. I can imagine taking hold of them like a steering wheel, or shrinking to fit in the
concave hollow of its bowl. Light comes through the strainer holes, reflected off of the white
wall underneath. A kaleidoscopic image, almost. The holes alternate between rows of two and
rows of three. There are five rows in each quadrant of the colander, which means a total of 52
holes. 52 holes in a golden colander the size of your palm, holding a tiny pair of boxing gloves.
Someone somewhere must know the mechanical procedures which were required to
create 52 holes in a plastic toy colander, but I do not. I imagine someone in a factory being
tasked with precisely poking each hole, even though I know that the colander is cast from a
mold, and its entire production is likely automated. Are these colanders still being produced
somewhere, even as I write this? Has the demand for miniature toy plastic colanders gone up or
down recently? Is it a sustainable business? I’m getting lost in the absurdity of this object which
snowballs under close scrutiny. But I’m not done yet — what history has this object obtained,
how many hands has it passed through before mine? Was it cherished by a child at one point, was
it ever precious before being spray painted gold to signal its elevated status through the social
agreement of art? The questions are endless, and unanswerable.
Miniature toy boxing gloves sit at the bottom of a miniature toy plastic colander with 52
holes, whose origins and production are unknown and likely unknowable. Except they do not
really sit, since the colander hangs vertically on my wall, it would be more accurate to say that
the gloves are framed. There is the assumption of gravity, which if I were to subscribe to, would
place me looking down into the colander instead of sitting at my desk and looking straight ahead
into it. If I were to erase the surrounding objects in my room, the gloves at the bottom of the
colander would appear as one prop in a large childlike theater of objects. The colander full of
gloves seems to embody something sentimental; nostalgic for a time when miniature objects had
souls which harmonized with one another in the dawn of infancy. There is nothing random about
their conjunction, it is the product of free associative intuition — gloves need a place to go, the
colander will hold them.
Lindsey Poremba
not all that doesn’t glitter isn’t gold
If we live in an era of bravura and surface illusions, here’s a phrase for consideration: the nine inch boxer (re)strains her golden gloves.
In this sculpture, a miniature pair of boxing gloves nestle in the bottom of a correspondingly small strainer. The found materials appear to have once been the accessories of dolls and a play kitchen designed for children. Everything is reduced to a scale suited for smaller hands than mine. The strainer, with functional diligence, does not allow the gloves to pass through. In their golden cradle, the boxing gloves remain upright, victorious in their retirement and display. Both the gloves and the strainer are painted gold, a trophy to hang on the wall. A minute metaphor, if one will.
In boxing, as in wordplay, there are feints and dodges. Puns and punches land best with swiftness. Though on the same team, the brain and the body race against one another: to react to a strike, to defend against the offense, to follow the joke, to assign a word to what we see. The speed of these actions and reactions is automatic. While children’s toys encourage play, these found objects encourage the play of words, slipping between description of what we see and new words enacting a series of displacements from the original image: strainer / strain / restrain / retrain / trainer.
Words re-arrange into sentences, constructing new images and narratives. In a similar manner, to transmit new meanings, found objects may be transformed, altered, or rearranged. We assume that selection and translation of these individual elements isn’t arbitrary, but a motivated choice. In a world stuffed with stuff, both in physical and digital landscapes, selection is a necessary and urgent task. Sociopolitical conditions of exclusion and migration further emphasize the urgency of selection. The significance of these choices prompts the inevitable and inconclusive question, why? For this sculpture of unknown origins, it falls upon the viewer to speculate.
Shiny things catch the eye, and by extension, attention. Magpie tendencies, begun and nurtured in childhood, may be nursed by metals in adulthood. Metals become medals.
Recently, I spent several hours polishing a few pieces of my grandmother’s silver. Having never met her, I know her only through stories and objects. A few practical silver trays and a somewhat dramatic candelabra. Nothing particularly valuable, just shiny and sentimental. I should have suspected by the decades-long neglect of these tarnished pieces and the many tales from other adults bemoaning the wasted hours as children armed with toothbrushes–cleaning silver isn’t fun. The chore is labor and time intensive, eating up the afternoon and cramping the fingers. And it’s smelly.
After several hours, I rinsed the filthy, gray foam of polishing cream from one of the trays with water. With the tarnish (mostly) lifted, I saw a pale and luminous reflection of my face in the silver. Like looking into the moon, the warm glow from such a cold object surprised me, as if the light came from within it.
A second, unspoken assumption holds that the transformation of the found object imbues it with significance. Rub and polish a silver tray and watch as the surface becomes a mirror. The miracle is the process; the chemical reaction unfolding under our sore fingers. But all we see at the end is ourselves, staring into the shining silver.
Painted gold doesn’t have the same reflective qualities as the real thing. Light bounces, and scatters, but half-heartedly. It is the color of gold, flattened. It signals gold without being gold. Simplifying the complex history of this material, suffice it to say that the reputation of gold isn’t always so shining. If gold symbolizes riches, then gilt gold, fool’s gold, or painted gold signals artifice, a-la-Mar-a-Lago aesthetics and “all that glitters is not gold.”
Or so it seems. If there is distrust in gold because of associations with artifice or avarice, this sculpture is opaque. It lacks reflection; I can’t see myself in it. The sculpture exists on its own, resisting projection while encouraging it through associations with boxing, childhood, and gold.
With the boxer and the artist not around to defend themselves, the metaphors multiply.
On one of the boxing gloves, small scratches rub away at the gold paint. A hint of tarnish comes in just below the surface.
Kun Sok
The Weight of a Light Object
Before I saw the work, I first experienced its delay. I was about to move and hoped to receive it before leaving my old apartment. The previous participant (Lindsey)mailed it on May 26, but it did not arrive in time. On June 5, the day I moved, she told me the package had been returned. For a while, the work existed for me as something missing: expected, in transit, and absent. To avoid another return, she handed it to me in person on June 10.
I was curious, but I could not open it right away. Moving boxes covered almost every bit of floor in the new apartment, so I placed the unopened package on top of them. For a few days, it looked like another object waiting to be unpacked, another thing without a place.
When I opened it on June 13, I found a small bowl-like object and a note explaining how to hang it: two nails, with Velcro as a backup. The instruction immediately created a problem. I live in a rented apartment, and I cannot freely put nails into the wall. The work arrived ready to hang, but my home was not ready to receive it that way. For the time being, the work remained unhung.
For the next few days, life itself took over. My mother and I could not find the rice cooker. My body ached from the move, especially my fingers. The work could not help with any of this. It did not solve anything. Yet this uselessness was not entirely negative. While everything else demanded my hands, the work asked for nothing.
Because there was no proper place for it, I kept moving the work around the safest areas near my bed so it would not get mixed in with the moving boxes. It looked like a small yellow brass bowl, but it was too light, more like a plastic manufactured object painted bronze. It was about the size of a small cup, with holes and handles, like a miniature colander. Inside the bowl were two small gloves made of soft, rubber-like material, fixed to the bottom. The left glove faced downward, showing the back of the hand. The right glove opened upward, exposing its palm. The bowl and the gloves inside seemed to have been coated together in the same yellow-bronze color. I did not want to decide too quickly what it meant. The form looked like a container, but what it contained could not be removed. The holes suggested drainage, but the gloves could not pass through. They were hands, but they could not move; gloves, but they could not be worn. If it had been hung as instructed, the handles would have faced upward, and the two gloves would also have pointed upward like raised hands. In my apartment, however, it remained leaning, slightly displaced from its intended position.
I began to call it the “boxing-glove bowl.” When more furniture arrived, I placed it diagonally on the corner of a rustic wood bookshelf, almost as if it were on the wall. Finally, the work no longer felt like part of the moving boxes; it seemed to have found a proper place and to be displayed. The gloves seemed to say, “Don’t forget me. I am here.” Under a soft yellow light, the bronze surface shimmered, and the darkened back of the left glove looked natural beside the black steel frame. It looked less like an object I was protecting and more like an object staged.
At first, I was relieved that this small thing would not become another object I had to keep. But when it began to suit one corner of the apartment, I felt attachment. This happened while I was deciding what to keep and what to discard. Before moving, I had thrown away old artworks and many art supplies. Some materials were donated; others were given away. Even after moving, I continued discarding things to fit my life into a smaller home. Keeping anything—an object, an artwork, even something once precious—requires responsibility. For a short time, this work became my responsibility: to keep safe, look at, think about, write about, and return.
On June 21, I ended my cohabitation with the boxing-glove bowl and returned to the title of this project: When The Artwork Disappears. Does an artwork disappear, or does it remain in another form? Here, the work will not circulate as a photograph that can be saved, enlarged, shared, or checked again later. For others, it will remain only through my writing. For me, it will remain through feeling and memory.
But memory is unreliable. One day I may forget the bowl’s exact shape, the size of its holes, the position of the gloves, or how the bronze surface shimmered under the yellow light. Many works we see in galleries disappear in this way. What remains is often not an accurate image but a question, a sensation, or a direction of looking that the work briefly opened.
Because this event unusually coincided with my move, I came to feel that when an artwork disappears as an image, it does not become immaterial. Instead, everything around it becomes more material: delivery, return, walls, shelves, boxes, hands, pain, storage, and responsibility. The disappearance of the image does not erase the object. It changes where we look.
Art does not solve the practical problems of life. This work did not find the rice cooker, unpack boxes, reduce the pain in my fingers, or clean the balcony. In that sense, it was completely useless. Yet because of that uselessness, another role became possible. Because it did not belong to the order of tasks, it could sit outside that order and make the order visible. Instead of solving problems, the work stayed quietly among them. It made me see more clearly what I was discarding, what I was keeping, what I was temporarily caring for, and what I had to let go.
The boxing-glove bowl came to me while I was throwing things away, making room, and trying to live with less. It arrived without a stable place, just as I was trying to make one for myself. It did not repair my life, but it rearranged the materials around it: space, ownership, fatigue, storage, responsibility, attachment, and release.
After it disappears from my room, I may not remember its form perfectly. But I will remember that it once sat among my moving boxes, could not find a place before a rented wall, and suddenly looked right under a yellow light beside black steel. The work does not remain as a clear image. It remains as a relation: something I briefly held, felt burdened by, grew attached to, and finally had to send away.
Perhaps what art leaves is not resolution but rearrangement. It does not fix the world. It makes us look again at the world we already live in: what feels heavy, what feels light, what is ours, what is only entrusted to us, what we hold, and what we release. This boxing-glove bowl was light enough to move easily, but the question it left was not light. The weight I felt was not measurable; it gathered in the temporary relation the work created between object and room, care and release, image and disappearance.
Carl Watson
Untitled (sutra)
“Untitled (sutra)” was delivered into my hands in a linen bag containing a makeshift cardboard box containing two layers of protective plastic bubble-wrap around the painting. What follows are impressions and associations made over about ten days that I lived with the painting
My first impression was of dirty window blinds that had bits of white cloud-like material clinging to them, as if the blindered sky that had been shut out, somehow crossed over and settled on the inside surface of the blinds, which gave the illusion of a waxy texture and color not unlike the sticky side of beige masking tape. When I positioned the painting “right side up,” there was a slight sense of a slow downward flow, as if the blinds were melting. They weren’t.
The vaguely horizontal divisions of the background. were echoed in the white tissue clouds, that, from arm’s length, could be read as signals, long-ago messages transmitted perhaps from space or some other dimension. Or they could read as noise emanating from a much closer, more intimate source, a whisper perhaps, or a voice inside the head. This notion of communication will come up again later.
Another early impression was connected to a childhood memory: the raised white, tissue-like surface reminded me of the frosting on a Stage Plank cookie. However, rather than being dribbled-on, these white accents seemed to be bubbling up out of the background. People of a certain age might remember “bit o’ honey” candy bars, which I believe were invented by dentists to ruin the teeth of American children. It also occurred to me that, if this painting had a fragrance, it would be sweet nougat, or at least something close to that honey-flavored candy already mentioned. But there are two sides to every sensation and the hidden side of this hypothetical sweet scent was something more industrial, as in the factories and labs where popular flavors are is designed in test tubes
I don’t want to get all synesthesia here, because I don’t want to get into personal tactile or sound associations that are, after all, utterly subjective. However, if there were a sound pallet to the painting, it would be something drone like, oceanic, but muted, perhaps with flashes of static breaking through, not unlike the green or brown noise one might use as a sleep aid, only beige—beige noise. Look it up—it’s a thing. Of course, there was no actual noise, the painting just sat there, absorbing but not emitting.
As I examined the surface further, I noticed a few imbedded threads, thin vein-like pathways curling across the surface that reminded me of a fossil trail, like what the tail of a running lizard might leave in the mud, or possibly the long flagellum of an ancestral life form, some unknown simple creature preserved in the LaBrea-like, bit-o’-honey surface. I was interested in paleontology as a child, so this would be the influence here.
Now, the world is nothing if not perpetual change, and the longer one lives with a piece of art like this, the more it changes, even as it remains the same, and the more it speaks in its stasis. It’s lack of figurative subject matter or familiar outlines testifies to the infinite productivity of misinterpretation and the shifting emotional perspectives of the viewer. In other words, my perspective changed according to mood, despite the object itself.
It’s important not to get locked into a single framework like my earlier window blinds/fossil record analogies. And so, in an effort to alter the framework, I moved the painting around. I played with it. I laid it flat and viewed it from the edges of the frame, where waxy drips were prominent, as if running off the edge of a flat earth. From this perspective I gazed across the plain of the surface as if it were a desert landscape. Then I rotated the corners, shifting the angles, and changing the light source, all the while scratching my chin thoughtfully as if the painting was an inscrutable object and I were a baffled alien trying to discern its meaning.
Eventually I set the painting on top of my file cabinet so that I could observe it from every corner of my small apartment. At this distance (8-10 ft.) it became less a study in texture and more of a window—a secret, portable but opaque window. I placed the window/painting next to my indoor thermometer, whose reading varied from 67 degrees to the high 80s during that week. Outside it rained, the temperature changed, it was windy, then sunny, then cloudy, but in the window of the painting nothing happened, it was always the same day. There were no divisions. Some might find comfort in this, a certain kind of security.
From this distance, the surface of the painting was flattened out and the textures were absorbed into a general effect. We all know how, when you look at clouds, or the splotchy patterns of the concrete sidewalk or an old rusted door, or any undefined surface, you will see images. And I did, I began to see eyes, sailboats, teeth, and some undecipherable written language. In fact, sometimes the window looked like a wall of washed-out ancient writing. I also noticed an aura of sadness, perhaps related to the prison of time’s passage and the mind’s confinement by its limited environs. But there were no tears in this window. But tears can be found when you look for them. Sunt lacirmae rerum.
Then I had an idea, I turned the painting 90 degrees on its side and placed it back on the file cabinet. Amazingly, the former prominent illusion of a window became instead a swatch of used wallpaper, and not just any wallpaper but the tobacco-stained wallpaper of a room where a heavy smoker had lived and possibly died, wallpaper that was old enough and damp enough to be warping and peeling in its decay. Again, I felt there might be some kind of information being expressed, like old writing smudged and distorted by humidity. Some kind of history was struggling to get through—perhaps the traces of a conversation that was held in that room 100 years ago, preserved in the old paint and paper, or maybe the muted cries of murdered family members sealed up behind the wall. Then I realized I was being influenced by the Collected Works of Edgar Allen Poe that was also sitting on the file cabinet. It’s easy to be influenced by random objects in proximity to the work under consideration.
In any case, I had journeyed far outside the realm of proper art analysis, and my time was running out, so I decided to end the project and began to rewrap the painting for the next adventurer.
Postscript: It wasn’t until after I had sent the painting on, that I inquired if there was a title. I learned the title was “Untitled (sutra)”. It occurred to me that the word sutra (like suture) means string or thread, some kind of connecting principle. This changed my perspective yet again (although after the fact) because what I had originally thought to be the fossilized record of a lizard’s tail, or a primitive flagellum trapped in the sticky surface, was actually a kind of metaphorical focal line for a meditation upon the sewn-together, inter-dependent nature of the universe and consciousness. I had got everything entirely wrong! I felt bad, but it was too late. The piece was gone. But then, such is the nature of life. When you finally think you understand it, it’s usually too late.
Bob Holman
Untitled Haibun
May 17, 2026, 7am. “Haibun” is a Japanese poetic form blending prose and poetry. After this sentence, I will stop writing this essay to FaceTime Sono Kuwayama in Bali, where it is 7pm.
Painting by Sono
In front of window spring day
Inspires this haiku
“Company” was one of poet Robert Creeley’s favorite words. He used it to refer to his community of friends, many of whom were artists, musicians, filmmakers he collaborated with. Sei Smith’s conceptual project, “When the Artwork Disappears,” involves his "company" translating visual art into written descriptions, allowing audiences to “see” (imagine) the piece through text alone.
It’s easy to know
What time it is in Bali
They’re twelve hours ahead
First, Sei and Laura Horne, editor of “Tussle” magazine, solicited artwork from three artists. Then Laura assigned nine writers to each spend two weeks with the pieces, three writers viewing one piece each, and arranging their transport from writer to writer and back to Laura. The writings on the art will then be published in “Tussle” and read in a performance. So – the only way you, dear Reader/Audience, will view the art is to imagine it via the written/spoken word.
White paper waves clouds
Threading white horizon string
Floats off waxed canvas
In this instance, I, Bob Holman, having spent two weeks with an untitled painting by Sono Kuwayama, am in the process of transmitting this painting via a haibun to you, the Reader/Listener. Kuwayama’s painting is inspiring me to write this, even this pedestrian part that you probably already know anyway, but I often chuckle over my “assignment” and I do wish to convey my process. Eg, picking up on her title, I’m calling my writing “Untitled Haibun.” How’s that for interplay and collaboration? As for Sono’s painting,
Does it inspire me?
Or is it a directive
Demanding I write?
Can art demand a reaction? Does it inherently? Is art disappointed if you have no reaction? Is Sei Smith unwittingly creating a new example of haiga, the Japanese art form that combines a visual image, a haiku, and calligraphy?
Painting is landscape.
Landscape is poem. Poem
Is painting your ear.
I like the story of how, in 1689, Matsuo Bashō, on his five month, 2500-kilometer Narrow Walk into the Interior, freed the three-line haiku from the five-line tanka, changing Japanese poetry forever and becoming Japan’s National Poet in the process. Interesting fact: during his entire walk, Bashō carried the gifts his “company” had given him at his Goodbye Party! He recorded his journey in haibun form.
Haiku sits on shore
Painting beckons in the rain
Halfway round the world
And now, what you’ve all been waiting for, my personal backstory to this project!
In 2023, Sono Kuwayama and I followed Bashō’s walk for ten days, a hundred miles. Sono sketched, photographed, filmed, painted; I wrote over a hundred haikus. We were taking a self-guided tour via a wonderful spiral-bound book, maps and directions included, interspersed with Bashōs poems and prose. Thanks to the tour service, we’d end each day at a new onsen (hot spring) with a delicious kaiseki (multi-course meal with many small plates). The next day, back to the wilderness, interspersed with parking lots and suburbs, Basho’s poems leading the way, while our luggage was spirited away to the next onsen.
Take a moment to
Remember the poet who
Passed here long ago
It was a surprise to me when the person who delivered Sono’s painting to me was none other than Carl Watson, a dear friend and member of my “company,” who I didn’t know was a part of Sei’s project. He handed me the carefully wrapped 7 ½ x 7 ½ painting by --another BIG surprise! -- Sono Kuwayama. I didn’t know Sono had contributed a painting to Sei’s project! Laura didn’t know that Sono and I knew each other! She was certainly surprised when I informed her that Sono and I would be married June 17, 2026! And the fact that Sei is Sono’s oldest son… is this an art project or a family tree?
Painting! Kisses! Wow!
Why are there no love Haikus?
Love will not condense
In this instance, I, Bob Holman, having spent two weeks with an untitled painting by Sono Kuwayama, am in the process of concluding the transmission of this haibun (remember?) to you, the Reader/Listener, pursuant to the orders of the artist Sei Smith and the ministrations of editor Laura Horne. I do believe we are creating new example of haiga, the Japanese art form that combines a visual image, a haiku, and calligraphy!
[Note: Poet requests
You (Reader): Draw an image
In space provided]
Now we’re getting someplace. The place we are getting to is a portal to all you do is art, transforming you, the Reader/Listener, now taking my place as the artist. I, Bob Holman, poet, am informing you that the painting of Sono Kuwayama is a handmade from organic materials and is a spring day of white cottony horizon. This painting is now almost complete. All that’s required is for you to be inspired, or follow my directive, to create a new work of art in any medium. Send it to Laura at Tussle, and Sei, and me. Let’s keep this thing going, ok?
Ian Cofre
A meditation on boredom
Exactly one year before the pandemic lockdown, I traveled from New York to Nevada to spend a week playing caretaker to a friend who's like a sister to me. She was there for an experimental treatment, the kind of alternative medicine you can only get in a less well-regulated state out west.
Our days followed a steady routine to and from the treatment center, where my friend would undergo controlled fevers and transcranial magnetic stimulation while I read El Lissitzky’s Russia: Architecture for World Revolution. Our hotel was squeezed between a small, planned community around an old quarry that was filled in to create a lake and a parking lot next to a large shopping center. Every day we would circle the same roundabout, drive past the same Target, past the same gas station, and onto the same highway, where we traversed intervals of newly built gated communities, strip malls, and pockets of emptiness. Somewhere in the distance, was the ever present backdrop of the Sierra Nevada. After a few hours, I would drive the same route in reverse in the rented red Volkswagen Beetle and closely monitor her for any adverse aftereffects back at the hotel. Mostly, I had to ensure she stayed hydrated. I wasn’t the one being treated, but there's something about the high desert, what it does to your oxygen levels and brain chemistry. Everything feels like it’s under a membrane of unreality, time starts to flag. It might be one of the last times I felt profound boredom.
—
I received a perplexing little painting in May of this year. Tasked with describing it in writing to an audience who will never see it, I spent long stretches of time staring at this unassuming and reticent square with its spare palette, hoping to unlock an unyielding secret. Since it quietly displaced another work on my wall, a snow scene, I decided that it must be a spring picture. There’s no gentle murmur of sun-dappled waves at the edge of a lake to signal the seasonal thaw. It just is.
Materially, the surface shows damage and repair. Three descending blank pages that could be the end leaves separated from an old book are layered and glued over an unembellished wood panel base. Their dry, torn edges create irregular, horizontal seams that cast thin shadows, dividing the work into four planes. They're proportional to the facade of Marcel Breuer’s inverted ziggurat on Madison Avenue. All of it is covered in encaustic, giving the work a gelatinous appearance, but its congealed waxy finish is solid, smooth, and hard to the touch. Embedded in the overlay are fine threads that may have once bound the dismantled book, twisted and pulled through plumes of milky highlights. Projections rush to fill in the blank pages of the reconstructed tome.
There are echoes of John Singer Sargent’s tableau Fumée d’ambre gris (1880), from the figure’s creamy layered veils and the contrasting, yet muted tones to the arrested wisps of smoke. It could easily be one of Eva Hesse’s latex and fiberglass works in miniature. White Butoh dancers, barely clothed, slowly writhe on the steps of a shrine.
The moment I let go of these tenuous associations; I am left to interpret this object like a topographic study. For now, it's a map of a mountain range or a footpath. I follow two separate loops of string just right of center that almost intersect when one breaks away through a gap or valley to the northeast corner. It curls over itself and turns sharply south by southwest towards the painting's westernmost edge, where it dangles idly over a dark thin vein, in actuality, a single dark hair captured under the surface. Where the encaustic has pooled, the saturated paper is translucent.
During the month we had together, it became apparent that the work reacts noticeably to light, absorbing and reflecting the changes throughout the day. In waking light, it’s most intensely yellow. From an oblique angle, it washes out nearly white on a bright afternoon. When the horizon glows a brilliant golden orange before sunset, it does, too. By evening, dark almost-crimson blotted undertones hover just below the surface. The light seems to emanate from within it like a deconstructed paper lantern.
Is there such a thing as an ambient painting? There is atmospheric painting, of course: Turner; Whistler; without the landscape, there’s Rothko; maybe Ryman. The California Light and Space artists elevate luminance with factory finish. I'm thinking, however, of something more organic, a kind of environmental painting, the material version of John Cage’s 4’33”, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s kankyō ongaku, and Brian Eno’s convalescent musical explorations.
—
I desperately want the painting to be something, anything else. I have tried metaphor, misidentification, reconsideration, and recognition to describe what it could be. To fill it with hope and desire. What became apparent only with time is that this chameleonic square is simultaneously many things. It is a catalyst, triggering flashes of self-recognition, ignited memories, and pain points, which led to several false starts and attempts to surmount a mental embargo in addition to the visual embargo. Like a wound or scar tissue, it unlocked some sensitivity to past physical trauma. It's invisible, and it's always there, but it should not be mistaken for fragility. It also reflects my greatest fears: to be infirm and alone, to disappear and not have produced anything that mattered to anyone. There is no paint. There is no image. There is no artwork. That combination of factors amounts to an empty set, and because of that, it’s terrifying.
Like Eno, I was also in a car accident over ten years ago, battered and bandaged, but without the inspiration or foresight to invent an entire genre of music. I didn't own a car or drive that often after that, so when my friend needed someone to drive her four years later during her recovery, I didn't hesitate. Over the weekend, my friend and I decided to drive to a casino near Lake Tahoe, on a route that took us up and down some fairly steep ridges. Going up wasn't that difficult, but coming down the sharp curves, I would feel a tug in my stomach, my back tense up, and a subtle shaking that increased with each turn. Not realizing we were at the last turn, the tremors forced me to pull over to the shoulder and ask my friend to drive the rest of the way. They subsided when she was in control of the car, even on the strongest curves into the valley. On the way, we stopped by the lake for a short while to feel the cold, clear water and listen as it lapped gently that sun-glinted morning.
—
It’s curious that an unresolved tedium is derisively referred to as being as “exciting as watching paint dry.” In life, unless you’re a house painter, you will have few occasions to repaint a room—when you move in or out of a home, while preparing for the birth of a child, before the arrival of new roommates, furniture, or perhaps art. Even when it’s brief, the wait for paint to dry is fraught with excitement, full of expectation for what’s next. For a painter, it's an almost obligatory resting point in an endurance performance. It's an exercise in patience, a pause for reflection before committing more pigment to a surface. Evidence of it disappears as longer stretches of time get compressed into a single, static image. At what point exactly do you realize that the paint you are watching is dry? The wait stretches on into infinity, until a single exploratory touch ends the uncertainty and you can move on. Perhaps the author of the aphorism is inadvertently commenting on the futility of knowing something just by looking at it. Long after an image is fixed, a painting will continue to invisibly cure and stabilize for weeks, months, sometimes years, while audiences look on excitedly, unaware that they too are watching paint dry.
Thank you artists and writers!
Artists:
Justin Orvis Steimer; Jasmine McGlade; Sono Kuwayama
Writers:
Taylor Bielecki; Joanna Seifter; Jason Carey-Sheppard; Jonah James Romm;
Lindsey Poremba; Kun Sok; Carl Watson; Bob Holman; Ian Cofre