Real Family Is Difficult

 

Trisha Low focuses on the family in a new post for SFMoma's Open Space, writing on the issues of the day: Conceptualism as it's seen and branded, the Mongrel Coalition, Kenny Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, and the complications therein politically and personally for someone stranded somewhere between camps. An excerpt:

Real family is difficult for me, so I’ve chosen my family. And over the years, Holly and Joey, and other writers who feel the same and make work that is weird and ugly and unfit: Steve and Josef and Diana and Rob and Kim; Lanny and Gordon and Chris and so many more, they became chosen family too. I don’t know what Conceptualism means any more; if it an aesthetic practice, even a lineage. Should it be assigned to me or my peers? I might not have any say in this, but I do know that I will never disavow my chosen family. I will yell at them for the fucked up thing they did or wrote or said; have yelled at them for the fucked up things they’ve done or wrote or said; know that they might betray me and I them; that we’ll write weird poems about sex or not having sex; about burning cop cars, or 9/11 or Black Flag together or apart; but I will never disavow them.

It doesn’t really matter. We might not even identify that way, but to the rest of the world, we’re just a bunch of undifferentiated Conceptualists. To other people, we’re just another part of a machine they can recognize with utter clarity. A brand might be something that distinguishes a product, but it is also about consumption. It devours, it buys up the market so no one can see autonomy of objects. But I hate this metaphor. Not one of my freak family makes work in the same way anyway. I’m sitting here writing a personal essay, for fuck’s sake. In Joey’s words, “I would hate it, but it’s you, so I guess I’ll read it.” I guess it just looks different from the outside.

Another word for brand is legacy. Legacy is something that the head of a family is obligated to create and maintain, a title under which everything that’s descended from it has to be marked. Sometimes it just feels like that Conceptualism, the brand (and its family reputation), plastered all over the front page of the newspaper or Facebook or Twitter, just lets it win again.

I heard a rumor that Kenny was saying how no one makes a good book before they’re 25, someone raises me as a counter-example and he says that I would never have made that book if not for that fact that he taught me how.

I’m at a conference and Vanessa teases me in her response to my paper about personifying Bourdieu’s “youngest” and later gives me a snickerdoodle, smiling wryly, saying, “let it never be said that I did not care for the youth.” I’m hungry so I think it’s kind, that there’s some self-deprecation in the condescension.

I’m mad about these things too.

Later, Low shares her mad, for those of us paying attention:

I’m so mad. I’m mad because no one in my chosen freak family will say anything about this publicly because they’re too anxious about their position as white, or straight, or whatever, when I feel I’ve been pulling all this weight. I’m mad because people of color are fighting each other in ways that come only at a cost to them; for white poets, it’s just a matter of watching and clicking, the cheapest kind of support. I’m mad at a man of color for leveraging sexist, gendered language against a supporter of the Mongrel Coalition just to prove his point. I’m mad at the Mongrel Coalition for attacking more people of color and queer women than straight white men. I’m mad at Kenny and Vanessa for making some racist poems that aren’t even good art, I’m even madder that they don’t understand that they have to be accountable for the hurt they’ve caused and that sometimes, you just have to say you’re wrong. I’m mad that I have to take a side just because someone else built the wall for me in the first place and I’m even madder that I have to write this because I feel forced to publicly qualify why I just don’t believe it’s as simple as that. I’m mad at the white people who are lazy readers and thinkers and refusing to engage issues of race and aesthetics in more complex or complicated or negative ways because the truth is they just don’t have to think about it. I’m mad that racism in poetry seems like it’s currently being reduced to a simple matter of one aesthetic movement, a handful of white writers, and other persons of color who might politically or aesthetically disagree with the Mongrel Coalition. I’m mad at myself that I feel, still, indebted or grateful, to anything or anyone. I am so mad, but I don’t hate anybody; not one bit, except for maybe myself.

Read all of "On Being-Hated: Conceptualism, the Mongrel Coalition, the House That Built Me" at Open Space.