Subject:
From: Jane Parshall
Date: March 8, 2013 9:37:53 PM PST
To: "A"
http://janeparshall.com/1/20101221/

Subject: Some questions
Date: December 18, 2010 4:23:29 AM PST
To: Jane Parshall
From: "A"
Are you a painter?
When do you start painting?
When do you stop painting?
How much of your solitary thoughts, or your fast story emails to me, or letters, are part of your painting?
Do you sketch things out first? What is the first thing you do? Where is the first located? Is there a before and an after to your paintings?
What is a "study"?
How do you know when you've finished? Is there something mystical in the way you decide, or are you tired, something physical? Or both? Or something else? Am I being too leading?
Why is your desk very messy while your paints are very organized? Or was that just because you tidied up a bit?
You've said before that you were attracted to anthropology not because you wanted to learn how to look at others, but to understand why/how you function the way you do. You've said similar things about painting. We've talked about you feeling somewhat guilty that you study your family, that you are constantly doing ethnographies of people who reside in the wings of your childhood. You bring them out, turn them around. Or you paint wallpaper. What do you think about Justine now? You always have something to say about Justine. She's the set decorator of all the important sets of your life.
Can you do commissions now?
Why are you attracted to authors'/painters'/critics' diaries/personal letters/intimate things (privileging them over their public works)? Was Susan Sontag writing for herself or for you? And yet, you've said that you want to burn your personal papers. Is this out of a need to control the you that people might read if you didn't? There was a book review by Garrison Keillor of Mark Twain's Autobiography (published recently). He seems to all but advocate the burning of papers by famous writers. (This is not me telling you I think it's a good idea, however.) I hope you don't burn your papers. Franz Kafka wanted to burn The Trial!
Do you Google yourself? When was the last time? Do you like what you find? Do you ever desire to efface what you find?
Do you plan? (Paintings, life, apartments.)
In what way(s) are your productions of visually perceived objects related (i.e., describe the relationship(s), if any, between your paintings and your videos)?
Do you plan?
Do you see things as connected before you begin, or is it after that you give them coherence, direction?
How you decide who to listen to? What criticisms to hear?
How do you change yourself or your pieces in relation to criticism?
Why did X say you should listen to some people and not others? Did he have reasons, or did he simply think that his person was enough to explain his reasons?
Perhaps this is enough for now. Is it enough?

On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Jane Parshall wrote:
From you:
Have you read Jorge Louis Borges’ very early bit of writing “The Nothingness of Personality”? He later disowned it. He has a wonderful passage bout memory and memories, remembrances, and the way he talks about it and them reminds me of you and your paintings which seem to me to be remembrances made flat and colored. “There is no whole self. He who defines personal identity as the private possession of some depository of memories is mistaken. Whoever affirms such a thing is abusing the symbol that solidifies memory in the form of an enduring and tangible granary or warehouse, whose memory is no more than the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way. Moreover, if I root personality in remembrance, what claim of ownership can be made on the elapsed instants that, because they were quotidian or stale, did not stamp us with a lasting mark? Heaped up over years, they lie buried, inaccessible to our avid longing. And the much-vaunted memory to whose ruling you made appeal, does it ever manifest all its past plenitude? Does it truly live? The sensualists and their ilk, who conceive of your personality as the sum of your successive states of mind, are similarly deceiving themselves. On closer scrutiny, their formula is no more than an ignominious circumlocution that undermines the very foundation it constructs, an acid that eats away at itself, a prattling fraud and a belabored contradiction” (translated by Esther Allen).
From me:
I took these photographs last November of my dad’s cousin’s husband Will. I’ve only met him once: I stayed at his house in Ligonier Pennsylvania; I met my father at his house and stayed there with his wife and son who’s about my age. I’d been out-of-it. I have a tendency, when I don’t have enough tangible obligations, to stew in my thoughts… to let time expand… so I was tired and out-of-it when I got there. I’d pretty much invited myself because I was taking a documentary film class and thought I’d make a documentary about the weekend (the hunt ball) but then didn’t have the wherewithal to bring my camera out except at those times that seemed designated. I like these 35 mm slides I took of Will the most. They look like they’re from the 70s. They don’t even seem to be really of him… just his physical form. He’s with his horse. I forget the horse’s name now although I have it on video somewhere. Will is a flirtatious person; I started to wonder what his romance must have been like with Pam; she has the same coloring as my father: pale hair and pale pink skin: you know, looking at her, that her family came from the British Isles but she seems bred out of the Pennsylvania landscape. She takes care of things; she’s warm. She doesn’t dress fancily unless the occasion calls for it although she does think about her appearance. When I first arrived she made me an egg. She keeps butter at room-temperature. They have dogs. They have a good sound-system too like they throw lots of parties. They played John Mayer and you could hear it in their backyard. I got into Pittsburgh very early in the morning and because I’d never been there decided to go the Warhol museum. I found a Warhol book at the giftshop to give Pam and Will to thank them for their hospitality. I took pictures after hunting was over and Will was leading his horse back to the stable. He had taken off his red coat but still had on a vest: yellow silk. He’s got white hair although his face still looks energetic and youthful enough: is a ruddy face like he enjoys his drink – and Pam enjoys her drink too. My mother didn’t come to Ligonier that weekend even though she might have; she doesn’t ride. She doesn’t like going to these kinds of parties where the focus is on relaxed merry-making; I’m more like her: we’re stiffs.
I only take pictures twice a year. They’re haphazard; anything that triggers a memory is imperfect anyway. When I got the slides back from being processed some were over-exposed and some under-exposed. When I looked at them again they hardly made me think of Will at all… I kept noticing the space between him and his horse, where they overlapped, and how light framed or manipulated them. They made me think of the separation between my activity and the realities of his life... There’s a pink bald-spot on his head (my father, to put it nicely, has thinning hair). What’s the difference between the aging body (bald-spots or whiteness of hair) and the evolution of the choices that end up simply turning into the patterns of one’s life – like how a piece of clothing like his vest takes on the contours of his body through his wearing it, or how he comes to form a relationship with his horse? I felt removed from Will when looking at the photographs: and a bit guilty like I was simplifying his experience. Ralph Lauren, through his own desires and ambitions, understood a particular American psyche: east-coast Britishism/pseudo-aristocracy/living well with good things/ having a horse equals having a ‘good-life’ crossed with country-western heroism. I never thought about the mindset of a pioneer before moving to the west-coast.