Speed of Life

Gregg Chadwick To Talk About Trees 24" x 18" oil on linen 2012 What Kind of Times Are These BY  ADRIENNE RICH There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at...

Jenny Holzer’s "For the Guggenheim" projected the words of Wislawa Szymborska on the museum’s outdoor facade. (2008) photo courtesy of Lili Holzer-Glier Clouds I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds— a split second’s enough … for them to start being something else. Their trademark: they don’t repeat a single shape, shade, pose, arrangement. Unburdened by memory of any kind, they float easily over the facts. What on earth could they bear witness to? They scatter whenever something happens. Compared to clouds, life rests on solid ground, practically permanent, almost eternal. Next to clouds even a stone seems like a brother, someone you can trust, while they’re just distant, flighty cousins. Let people exist if they want, and then die, one after another: clouds simply don’t care what they’re up to down there. And so their haughty fleet cruises smoothly over your whole life and mine, still incomplete. They aren’t obliged to vanish when we’re go...