Reading the Room

by Matt Morris

Judith seized her chance and decapitated the intoxicated Holofernes. And sure, an immeasurable volume of blood ran out of his neck, but then as quickly as the skittering movements of a rodent or insect, dark metal limbs—flashing like the sword that revealed them—jutted forth from the executed corpse. Awkwardly, surreally, mechanical foot then leg, fingers then hands, arms, twisted droid body parts fell into the space before the novice assassin. Wet metal cheeks and vacant beacon eyes hovered in front of Judith’s horrified face. Just before she fainted, it spoke: ‘My name is Judith Bot-man. May I read your fortune?’ it asked while fanning its hands between them, revealing an equally soaked deck of cards.

Lately we’ve been thinking more like decks. There could be a variety of contributing symptoms for this structure: it occurs to me that should I open four more tabs in the web browser on my smartphone, there would be seventy-eight little windows peering into different corners of the Internet—equivalent to the number of cards in the popular tarot deck first released by the Rider company in 1909. It may even be that we’re in something of a tarot revival, following on the 2018 release of the massive scholarly corrective Pamela Coleman Smith, Stuart R. Kaplan, et al, which rightfully recognized the mixed race woman who actually made the paintings that comprise the so-called Rider-Waite deck. We’re reminded that even in magical and artistic circles, sexism, racism, and material inequities politicize our traditions and histories—overdue reckonings for justice pile up even around mystics and the other typically socially progressive.

Nowadays we appear to be awash in a kind of New Age Capitalism: dressed in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s tarot-themed haute couture for Dior’s Spring 2021 collection; algorithmically tailored astrological advice issues from popular phone apps like Co-Star and Chani (the latter named after queer political activist and astrologer to the celebrity set Chani Nicholas); boutique chains like Anthropologie and CB2 have begun to peddle of crystal-based spiritualism-cum-décor and, yes, designer tarot decks.

When I speculate at what might be the structural indicators for this hybrid, mutated latter day mysticism with its archetypes, with its Major and Minor Arcana, I wonder if there’s a longing for the security of more or less rigid rules, roles, and iconography in counterposition to the pernicious absolute abstraction of alt-right chaotics and the disorder of white supremacist insurrection. The most recent incarnations of fascism have been far from clearly delineated; in fact, evil per se can be found propagating through cascades of paranoia, delusion, and

misinformation—an optics of obscurity, the worst kinds of shadow work, abjection, endless, formless. The desire to be ruled (by The Emperor, say, or The Hierophant, or The High Priestess) and the allure for consistent, reliable compositions (a three card draw or a Celtic Cross spread, for example) may be understandable.

But what of a deck thinking that surpasses these traditional formats, preferring—as in Judith Brotman’s artistic practice—a mutable composite in which we find imbricated a secular approach to the tension between aesthetics and ethics, an intelligentsia of the deconstructive, a card/s carrying contribution to neo-dada literati discourses that aim to fail to limit or contain eroticism, kinship, surface, depth, and a wry turn of affect? If we accept a post-atomic conviction that there is, in fact, no external means of measurement, no inherent meaningfulness, no order or value or fixed positions except those that are agreed upon, then there stretches an endless expanse of battlefield between the esoteric guidelines of yore and an expansive, present-day matrix of possibilities for the production of meaning that runs through not only bespoke, idiosyncratic spiritualism but also the habits of daily life and, most pertinent to my considerations here, the intrepid problem solving of the artist’s studio.

Extrapolating the capacity for meaning from deck thinking, one might set an endless playlist on Spotify to the “shuffle” function, and take the resultant sequence of songs as a starting place to reflect on the day. It could be the random order in which books are reshelved at one’s apartment, or blindly selecting tubes of paint for mixing, or entering an exhibition backwards and allowing the succession of artworks on display to serve as magical prompts for organizing a type of knowledge. The crucial bit of preserved methodology is a humanist capacity for association—not just taking apart but also bringing together, however unlikely. In other words, tarot—whether taken literally as a deck of archetypal indicators or as a kind of randomizer from which associative definition is articulated—reasserts itself in our time as a strategic anachronism resistant to advanced epistemological technologies. Withholding conclusive positions on algorithmic nets, native advertising, crypto, dark webs, machine learning, and the lengths to which corporate identities will go to profit from artificial intelligence, tarot, broadly speaking, constitutes a more rudimentary learning system, one that does not distinguish between knowledge, meaning, and fundamental states of being.

It is on the basis of a logic that would have literacy as a totally redefining condition for being that I apprehend the assemblages, collages, procedures, and speech acts comprising Judith Brotman’s art practice. In precisely the historical moment when points of purveyance as disparate as, say, libraries, art supply stores, and pharmacies appear to approach collapse into a singular, monopolizing digital marketplace (Amazon or whatever predator supplants it), Brotman’s work serves to bookend the arc by which the printing press radically reoriented the distribution of knowledge. The quandary of whether text is a mortal or immortal thing gapes open with uncertainty.

Be it autopsy or outpatient surgery, a primal scene in the goings on of Brotman’s work is an operation performed on a book. Pages excised, snippets, clippings, rearrangements: sentences and sentiments are broken into pieces, all raw edges longing to be recontextualized. This is

cerebral activity made physical—a demonstration of the ways that the bibliographic record of one’s life serves as self portraiture. We are so achingly legible in the summation of what we read. I read a lecture of Lacan’s after breakfast. I listen to audiobooks of Sarah Waters’ novels in the studio and listen to Agatha Christie novels when I sleep. In the afternoon, I pick up an issue of Town and Country magazine to peruse. Later on, I catch up on the past few months of X-Men comic books. By bedtime, I’ve marked out a highly personal, intertextual pathway, as unique as a fingerprint.

The conceptual leap, one that we may disagree about, is that these texts aren’t simply a reflection of the material of who I am, but rather language and body are inextricable from one another, are, finally, really, one and the same material. Put simply: corpus.

Just as the tarot, one of the applied apparatuses used to organize Judith Brotman’s current projects, treats the epistemological, semiotic, and ontological as coextensive, mutually constituted, in the Brotman oeuvre, Mary Shelley, Doctor Frankenstein, and the creature are all one and the same. A confluence of metaphysical subject-object relations swirl around the site at which the good doctor operates upon herself: a book page inlaid serves as a skin graft; metallic paillettes in assortments of garish hues inlaid, beading inlaid, woven threads inlaid into open, flayed zones on the body. Across individual collage works, Brotman has pieced together book pages, photographic elements, and little pieces of fancy papers—ones embossed with patterns, coated in glitter, or delicately altered with blooms of spray paint. Built upon these composite surfaces are glimmering webs of additional ornamentation that array sequins, charms, and clots of colored string. The ongoing curiosity about ornamentation is that (to me) its accumulation always belies even more elaborate complexity running deep into an underlying superstructure. In the case of Brotman’s newest works, encrusted costume jewels pile along whatever fissures follow along her various-coming togethers and coming-aparts. The deck results from the dismantling of codexes; the deaths of many authors—or at least the strategic dismemberments of their output—serve the attempts she makes to be resurrected from rearranged fragments, shuffled like a deck. The deconstructive impulse on display in Brotman’s work is always anticipatory of a later incorporative turn, where excesses are compiled into a continuous corporeal form: patchwork bodies, mismatched decks, excerpts having exited now entering into new wholenesses.

For Okay Is the New Fabulous, Brotman has buried bodies inside bodies. Mangled, reposed, ravished, or recollected (and often all of these), family members and friends—Judith’s kin—have been mythologized in a mire of paper goods and fabric store notions, transfigured from their photographic references into ambivalent monstrosities who roam through a strung together narrative variously penned by James Baldwin, Anne Frank, Julia Child, bell hooks, Haruki Murakami, David Sedaris, Rebecca Solnit, Sigmund Freud, Homer, and many, many others gathered in Brotman’s particular bibliographic records. Often in the artist’s manipulations, the transformation from family snapshot into a population of her own exquisitely magical major and minor arcana begins at the eyes—cyclops, blind oracles, River Styx riders, and the mineralic stares of Medusa’s opponents are all conjured in collages such as The Fulsome Late Bloomer or The Most Least Best and Confused. Elsewhere, as in The Atonement, limbs are amputated

and replaced with glinting appendages. In fact, close inspection reveals that this project not only draws together occult histories and the annals of autobiography, but in fact, broken bodies are mended with mechanical parts, with the manufactured and the deliberately, contemplatively, technological. Within the cosmology of Brotman’s deck, long-held symbolic archetypes and literary heroes who have vacated their thrones are succeeded by a rabble of paper doll cyborgs, a conspiracy attempting to reconcile the pertinent vestiges of civilization with the advent of advanced technologies by which power will circulate in a fast approaching hereafter. Sequins and surgical sutures mark out breaches between the pressures of remembered pasts and the purchase of possible futures stretching forward beyond the length of these books or the hardened resolve of their back covers. In other words, each of the collaged works that Brotman has amassed into this epistemological tool serve as a radical attempt at presentness, grasping onto a continuum of what has lived and since become lost along with emergent conditions for how life will be in the moments directly after this one.

Codex, corpus, cyborg: inclusive of the earnest epistles Brotman and I have exchanged surrounding this project, the digital doppelgangers that have been sent my way to demonstrate developments in the ways that her collage vocabulary has come to draw from photos gathered from social media, cloud storage, MP3s, and the various avatars made to carry our artistic labors across literal and virtual landscapes, these bodily conglomerations shuffle through literal and virtual rooms, making the locus at which the most essential aspect of an artwork resides even less clear than usual. Taking up deck thinking as an organizing principle, Brotman’s tender composite sheets underscore qualities of both dispersal and interdependence that characterize an uneasy carriage of what has been into some generative eventuality.

Cutting across cliches and outmoded diagnostics of mad scientist or hysterical woman, Brotman works toward a progressive posthumanism that questions the efficacy of bounded, discrete autonomy, instead looking forward toward shared, blended amorphous states—bodies having literally swapped fragments of one another in a piecework of collectivity. Hers is a prophecy whereby the ecology of the commons is embodied in something more abstracted than individual personhood: the population of a deck.

I don’t want to be cavalier about the mutilations that precipitate such a future. These cuts cut deeply. The cards recollect what it was like to have been bound into a spine with all that spines are meant to afford in terms of stability, upright fortitude, courage to continue the reading. To be spineless indicates the close range destructive transformation of a codex liberated into pages— pages of wands, of pentacles, of swords, and of cups—dispersed in multidirectional, simultaneous quests; with this in mind, the longstanding association of spinelessness with cowardice might be interrogated. This imposed invertebrate condition initiates the shift toward cyborg partiality, repair, and a powerful potential for rethinking being outright. Imagine a library remixed into soothsaying cybernetic coelenterata. A colony of coral, a jellyfish literary circle, a book club of historiographical sponges. Who among us can survive an introspective retrospective? What body won’t tear apart under the pressures of holding space for the present between where it has been and where it is headed? Reading into the past is the first step in telling the future.

Queen of cups and queer crustacean that I am, I can contribute a memory to this mindful, burgeoning ecosystem. These projects—Judith Brotman’s altered book pages and the accompanying recording of her speaking—proceed from an earlier collaborative, process-based period of her practice wherein a request was issued to me and others in her community that we select a text to read to her aloud. In my case, she visited my home, and amid beams of afternoon sunshine I read the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Itself an already elegant if not brutally temporal text, spoken into space was transfixing, a shared experience that truly lived in its own present. I feel fortunate to have been in this arrangement of body, book, voice, attention, time, and light. Indeed, these are the same qualities that Brotman transposes into the collages she makes—so many she could fill a library.

We are held together in a stack. We are shuffled so as to disrupt the fixity of any hierarchies and the systems of power that might be correlated to them. The reader may have noticed how many corners of these arguments dip into the unknown: fascism, the central features of an artwork, and the lifespan of a text are all brought into doubt. Candidly, we don’t yet know how or what we will be, nor the implications of those future states. If there’s an emanant truth that Brotman’s tarot tells, it’s that we will have to release our hold on any prior states before what is ahead of us will come into focus. Total, top down reorganization. Upheaval, body swapping, body snatching, body con/sciousness, forensics, derangement, book burning, book cutting, book blooming, wreckage, sentient cyborgian stenographers annotating only what comes next. When the time comes, our eyes will go metallic and reflective and festive; we will sport antlers of negative space and brocade fish tails; we will be scylla; we will be hydra; we’ll be pinheads and geeks and lobster girls and solid light holograms and computer viruses; foreskins, fins, fetishes, and fever dreams will fall out of newly open wounds, from within severed necks, out from behind pleated pink silk sashes; we will be draped in pearls; we will swim among the corals; we will read backward as well as forward, in fact in any direction we choose—multi-axis literacy. When libraries burn, we will smuggle books away page by page. When we have become fully predictable by the algorithm, all that will be left to do is to become a kind of latent embroidery within the metadata, spreading in stitches and ribbons so that the known is overwritten with as of yet unforeseen circumstances. In the airless, sightless space of a power vacuum, where loss is endless and total, the act of greatest resistance is for me to turn to face you and whisper, “You mean something to me...”

“I’ll show you...”

“Just draw a card.”

Matt Morris is an artist, perfumer, and writer based in Chicago. Morris has presented artwork nationally and internationally in Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Cincinnati, OH; Portland, OR; Austin, TX; Milwaukee, WI; Berlin, Germany; Aalst, Belgium; Skive, Denmark; and elsewhere. Morris’ writing appears in anthologies from Routledge and De Gruyter, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues, artist monographs, and publications including Artforum.com, Flash Art, Fragrantica, and X-TRA. Morris is a transplant from southern Louisiana who holds a BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati and earned an MFA in Art Theory + Practice from Northwestern University, as well as a Certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies. In 2017 Morris earned a Certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD. Morris is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Works by Judith Brotman