IN AN INTERVIEW conducted in 1966, shortly after the opening of a retrospective of his work at the Tate Gallery, Marcel Duchamp makes a strange pronouncement. By that time Duchamp had become an American citizen and was living in New York. His interlocutor, Pierre Cabanne, asks him what he does when he visits Paris. “I don’t go out very much,” Duchamp admits. “I don’t like going out so much. Obviously I have relatives. My wife has a married daughter in Paris, whom we see often. . . . There is no one I see in a more or less official capacity, or to discuss certain questions. I really have the life of a restaurant waiter.” Or, in French, “J’ai vraiment une vie de garçon de café.”
On YouTube, you can watch a video of a talk recorded at the Venetian headquarters of the Fondazione Prada in 2021. Gathered in the Fondazione’s eighteenth-century palazzo are Swiss artist Peter Fischli, curator Eva Fabbris, and artist, writer, and gallerist John Kelsey. Kelsey perches tightly on a chair, his expression hidden by a microphone held across his face. He doesn’t say much, deferring instead to the relaxed and voluble Fischli. At one point, Fabbris asks Kelsey how he feels being in the space. “Well,” he begins, hesitating. “The first time I encountered the art world was as a waiter in a restaurant. So to me a painter was someone that you poured wine for.” “I never went to art school, so I don’t have any training,” he continues. “I’ve always felt like a bit of an imposter, and some kind of servant in relation to art, maybe. Even writing is somehow serving the machine of art, or the economy of art. So there’s always a bit of that.”
There are a few possibilities here. One is that Kelsey and Duchamp independently hit on the same metaphor, which presents the artist-critic as a service worker whose compulsory participation in wage labor is reimagined as a sacrifice freely given to culture’s “machine.” In this scenario Kelsey isn’t parroting Duchamp but speaking innocently from his own experience, which attracts sympathy with its aw-shucks flashback to Kelsey as a combination of drudge and art-world altar boy. There is also a possibility—call it karmic, or perhaps dialectical—that Kelsey incarnated in the 1980s what Duchamp could only anticipate in the 1960s, a life in which art and commerce would so completely entwine that the difference between the restaurant, the gallery, the studio, and the auction house might all but collapse, and the boundary between artist and worker dissolve.
What I think most likely is that Kelsey, whose work and thought are defined by an obsessional interest in repetition, appropriation, seriality, mimesis, parody or burlesque, copying, restatement, and trolling, is offering the words of a master (Duchamp) up to an audience not likely to know where they came from. It’s a characteristic maneuver: the simultaneous exhibition and concealment of a vast, even encyclopedic body of art-historical knowledge funneled into a homely image or allegory that hints—sometimes pointedly, other times languidly—at anti-capitalist critique. Later in that same talk, he describes making paintings with a Roomba vacuum cleaner. “We called them seascapes, I’m trying to remember why. . . . Oh, because we were looking at [J. M. W.] Turner a lot.” “The idea,” Kelsey explains, “was to use a robot to translate Turner’s translation of nature into a kind of zombie formalist product.” “Yeah,” he deadpans. “That was great.”
With artist Emily Sundblad, Kelsey is the cofounder and codirector of Reena Spaulings Fine Art, a gallery with locations in New York City and Los Angeles. A member of the artists’ collective Bernadette Corporation, he is also a prolific critic who wrote regularly for Artforum until 2023, when many writers began boycotting that publication for its firing of editor-in-chief David Velasco; in 2020, some of his essays were published by Sternberg Press as Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art. He has a longstanding relationship with Semiotext(e), run by Chris Kraus and Hedi El Kholti, which put out Bernadette Corporation’s collectively authored novel Reena Spaulings (2005) as well as Kelsey’s Ditch Plains (2013), a sci-fi text written to accompany the German artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz’s twenty-nine-minute film of the same name. In 2008, Semiotext(e) published Kelsey’s translation of All the King’s Horses, a mordant novel by the Situationist Michèle Bernstein (first wife of the Situationist International’s most prominent member, Guy Debord).
The top note of Kelsey’s work, both as an artist and as a critic, is neutrality. Rich Texts even takes an epigraph from Roland Barthes’s unfinished lectures collected in The Neutral, in which Barthes expresses his desire for a style that might “disseminate intelligent stuff, as if between the lines . . . of a flat, dumb (verbal) fabric.” Kelsey shies away from personal judgments and, more pertinently, from judgments of value in his writing, attempting to reflect what he takes to be the grand theme of contemporary art: “an encounter with our own absence in the midst of the very activities we manage and monitor.” An artist like Wade Guyton all but removes his body from the scene of aesthetic production by printing his paintings out on Epson inkjet printers; Kelsey, for his part, aggressively quarantines his personality, indeed his whole identity, as a subject or a being with a unique consciousness and set of experiences, from his artistic and curatorial projects and from his own prose. When he uses the first person, it is almost always the first-person plural.
Like Barthes, he seems to believe that this is political gesture. Under what Kelsey calls “spectacular democratic capitalism,” “the more individual we make ourselves, the more alike we become—not someone in particular, just like.” To retreat from the pressure to appear in public as a specific person, to submerge our identity in collective or corporate entities (as in “Bernadette Corporation”) is to offer some measure of resistance. Or, since resistance is a heroic notion, tightly bound to fantasies of singular personhood, we might say that Kelsey does not so much resist spectacular democratic capitalism as mimic in order to subvert its logic. He turns himself into a nobody, a servant whose labor is an anachronism: pouring wine for artists is not toiling in the factory, and a curator is not an arms dealer. The position Kelsey imagines for himself is at once abject and courtly, as if he were permanently displaced, or displacing himself, from any one social, economic, or ideological sphere.
In an anonymous essay published in the British magazine Mute in 2013, Kelsey is accused of turning his “sober indifference” into a “sagacious business model,” effectively commodifying his own self-negation. But this is to mistake the emotional resonance as well as the historical specificity of “the John Kelsey personality.” Many of the essays in Rich Text express ideas that wouldn’t be out of place in Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794), in which Schiller bemoans the over-specialization and fragmentation of human activity caused by the division of labor and urges us to reclaim our Spieltrieb (“play drive”), our capacity to take a soul-regenerating pleasure in things that have no quantifiable value or purpose. Kelsey’s catalogue essay on the German painter Charline von Heyl similarly closes by suggesting that “the question of happiness,” for painting, “is a question of dislocating painting’s means from its ends, its gestures away from any efficient or programmatic result.” “Means without ends,” a phrase borrowed from Giorgio Agamben, becomes Kelsey’s rallying cry, muted but no less emphatic.
This is all to say that Kelsey is, at heart, a Romantic, but an injured and grudging one, a twenty-first-century Heinrich von Kleist or Comte de Lautréamont. He loathes the conscription of art into global capital but also takes it to be inevitable and irreversible; he assumes that no one’s hands are clean, least of all his own, and he takes sentimentality to be essentially unethical. Nonetheless, he has his ideals. Some of Reena Spaulings’s best recent shows—with work by El Kholti, Patricia L. Boyd, and Marika Thunder—push through irony, citation, satire, and even kitsch to produce a genuine exhilaration in the encounter with the work of art as an act, however limited, contingent, and frail, of embodied freedom. As Kleist puts it in his 1810 essay “On the Marionette Theater,” grace, or beauty emancipated from use, “returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity,” and the artist seems to have achieved a state where she “either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness.” “We must eat again,” Kleist insists, “of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence”; we must exhaust ourselves to be made new.
These principles of repetition and return, of going forward to go backward and going backward to come to the end, are tenderly explored in I Forget, a long poem published by Semiotext(e) in its pamphlets series. An homage of sorts to Joe Brainard’s beloved 1975 book I Remember, Kelsey’s I Forget inverts its mnemonic formula, which has Brainard writing hundreds of short sentences or miniature paragraphs beginning with that titular phrase. “I remember when polio was the worst thing in the world,” Brainard says. “I remember pink dress shirts. And bolo ties.” While not all the vignettes in I Remember hearken directly back to mid-century America from the jaundiced perspective of the 1970s, the book nonetheless reads as an elegy for an artificially innocent era punctuated by world events: “I remember when I was very young a photograph in Life magazine of a man running down the street naked on fire”; “I remember ‘Korea.’”
“Repetition,” Kelsey writes in an essay on Richard Prince, “can be a way of keeping [a] moment open.” In I Remember, it is an algorithmic formula that fashions the self by iterating its memories and experiences. In contrast to the linear narrative of a standard biography, Brainard’s memoir is made of fragments and parts, hints and intuitions. The book implies history as opposed to reporting it, a strategy that runs parallel to Brainard’s own slow, covert discovery that he is gay. As in the poetry of Brainard’s contemporary and friend Frank O’Hara, I Remember registers queerness as a mood or tone, cut free from description or self-disclosure and embedded instead in style. Each “I remember” thus registers the possibility of a self, and a sexuality, that is “open” in the sense of unresolved and perpetually emergent, discovering itself as if for the first time.
On first pass, you might think that Kelsey’s “I forget” is simply the glum, heterosexual flip side of Brainard’s essentially optimistic “I remember.” For one thing, it is the memoir of a Gen-Xer, and Gen-Xers are a saturnine bunch. “I forget sinkholes and spinning wheels,” Kelsey begins, gingerly donning the first person. “I forget cuff links, Cat’s Cradle, and electric knives.” Into Brainard’s rose-tinted cache of American recollections Kelsey tips acerbic snapshots taken from the long neoliberal period: he forgets, for example, Conan the Barbarian, fax machines, Danceteria, Wite-Out, and jumbo shrimp. But Kelsey’s forgetfulness, his impulse to relinquish or cancel experience, is not just a matter of sensibility. It’s a matter of technology. At no time in history have we been able to forget so many things. Do you remember phone numbers, or directions? Kelsey doesn’t:
I forget all the phone numbers I have stored in my phone. I no longer bother trying to remember the numbers. And if I don’t remember a number in the first place, I guess I’m not forgetting it. This also goes for experiences, people, and places remembered by my phone. The phone reminds me what happened and I don’t forget it because it wasn’t me who remembered. It never happened? I think it did though. Then something else happened. When the smart phone happened, forgetting changed.
The passage echoes Marshall McLuhan’s memorable (ha!) assertion that every technology is at once an extension and an amputation of our capacities. The smart phone gives us access to an unimaginable store of information. It allows us to hold thousands of books, songs, and images in the palm of our hand. It tells us the fastest way to get to the airport, or home. But it also erases the intimacy of memory, the pleasure of knowing your best friend’s number by heart, or of getting lost in a foreign city. At one point, Kelsey tells a story about driving through upstate New York to meet up with a woman named Ida, “without GPS.” His car falls into a ditch, and he walks down “a freezing, dark road looking for a phone or someone to help.” Eventually he spots light coming from a window in the distance. “I knocked. The door opened and it was Ida.” It is the kind of story we don’t tell anymore.
I Forget, then, allows Kelsey to stage one of those encounters with our own absence “in the midst of the very activities we manage and monitor”—for what do we manage and monitor more than our phones? Because it seemingly allows us to recover anything, the phone also severs us from our full range of cognitive capabilities. It also severs us, whether we’d like to admit it or not, from a certain degree of emotional reality or presence even as it tends to amplify our ugly feelings. “I forgot what I texted you but I really don’t want to look,” Kelsey pleads, even as a lover sends “screenshot[s] or quote[s] my texts out of context, sending them back weeks later as proof, an accusing memory.” “Words no longer disappear into thin air and you can’t even burn them,” but this disturbing sense of permanence is matched by a new fragility in our relationships, an inability to encounter another person in real time, without the armor or bludgeon of a screen.
Kelsey’s most marked departure from the blueprint of I Remember is his apostrophic address to some “you,” who, based on memories Kelsey says he can’t recall, seems be his partner in a doomed relationship that may be still ongoing, if only because it so stubbornly rises up to insist on being forgotten. The tone of these addresses is strikingly pure and direct, as Kelsey forgoes his usual remoteness to offer stark, searching confessions of personal inadequacy and pain. “I forget you need to feel safe, that you need a solution. You forget that I need that too.” Here, another person is, however briefly, allowed to take the helm of the operation called forgetting, so that she and Kelsey mirror each other even as they slip further apart. The tone is desolate, stiffening just slightly around the therapy-speak of “feel safe,” not to reject the sentiment but perhaps to mourn the reduction of vast and unruly human emotions to phrases that border on cliché. “When we fight,” he says, “it’s you forget versus I forget,” a mutual erosion of one person by another under the pressures of a great but frustrated love.
Remembering offers to put us back together, to re-member and re-assemble us even against the attritive onslaught of time. Forgetting would seem to do the opposite, to mangle or disfigure our identity by stripping it of its experiences. This is the forgetting of dementia, which Kelsey alludes to in a passage that describes his father’s “unfocused eyes and hanging mouth,” “his memory, his mind” beginning to liquefy. But in the lyrical love story that weaves in and out of Kelsey’s catalogue of lost things, we glimpse another forgetting, the kind that clears the way for its familiar cognate, forgiveness. “Forgive and forget” is another cliché, but, like Kleist’s idea of a consciousness that is either absent or infinite, it points toward the ideal of a second innocence, rigorous in its negation of a bruising past. Such an innocence is not irrational, or pathological, but bold. It does remember, but it does not build a new body from old wounds. It sets us walking down a dark road with only one thing to be sure of: that somewhere the light is on, and someone is looking for us, still.
Anahid Nersessian is a writer living in Los Angeles and Professor of English at UCLA.