"…, Iʼve laid bare the me… …plicate her every move…"
Alicia Salvadeo arrived from space 400 years ago while Ryan McGinnis was emerging from a bardo spanning prehistory & Gerard Winstanley’s birth. Simultaneously, Evan Chen appeared within a mountain fissure, seemingly spontaneously, the crack in the rockface like the armpit some say birthed the Buddha. Or was his birth more profane (miraculous to think)? There was Diderot’s Salon, then The French Revolution. The three met during Brumaire, a time of much gloom and ambivalence. At night, Alicia would signal in phosphorous to stellar civilizations from the National Convention’s former strongholds. There was something about an imperious tinge to rationalist discourse and the suspension of time giving way to the suspension of place in a prefiguration of the littoral theorized after cold war, market crashes, & the proliferation of networks in the millennium. The archives prove sparse on this interval; some suspect suppression of documents attesting to a complex agential presence in assorted flash-points: the invention of photography (and by extension of cinema), the toppling of the Vendome column, the Ern Malley hoax, the de- and re-materialization of the art object, and the various political, aesthetic, politico-aesthetic & aesthetico-political coups of Rosa Luxemburg, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michael Jackson, and Nicki Minaj. Ryan’s whereabouts are presently unknown; he was last seen waving from an anachronistic steamship, as if in ouroboric recapitulation of some wartime self-exile – impossible to take seriously now, on GoogleEarth.
Ryan McGinnis is a cute librarian.