To the pulse of Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, says our moral philosopher: “I have working-class values, so I lack humor, but that permits the rejection of essay narratives with a beginning, middle, and end.” (1)
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If I’m honest these fragments aren’t really about Trisha Donnelly—at least not anymore. Martin Herbert saw The Redwood and The Raven in the ’00s and wrote down everything there is in the ’10s. For me, the idea of wanting more even though it would equate to less is enough, or Everything. I’ve no interest in Jerry Saltz’s “aesthetic heart.” It’s two-faced, no matter which way you look at it. Besides, I’ve already deleted most of what I’ve tried to write about her. Trisha Donnelly is taciturn and unamenable to interpretation. From what I can tell, an artist whose greatest attribute is that she avoids resolution.
I’d like to try to figure out what I saw in Donnelly, because she was my siren call to JSF, though I have just moved to the city, and like it was in the wake of Ulrike Ottinger’s film Ticket of No Return, will drink just about anything. In the English translation of Lisa Long’s exhibition text I read about David Howes and Empire of the Senses, the sociologist’s breakdown of perception, which questions the established hierarchy of sight over the other senses, and latched on quickly. It resembled the “haptic” or “synaesthetic” label I’d seen elsewhere, with Suzanne Cotter, and John Miller, who said: “Seeing is not necessarily believing.” Her 2002 Casey Kaplan show apparently marked by baffles and faints. But in the following days and weeks I have succumb to something else, an offshoot of the original mise-en-scène.
Earlier in the year, I’d been walking around an artist’s studio eating Snack Day pretzel slims, drinking expensive English tea, making covenants with the idea that I liked nothing in the former classroom as much as the books and papers earmarked for me to read, and the idea of it all coming together; the roter Faden, like turning a key. I wasn’t stymied in his gab or the vacillating objects I’d already snapped a few sticks over. He talked to me about storytelling and abstraction trying to decipher the charade. But I couldn’t let go of the first idea that appeared to permit decryption.
I’m writing about this catastrophic preoccupation with piecing together a theory because starting now, I’m trying to think of a way out of simplified, mood board-friendly conclusions, and because two seconds into meeting Donnelly, I lost my origins.
After Images
Trisha Donnelly is quietly affected but also commanding, which means sometimes there’s the most profound or gorgeous denouement, and sometimes I’d like to take up something else with my afternoon. An untitled video resembling static stinks of injustice, an uncooperative artist I can’t get to know. I read John Miller say Donnelly took an oath to Bas Jan Ader’s paragon of incommunicability. So any incredulity, I know, is not just my own.
But everything in her oeuvre portends to portent, to something gone or about to be; a prèsage, an approach to image-making that circulates on the notion, an accurate one, that we have an aversion to things we don’t understand or can’t easily consume.
Illegibility is exalted over and over again, a fervour for saying no, a defiant chord that underscores her every decision. Her putative Napoleonic stunt is an invisible theatre. Tell Them I Said No, the title of Martin Herbert’s book, comes from the response given to him when he requested an interview with Donnelly. And since she’s asked staff members at JSF not to share documentation of her work, it’s not a stretch to imagine that the same thing Hans-Christian Dany and Valérie Knoll wrote about Marcel Duchamp in their book No Dandy, No Fun could be said about Donnelly: the unanswered questions were part of the charming effects of the game, which seduced others into playing it.
“let the little birds have a pee.”
The great crisis that set the stage for artists like Trisha Donnelly had already begun in the last century. A growing dissatisfaction among those who realised they didn’t owe anything to the public led to a heightened determination not to fulfil anyone’s expectations, and to a refusal to be the person behind the work. (2)
Raymond Roussel, the dandyish son of a wealthy Paris stockbroker, developed fantastical stories out of found sentences. The sting of La Doublure’s received indifference spawned a new way of making work, he called it “prospecting.” Back then, a risky zone to enter. Reclining on a red-eye like the go-getter he was, John Ashbery, a fan, said: “What he leaves us with is a body of work that is like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace.”
One person who sensed which doors had opened was Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp attended Roussel’s Impressions d’Afrique at the theatre, and was one of three people not inclined to ask the clerk for a refund. He cited it as the main origin of Le Grand Verre, no longer afraid of being misunderstood.
In the years before he worked on the idea of the readymade, Duchamp read The Right to Be Lazy, a critique of work and its centrality in society by Cuban-born French philosopher, son-in-law of Karl Marx, Paul Lafargue, and devised a plan to open a hospice des paresseux. Although the plan was never realised, it was ironic evidence of his dissatisfaction, and maybe a sincerity that teaches us to negotiate and reflect on our own position. To read Dany and Knoll, because they say it better: “Duchamp’s resolutely deadpan manner ensured he remained inscrutable to those who sought meaning in or explanation for his output. If the chatter caused by his secretiveness turned to murmuring, he would say: “let the little birds have a pee.” This was not meant disparagingly: he liked birds, especially parrots, as he did the call of nature and having a laugh. What lay behind it was a determination never to aggressively impose his own views.”
Leipziger Straße
In one of those restless states, speeding up, and tearing down Leipziger Straße with growing impatience, my friend tells me about the time she saw Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz in 2022, coaxed by one of her students. It was a brief encounter. She was drawn in through the Rorschach tests, but soon started to have doubts about the show. “No one was interested in the work. No one knew what was going on.” Donnelly, in Rousselian fashion, didn’t show. “She knows about the power differential in refusal.”
She’d been drinking and said to me: “I didn’t want to join the cult.”
(1) Estelle Hoy, “I Always Had the Nerve to Do Things in Secret: Sub-Rosa Retrospectives”, in saké blue (Paris: After 8 Books, 2024).
(2) Hans-Christian Dany and Valérie Knoll, No Dandy, No Fun (London: Sternberg Press, 2023).
This text is published on the occasion of After Images at Julia Stoscheck Foundation, Berlin, 2024-25.
Cover image: Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2022. RC print, 35.5 x 27.9 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin.
Trisha Donnelly (b. 1974) was born in San Francisco and currently lives and works in New York.
Robert Frost is a writer, editor of émergent, and host of Divine Transportations.
