in response_Emma Stern
Revolver
REVOLVER
My first love, Greg, was a real piece of shit. It wasn’t that he lit my hair on fire once (“as a joke”), or that more than once, in the heat of an argument, emptied a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on my head. It wasn’t that his only prized possession was a yard-sale sitar, or that the only thing he knew how to play on it was covers of George Harrison’s parts on the Beatles’ Revolver. It wasn’t even that he got himself addicted to heroin behind my back, and I, too young and naive at the time to recognize the obvious symptoms of his condition, blamed myself when suddenly he couldn’t get his dick hard anymore. No, all of that is forgivable, I think, if you really, really love someone. The reason he’s a piece of shit, and the thing that’s unforgivable (this coming from me, who could forgive anyone for anything if I really, really love them), is that he put the idea in my head that one day I would run out of ideas.
He got me believing that creativity was limited, meaning zero-sum, meaning that every person had some predetermined, fixed number of so-called “good ideas”, and when you ran out, when they were all used up, you were stuck with the bad ones, or with none at all. “So you need to use them sparingly,” Greg told me, “You don’t know how many more you’ve got.” And I believed him, because I really, really loved him, and because I’d also gotten it into my head that every person also only had a fixed number of lovers allotted to them in life and so I was, of course, using those sparingly as well.
I was in art school while I was in love with Greg, and started struggling with my assignments because I didn’t want to use any of my Good Ideas on them (because art school wasn’t real life, and didn’t deserve real art). I remember sometimes I’d be walking outside somewhere, just letting my mind wander, and I’d feel an idea coming on, that bit of warmth and buzzing at the top of my head and behind my ears when you know it’s gonna be a good one, and I’d try to block it before it set in, to reverse its onset, to eject it before it could be digested. A spiritual bulimia, if you will, denying myself any Good Ideas until I was out of art school, until I was a Real Artist.
This mindset persisted for years even after I graduated from art school, and graduated from Greg, until by chance one day I met a Real Artist. I’d wandered into his ground floor Williamsburg studio one day because he always had the door wide open, and I asked if I could work for him for free. He’d shrugged and said okay.
It worked out great because it had never occurred to me that I should be in love with him, so I never was. While he was drawing or painting or slathering chicken wire with paper mache, he had me sit in a corner sorting beads, hundreds of thousands of them. On any given day, I’d never know if he’d want them sorted by color or by size, or by something he called roundishness that he couldn’t define, only give examples of, and eventually I did catch on.
He had so many Good Ideas, I remember thinking he was like a lightning rod. Ideas were just floating in the air around him like oxygen, and he could just inhale one anytime he wanted to, and maybe if I stuck around I could catch some secondhand. He had so many good ideas, he didn’t even bother to write them down, because it didn’t even matter if he forgot one, they could always just get another. He had so many good ideas I assumed he must have been taking tons of drugs, and so one day I asked him what kind, and how often, thinking maybe I could nail down his formula and replicate it, tweaking it slightly, if needed, to agree with my own chemistry. He laughed and told me he’d never tried drugs, that he could make his own drugs with his mind.
Another time, he told me that the Ancient Greeks didn’t believe that ideas ever belonged to them in the first place. They believed each person was assigned a small, spiritual being called a daimon, who acted as an intermediary between humans and the divine. Each daimon provided their human with thoughts, creativity, impulses, and could potentially even influence their human’s destiny. Socrates spoke of his daimon as a kind of internal voice or presence. The concept of a personal daimon was later adapted by Romans, only instead of calling them ‘daimons’, the Romans called the little guys their ‘genius’.
One day I went by his studio and the door wasn’t wide open. I knew right away I’d never sort beads for him again. Luckily, it had never occurred to me to be in love with him.
Years later I’d run into him late at night at a party, in the summer, on a rooftop. I asked him if he remembered our conversation about daimons, and geniuses, about any of it. He laughed and said “No, I don’t recall saying any of that specifically, but it does sound like something I would say.” Then he asked me if I had any cocaine, or if I knew anyone who did.
It didn’t matter though, because by then I’d already unlearned everything I’d learned from Greg, who was not smarter than Socrates, who’d never had a Good Idea in all his life, who could only play cover songs, and couldn’t even get his dick hard.
Written by Emma Stern
Emma Stern’s work deploys her formal background in traditional oil-on-canvas painting to achieve a kind of contemporary portraiture made possible by 3D software. Using tools intended for game developers to create virtual female models that serve as her subjects, her work emphasizes and exacerbates the apparent inclination towards pornographic (or at least porn-adjacent) representations of women in 3D communities and gaming culture. Persistent themes include subversion, perversion, fantasy, and a unique kind of off-brand feminism vaguely reminiscent of pop-up ads of the "You Won't Last 5 Minutes in This Game” variety.
Emma curated “"Kevin Peter He and Jake Oleson, FLUX ” at 99 Canal as part of 5x5, 2024
about 99 Canal
99 Canal is an artist-run program based in the heart of Lower Manhattan, New York City. Fostering a community-centered environment, we facilitate artists' access to professional studios and public exposure to experimental practices, with a strong emphasis on moving image and performance art.
As a 501(c)3 Non-Profit, both our Studio & Public Program encourage artists to lead urgent conversations and collaborative projects, sharing their open-ended work and ideas with a dedicated audience.