Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning (Part Three)
from The Shape of Things to Come, 2006
With David Thomas’s death on April 24, I want to do what can to keep the work of someone I was lucky to know alive in the little corner of the public mind this newsletter might reach. I’ve written a lot about David’s work over the years; my piece from Artforum in December 1997, and this chapter from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it. (Part One of this chapter is available here, and Part Two is available here.)
The Judy Rogers Story
In the strange décor of the past, ordinary acts themselves seem strange. The attempts of artists to create a new world, to call it into being with a single, perfect act—or their discovery that they are already living in a new world, the existence of which remains a secret—seems stranger still. Such attempts to create, such discoveries, can flare up and flame out in an instant; even as they appear they are suffused with the tragic, romantic power that surrounds those things that seem lost forever.
No sentence I know catches this sense of possibility and loss as well as a line from Steve Erickson’s 1999 novel The Sea Came in at Midnight: “A dream is a memory of the future.” If you replace “dream” with “painting” or “film” or “novel” you have some idea of how the phrase might work—but while I have held onto this line since I first encountered it, I don’t think I began to understand it until a few years after that.