The Afterlife
Artforum, December 1997
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; this piece from Artforum in December 1997, and a chapter—to be posted in the coming days—from my 2006 book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, is some of it.
The end of the year is supposed to be a time of adding up accomplishments, separating winners from losers, declaring, in a smug, vaguely bored tone of voice, that the year wasn’t a complete waste of time. But a given year is more than anything else time that has passed, that is gone, an occasion that will never return—and in 1997 most of what could have been done wasn’t. Think about it that way and you might find yourself drawn not to ten-bests but to the cut-off, the broken-down, the used-up, the morbid. Never mind what Bill Clinton did or didn’t do in the last twelve months; from this seat on the downbound train, it’s far more interesting to imagine what he’ll be doing when it’s all over. He’ll be fifty-four when he leaves office, facing a future as blank as any pop star’s five years after her last hit. He’ll spend the next twenty years or so as—US senator from Arkansas? From California? Editor of Newsweek? Fixer for the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere? Stuffed party animal for William Styron, Carly Simon, and the rest of the Martha’s Vineyard crowd?