Looking at (but not listening to) Sonic Youth

Perhaps we all come to this…

On one side we have a difficult truth: ART’s inadequacy of manifesting what was without stoking the sentimental and nostalgic. On the other is a longing, or perhaps expectation, that ART can unleash a profundity beyond language from its storehouse of images, something so great, so vast and often from our distant past that we are awestruck first by the forgotten memory made whole again in our psyche and second the affirmation that we knew greatness then, and seeing it confirmed now we flatter ourselves that we may therefore be able to spot on the regular.

What happens, the tragedy of it really, is that we fall in love in the first place. Nothing will ever match it, nor replace it, but ART in the present serves as the time travel portal for us to come close to that feeling. That real feeling. We fall in love with something and it is perfect but then things change. Two things change in particular, us and the object of our affection.

And so it was for me and one of my greatest loves, Sonic Youth. Their earliest music intrigued me but the back to back wonder of their albums Sister and Daydream Nation carried me in my haze through the last few years of the 1980s. It was almost all I listened to and almost the last time I was enchanted with the music of the day. But I should have known the pretense of using a Gerhard Richter painting as an album cover would mean a step too far was coming. By the time they released Goo maybe (despite the superior Raymond Pettibon cover) it was me and maybe it was them and maybe it was shit by the third time I listened to the cassette and didn’t bother flipping it over to side two but the love had died.

And so staring me in the face on a linked PDF from New York’s NO GALLERY in their email announcing they will be in Miami’s NADA fair this week, was that mysterious woman on the floor from the aching center of the second half of the 1980s when nobody argued over pissant terminology like Postpunk or No-Wave, when I still got high and screamed in joy or terror or the confusion between the two and the sound of Thurston Moore’s guitar made the same sound and the dissonance was for a few hundred days at least the antidote to the harmonic convergence.

There it was, not as an icon, but as an artwork, with a price and artist credit and a gallery inventory code. $3,500 for an original print of a mystery some of us solved and then forgot except the part where we were saved by an image that spoke only to us, still sponges for what could lead us on our way.

I can’t explain it beyond that, there is a gap between thought and the pulse of feeling which only ART careens down into the center of our hearts. Basically, I am asking nicely, will someone buy this for me, please? Thank you.