Disruptive distinctions

Sometimes (well, oftentimes, and with the semester beginning, oftener-times) I need diversions, stark as a good Onion headline ("Nation's Weirdest Teenager Buys Season One DVD Of 'Murphy Brown'"), but nuanced enough to colonize my interest for several accidental minutes. At once permanent—or for the moment, permanently accessible, as in, wherever there's a WiFi hotspot—and ephemeral—no "object" in the sense of tangibly differentiated space; always remote from "I"—the projections/projectables/projective virtual "things" so far incapable of being possessed, bought (copyrighted?), except through Lindley's temporal act of installation (in this sense, of course, it is owned), or if I permit the temptation to fetishistically stick it to my desktop background; what do I want to say about them? Something simple. Something like, "She does it best." Isn't this the point, by varying degrees of totalizing statement, which art critics arrive at in their praise of a person, or his/her craft? I don't know. I'm happy it isn't my business to be an expert on such questions (for now, at least), but if I could just give a more intelligent, less inherited, sense of what I mean by "transfix," when I say I am trans-fixed (I stand or sit, and I am moved) by these pieces. If I could only inhabit these virtual works besides just within my own mind—but that thinking is illusory. The material, the tempo-real cannot (shouldn't?) be transmuted by the mind (only within its conceptual parameters). Nor can the virtual object coagulate, calcify, inhabit space in a solid, intransigent way; and this is the axiomatic takeaway of the medium itself: nothing, essentially, exists in this way. All is finally subject to corrosion, structural decomposition, liquification, elemental reconstitution.

I'm not nailing this aesthetic definition-thing down. It would be a mistake to think I could even attempt a potent critical investigation of Lindley's craft. And I don't mean for this reverence to lend more autonomy to the work than is due; it is just one of those pieces I would rather (for better/worse) let speak for itself.

"D.2" by Kasey Lou Lindley