his weight.
âDark Horseâ evokes the early Sunday hours at the height of the American weekend, the last minutes before sunrise, when you either choose among the dazed remnants of the night or go home alone. Also, the highly organized systems of information management that cache, tag, and categorize both the metadata of these remnants (text message: âhi what r u doing rite now its late i knowâ; recorded as âMessage containing no flagged content sent at 3:02:42AM 11/08/13 from Maison O, 98 Kenmare Street, New York, New York 10012) and the remnants themselves (recorded as: ANDREW SCOTT DURBIN, resident of 855 Park Place, Brooklyn, New York 11216; born 09/28/89; profile clear of flagged content. SEE MORE). The cover of Perryâs Prism features a photograph of the artist taken by Ryan McGinley, whose terrible work effaces the marks of aging and those that differentiate youthful bodies by reducing them to a blur, blotched in the sunlit fields or the caves out west, flakes of flesh tones in which only the vaguest outline of a thin college student emerges, naked, unseduced by the camera itself but in love with the audience at the other end of the process that manufactures his image. People stare at them in the gallery or scrolling through a blog on their iPhone, the faces staring back, sometimes very clear, sometimes still blurrier, prismatic, triangulated as viewer, model, and the networks of distribution for which Ryan McGinley serves as a conduit for an idea of beauty not exactly universal as it strives toward a uniqueness defined by the unexpected intensity of the sight of someoneâs sharp pelvis or high cheekbones but getting there. They are strange, even ugly in McGinleyâs photographs, and yet this doesnât deprive them of their magnetism. The three of usâmodel, Ryan, and Iâbegin to organize into a record of taste to be graphed by agencies more or less invisible to us. I text my friend âhi what r u doing rite now its late i knowâ and even though I am certain no response will come I go deep and send it again. The impulse is, itself, based on a belief in the dark horse: that a thing probably wonât happen leads me to think that it must. In [REDACTED]âs apartment, everything darkened as we resumed our places at the table. In the candlelight, I stared at the cover of Katyâs new album, narrowing in on the little A in Katy shaped like a triangle, a prism, over Ryan McGinleyâs sun-drenched image of her as she catches the light, and it became easy to see in it another prism, lying in repose among the sunflowers, the quartz pyramid through which light becomes a rainbow or in other iterations, rectangular or cubic or pentagonal or, finally, the hexagonal crystal, in which I see myself telling Katy to back up a step, please, Katy, can someone get her some makeup please? and raise the silvery cloth up to your lips before the green screen where my assistants later overlay the field that seems real but probably isnât, or back of that, another prism that spins in a nest of light, tagging content endlessly, storing that content into the plural databases where I take residence among the machines who read me, who render me legible in various other systems languages, flagging âbomb,â for example, like, Katy Perry is the bomb, Katy, youâre the bomb, as the prism spins in my hand and I bring it close to speak into it, pressing it to my lips, under a prismatic sunset a gradient of red like the stroked, reddish brown hair of a horse moving across a field, the field where the sunflowers do not wilt under the hand of Ryan McGinleyâs assistants, the horse moving quickly through it, running up and turning back at the electrified fence over and over again in a game it plays with the only environment it knows. I raise my phone to take a picture. I hold it close, tap the screen to focus the image, but the horse moves too quickly and I only manage to snap
âDark Horseâ evokes the early Sunday hours at the height of the American weekend, the last minutes before sunrise, when you either choose among the dazed remnants of the night or go home alone. Also, the highly organized systems of information management that cache, tag, and categorize both the metadata of these remnants (text message: âhi what r u doing rite now its late i knowâ; recorded as âMessage containing no flagged content sent at 3:02:42AM 11/08/13 from Maison O, 98 Kenmare Street, New York, New York 10012) and the remnants themselves (recorded as: ANDREW SCOTT DURBIN, resident of 855 Park Place, Brooklyn, New York 11216; born 09/28/89; profile clear of flagged content. SEE MORE). The cover of Perryâs Prism features a photograph of the artist taken by Ryan McGinley, whose terrible work effaces the marks of aging and those that differentiate youthful bodies by reducing them to a blur, blotched in the sunlit fields or the caves out west, flakes of flesh tones in which only the vaguest outline of a thin college student emerges, naked, unseduced by the camera itself but in love with the audience at the other end of the process that manufactures his image. People stare at them in the gallery or scrolling through a blog on their iPhone, the faces staring back, sometimes very clear, sometimes still blurrier, prismatic, triangulated as viewer, model, and the networks of distribution for which Ryan McGinley serves as a conduit for an idea of beauty not exactly universal as it strives toward a uniqueness defined by the unexpected intensity of the sight of someoneâs sharp pelvis or high cheekbones but getting there. They are strange, even ugly in McGinleyâs photographs, and yet this doesnât deprive them of their magnetism. The three of usâmodel, Ryan, and Iâbegin to organize into a record of taste to be graphed by agencies more or less invisible to us. I text my friend âhi what r u doing rite now its late i knowâ and even though I am certain no response will come I go deep and send it again. The impulse is, itself, based on a belief in the dark horse: that a thing probably wonât happen leads me to think that it must. In [REDACTED]âs apartment, everything darkened as we resumed our places at the table. In the candlelight, I stared at the cover of Katyâs new album, narrowing in on the little A in Katy shaped like a triangle, a prism, over Ryan McGinleyâs sun-drenched image of her as she catches the light, and it became easy to see in it another prism, lying in repose among the sunflowers, the quartz pyramid through which light becomes a rainbow or in other iterations, rectangular or cubic or pentagonal or, finally, the hexagonal crystal, in which I see myself telling Katy to back up a step, please, Katy, can someone get her some makeup please? and raise the silvery cloth up to your lips before the green screen where my assistants later overlay the field that seems real but probably isnât, or back of that, another prism that spins in a nest of light, tagging content endlessly, storing that content into the plural databases where I take residence among the machines who read me, who render me legible in various other systems languages, flagging âbomb,â for example, like, Katy Perry is the bomb, Katy, youâre the bomb, as the prism spins in my hand and I bring it close to speak into it, pressing it to my lips, under a prismatic sunset a gradient of red like the stroked, reddish brown hair of a horse moving across a field, the field where the sunflowers do not wilt under the hand of Ryan McGinleyâs assistants, the horse moving quickly through it, running up and turning back at the electrified fence over and over again in a game it plays with the only environment it knows. I raise my phone to take a picture. I hold it close, tap the screen to focus the image, but the horse moves too quickly and I only manage to snap
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