Art for the Already Dead

Susan Sontag's Burner Phone

Notes on Devotional Looking Nov. 22, 2025

AFTAD

Painting begins with an absurd premise: that if you look long enough, something will reveal itself. Many painters return to the same subject for years. Beneath that repetition is a belief that looking, if done with enough intensity, might change the tangible, or at least alter how it meets us.

This may, in the end, be the real reason one paints: the sense that looking can transform something. Every painter knows the brief, electric moment when perception feels alive. It comes without warning, and it leaves as soon as one becomes aware of it. These moments are what the painter chases, hoping to find again and again.

Looking, after all, is not passive. It is something the whole body does. You lean toward the world, press into it, and the world leans toward you. If you look long enough at anything, the separation between "what is seen" and "what is made" begins to blur. It takes years of steady work to recognize that boundary at all.

With sustained looking, forms that seemed solid start to give way, edges soften, leaking form into space. Painting as a physical call and response attempts to keep up with these shifting realities.

When someone says a painting "has presence," they are responding to this exchange: to painting as residue of a sustained encounter in which both the external world and the painter's internal world press into each other's space. The deeper this shared space extends, the more the painting allows the two pressures to meet, the more alive it becomes. Giacometti's drawings come to mind here. They read as diagrams of this phenomenon: the world leaning toward the artist, the artist pushing outward, into the surrounding world, the paper catching the vibrations where the two pressures meet.

Such an encounter needs devotion, and devotion requires privacy. One must close the door. There is no room for witnesses to this kind of looking.



Writing about painting feels like a betrayal. It flattens experience into language, but paintings themselves insist, more than words ever could, that something shifted under the pressure of looking.