Previous articleNext article FreeBuilding Worlds, Losing FriendsZachary CahillZachary Cahill Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreFarBar, coined by our Interim Director Ghenwa Hayek for the Gray Center’s monthly online conversation series and the bulk of much of our work this past year, was meant to signal our ambition to take the Center’s work beyond the lovely abode for our Sidebar series at Midway Studios here on campus. If the name and effort directly addressed the ambitions, it also indirectly commented on our situation during COVID-19 in its homophonic ring with F.U.B.A.R, that acronym used by American GI’s during World War Two: Fucked Up Beyond Any Recognition. While enjoying relative privilege from our position at the Gray Center, it was hard not to feel, like everyone else, that we were living through some sort of sci-fi-inspired dystopia and that our lives, our work, our enjoyments, and perhaps most acutely our grieving was indeed—disrupted beyond recognition.I do not have the intellect, emotional stamina (or the hubris) to try to grapple or comment on what all this means in the face of mass death that we have been tethered to since the COVID-19 virus stalked the earth and stole so much time that will never be regained. I do not have it in me and maybe no one does. Maybe this is a collective project that we share together to offer each other solace for the losses we have felt and the suffering we have shared.The Gray Center lost two friends this past year and more to the point—I lost two friends. Is it proper to memorialize them in this issue? Is it even ok for me as editor of the journal to take space here in these pages in this way? In light of all our losses during the pandemic? Ethically, I am not sure. But maybe the loss of these two friends isn’t just my loss … Maybe it is yours, too … Maybe this is just one effort among many to memorialize the ones we love. So many of our friends are gone. Maybe it is up to us now to keep their worlds alive.Robert Bird was a fellow at the Gray Center from 2017 until his passing, and to date we are still working on a project that grew out of his work with artist Cauleen Smith. When he passed, I wrote the following remembrance in the immediate wake of the news of his death for Critical Inquiry’s blog. I wanted to be sure that his peers in the academic community saw this aspect of Robert’s work, and Critical Inquiry was not only the best avenue in which to do this, but I also think it would have been Robert’s preference. Here, we reproduce it as it was on the blog.The shock of Lauren Berlant’s passing found me stunned and wordless. Here, I try to find words to dedicate to Lauren’s memory. Both Robert and Lauren died of cancer. In their illness, they found each other and became friends. For a number of reasons, not the least being the pandemic lockdown, I missed out on this shared moment of their journey. Both of their deaths caught me off guard, rocked me from my complacency, thinking that we still had time. We didn’t. I pray that somehow these words still find them.Robert Bird, Christina Kiaer, and Zachary Cahill. Photo: Michael Christiano.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointRobert Bird (1969–2020): A RemembranceRobert Bird, a scholar of vast erudition of film and Russian literature, passed away on 7 September 2020, after a prolonged struggle with cancer. His book Andrei Tarkovsky: Elements of Cinema is considered a landmark contribution to the scholarship on the Russian film director. Professor Bird was a storied teacher in the Departments of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. Bird also curated major exhibitions of Soviet art at the University’s Smart Museum including: Vision and Communism: Viktor Koretsky and Dissident Public Visual Culture (in 2011, with Christopher P. Heuer, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Tumelo Masaka, and Stephanie Smith) and Revolution Every Day (in 2017, with Christina Kiaer, Diane Miliotes, and this author).WordsAs many of those close to Robert have expressed in the past few days—there are no words. No words and too many memories flooding in. Still, there is one word that keeps coming to mind as I remember Robert Bird: comrade. This word, especially as applied to him, means something deeper, and conveys a relationship that is broader than perhaps the more familiar word, friend. I think it has something to do with a common cause, a cause worth devoting one’s life to. To be comrades with Robert Bird meant to be a witness to, and to share, his passion. It was a passion marked by a deep intellect, grace, gentleness, wit, and a poetic soul. It is one of the great fortunes of my life to share in some of his passions; it meant I would be one of the many beneficiaries of his genius and insight.DebtsIn my experience of academia, when folks are talking about art, the discussion tends to dwell on how artists affect scholarship. How artists lead thinking—that artists are the seers of knowledge production and culture. Less frequently do we hear the stories of how scholars impact artists and their work. This latter perspective is the vantage point from where I write. So maybe this is a remembrance and an acknowledgment of a debt.For the past decade, my time with Robert has had an enormous impact on my artwork. Always supportive and inquisitive, his energy and intellectual generosity buoyed my spirits as well as enlarged my mind and my art. For any artist, knowing that there is even one person out in the world who not only understands but also cares about your work is the ultimate lifeline. Whether he knew it or not, Robert was that lifeline to many artists, not just to me.We met at the first birthday party of the daughter of our mutual comrade, Matthew Jesse Jackson. To my amazement, during casual party chitchat, I had stumbled into talking with one of the world’s foremost scholars of Andrei Tarkovsky, a filmmaker whose work I was in awe of. But more than that, he also was a scholar of some of my favorite writers, Soviet authors like Andrei Platonov and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. It was at this first meeting that I would start to accrue my many debts to Robert Bird. Fanboy enthusiastic, I blurted out something to the effect that Memories of The Future collected some of Krzhizhanovsky’s “real” writing (distinct from his work on say, The Great Soviet Encyclopedia—or so that was what I had thought I had read), to which Robert graciously pointed out that this claim was unclear and that, in fact, the author did not necessarily make such distinctions between his work on the encyclopedia, editorial work, and his novels—it was all his writing. For the Soviet writer, there was no such divide between art and life. It was a casual thunderbolt, as was Robert’s way. This observation was both inspiring and liberating for me as an artist because I no longer felt hemmed in by a profession, or role, that my art wasn’t dependent on being claimed as such by other people, nor could anyone ever pay me enough in a job to stop being an artist: artist in the studio and artist in the office. Robert gave me that and so many more insights.Time and ArtThe metaphysical study of time was one of Robert Bird’s great passions. This is evidenced not only by the fact that he was a keen observer and interpreter of the time-based art of film, and not only because he was a prolific writer on revolution and memory. His passion for time culminated, I believe, in the Soviet-style tear-off calendar-cum-exhibition catalog for Revolution Every Day. This little 800-page brick-shaped machine for art and primary research on what it was like to live everyday life in the Soviet Union was his invention for the exhibition. In it, Robert had essays about the Soviets’ early attempt to create a new sense of time through changing the workweek to changing the annual calendar from the Julian to the Gregorian (where 25 October became 7 November). These essays were placed alongside reproductions of the wildly creative Soviet calendars, numerous diary entries that he translated at an unbelievable rate. The book and the exhibition Revolution Every Day had an ecstatic quality to them, not simply due to the revolutionary subject matter, but because he was working alongside his life comrade and wife, the renowned art historian Christina Kiaer. Two giants of Soviet art scholarship engaged in a true labor of love, and this labor was a gift to the city of Chicago that drew rockstar writers like Karl Ove Knausgård (one of Robert’s favorite contemporary novelists) and real rock-and-roll stars like Ian Svenonius to the museum.Robert Bird will surely be remembered for his scholarly work, but he also was a great curator. He had a discerning feel for space and vision for what would make an exhibition interesting. Robert was a wonderful collaborator (an essential ingredient for successful curation) open to other people’s ideas, he possessed a genuine desire to hear from people besides himself (this no doubt was one of the things that made him such an excellent teacher.) Yet, one key reason for his adeptness at curating had everything to do with his reverence for art and his enduring belief that, in fact, art could change the world. Standing beside him and Christina in this photo, I definitely believed it could and, because of everything Robert gave to us, I still do.Thank you, my comrade.May you rest in peace and in art.Sharon Hayes, Parole, 2010, multi-channel video and sound installation, pictured (l to r): Lauren Berlant and Becca Blackwell, Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: David Smith.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointLauren Berlant (1957–2021)Lauren Berlant was one of the preeminent literary, affect, Feminist, and Queer theorists of their generation. A beloved and gifted teacher, they taught at the University of Chicago for over thirty years and during that time was a co-editor of the revered academic journal Critical Inquiry. A prolific author, they published numerous books and articles including Desire/Love (2012), Cruel Optimism (2011), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (2008); The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (1991); and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (1997). A fervent practitioner of and believer in collaboration, Berlant also co-authored Sex, or the Unbearable with Lee Edelman (2014) and The Hundreds with Katherine Stewart (2019). Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book from Duke University Press is titled On the Inconvenience of Other People. In 2015 they co-organized and participated in Painting and Its Humors, a symposium with artist and faculty colleague Catherine Sullivan and the author as part of their collaborative fellowship, Infrastructures for the Comedic, at the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.Dear Lauren,Emotions sometimes feel like a labyrinth that we can’t escape from—that I can’t find my way in.Where are you now?Apostrophe.That’s a word you taught me. Apostrophe, not the diacritical mark, but the poetic form for addressing someone who isn’t there … like a note to Santa Claus. We were sitting in Sharon Hayes’s exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago watching a film that you were featured in when you explained it to me. You had been writing about your mother on your blog, Supervalent Thought. Always thinking and sharing. Helping me process my own relations to death and sickness.Sigh. (a common expression you used)Chance meetings on the street in Hyde Park. Random whirlwind discussions. Once as I was preparing for a residency, we got to talking over coffee about your concept of the Intimate Public Sphere as I was planning my first séance, I was so inspired. I remember running (actually running) to the bookstore immediately after to buy your book The Female Complaint.There are so many things I wanted to tell you.To thank you for.Is it weird to admit that in many ways I can’t imagine who I am without our encounter? That our conversations wired my brain differently. You did this for so many people. Your intelligence was a type of grace that through its sheer velocity coupled with your care raised people up. Raised me up. It was a shield for us when we felt overpowered, disempowered. You were a champion for so many. I am sure that may strike you as hyperbole but that is how it was for me, for others.You told me once: a personal story told in public is no longer just a personal story. This observation/proclamation reset how I talked to students and fellow artists about their work—when they were told, “no one cares about your personal story.” You had taken a complicated thing and made it clear. It empowered them and me.You could hold a whole classroom and guide students through the toughest and most traumatic material … a quiet autumn afternoon … our comedy class’s day on “the rape joke,” a genre of stand-up that pushed the limits of taboo and in so doing not surprisingly also often trafficked in toxic masculinity of the worst kind … this was even more raw as it was the fall of the 2016 election and Trump’s “locker-room talk” was all over the news … you could hear a pin drop in the classroom that day … there was so much love and gentleness in that room, the affect was verging on the physical … soft light … tenderness … this is what they mean when they talk about safe space and care … It was a marvel of teacher-ly compassion … Even now I wonder, how did Lauren do that??? … we co-taught the course because that was how generous you were, but I was only ever your student really.I wish I could share all the stories for how you shaped me … provided me with a model for how to be with others … how to say someone who shared a traumatic experience—how to say to them: that was powerful what you just shared with me, and I want to be there for you … I am processing what you shared but I want you to know that I hear you and am here for you. How to speak and not go silent in the face of the unspeakable. This is a lesson I keep working on. It is incredibly difficult to show up for other people in this way. You made it looks so easy, but it is not.Will I ever learn all the lessons that you taught me? that are too many to count? I don’t know, but I do know that the world is a smaller place now that you are gone—you made so much space for others. But even in this impoverished space of your absence, this void without your laughter—your good humor, you left us guides for building worlds together.Thank you, Lauren. I miss you.I do not read things; I read with things. When I read theorists, with art, with a colleague or a friend, to read with is to cultivate a quality of attention to the disturbance of their alien epistemology, an experience of nonsovereignty that shakes my confidence in a way from which I have learned to derive pleasure, induce attachment, and maintain curiosity about enigmas and insecurities that I can barely understand or comprehend. This is what it means to say that excitement is disturbing, not devastating; ambivalent, not shattering in the extreme. Structural consistency is a fantasy; the noise of relation’s impact, inducing incompletion where it emerges, is the overwhelming condition that enables change that, within collaborative action, can shift lived worlds.1Notes1. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, Or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 125. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Portable Gray Volume 4, Number 2Fall 2021 Published for the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717481 Views: 763 © 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.