ONE SELF PORTRAIT EVERY DAY in 2020 : 143

I am not sure why but I have lost touch with Jo Melvin. I loved our conversations about art. I loved the fact that although she is way more cultured than I am she sort of saw something interesting in what I did. She wrote the text for the first Susak expo in 2006 where she translated my simple concept into a sophisticated idea, “an idea on the move, an idea in translation”.

Here is a text she wrote about me (for me?) about the importance of failure: https://sracok-pohlmann.com/failure/

I first met Jo at the PV for an exhibition about Avalanche magazine at Chelsea Space.
[Avalanche was a New York based avant-garde art magazine publishing 13 issues between 1970 and 1976. It was founded by conceptual artists Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp and featured works, interviews, photos of the New York conceptual art scene. The interviews are brilliant.]

A few days later there was a talk by Liza Bear herself and someone remarked how amazing it must have been to have lived through and actively experienced that important period in conceptual art and I remember her answering that she was not aware at the time that they were experiencing anything special, and that most of the time their lives were mundane.

I quite like to think that our lives are maybe special and exciting and worthwhile but we are not aware. I am talking nonsense now but this is the kind of shallow thought that maybe Jo would be able to elevate into something with meaning.
In this self-portrait I am reading the last issue (n13) that features Bas Jan Ader.

Two or three years ago I saw Jo at a PV at studio1.1, we said we should meet up for coffee or something but we haven’t yet.

22.5.2020.

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