Go From There
General Conversation with Devin T. Mays
This piece is written in the wake of a conversation with Devin T. Mays inside his work for the show Building A he did with A.Mac Giolla Bhríde at Goodweather gallery in Chicago, IL. As someone who I did/had a conversation with when this was a radio show, I’m excited to revisit his work and the joy that having a conversation with him engenders. I hope you enjoy it as much I enjoyed talking with him.
I. “I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten”
How to build out this writing using a conversation between myself and Devin T. Mays that we had two months ago, all about his work and his ideas? Even that grammatically I must use had in regard to the conversation as opposed to did, something we possessed as opposed to it already being something we built together, is part of what must be built around. I took so long I’m now engaged even more in that act of remembering, but it is this remembering that perhaps builds out the did and not the had. I must lay out some things like a foundation which I believe may situate this act in its proper context; building out the writing as a space, with readymade components slotted together. Being beholden to the form the work takes to form the form this writing takes.
First thing: I need to say to begin construction is to acknowledge that when I went to sit down to write this the first time I was focused in on part of our conversation on the sonic potentiality of Sanskrit. This language where meaning is tertiary, sound and vibration come first, not meaning. I was so locked in to it being the key I purchased a book on the Sanskrit language to better understand what this part of our conversation meant in the context of the language and its structures. It is a language marked by inflection, absence, and presence. For example, “the consonant system of Sanskrit is marked by the opposition of aspirated and unaspirated stops, both voiced and voiceless, in a series.”1 What is not said is just as important. What is not done is just as important.2
Second Thing: Months on I return to writing out this engagement with Mays work after beginning Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. There is this line in it early on about the basketball coach Bruce Howard, and his tendency to never forget a face and how he always worked to know why he knew your face.
He was rare in this way, how broadly his affections extended beyond not only his players but also beyond the young people who were students at Brookhaven. It was a salve in a sometimes vicious place, to have a respected adult, a pillar of greatness, look at you and remember your face enough to want to say hi, to ask if you were staying out of trouble. To, in so many words, say I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten.3
Abdurraqib is someone who can make memory feel like light coming through a window, and bring about this very thing he describes in Howard.
Third thing: The original catalyst for finally getting mine and Mays conversation off the ground and happening came when I was walking around Art Expo on my own. A space filled with immense shows of wealth and extravagance, whether spaces or people. It is a maze of dealings, influences, and artworks. I don’t get to see Devin very often, so when, walking through this space on my own, as I often do, unanchored to another, I saw him there. It was, like every time, a jolt of excitement. Walking through into one of the central spaces of gathering of this giant warehouse area of Navy Pier, I locked eyes with him and it was that instant of excitement and remembering a face. To look at another and see that bridge of joyful recognition, “What the hell are you doing here?! What are the chances?!” Friendship leading to a simultaneously aspirated and unaspirated exasperation.
Fourth thing: There are many ways this piece is a kind of catch up of getting to what I wanted to get to. One of those funnily enough was finally reading a piece a dear friend of mine (who I also never get to see, and who when I do, I have that same response as with Mays) Rohan Ayinde wrote on friendship. Ayinde was someone I was lucky enough to meet towards the end of grad school and who helped me get where I needed with that MFA exhibition in the role of my curator. His advice, like his writing, is the kind that seems to open you up to what could be, what he would call the otherwise following Ashon Crawley. This piece of his was no different. Hearing him speak of the joys that are birthed out of friendship and collaboration. He did preface the piece with the reminder that it was rough so I’ll avoid direct quotation from it. But it’s that he notes in his email to me that it was a joy to sit in regardless, and that he hopes I too find joy in his ramblings is something of a kind of beauty that doesn’t shine out of the polished memoir, the perfectly curated note on a moment. It’s why Abdurraqib’s writings always feel so strong, because he’s in the joy of it with you, and his intense poetic notes on the world feel like a friend hitting their stride in thought. It’s why Ayinde’s supposed roughness was a gift, not a roadblock, to my enjoyment of the writing. It’s that how something is said is just as much of that meaning, something around the “troubling of aboutness” that Mays notes in our conversation is what interests him with the Sanskrit language. It’s not about that validation that's usually expected to come with a work of art. And it’s this that gets me going to where I wanted to get in this writing around the work. Works which, for many, may appear in the guise of the stranger, the thing, the collection, the trivial, the mundane, or the meaningless, but I would propose are much closer in kind than we’d expect at first blush. Something like what I’m doing here, trying to catch up with friends.4
Intermission on Alfred North Whitehead:
Givenness in the Eternal Object
I’ve chosen recently to begin trying to work through the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead. His book Process and Reality in particular, which is considered by many to be one of the most difficult books on philosophy written in the 20th century. That it is a series of lectures that requires a corrected edition may have something to do with that. But as I was sitting down to think about Mays’ work this word of Whitehead’s came back to me: givenness. I want to try and think it out here with Mays’ work, if only especially because the quality of the word as it rolls out the mouth has some affinity to the feeling one gets when engaging with Mays.
Speaking of his notion of eternal objects—what Manning describes as “the pure potential of felt relation”5—Whitehead says that, “Any entity whose conceptual recognition does not involve a necessary reference to any definite actual entities of the temporal world is called an ‘eternal object.’”6 Put more simply, eternal objects are the qualitative differences of things, but also fundamental laws of physics, something also like ideas, which Whitehead then ties up with his term givenness:
An eternal object is always a potentiality for actual entities; but in itself, as conceptually felt, it is neutral as to the fact of its physical ingression in any particular entity of the temporal world. ‘Potentiality’ is the correlative of ‘givenness.’ The meaning of ‘givenness’ is that what is ‘given’ might not have been ‘given’; and that what is not ‘given’ might have been ‘given.’7
While its presence is not total, that which is not given continues to have a bearing on us due to the fact that there is a presence of that which was given. If I am understanding it correctly, there is what Manning points out as its “speculative potential, this uncharted value” that cannot help but be understood (in my mind) in regard to the work Octavia E. Butler did in helping to define what we now understand in a fuller scope to be speculative fiction. Another way to put what I’m saying is that the “speculative potential[s]” of Whitehead’s “eternal objects” is understood more clearly when placed in conversation with, not speculative fiction in general, but speculative fiction post-Butler as far as her light shines in defense of its potency. My point being then, that these eternal objects in regard to the actual entities of the world can be understood beyond that which is usually situated as mundane or trivial, but instead towards something mystical, imaginative, and potential. This, now, is how we arrive to the threshold of not Mays’ work in general (at least for these purposes), but his show Building A with A.Mac Giolla Bhríde in particular, which took place at Goodweather this past spring.
II. “I can’t do that shit on my own”
While it may seem odd that I’ve chosen to spend a good chunk of this piece on the work of others, it is appropriate to the work. Mays’ pieces are not interested in what is usually considered as part of art in general, that is validation, the idea that something of yourself is reflected back. He noted in our conversation the importance that both of us being teachers has in regard to our thoughts on how we can get on the other side of validation. What we see of the double-edged sword in operation. His work is as much about the process of finding out where you are in the work as it is the work itself, a kind of reciprocal exchange, and this is an often difficult prospect. Nevertheless, it’s something he utilizes as much in his teaching as in his art. While validation is a valid thing to want to find in the creation of your own art or in the viewing of other’s art, it can’t be the only thing, it’s a singular mode. Something of the opaque artwork, that idea of what is not there as much as what is there.8 It’s the work done by Howard to find recognition where it’s difficult. The attentiveness of caring relation with the other.
It’s here that we arrive at the point of relation, not just between ourselves and Mays work but, specifically in this show, the point of relation between Mays and Giolla Bhríde and their works that followed. For both artists they arrived at the idea of the “visit” as a form for their work and collaboration to take. With it being Giolla Bhríde’s first time in Chicago, and Mays having lived here, the city took on a role as that which allowed them to “understand and connect with one another.” To look at another and say, “I will not let you move through this city and be forgotten.” When two people can do this for each other, then the process of doing it for others becomes that much easier together. Referring to Building A at the Midland Warehouses where this exhibition took place, the write up for the show on the Expo Chicago website notes that “This site has served as a physical space for both artists to respond by engaging with its architecture and the various forms of day-to-day labor housed within it.”
What form then does this work take? For these two artists its a doing and a finding, and the conversations which guide it. This is the curator Mark O’Gorman in the press release:
A conversation is not scripted.
A conversation is an oral form of communication that
risks losing meaning through noise.
A conversation is an event of knowledge.
A conversation is an improvised act.
A conversation is a collaborative act.
A conversation is looping.
A conversation is sharing.
A conversation is a rehearsal.
A conversation is non-hierarchical.
A conversation is non-binary.
A conversation is free.
A conversation is staged.
A conversation is a pulse.
A conversation is dialectical.
A conversation is speculative.
A conversation is a self-sustaining mechanism.
A conversation is a two-stroke engine.
A conversation is a bridge, constructed brick by brick.
A conversation is reliant on both noise and silence.
A conversation is polyphonic.
A conversation is an evolving composition.
A conversation rejects metronomic time.
A conversation can be overheard.
A conversation does not demand perfect synchronization.
A conversation resists division of labor.
A conversation resists expectation.
A conversation resists stopping.9
While I want to focus just a bit more on Mays’ work, I want to take a quick sidestep into Giolla Bhríde’s work. All of the elements were contained under the singular artwork drip consisting of mirrored window vinyl, framed archive prints, magnets, paper clips, mechanical pencil, and a Nucraft wastepaper bin. The archival prints acting as a kind of key into the work, they are cropped shots of the lap of someone in a suit making themselves comfortable creating gestural forms with their hands and legs. One hand in both sitting comfortably on the leg, the photograph on the left has the other hand with an almost welcoming gesture, one of invitation. Each of the works asks of you the viewer to come in and explore these small intricacies of the gallery. Those photographs. A window vinyl marking the overlap of an open window’s panes. An empty wastebasket. And a series of small collections of magnetized materials scattered asking you to look around this space closer, an invitation to play inasmuch as finding that which is hidden is a classic children’s game. Its what first hits you and sets you up to find Mays work.
What I find most enjoyable about this is that in order to move into this main room you of course have to enter the door. And in this way you’ve already encountered Mays first work: two wedges Untitled, Unnamed that make possible an easy enough entry into the room, setting the door at a 45 degree angle, you still have to make the choice. In this act of invitation to visit Mays has immediately set himself up as a kind of greeter, even if he is not himself present. And so that sentence “Its what first hits you and sets you up to find Mays work” can be reversed “It’s what first greets you and sets you up to find Giolla Bhríde’s work.” A true model for the two person exhibition. That this first work of his guides you into the gallery feels like he is saying, “welcome, I’m glad to see you, I want you to meet my new friend A.Mac and their work, it’s their first time here in Chicago, this city that held me as I held the door for you.” What is not present is in many ways then that much more powerful. An open door, a threshold, is a potent absence.
And once you’ve entered the gallery, directed more towards A.Mac’s work then Mays, you see it. Another door set in front of an arched doorway, removed from the other room. It has vinyl placed on it with the door number and the name of what that room normally is, the office, marking it as what would otherwise be a space of administration not art. This door, alongside the carpeting, the chairs, and the lights make up his second work Facsimile. Even more focused on the labor, it’s this reworked room as artwork in which the conversation that spurred this writing took place.
As Mays put it in our conversation around the construction of this piece he wanted “the carpet to be carpet, the chairs to be chairs, the light to be light…the door to be door” but he still wants to be accountable for the appearances—these facsimiles— that he’s accumulating and sharing. It then comes down to the small gestures to fulfill what he calls “the artistic promise” operating as the small clues to guide us in to the work as art work. The door set off its hinges and doorknob keying us into the fact that it lies parallel to the floor when set on its hinges and doorknob. The offcut of the rug that he laid in the space rolled up and set aside. The fluorescent lights he changed set on the windowsill with all the marks of his fingers, the indication of his act of changing out the bulbs. The chairs scattered but purposefully toward a corner. As he puts it, its the rearranging, the placement that allows him to, not explain the work through action, but hold himself accountable to the process. I’ve done the work so you’ll want to do it too, but with me. Reorient what you see, think it again, but don’t get it twisted, these are still chairs, still a rug, still the spent fluor
escent lights. It’s about that invitation in. As he says at the end of our conversation,
Do I even need to do anything about this? Do I even need to intervene actually? Is that necessary? You know maybe it’s just that the acknowledgement is enough. That’s something I always think about. But then at some point I kind of find myself on the other side of that being like well “I can’t do that because that’s only something that I am making myself aware of and not bringing other people in to it.” I think in order for me to acquire language, in order for me to acquire understanding I can’t do that shit on my own, by myself, for myself. That’s why we have public practices. To invite people into the work so that we can then metabolize that information and go back into the work some more and keep what we need, get rid of what we don’t. Go from there.
Madhav M. Deshpande, Saṃskr̥tasubodhinī: A Sanskrit Primer, (Center for South Asian Studies University of Michigan, 2014), xvii.
Although I would be remiss to take note that Alice Coltrane also known as Swamini Turiyasangitananda is a massively important influence for Mays and her own use of Sanskrit in relation to her music in general and that relationship to the work of Mays is perhaps an entire set of essays on its own.
Hanif Abdurraqib, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2025), 49.
There is something here in regard to things Edward Said notes about seeing the familiar as stranger, but that’s, again, another essay.
Erin Manning, For a Pragmatics of the Useless, (Duke University Press, 2020), 20.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (The Free Press, 1978), 44.
Ibid. 44.
Here I think of Bruce Naumann’s John Coltrane Piece in which he took a slab of aluminum and polished the bottom of it to a mirror sheen but placed it so you could never actually see the labor, that it was there was a matter of faith.
Mark O’Gorman, Building A Press Release, https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/a-mac-giolla-bhride-devin-t-mays-at-good-weather-chicago-52953.