“Possibilities for Painting’s Portability” was staged by hanging a painting of my ear on the front side of a three-sided box affixed to the wall. I read a text from inside of the box with my mouth and nose visible through a hole in the painting. The performance was for a Zoom audience. The zombie became an emblematic figure for the masses in the text. “We zombies,” I spoke, “travel great distances in search of brains, but are just as likely to hit a wall and shuffle in place for days. Recently, after many hours of consecutive Zooming with my students, I dissociated from my own image to such a degree that I had the impulse to stop speaking in order to better hear my own talking head.” Each time I came to the word zombie in the text, several members of the audience said it with me.

As the narrative built, the theme of circulation emerged and in particular the ways the pandemic has made clear that categories like work and home do not describe places so much as they do relationships to production. The text ended by connecting these ideas back to painting, “Marx uses formal subsumption to describe what happens when capitalists take command of a labor process that originates outside of capitalism and real subsumption to describe a labor process materially transformed to meet the dictates of capital. The built environment, the tools we hold in our hands, and the air we breathe have been produced with profit in mind. I want to trace this process through to capitalism’s demise; after we seize the means of production, what will we make of them? We can’t know of course, but I imagine possibilities for painting’s portability when there is no private property. If space is made and remade for our needs, perhaps painting can function like a wall on wheels or a mask.”