LETTER FROM THE EDITOR : CLAIRE BARLIANT : NOVEMBER 2005

Years ago, when I was in a poetry workshop at Hampshire College, the topic of discussion turned to clichés. I believe it was the word “stone” that triggered it: Why did people always write stone when crafting a poem, and not rock? What made some words seem embarrassingly poetic—stone, harbor, woods, origin, heart—while words like cheeseburger were continually passed over? (Cheeseburger—I’ll take that over “summer afternoon” any day of the week.) This curmudgeonly conversation eventually led to the teacher’s exclaiming: “It’s reached the point where people can’t even say ‘I love you’ without feeling self-conscious about it.”

That comment still rattles me. Not because of what it says about clichés, but what it says about the idea of romantic love. Love, as in “How do I love thee?” “Thy skin cream smells like a summer’s day,” and so on (you know the rest), often feels like an outdated notion. But the concept still seems reasonable. It is okay to believe in a “special” connection between two people, to believe that you can find some one person that you want to spend the rest of your days with. Because most people do experience this. The problem is that we rarely have the words to describe this phenomenon in a way that feels right for the twenty-first century.

Perhaps we are too aware of every action and every verbalization being public. We publish our diaries as blogs for anyone to see. We are aware that our ways of expressing affection are somehow mimicking what we’ve seen others doing. “Sincerity” had a brief comeback right after 9/11, but that quickly faded. How can you be sincere when you are constantly checking yourself against some bogus standard of normality?

And still we try, muddling our way through this new century by offering the same feeble red-roses-and-heart-shaped-boxes-of-chocolate routines, and probably the next one too. We write notes to one another (more often on email and in text messages than with paper and pen, as they did in olden days). We prepare elaborate meals, give gifts, make out on rainy street corners. We know these steps by heart, they might as well be set in stone, and yet we continue to have sweaty palms when opening the door to let someone in who doesn’t grate on our nerves the way other people do. We say “I love you.” And sometimes we mean it.

Claire Barliant
December 2005

Claire Barliant is an associate editor at Artforum. She has written for numerous publications, including Artforum, Blanton Museum of Art: American Art since 1900, Sculpture, and ArtNews. A 2004 graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, she will be curating an exhibition in April for the Dorsky Gallery in Queens, New York.