Making the Present

Abstract:My conversation with Annabel Kim, editor of this special issue of Diacritics , about my contribution to the journal influenced my understanding of how citation might apply to a process of making, and specifically my process of making. She spoke of citation as a form of relation. This phrase began to evoke for me a constellation of people, experiences, conversations, and texts that I would and could cite in relation to how I work, what I make, how I think. "Form of relation" speaks to the formal and the social simultaneously, the formal relations on the surface of a painting and the social relations in space and time—the many influences that yield a production of knowledge and understanding. I was left wondering about how painters, or visual artists more broadly, make their influences visible, to whom they are visible, and if there are other ways to do so. What follows is a brief foray into a constellation of relations, a series of incomplete citations that I hope will illuminate some of the ways in which my making is indebted to others whom I cannot cite directly in my work.