1. You call me up and tell me you’ve got this big X lying around the living room. It’s really got you down in the dumps, you say. Last night you got very upset, lost control, and put a line through it. Well, now it looks like *, but bigger. I wouldn’t call that a solution, I say, but it’s definitely a forward movement. I mean this as a joke. But I cannot tell if you smile at my joke, which does not call for a laugh, because you are on the phone. When we next meet, we’ve both forgotten all about this exchange.

2. What we’re doing here is pointing at. We’re pointing at the interstice between the pointer and the object at which it points, the shape of its pointing. What we’re not doing here is looking at pictures of our mothers, even though there are pictures of our mothers here. We’re not really having a sculptural or spatial experience, even though there are objects around and this is a space. Politics is a non-privileged part of this cultural arrangement. Just because it has video does not mean it is video; just because it has photography doesn’t mean that it is photography, unless it is. And we’re definitely not doing colors, even though there are colors and polygons and Albers.

3. Look. It will be laconic. More laconic than this. Extremely so.

4. One time I owned four horses. I used one for carrying apples, one for oranges, one for bananas, and one for motorcycles. For these reasons, I called the horses, respectively, “Apples,” “Oranges,” “Bananas,” and “Motorcycles,” who was the most beautiful of them. As we were walking out to the corral one morning, I asked my son, “Do you like riding motorcycles?” And he said, “Not really, I don’t like riding horses.”

5. If, in the middle of everything, there were visible nothing, if the subjunctive mood were a sensual experience, if Now were an algorithmic function of Whens, and This a strict causal relative of That, if medium were nothing but between, if we could enact a dynamic cessation between the number and the footnote, then we would be there at the point vertex of here and now.

6. You call me up and tell me you’ve got this big O lying around the living room. It’s really got you down in the dumps, you say. Last night you got very upset, lost control, and put a line through it. Well, now it looks like ø, but bigger. I wouldn’t call that a solution, I say, but it’s definitely a forward movement. I mean this as a joke. But I cannot tell if you smile at my joke, which does not call for a laugh, because you are on the phone. When we next meet, we’ve both forgotten all about this exchange.

Born and raised in New York City, Tyler Coburn holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University. Tyler has exhibited with The Centre of Attention, London, Galerie Ben Kaufmann, Berlin, and Gavin Brown’s Passerby, New York. His work has screened at CRG Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive, and Ocularis, among others. Tyler is a contributing editor to ArtReview and a staff writer for Rhizome. This is his first solo show in New York.