Satya Paul's note on how the piece came to be — the misattributed epigraph, Simon Gray's The Old Masters, and the ideas regarding historicity that informed the text.
The Pig Trade was borne from a state of simultaneity — between the actions of reading and posting, during the actions of imbibing and inscribing. In simpler terms, I read an epigraph and I posted it on my Instagram story: "A complete life may be one ending in so full identification with the non-self that there is no self to die." From Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H., the quote attributed to Bernard Berenson, an academic, art historian, and critic. My friend Alec replied to my story, asking for the source, but the Lispector was not the source, rather a different location, one that ripped this quotation and placed it in the foreground of a different work. I spent the following months reading Berenson's diaries and letters and could not locate the source.
Many months later an occasion emerged. Alec had mentioned a play to me — Simon Gray's The Old Masters — about Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, the art dealer he worked with. I ordered a book of Simon Gray's plays, never making it more than a few pages through. But my friend Laszlo asked me to perform a DJ set at his album release moment, for his latest album I Don't Have That Problem, and after our performances he mentioned the possibility of what is now tonight's occasion, and asked if I had any ideas for such an occasion. I thought about The Old Masters and the idea of producing a theatrical work, with the films of Rivette in mind, remembering certain nocturnal weeks of my life in which I lived with them repeating, opening new territories of thought, repeating, opening, repeating.
At that point work began. Olive, another friend, expressed interest in the project and introduced me to Malia and Alice. I reached out to Lauren, who I had met while watching Out 1 at MOMA last year. Together, we began to read through Gray's play, though much of our time was spent on discussions that sprawled out tangentially, spawning webs of new ideas and references. I recorded this process and attempted to rework the development of these ideas into a new work.
The Old Masters is a two act play whose central concerns are of legacy, value, and reputation. The central tension is the act of naming, the act of attribution, how an action, or more specifically an accredited action can transform situations of legacy, value, and reputation. Yet this focus seemed narrow, entirely concerned with a discourse on Western art and Western values that is, if not dissolving, rapidly transforming. And as we read Gray's work, which maintains an incredible veneer of fidelity to historical accuracy, we uncovered anachronisms — chief of which was the time and place, a 1940s Italy which in reality was decades after Duveen's death. Thus, the central concern transformed — a meeting between two men engaged in games of legacy, wealth, and reputation became a man confronting a ghost of his own making.
The illusion of historicity was shattered. I attempted to sweep up our sprawl into narrative conversations, embracing this temporal collapse, which in turn lead to implosions and explosions that were both spatial and thematic. The work became The Pig Trade, taking its name from Gray's original name for the play. Its five scenes span five discrete decades across two centuries, migrating from Italy to Algeria to Albania, crisscrossing the Mediterranean as rafts and ferries do today, shuffling the ever-growing homeless population of our world at a point in time where origins, possibly even the idea of orientation, whether cardinal or cartesian, are dissolving and blurring. The Pig Trade became an attempt to explicate the boundaries of our current moment through a series of constellations: Berber shawls, Renaissance paintings, Albanian real estate, the formation of canons, dying nations, dying peoples, dying worlds.
At the heart of The Pig Trade is a logic joke, with its punchline delivered because of a person who does not understand the rules of deduction. A chain begins to form — now The Pig Trade has a heart, as though it were a living body, a body formed by rules, rules which have etymologies, origins, and histories, rules forming the spine of language. But what if this spine of language was shot, if language has become paralyzed, if it needs grafts and surgeries, if it needs a new heart. What happens to the rules? What becomes of the games? I began by saying that The Pig Trade was born. Logically then, it must die.
— SATYA PAUL