BRAD PHILLIPS
Read at KGB on 8 Dec 2021

I recently joined a reading group that’s studying Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. I want to share a quote from the book’s introduction, written by a farmer named Gustav Thibon in whom Weil had entrusted her notebooks before she died. Thibon writes, “In order to kill the self, we must be ready to endure all the wounds of life, exposing ourselves naked and defenseless to its fangs. We must accept emptiness, an unequal balance. We must never seek compensations. We must also renounce the past and future, for the self is nothing but a coagulation of past and future around a present which is always falling away.”

I think Brad Phillips is someone who exposes himself, naked and defenseless, to life’s fangs. Though Brad speaks of his own spirituality as grounded in the Buddhist, not Christian, tradition, I was reminded of this quote when I listened to him talk about his idea of the self on the Other Ppl podcast, and when I was reading his book, Essays and Fictions, which came out from Tyrant Books in 2018. He tells Brad Listi, “There is this idea of the self, so unstable and kind of inherently false, so the idea of who we think we are is really based on the narrative of what we build in our lives, which is contingent on memory. Memory is so unstable and prone to nostalgia, so really what we have is an idea of a self instead of a self.” He speaks of wanting to not mollify, but murder, his inner child. “I want to slice its throat, curb-stomp it and throw it in the garbage, and be done with it.”

Brad’s work — both visual art & writing — comes at the reader directly, with an immediacy that will jolt you into the present moment if you weren’t there already. He’s a sensitive, intuitive, brutal writer who makes work that is so unadorned, and so concerned with the full range of life, that you can’t help but meet it with the acceptance and openness that characterizes how Brad sees the world. It just comes at you, like a movie. Brad’s work is influenced by film, much more so than other types of contemporary art, and he describes one of his favorite filmmakers, Brian de Palma, this way: “I would see images when I think of de Palma, which is, like, a pearl necklace, a leather glove, a handgun, and a mirror. That’s de Palma.” When I think of Brad Phillips, I think of images, too, or maybe scenes: his wife Cristine's braids falling down her back. The beach in Miami. The ice cold air of British Columbia. A handful of pills. A needle. A gun. Tenderness, when it appears in Brad’s work, is never cloying: Because of his awareness of how horrifying life can get, it’s rendered as vital, idiosyncratic, energizing — presented with as much starkness, frankness, nonjudgment & respect as the rest of his work, and thus never losing its power or risking becoming cliche. Brad Phillips is an artist and writer who lived in British Columbia from 2002 to 2013. Please give a warm welcome to our final reader, Brad Phillips.