So, I lead myself to write this from the hip, in pieces, reworking and updating, editing without announcing state changes. Maybe my distaste of the normal platforms of distribution allows me, defers me, into an iterative method that slides inward, designing the delivery of my writing and its context enough to perform something new. Luckily for me, to edge any pressure, nobody “reads” anymore. You might be in the wrong place—your favorite large language model may help this synopsis.

When writing on art, the vernacular utilized within an art historical context is important in that it encodes its legibility for its reader and institutes them for further contextual understanding. Gestures summoning the intention of vernacular to be present, putting it in check, is a primary thing to Virgil’s creations. When he was approached to do a museum show, which became his “Figures of Speech” at MCA, he said the previous decade of his work was intended to attract the attention of the art world, of a curator, who could bring the work to its esteem. And as it opened in 2019, the art historical canon was captured as closed vernacular, illuminated by the assumption of it as a non-diverse structure, something non-porous to the infinite and rich complexities of its non-identity.

My awe for Derrida might have a large influence here, influencing how I read Virgil’s practice as one that activated a presence for formalities, or maybe one of difference, without relinquishing the truth of his own speech, his language for design and culture that also cultivated him, social and institutional, that enabled him to dip into various camps and back out again to speak to the other on their own terms, like a jovial child telling you what’s up with the other side. If Derrida outlined a way to human-ethically listen, Abloh divulged a script for identity-ethical creation.

Virgil wasn’t without riffing on references from the establishment of art and architecture, or the trends of media and branding, the legacy of narrative in color and design, or the culture of music and its affects. It might have been his primary mode, booting up a Duchampian OS regularly, a system that updates an existing thing at least 3% to make it new. Virgil began his career as an assistant to Ye, a role he embodied as one who shepherds visual literacy forward, an “assistant” that encodes the currency of relevant material for the next generation to decode their past. “I am no one, sort of as a first statement ... I’m just an assistant to the people that came before me trying to add to the design that goes forward for the next generation. I’m not anything, I’m just creative.” he told the culture hounds of Hypebeast in 2017. At that time, he embraced the mode of the non-artist, a complication from Duchamp, becoming the every-artist or maybe the no-artist, working to emancipate himself from a position of owner or creator, as someone in conversation with history amongst a global people, and rebuffing a belief in the chronology of originality. This mode was a foundational step and one he continued operating.

Yet, to say of himself that he is no one, a ghost ad-libbing with historical relevancies, would truncate the material advancement his work performs, an exegesis of identity formed in part by the social and cultural cauldrons of his life, or the canonical influence of education and interests. It would dislocate the entire content of his best work. Later, Virgil occupies with clarity a position empowering racial exposition and equity from a more composed, singular point of view—his own—advocating against an atmosphere of the “hostile takeover” for one that provides a mutually identifying progression forward. These last two paragraphs deserve a deep journeying of explication, where, if done at breadth, will locate the possibilities and fictions of my own identity.

A personal mentor of his, Peter Saville, plugged the logic of visual communication into the geist of popular and historical relevance, ushering the affect of specific art movements into the pop cache of youth. His work gives the possibility to feel the travel of time through a collapsed star. Saville’s craft requires a riffing on presence, an identified position on the present and the past. He may be a craftsman of time, in its infinitely disinterested and immediate relevance. An artist who hasn’t been invited to the art camp, and a designer who has labored to locate a graphic practice that can dignify personal expression using the communicative function of design, the currency of visual sense, his work holds the line between irreverence and acknowledgment. Undoubtedly, Virgil nods to the gestures of Saville, as one might look for someone cool in the thickness of late night chatter.

It’s a story of rebasing the values encrypted within formalisms, a decommissioning of biased visual meanings by riffing on them just enough with current relevancy. Objects and contextual output are made new, freshly updated, from 1.0 to 8.0. Authorship slides into an orchestrated act of decomposing powers of ownership, updating the potential for possession by anyone. Or at least for those who are paying attention.

I named these texts “Show Notes” due to the many show notes that followed Virgil’s Louis Vuitton Men’s collections, shows he finalized at the end of his life. They are the closest snapshot of an instruction manual written with the most normal, nuanced language he could, an offering of unambiguity that highlights his stakes. And naturally, they have a twistable title with many potential meanings. In one sense, the title suggests that he should “show notes” to the teacher, a punk jab at the paternal incongruence of shared knowledge he no doubt navigated. Or the title occupies a more objective read, just notes to accompany his shows, handbooks he crafted more like the conceptual artists of the 1970s, communicating as concisely as one might find in the monotony of the best structuralist works. The “Show Notes” navigate historical biases, how uniforms presume culture, gender and sexuality, the power of Black cultural speech (irony, punning, riffing), the language of high Art (like Lawrence Weiner), or the ripeness of re-invention for manmade myths of ownership: these notes define and then redefine in glossary format a deep wealth of affirming new recipes for human progress, like transcriptions for the future.

To fanboy only on the aura of streetwear, his aesthetic induction of color and form that informs rich socio-cultural histories, isn’t “all of it.” And just as limiting would be to preach a writerly evaluation situating his objects within or from outside a European Canon of architecture and fashion. You encounter his work, his affects of design stamped with inverted commas, contextually, with however far you might have journeyed into decontextualization, how little or large you might be aware of the social or institutional encoding of your identity and your progress dispelling and owning it. The best evaluation of Virgil might be to make work in conversation with his, where, if successful, it would hold a conversation with all work addressing epochs of relevance. Yet, writing retains its ancient ability to enter most anything and carry it into the future.

Of the audience and the institution, he simplified this generative dialectic into more marketable vocabulary, as concepts of the “tourist” and the “purist,” maybe nominally teasing each camp with a desire to hold the other’s naiveté. But it was an elegant solution to what appeared to be a natural friction, a love for both. There might be some looseness to uncover in its interpretation, as for example streetwear purists may embody an institutionalization of the Nike narrative across culture and time as much as students of architecture become fluent in Mies van der Rohe. The dialectic nonetheless pushes for conversation.

And an ending here, an end to one part, or maybe just a long preamble, leading to another part, a second one during some future that contains more perspective, amelioration. Notes to the future self: