Sal Randolph

@salrandolph.bsky.social

2430 Followers 2020 Following

Artist & writer working between language & action. Art, attention, poetry, and Zen. My book is The Uses of Art. Co-founder of dispersed holdings, a publishing project. She/they. https://salrandolph.substack.com/ https://linktr.ee/salrandolph

Mosaic of a striped cat with huge eyes who has just caught a duck. Below, in a separate frame, are two ducks sitting side by side peacefully.
Screenshot of the Artemis II capsule after splashdown, taken from the NASA live feed. A small triangular shape in the center of the image with round red inflatables that are meant to keep the capsule upright, against a dark sea dotted with tiny white reflections from waves.
A collection of plastic water bottles, partly filled with blue liquid, hanging from a cable like a necklace.
Close up photo of a cute brown fluffy dog gazing right at you with her tongue slightly out you. She’s about to give you a love-lick.
A grid of faint lines in ink on cream colored paper. The horizontal lines vary in length so that the drawing has wavy, ragged edges on both sides.
Cover of the book Conversations by César Aira. The illustration, which extends across the whole cover is of many tiled conversation boxes, as you might see in a cartoon or text chat. Each is sloppily painted with a bright color.
Screenshot; A Post on Language It seems we are foraging, looking around in ourselves, and that’s what production is. I’m tired today, and all of the spatial and semantic clusters are hanging like grapes in the ripening vineyards. By which I mean it’s the end of summer. By which I mean I’m planning to describe a scene
Screenshot: “Expect to see more dictatorships. Expect to see more dictatorships in formerly democratic states. Expect to see more men feel that they have what it takes to be a strong leader. Expect to see more dictators get what they want. Expect to see a few more dictators get exactly what they want, or what they think they want, in their capacity as men without a superego. Expect eight out of ten dictators to feel basically happy in their work. Expect eighty percent of the dictators and warlords who participated in our survey to admit to occasionally falling short of their objectives without letting it affect their home life; ten percent of dictators and warlords to admit to regularly falling short of their objectives and to be unable to prevent it impacting on their home life; five percent of dictators and warlords to meet all their objectives and to feel proud of their accomplishments; and the remaining five percent of dictators and warlords to exceed all objectives and to feel neither happiness nor regret, only a chilling indifference, their addiction to power only assuaged by increasingly heinous acts of cruelty that leave them unable to feel any emotion at all, even towards their own family.” Sean Ashton, Massive Massive Oil Slick.
Screenshot of a very simple event flyer with black text on a white background. Bathtub Nebula Presents: Filip Marinovich 50th Birthday Bash, Unnameable Books, Brooklyn, Thursday September 18, 2025 7:30-9:30, Featuring Poetry and Music by, The Ghost Shepherds, Eddie Berrigan, Sal Randolph, Filip Marinovich, with your host Bathtub Nebula.
Cover of “The Sea, the Sea” by Iris Murdoch, a Penguin Classics edition where the lower quarter of the cover is plain black, with the title and author in white. Above is an illustration showing the torso and legs of man, facing away as he looks out a window (or looks at a painting of a window). The window shows the sea with sunlight reflecting on its waves. The room has a bright red wall, and the man is standing on a pinkish carpet decorated with Chinese dragons. One of the dragons has lifted from the carpet and is climbing on his leg.
Cover of “The Sea, the Sea” by Iris Murdoch, a Penguin Classics edition where the lower quarter of the cover is plain black, with the title and author in white. Above is an illustration showing the torso and legs of man, facing away as he looks out a window (or looks at a painting of a window). The window shows the sea with sunlight reflecting on its waves. The room has a bright red wall, and the man is standing on a pinkish carpet decorated with Chinese dragons. One of the dragons has lifted from the carpet and is climbing on his leg.
A book is lying on weathered boards: “A Thousand Thoughts in Flight; The Diaries of Maria Gabriella Llansol,” translated by Audrey Young. The cover is filled with an illustration of an expressive, abstracted flower and its leaves and stem. The style of the illustration is flat colors and organic, undulating forms.
Self portrait of Margaret Preston, a white woman in early middle age with red curly hair parted in the center. She has a resolute gaze and reddened cheeks, and is wearing a black drapey garment and holding a painter’s pallet and three brushes. Behind her is a potted plant with bright red blossoms.
A black vase contains stems of Australian banksia pods, with dark stiff lobes and bristles, and thin green serrated leaves. The pods and leaves appear to writhe with dark shadows and starkly illuminated surfaces.
Margaret Preston’s painting Western Australian gum blossom. A vase containing green-white eucalyptus leaves makes a column at the center of the painting. The leaves are strongly lit and shadowed. Near the bottom of the arrangement are three round gum blossoms in bright pink and yellow. Behind the vase are cream colored panels. A single green bud is placed next to the vase on a dark, reflective surface. The feeling is one of great intensity.
Margaret Preston’s painting, Implement Blue. A strongly-lit, still life composition of three cups and saucers, two stemmed glasses, and a pitcher, all of which cast dark blue shadows on a cream surface. The objects are outlined in black with a stark, geometric, modernist feeling. One glass contains a submerged lemon; another glass, cubes of ice. Behind the objects are black lines which meet in an angle towards the top right of the image and frame the central composition: perhaps representing the edge of a table or tray.
Screenshot: A Post on Modification Imagine a crab which is also a cheetah. Would it be fast, or would be be furred? Would it leave the water and climb a tree to wait for something that will never come? Someone on the internet is telling jokes and other people on the internet are taking every statement as truth. Tell me, could the world be funnier than it is?
Screenshot: A Post on a Squirrel She’s the squirrel of the day, stretching her body from branch to branch to get his mouth close to the berries. With one little upright ear she is listening to all of the nearby conversations. There are problems, apparently, in the story. What does the tree stand for? What is its name? Its name is mulberry and it stands for all the data in the world.
Screenshot: A Post on the Democratic Machine Clearly they see the narrative going in a certain direction. Myself, I’ve never understood the story, not the hero’s journey, not the rising and falling arc. I seem to be doomed to my own particular confusion. The governor mouths words, and even though they are captioned, I do not read them because I do not need to. Before I’ve even arrived I know the ending.
Cover of Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara. The title and author are in white against a very dark blue background block. Around the block on three sides is a bright red-orange background which includes the words “The Pocket Poet Series” above and “Number Nineteen” below.
Screenshot from the opening of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: : a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration; in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause; hard put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.
Screenshot of the words: A Photograph of Victory Here is the place where buildings and bombs met each other, an ordinary ruin where the surface of the emulsion is broken in lines and scratches. The sun is made whole by shadow. Where there were windows are mouths; where I am standing, you were standing. I cannot loosen my mind from this. There were heaps of apples, there were leeks and potatoes and cabbages, all now become the damaged blue-green sky
Screenshot of the words: A Painting with a Signal Twenty-one hours ago, a woman looked to the left. She was unfortunately pixilated, skin mottled with compression artifacts. She sat perched on a balustrade—it could have been California, it could have been Italy, it could have been Greece. Like her garment, I am caught in the eye. The centuries are rosy and confused. All I want is a tall tree to define the world.
A painting of a farm on a frosty morning with a group of cows illuminated by the rising sun. The painting is Spring Frost by Australian painter Elioth Gruner, 1919.
Screenshot of a prose poem: A Post on Species The sand lizard and the adder are among those who have benefitted. By themselves, they did nothing to influence the outcome. Somewhere, right now it is raining. Maybe there will be damaging winds. A child is looking at two pictures, trying to find the differences between them. In one, there is a cloud. Meanwhile, on a bed of fallen leaves, a rough green snake is swallowing a large caterpillar. Nothing happens without a photograph.
Screenshot: A Post on Animation Perhaps it is an insult to life itself, perhaps there is nothing that can be done. An artificial woman is weeping as an artificial man snaps the handcuffs shut. She is also a real woman, and he a real man. Tell me, what is the problem here? Sometimes we fail and fail, overriding the self. Sometimes the failure and the loss is what is sacred.
Black text on a white background that reads: A Post on Kittens There were three, swirled like a cinnamon bun, then there were four, then five. Some slept through everything, some tumbled and chewed on any ear available. This is all a kind of sweetness, like rushing somewhere in the morning; what do you put in your mouth? I put everything in my mouth, and much is bitter, much is filth. Among the troubles are the new troubles, clawing each other with soft, open paws. Where is the honor among kittens?
The image consists of text: A Post on Risk-Taking Unsurprisingly, it is good; there is little risk in taking calculated risks. Apparently it’s like moving through the city on an afternoon when no one is thinking of me. I could turn right, I could turn left, I could go into the movie house. Not even a quantum computer could predict my choices. Near me are groupings of artificial plants. They look plausible enough, but their roots are purely in imagination.
Cory Booker on the senate floor past 24 hours. He is a Black man with a shaved head, wearing a black suit. He is gesturing with open hands. Behind him is a wall of red marble and greek-key ornament.
Taylor Mac singing Patti Smith’s version of Birdland in the twenty-third hour of A 24 Decade History of American music. Taylor is alone on stage wearing a huge afro-style wig made of CDs and an illuminated costume.
A Post on Cowardice. A confrontation has been postponed, and by postponing it has been avoided, and by avoiding it has been turned away from, and by turning away it is pretending not to know, and by pretending not to know it is lying. There will not be an apology. In other times and places, jaguars tended to devour their colonizers. They did this by climbing upon them and biting in at the neck.
A Post on Civil War We are not calm. We have taken the old paintings into our hearts. We have seen the leaping horses and thought about the terrible losses. It looks like a classroom which has been ravaged, where all the books were taken away, and only one saint remains, suspended by her hands. Everything that takes place has already happened in a painting.
Giorgio Morandi still life from 1953, showing three white bottles with narrow necks standing in a row in front of three blocky canisters.
A grid of paintings of a water glass by Peter Dreher.
Photograph of a sculpture of the wrathful goddess Kurukulla. She is dancing, has four arms, and is wearing a necklace of skulls.
This large-scale appliqué thangka depicts the Vajrayana goddess Kurukulla. Her skin is red, and she is holding a bow with a flower-tipped arrow. She is wearing bone ornaments and dancing on a pile of corpses. A garland of severed heads frames her body. Below is a group of fierce protectors.
The Panther By Ogden Nash The panther is like a leopard, Except it hasn't been peppered. Should you behold a panther crouch, Prepare to say Ouch. Better yet, if called by a panther, Don't anther.
View of water from a bus window outside Seoul.
Event poster with photographed scraps of text over the cover of Midwinter Day: A Poetry State Forest Marathon Reading of… Midwinter Day, Bernadette Mayer…On the Solstice Saturday Dec 21st - Start time 1pm…Watch live via tinyurl.com/midwinterday…tinyurl.com/midwinterday This is coming to you from East Nassau, NY…(Not a Zoom Event - No remote readers)…To Donate visit Poetrystateforest.com Funds will go toward maintaining the house - library - future events and residency programs
A tanka poem: I know you: morning know your thought, know you again sadder than night’s waves, reading their eternity into flowering rivers.
A small black iron cooking pot with vivid green mum flowers floating on the surface.
O. adrift in skirts and in brambles fell asleep in this body where depth indicates time
A pair of apparently identical granite stones on a white background. An artwork by Vija Celmins:Two Stones 1977/2014–16. One found object and one made object: alkyd oil on bronze 2¼ × 8 × 5½ inches; 6 × 20 × 14 cm.
A small brown australian shepherd dog is gazing at you with wide caramel eyes.
Manuscript of the original Portuguese of the three poems by Hélio Oiticica
Photograph of a Gallimard edition paperback of Marcel Proust’s Les plaisirs et les jours.
A virtual certificate with text "Celebrating 10M users on Bluesky, #15,249, Sal Randolph ‪@salrandolph.bsky.social‬, joined on Apr 11, 2023"
Sometimes I need a record Knowing it doesn't matter And sometimes I need A flower machine.
A portrait of Eihei Dogen c. 1253, by an unknown painter. man with a shaven head and priest’s robes sits in a chair with decoratively curling arm-rests. He is gazing to the left and slightly upwards. Overlaid text: Zen & the Art of Attention — Classes on Mondays, 7:00 - 9:00pm, March 4th - March 18th, 138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn.
Taylor Mac, a white person in a large, messy, blue and aqua wig and a glittery feathered minidress sings with a wide open mouth, hands outstretched. Around Taylor is a colorful multiracial cast wearing extravagant and varied costumes, signing with arms raised. Text overlay: Taylor Mac’s Glittering Millions. Dear Friends, I’ve been thinking these days about the why of life. I’ve been feeling a certain dryness of the spirit, as the old saints used to call it. Then I took myself to BAM to see Taylor Mac’s new show, the Bark of Millions…
A multipart series of kinesthetic photographs of trees in a forest. Seven images are put together in an irregular grid with white lines that separate them. The images are made with a camera whose lens is held open as the photographer moves, so that all of the images are indistinct with trails, overlays, and other traces of motion. Photography by Natasha Myers
Taylor Mac dressed by Machine Dazzle in a poetic drag with a headdress of leaves and cascading lights, and a garment which is a red pleated sheath. The effect is ethereal, yearning, and slightly Christmas-y.
A woman sits in a one-person boat which is part bowler hat and part waistcoat; she wears it and rides in it among the trees of a half-submerged forest. This boat-woman had discovered the source of the Orinoco river, a wine glass perpetually overflowing from a mysterious chamber carved into in a tree.
Wile E. Coyote running in mid-air off a cliff.
Branches of a tree with small bright yellow leaves against a vivid blue skt.
A hand holds up a white sheet of paper that says in bold capital letters: “IT IS 6:31 PM.” Beyond the sheet you can see a horizon of harbor and sky.
A beach at sunset with swimmers silhouetted in the water.
A white woman with short blue hair smiles at the camera. Behind her are fair tables with books and a display of bright red pamphlets.
A box turtle with yellow and black markings stands on decaying wood among leaves and grasses.
A moss and acorn garden seen through the round opening of a glass jar.