The Journal is where Wahgi breathes.
Essays published when there's something worth saying, not on a schedule. Cultural figures who built quietly. Objects that carry more than their weight. Places that shaped how I see.
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Jacques Cousteau: The Ocean Came Indoors
In his 1956 film, Jacques Cousteau's crew dynamite a coral reef to count the fish. He spent his last two decades fighting to protect the sea. In between, he put the ocean on television.
Every essay
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On Mapplethorpe
In 1995 I walked into the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and stood inside another person's certainty for an hour. On shock, precision, and…
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A Door I Didn’t Know Was Open
A scent stopped me the other day. Sweet, then sharp, and I am already gone. Not a photograph, not a story I've told before. A…
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Paul Thomas Anderson – Characters Who Carry the Room
Anderson films the making rather than the made thing — scissors on silk, thread pulled through fabric. What follows is an argument about attention, and…
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The Blue That Cannot Be Owned
Klein spent a short life trying to hold a colour, and in 1960 he registered the formula for it. Under French law you cannot own…
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Patti Smith: The Patience of the Chelsea Hotel
Before the photograph and before the record, there were years in a bookstore, in museums, in a room with a single hot plate. Horses arrived…
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Ryuichi Sakamoto: The Sound of Being Caught Between Worlds
In the score for The Last Emperor, synthesisers and the guzheng circle each other and neither wins. Sakamoto spent fifty years refusing to resolve that…
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Agnes Martin and the Difference Between Lonely and Alone
Martin left New York at the height of her career, stopped painting for seven years, and built a house by hand in the desert. The…
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The Impermanence of the Rooms That Raised Us
A room in Mount Hagen: off-white walls marked by an electrician's work, deep red-brown carpet, rubber plants reaching toward high windows. The rooms that raise…
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Framed by Dreams: The Strange Beauty of David Lynch
Lynch's paintings are scratched, charred, crusted with paint, and titled like distress signals. Two visits to Between Two Worlds at GOMA in 2015, and one…
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Val Kilmer and the Death of Authentic Transformation
Kilmer filmed his own becoming, and then his own unbecoming. Set against an industry that focus-groups its reinventions, the question is whether anything was ever…
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