For anyone who’s been to my apartment, questions about the plastic or (as we call them in Nigeria) polythene bags peppered around become a topic of conversation. What’s with them, Ike? Well, they’re a nod to artists Aya Rodriguez-Izumi @__iamaya__ and stanley brouwn. The latter filled these polythene bags with trash and hung them from the ceiling; the former, in her "Thank You" series, bedazzled them with Swarovski rhinestones. I never met Brouwn, but Aya's participant-driven, experimental knack reminds me a lot about brouwn. Back in the 1960s, brouwn had random pedestrians sketch out directions to a particular place and he'd stamp them with "This Way Brouwn." When Aya and I worked on "On Air,” a late-night talk show that drew on the queer workings of Kubiki theater, the skits were all improv and audience-led. Folks detailed accomplishments, obstacles and regrets and Aya and her team intervened with a waggish kind of care (again, Toni Morrison and humor being serious stuff). A snippet of my thoughts on Aya: There’s a way about Rodriguez-Izumi’s practice that exudes a 1960s sensibility in that if you were good at something you often wanted to deviate from it—a drummer took up painting; an architect engrossed themselves in music composition. Success was sought in the unconventional, in the precipice of failure. It was this sort of queer art of failure that didn't necessarily have a recipe or a clear rhyme or reason. Yet there's a familiar "willingness to fail" that Allan Kaprow observed. It wasn’t an all-out welcoming of failure, but a belief that alternative modes of "success" could be constructed through failing. For Deleuze, exhausting something only inspires the will to try again, push possibilities, explore “that which is not realized.” That is not to say Rodriguez-Izumi was tired or that she couldn’t cut it in fashion or those other forms of artistic expression. Rather, she embarked on performance fully aware that it’s this tenuous terrain, one that often shouldn’t be—and really isn’t—scaled alone. In this terrain, there is often a public there, waiting to be engaged and entertained: how do you go about servicing them, and servicing them well?