THIS LONG CENTURY

I took the opportunity to make a manual for shooting. These are the first few pages. As I work, new entries are added.

Click image to see inside.
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Laida Lertxundi makes films with non-actors, landscapes and sounds. Her work has been selected for the 2012 Whitney Biennial, MoMA, LACMA, the Viennale, VIEWS FROM THE AVANT GARDE at the New York Film Festival, and the Rotterdam International Film Festival. She received the Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the 48th Ann Arbor Film Festival and was named as one of the “25 Filmmakers for the 21st Century” in Film Comment’s Avant-Garde Poll. She is a film and video curator in the U.S. and Spain, and teaches film at the University of California San Diego.

www.laidalertxundi.com

— I wrote this song in one afternoon, following a morning of intensive dental surgery. Oddly enough, this allowed me to concentrate better. Recording it was another matter. In some sense, it involved re-thinking the song itself – which is still a work in progress. I did this version with Aura Rosenberg (keyboards) and Frank Lutz (guitar). Frank and I worked out the arrangement together. Then he recorded it and I did the mix.

CATALOG OF DAYS
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John Miller is an artist, writer, musician based in New York and Berlin. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954. His work has been exhibited at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Kunstalle Zurich and the Musée d’art moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO) in Geneva, among others. His publications include THE PRICE CLUB (SELECTED WRITINGS, 1977-1998) and THE RUIN OF EXCHANGE, both part of the Positions series by JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel. He teaches in Barnard College’s Art History Department as a Professor of Professional Practice.

www.lownoon.com

— I made these collages over the last few days prompted by the invitation to contribute to This Long Century and it’s impending deadline. I live in upstate New York and my junk mail consists primarily of catalogues selling everything from fascinating farm equipment to creepy rightwing infected gift selections. There are of course many gardening catalogues, such as the bleak but well meaning Spray n’ Grow.

I had thrown a selection into a box as ‘possibly useful’ and last week I finally upended it looking for ‘a palette’ and surprisingly—or not—I ended up narrowing that down to just two: J.Crew and Consolidated Plastics Commercial Matting. For a while Dutch Bulbs was in the mix, but the giddy array of tulips proved too loaded with colorful suggestion. I chose instead to work with the already limited visual co-ordinates of J.Crew for men, and commercial matting. The print quality of their respective reproductions sat well together, which helped, because this was going to be a scalpel knife and glue stick project, no photoshop—I don’t know how, plus I enjoy the tactile jigsaw puzzle pleasure of handling the actual bits and moving them around until they fit right.

I then scanned them inexpertly on my HP All-in-One, so the quality’s not great but there’s always the original, albeit here on my desk! The images all feature the same guy, as it happens. He was ‘someone’—one of those guest models from the real world—but I’m sorry, I didn’t make a note of who, and the rest of the catalogue is now binned. Once complete, I realized that I had ended up doing just what I do in painting, which is to take a figure (usually one of my own invention) and make it pop or flatten in accordance with some kind of invisible ley lines of desire—though not for the figure represented, but for the creative process itself.

—

Nicola Tyson is a British artist who has been based in New York for many years. She is primarily a painter, although she has worked with photography, film and lately the written word and sculpture. The Fall of 2012 sees the publication of her satirical and autobiographical LETTERS TO ARTISTS AND SOME OTHER MEN, and an exhibition of photographs at White Columns in New York—her archive of London club photos from the late ‘70s. She is represented in New York by Friedrich Petzel Gallery, and in London by Sadie Coles HQ.

www.petzel.com
www.sadiecoles.com

When I’m asked to comment on or to somehow make a definitive statement positioning myself relative to my Art………..there is a statement by P.L. Dunbar that expresses “where I’m at” much better than I can…

When de Co’n Pone’s Hot
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Dey is times in life when Nature
   Seems to slip a cog an’ go,
Jes’ a-rattlin’ down creation,
   Lak an ocean’s overflow;
When de worl’ jes’ stahts a-spinnin’
   Lak a picaninny’s top,
An’ yo’ cup o’ joy is brimmin’
   ‘Twell it seems about to slop,
An’ you feel jes’ lak a racah,
   Dat is trainin’ fu’ to trot—
When yo’ mammy says de blessin’
   An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

When you set down at de table,
   Kin’ o’ weary lak an’ sad,
An’ you ‘se jes’ a little tiahed
   An’ purhaps a little mad;
How yo’ gloom tu’ns into gladness,
   How yo’ joy drives out de doubt
When de oven do’ is opened,
   An’ de smell comes po’in’ out;
Why, de ‘lectric light o’ Heaven
   Seems to settle on de spot,
When yo’ mammy says de blessin’
   An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

When de cabbage pot is steamin’
   An’ de bacon good an’ fat,
When de chittlins is a-sputter’n’
   So’s to show you whah dey’s at;
Tek away yo’ sody biscuit,
   Tek away yo’ cake an’ pie,
Fu’ de glory time is comin’,
   An’ it’s ‘proachin’ mighty nigh,
An’ you want to jump an’ hollah,
   Dough you know you’d bettah not,
When yo’ mammy says de blessin’
   An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

I have hyeahd a’ lots o’ sermons,
   An’ I’ve hyeahd o’ lots o’ prayers,
An I’ve listened to some singin’
   Dat has tuck me up de stairs
Of de Glory-Lan’ an’ set me
   Jes’ below de Mastah’s th’one,
An’ have lef’ my hea’t a-singin’
   In a happy aftah tone;
But dem wu’ds so sweetly murmured
   Seem to tech de softes’ spot,
When my mammy says de blessin’,
   An’ de co’n pone’s hot.

—

Ed Bereal was born in 1937 in Riverside, California. While still a student at Chouinard Art Institute, his work was included in the controversial 1961 exhibition War Babies at Henry Hopkins’s Huysman Gallery. Bereal’s assemblages challenge the viewer, directly addressing identity politics and racial stereotypes prevalent in the U.S. in the 1960s and beyond. These works also engage with uncomfortable and complex moments in global history, such as Nazi-era Germany. Bereal has been a mentor to several generations of artists and has taught at universities throughout the United States.

— I grew up in Miami in the 1970s. My father used to come home early in the mornings after a long night of overtime, unclip the holster from his belt, pour himself a tall glass of milk and say, “Ah crime pays.” My mom carried her holster in her purse and in a pinch was as likely to pull out a ratty hairbrush as a 38. My dad worked the midnight shift. His car had Dade Country Crime Scene painted on the sides. My mom was an undercover narcotics agent and always had a different car – ones that were non-descript and which apparently you were not supposed to transport children in. I know this because my sister and I did a lot of crouching on the floor when we would enter certain parking lots. We would stay hunched over- mind you I was probably three feet tall at the time and my hunching was unnecessary- and move quickly into our own car where we again would lay low until we were outside the parking lot. Suitcases might appear from a trunk and be moved to another waiting car. Despite my parents line of work, despite the influx of Cuban exiles and boatloads of Haitian refugees floating up on the shores and despite Miami being the murder capital of the country – it seemed a pretty dull place to grow up. I remember Thurston Moore recalling when he was visiting Miami in those years, seeing an ad in the Herald that said, “if anyone has heard of The Clash, please call me”. That really gets across the isolation and general feeling of being a teenager in an endless string of sunny days in a city of retired people.

Through out the late 60s and all through the 70s, I spent a lot of time on Miami Beach – first with my grandparents and later as a teenager taking my first photos. Somewhere in the early 80’s, having secured a job at Peaches Records and Tapes, I quit The Clog Shop on 163rd street and dropped out of high school. I was no longer living at either of my parent’s houses (they divorced when I was eight) but was bouncing around between my friend’s parents houses, my grandmother’s condo in a retirement village and pretty much blowing it in every situation I landed. The order of things gets a little foggy here but I did get my GED and enrolled in Miami Dade Community College. I got a little apartment in North Miami for a brief spell and through all the haze and chaos of those years I continued to photograph Miami Beach. Then, encouraged by the sixteen dollars I won in the Miami Dade Community College photography contest, I headed north.

I had gotten a ride to Boston and was staying at a friend’s apartment. I experienced my first snow and randomly met a bunch of punker art-school kids. They seemed to have it all going on. Thrift store dresses, army boots and shaved heads. I had no idea how old they were, I had no idea what punks were, they just seemed to be from mars (as it turned out they were from Martha’s Vineyard and weren’t actually very punk in their musical taste but more into records like The English Beat and Rock-a-Billy tunes by the Collins Kids) All my life I had suspected cool shit was going on all over the place if you could just get yourself north of Tallahassee and it was all proving true. I knew these kids (if they even were kids) were better educated, more cultured, and just generally better for having grown up someplace other than Florida. Within a week of being in Boston I enrolled in night classes at Mass Art and when I was invited to flop on a couple of the art-school kids couch, I was so totally fearful of them seeing my corny Miami photos that I destroyed them all. I remember tearing them up and throwing them in a dumpster on my way to buy some plaid trousers. I felt a real need to disassociate myself with all things Miami especially since the old timers and the Mahjong scene was being quickly replaced by Miami Vice, body builders and super tanned rollerbladers.

I can’t recall exactly where I first discovered Andy Sweet’s photos but it wasn’t long after moving north, probably in some bookstore in Boston. In any case, seeing images of Miami Beach in a different context had a real effect. I can still conjure up the physical pain I got in my gut. Seeing Sweet’s photographs outside the glare of Miami, I realized that my own photos were probably, some of them at least, possibly pretty ok, maybe even good. They were at the very least pictures of a unique time and place that was already fading away. If only, back when I was out there on Ocean Drive, with my Pentax K-1000 – If only I could have stumbled into Andy Sweet’s photographs or for that matter Stephen Shore’s. Even if I had just seen some little bit of good art as a kid I think I could have had a whole different experience. If I had met anyone, just any one person along the way that had heard of The Clash those years could have all been so different.

Andy Sweet was murdered in 1982 in the City of Miami Beach in The Carmel Villas Apartment Complex. He was stabbed 29 times. Approximately 99 color photographs were taken from the scene. My dad sent me a copy of the crime scene report; blood splatters run at a 45 degree angle, two ashtrays are over turned, there is a wooden box on the bed, TV is tuned to channel 7…

Twenty years after Sweet’s murder a local storage facility lost all the negatives of his work. His parents rented the space which advertised “Museum Quality Storage” for 10 years, paying the $25 a month fee until they received a notice alerting them that the five boxes of negatives could not be located. The Sweet family was paid $1 per box in keeping with the agreement they signed in 1992.

After you get some distance from a place, you realize there were some things you liked after all. And one of those things for me was the Miami Beach that is represented in Sweet’s photography. These photos come from the now out-of-print book entitled MIAMI BEACH.

—

Kelly Reichardt was born in 1964 in Miami, Florida. She lives and works in New York City. Her feature debut RIVER OF GRASS (1994) was acknowledged at many international festivals. Her second feature, OLD JOY (2006), won a Tiger Award at the 2007 Rotterdam Festival. WENDY AND LUCY (2008) had its premiere in Cannes and her most recent film, MEEKS CUTOFF (2010), premiered as part of the Official Section at Venice Film Festival. In the 2012 her work was included in the Whitney Biennial. Reichardt is currently Artist-in-Residence in Film and Electronic Arts at Bard College, New York.

— In the past eight years I’ve spent a lot of time in Columbus, Ohio, at the home of Bernard and Linda Beck. Bernard and Linda’s house is a record of their life together – it is full of emotional portraits they’ve made of each other and of themselves, as well as portraits (of self, mother, father) by their daughter Bianca. Their house was formerly a duplex, so it has a nearly symmetrical structure – every room has its double on the other side. This doubling is continued and amplified throughout the house as the family members are mirrored and echoed in various portraits.

This is a song that Linda recorded in the eighties with Eric Shinn and Lucy Jimison:

MAGNOLIA

And these are some more of Bernard’s paintings:

The initial impact of Bernard’s paintings is strong and sudden. As objects and images they often appear to be quite blunt or direct – their space is compressed, their subjects are immediately and centrally present, their colors and contrast are vivid and clear – but over time this frankness is transformed into something else: a chain of questions. “How did this painting come to be? What space is this? Where am I now and how with these figures, these things?” The paintings grow in my mind and in front of me, becoming gradually more potent and more fascinating.

The language in Linda’s songs is always clear and classical and intense. The songs themselves are formally and sonically seductive – alive and catchy, full of beguiling musical details – yet within them I am slowly led to the same sorts of questions and sensations that I find in Bernard’s paintings. I become gently disoriented, even in the midst of familiar words and feelings and musical structures. In Linda’s songs (as in Bernard’s paintings) things are always somewhat strange to begin with, but this strangeness changes and vibrates in new ways as time is spent within it.

For the past year Bianca and I have been staying in the home of Tuli Kupferberg and Sylvia Topp. Tuli was an artist and poet and performer – he was involved in a lot of wild and intelligent and positive things in his life, but he’s best known for his activities as a member of the band The Fugs. He passed away in 2010 and left behind an apartment full of books, as well as an archive of writings, drawings, and recordings of various sorts. Tuli’s daughter Samara and her boyfriend Brendan have been organizing all these things for a while now, but when they moved to Maine last year no one was living in the apartment, so Samara asked us if we’d like to stay here.

This is a recording that Tuli made sometime close to the end of his life:

LET’S HAVE HYSTERICAL HAPPINESS

One night Samara, Brendan, Bianca, and I were listening to some of Tuli’s cassette tapes and we found this song. Tuli would record one song idea at the beginning of a cassette and leave the rest of the tape blank. A lot of his songs are about mortality, so this relationship between song and silence is both apt and intense. It was amazing that night to hear Tuli’s voice come so roughly to life and then slip abruptly into the hiss of blank tape.

While we’ve lived here I’ve also thought a lot about these drawings that Tuli made in the fifties. It’s hard to grasp them by saying what they are – they resemble simultaneously journals and poems, cartoons and jokes, stories and notations. They are all these things, drawn out in an elliptical near-narrative way. Each one is a time warp – spending time with them is similar to the experience of living here in this apartment that feels like another, lost version of New York. I look at these drawings and wonder “Is this what life was like then? Is it like this now?”

—

Josh Brand was born in 1980 in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. He lives and works in New York City, where his art was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. One-person exhibitions of Brand’s photographs have been presented at White Columns, NY; Herald St, London; and Misako & Rosen, Tokyo. His most recent show was “Nature” at Herald St in January 2012. He is a member, with Richard Aldrich, Peter Mandradjieff, and Zak Prekop, of the band Hurray.

www.heraldst.com
www.misakoandrosen.com

PUMP: THE ART OF FILM IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL REPRODUCTION

— Walter Benjamin had it wrong when he spoke of the loss of “aura” in the age of mechanical reproduction. In his essay, film has all the radiance of a postcard. Perhaps he was always wrong? In that place, time, audience, projection speed and print damage meant each screening could have its unique flavor and memory. Seeing Hollywood features in the balcony of a Newark, New Jersey downtown theater, its floor crunchy with popcorn, sticky with candy and noisy with audiences who did not hesitate to speak back to the screen, is one such example. Experiencing Do The Right Thing in a spic & span New Jersey shopping mall with a largely white audience who walked out head bowed is another. Going to a drive-in movie as a pre-teen where the prints were so beat up and “reproduced,” the advertised pizza looked like nothing but a bloody bruise slipping off the screen – hysteric materiality – unforgettable.

Now, with the rise of digital reproduction, its endless and presuming exact cloning – it appears film has become rarer and rarer, and thus, full of aura. Film has no longer the pretense of an infinitely repeatable production but exists as a nearly extinct species. Its glories renewed, revived and praised when a preserved print is shown – shockingly precise and at full resolution – a silky shine clinging to its industrial past. Not so much nostalgic, though there is some of that operative – but rather, a physicality, a depth, a “look” that neither video, HD, nor digital can project. The rise of these new technologies successfully redefine film: celluloid as industry is defunct, hail celluloid as art!

Examples abound. The print itself becoming rarer and rarer as stocks go out of production – whether Kodachrome, acetate print stock altogether, or reversal ultimately. The print becomes unreproduceable. Films that were shot in or printed in Kodachrome can be so no longer. Thus, the five copies of my film Ornamentals (1977) are now a limited edition. Or Nathaniel Dorsky, an artist who has shot Kodachrome exclusively, is experimenting with other film stocks but cannot get the same contrast or reds that that original camera stock contained. As aspects of prints fade, much as a painting might crack or become dirty over time, the film begins to disappear. The 100-year history of film is chockablock with lost originals and/or prints and now, prints can’t always be recovered because of fading or breakage. Such an example, Mutiny (1982) used workprint to cut in with reversal original. Workprint was/is developed differently than original. It is not intended to last and indeed it has not. It has gone red – the magenta that celluloid aspires to (as with tulips, whose original color is red). This means there is difficulty in getting the footage to what it was; this means only one print remains without scratches, cuts or broken sprockets. Thus Mutiny is a mono-print, the only print. The implications are large: I hesitate to show it except at forums where the projection is controlled and I am in attendance. Suddenly a populist medium has become that of the specialist.

Perhaps in the more rarified atmosphere of the art film, the experimental film or independent film, this has always been the case. Many prints of Report (1967), which Bruce Conner distributed personally, were actually monoprints, in that he would tinker with individual prints extensively. I have seen at least four different versions in which the montage changes, sometimes in length, sometimes in the image itself. It was a privilege to buy one of these prints that had its cut-ups intact.

Then again prints get scratched. They are such “tender” vehicles of image and emotion (however deep their impact). The scratches disturb rhythms, undo meaning, destroy aesthetics. And there might very well be no existent negative. The film/digital divide makes me think of the divisions between oil painting and acrylic from the mid-twentieth century. I can only hope that just as oil painting survived with small producers, celluloid will as well. Am I being unjustifiably optimistic?

Ironically film is, in some ways, cheaper than digital: does not need computers that change every year, does not need ever-changing software or more memory. Instead its mechanical machines last for 20, even 30 years, and do just as well as they did in their original state. It was Arthur Jafa (aka “AJ,” marvelous cameraman for Daughters of the Dust and Crooklyn) who taught me how to make video look like film. I told my students video could do this. But I lied. Recently shooting film I realized how wrong I was. As of now, film remains, what AJ calls, the gold standard of image making—what “is considered definitive.” A nineteenth century relic then, or is film the definitive icon?

When one sees film, the image shudders, there is a little shake as the film moves through its sprockets – it reflects tenderness, fragility, mortality. Like rockets blasting into space, it has hubris and a mortal life. It recovers and uncovers a world. Like the touch of a lover, it has a remembered feel, smoothness and depth, a purity of complex light. It is silky without flatness. It won’t let go. Perhaps because we grew up with this form of representation, one can’t imagine a world without this satisfaction. How could the blank faces of corporate bottom lines allow this to happen? How could machines replace older machines with less authenticity? How is memory erased? Is the future not a projection in a community space, but rather individual peeks at Vimeo? How can the medium go extinct and yet continue its message?

Personally, I can’t let celluloid go. It’s too much fun. The little yellow packages, that like taxis, take you to and fro over the globe and inside communities, architecture, places and peoples. Film challenges you to lug that camera into the world, to observe exactly, succinctly. Not surveillance, but selection. Not anything goes, but everything possible. Not turn on switch and go, but turn on and attend. You find a corner in shadow to change the film and not expose the “daylight” rolls. You remove carefully the pieces that get “left” in the Bolex. You read a light meter and decide whether to shoot for the shadows or for the light. You refocus. These are skills, attitudes, a philosophy of seeing – that will be lost to automatic switches. But it need not be a battle, no need for automatons.

My memories include that of hand-developing reversal film: when the strip of film comes out of its first “bath” in chemicals, it is a negative image covered with a milky caul. A shock of light (a bulb in our set-up) undoes the caul, reverses the negative image and a positive appears: ethereal, shiny, gorgeous, miraculous.

Alternative to such alchemy – I remember getting a print back from a submission (yes we sent prints themselves!) with a deep scratch down the entire film. Or a print coming back with surrealistic timing, the lab having made a mistake. And of course no DVD to mail in when a curator requests same, no Vimeo for programmers to watch in their considerations. Yes. There is gain as well as loss. No doubt.

So – I say hello to digi-land but I reject it too or want to. We are all taken by our corporate sponsors: so clear and so debilitating. My art determined by digi-world where previously it was determined by Kodak? Perhaps yes, yet the digital cameras, the Canon for example, designed to resemble film, makes China look like Staten Island. Film becomes nostalgic, an effect in corporate software – that removes difference and flattens the affect of the person behind the camera.

Am I being nostalgic myself? Writing evolves – stick in dust, stone, ink, pencil, typewriter, computer – and yes there is that difference and it makes a difference. The means reorders my attachment¹. All those years of cut and paste and now there is copy and paste. Digital editing serves as both optical printer and editor. The computer supplies you with a copy machine. NO resistance to multiplication. We are industry and industry is us. We are condensed, packaged, replicated (?) for the future. We mediate the medium. We are the mediating heart of the world we are analyzing and inventing. We are pushing the hearts of the world in and out again, pumping, pulsing, perturbed, perplexed, persistent.²

¹From my poem LUST, in A MOTIVE FOR MAYHEM, Potes & Poets Press, 1989
²With hat off to Guy Maddin’s 2000 short film HEARTS OF THE WORLD
—

Abigail Child was born in 1948 in Newark, New Jersey. She has been at the forefront of experimental writing and media since the 1980s, having completed more than thirty film/video works and installations, and written 6 books. An acknowledged pioneer in montage, Child addresses the interplay between sound and image. Her major projects include IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?: a 9 year, 7-part work; B/SIDE: a film that negotiates the politics of internal colonialism; 8 MILLION: a collaboration with avant-percussionist Ikue Mori that re-defines “music video”; THE SUBURBAN TRILOGY: a modular digi-film that prismatically examines a politics of place and identity; and MIRRORWORLDS: a multi-screen installation that incorporates parts of Child’s “foreign film” series to explore narrative excess. Her most recent film, A SHAPE OF ERROR is constructed as an imaginary home movie of the life of Mary Shelley.

Winner of the Rome Prize (2009-10), a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2005), Guggenheim (1996) and Fulbright Fellowships (1993), and the Stan Brakhage Award (2011), as well as participating in two Whitney Museum of American Art Biennials, (1989 and 1997) Child has had numerous retrospectives worldwide. These include Buena Vista Center in San Francisco, Anthology Film Archive (in conjunction with The New Museum, NY), Harvard Cinematheque, Reservoir, Switzerland, EXIS Korea and most recently at the Cinoteca in Rome. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art NY, the Whitney Museum, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia, and in numerous international film festivals, including New York, Rotterdam, Locarno and London. Harvard University Cinematheque has created an Abigail Child Collection dedicated to preserving and exhibiting her work.

Child is also the author of five books of poetry, among them A MOTIVE FOR MAYHEM, SCATTER MATRIX AND ARTIFICIAL MEMORY, and a book of critical writings: THIS IS CALLED MOVING: A CRITICAL POETICS OF FILM (University of Alabama Press, 2005). As a teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Child has been instrumental in building an interdisciplinary media/film program.

[neuespalte]

Photo from PREFACES (1981)
by Abigail Child

— Here are two photos. One is a photo of my sister at a show of mine and the other is of my cat in my fathers garden. Both are from the this Spring.

—

Jacob Kassay was born in 1984, in Buffalo, New York. He lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. Solo shows include Art: Concept, Paris; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Eleven Rivington, New York; and Kitchen Distribution, Buffalo, New York.

www.galerieartconcept.com
www.xavierhufkens.com

—

Pioneer performance artist, Barbara T. Smith began her body-oriented work in 1965. By ‘68 she was creating powerful transformational performances and has continued to the present. The work often externalizes her inner psychic material in mythic rituals, based on issues of gender, spirituality, and sexuality and are integrated with larger cosmic laws and structures. Many pieces are intimate, personal and participatory often extending over many days. Since 1964 has also produced collages, prints, paintings, drawings and sculpturesfrequently related to her performances. Smith has performed throughout the U.S. and abroad and has taught at universities and art institutions around the world. A recipient of several awards and grants, Smith was a founding member of many alternative spaces in L.A. She was included in OUT OF ACTION: BETWEEN THE PERFORMANCE AND OBJECT, 1949-1979 at MOCA (1998); the survey show of L.A. artists at the Pompidou in Paris (2007); and WACK! ART AND THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION (2007) first at MOCA, later at PS1 in New York. In 2008 she had a solo show at Galerie Parisa Kind, Frankfurt and was included in the major Oslo exhibition called WHATEVER HAPPENED TO SEX IN SCANDINAVIA. Her work was included in eight PACIFIC STANDARD TIME (2011-12) exhibitions addressing the histories of performance, feminist art in Los Angeles.

www.barbaratsmithart.com

COMMUNISM IN COLOR

May Day, Poland, 1971. Our neighbor, mining explosive engineer and avid amateur photographer R. Kondracki shot thousands of stills on ORWO color transparency film in this period.

ORWO was the East German cousin of Kodak, their histories fabulously intertwined: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwo

This project is to honor Kondracki’s commitment to everyday photography, moments of joy, and especially to Color photography in a reality that is most often described as nothing but Gray.

After we left in April 1972 and were denied re-entry, our family reunions would happen in one or another Eastern Bloc country. Kondracki documented them all with great passion.

On the 40th anniversary of our exodus, I am gathering more ORWO Color photography from this era and from the Communist Bloc, shot by enthusiasts like Kondracki, to turn them into a book.

If you know anyone who visited or lived there in this period and who has ORWO Color pictures to share, get in touch! admin at aleksandramir.info, www.aleksandramir.info

EXPANSIVES – LIFE WITH YOU …

— This is the most expensive record I’ve bought (to date.) I think I paid $255.00 for it (plus shipping.)

It’s an early (1982), raw example of what would come to be known as Italo Disco, and was written by Gianluigi Farina, Francesco Rago and Monneret De Villard Xenia Olga Anastasia (aka X. Monneret.)

Farina, Rago and Monneret were responsible for other proto-Italo classics including Wanexa’s The Man From Colours and ‘Lectric Workers Robot Is Systematic and The Garden.

I’m still looking for a copy of The Man From Colours.

—

Matthew Higgs is an artist, writer and curator based in New York. Since 2004 he has been the director of White Columns, a not-for-profit art space located in New York’s West Village. Over the past twenty years he has organized more than 200 exhibitions and projects with artists, and has contributed writing to more than fifty publications. White Columns has a vinyl-only record label THE SOUND OF WHITE COLUMNS, its next release – summer 2012 – will be a 12″ EP of new recordings by Malcolm Mooney, the original vocalist from CAN.

www.whitecolumns.org

— Lately I have been receiving snapshots from around the world showing real life stuff that looks like my work. A curious fact, that I only realise now, is that they were all sent to me by people born in Norway.

Photo: Maria Brinch, 2 May 2012 10:39:49 CEST

Photo: Yngve Holen, 23 August 2011 12:43:35 CEST

Photo: Eivind Furnesvik, 9 May 2011 07:35:35 CEST
—

Nina Beier was born in 1975, in Copenhagen. Recent solo exhibitions include NINA BEIER at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; FOUR STOMACHS, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp; Standard (Oslo); Croy Nielsen, Berlin; and Laura Bartlett Gallery, London. Beier’s works have been included in various group exhibitions such as MODIFY, AS NEEDED, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; EXHIBITION, EXHIBITION, Castello di Rivoli, Turin; MUSEUM OF SPEECH, Extra City, Antwerp; UNDER DECONSTRUCTION, The Swiss Institute, New York; LOST AND FOUND; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin; and AUDIO, VIDEO, DISCO, Kunsthalle Zürich. Forthcoming exhibitions include WHEN ATTITUDES BECAME FORM, BECOME ATTITUDES, CCA Wattis, San Francisco; THE NEW PUBLIC, Museion, Bolzano; DOGMA, Metro Pictures, New York, PERFORMANCE YEAR ZERO, Tate Modern, London.

www.laurabartlettgallery.co.uk

— Twenty years have already passed since I started drawing “my memories”, which began with a little fortuitous consideration. My drawings are like a diary, a recording of memories which are far away and blurred, like scenery flickering behind the deep fog. They continue to increase and there are almost ten thousand of them now.

Every secretly cumulated memory in my brain is a response to a delicate stimulation from my body or skin. These emerge at the moment of an event or incident, like when a polaroid photo gradually becomes vivid.

—

Keiichi Tanaami was born in 1936, in Kyobashi, Tokyo. He is one of the leading pop artists of postwar Japan. Recent shows include DRAWINGS AND COLLAGES 1967-1975, Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Berlin (2011); DIVIDING BRIDGE, Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo (2011); LOST AND WANDERING BRIDGE SERIES, Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo (2011); Keiichi Tanaami / Oliver Payne, STUDIOLO, Zurich (2011); WANDER IN THE CHAOS WORLD – KEIICHI TANAAMI’S FANTASTIC WORLD, The OCT Art & Design Gallery, Shennan, China (2010); KOCHUTEN, Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo (2009); SPIRAL 2, Galerie Gebr. Lehmann, Dresden (2010); DAYTRIPPER, Art & Public – Cabinet PH, Geneva, Switzerland (2008). As a filmmaker Tanaami’s films have been included at festivals such as the Norwegian International Film Festival, the Rotterdom International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and the London International Film Festival.

www.nug.jp
www.galerie-lehmann.com

DIALOGUE FROM A NOVEL ALREADY WRITTEN

“I think I like it out here because everything seems still, there’s hardly any movement, everything seems stationary . . . I like that.”

“What’s down below, under the waves, down underneath, through the planks of wood, beneath the dirty water, beneath all of this? . . .”

“I don’t really think of much, I just look at the sky, the shape of things . . .”

“I enjoy the silence, I guess. I like it that way, not too many families walk all the way out here, it’s too long, and when the train isn’t working, it’s near empty. That’s the best time, for me, when no one else can get here . . . But it’ll all end. It’s not always going to be like this. Our time here, however we use it, is limited.”
—

Lee Rourke is the author of the critically acclaimed novel THE CANAL (winner of The Guardian’s Not The Booker 2010), the short story collection EVERYDAY and a work of non-fiction A BRIEF HISTORY OF FABLES: FROM AESOP TO FLASH FICTION. He is currently Writer-in-Residence at Kingston University, London.

leerourke.blogspot.com

— The best part of my job is getting to work with a lot of amazing people. I’m actually not much of a builder myself – I’ve worked on a couple remodeling jobs, but always as the low guy on the totem pole. I know my way around a hammer, I know how to weld, but not too well. After years of working with concrete I still have a very crude understanding of it at best. But it’s what I like to do. And I’ve been very lucky to be able to learn on the job, working with people who know a lot more than I do.

—

Oscar Tuazon was born in 1975, in Tacoma, Washington. He lives and works in Paris, where he co-founded the collective-run artists’ gallery castillo/corrales. Recent solo shows include MANUAL LABOR, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2012); DIE, The Power Station, Dallas (2011); STEEL, PRESSURE-TREATED WOOD, OAK POST, OFFICE CHAIR, INDUCTION STOVETOP, ALUMINUM, Standard (Oslo), Oslo (2011); AMERICA IS MY WOMAN, Maccarone, New York, USA (2011); MY MISTAKE, ICA – Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2010); Oscar Tuazon, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2010). Selected group exhibitions include Whitney Biennial 2012, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012); THE LANGUAGE OF LESS, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2011); ILLUMINATIONS (curated by Bice Curiger), 54th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2011).

www.maccarone.net
www.standardoslo.no
www.presenhuber.com

— Last year I went to see Peter Hook, the bass player from Joy Division/New Order, perform their debut album Unknown Pleasures at the Henry Fonda Theatre. I was with my friend Stephanie. We got tickets without thinking too much about it. As the event drew closer, it became obvious that it was terrible idea. Still, I was hopeful that Hook and his band could somehow pull it off. Maybe he knows what he’s doing and this isn’t just a way to make some quick cash now that he’s left New Order.

The place is packed. Old and young people, couples with kids are standing around waiting for the show to start. A transmission of knowledge. We sit at a booth and exchange trivia about Joy Division with a couple, while a documentary retracing the band’s career is projected on stage. The show finally starts and after hearing the first song, we completely lose hope. Stephanie leaves during the third song to go to our friend Heather’s Christmas party. She wants to buy a t-shirt but I convince her not to. I promise her that I’ll make her one. I think about the band’s off-grooves etchings and describe them to her. The one on Still, released after Ian Curtis’s suicide, says, “The chicken won’t stop” and “The chicken stops here.” The chicken tracks across the grooves on the opposite side would make a cool t-shirt. They reference the ending of Werner Herzog’s 1977 movie, Stroszek, where the character played by Bruno S., a street musician, leaves Berlin for the US, to escape the constant bullying his girlfriend’s ex-pimp subjects him to. After his trailer gets repossessed, and an absurd attempt to rob a bank, he ends up committing suicide. The film ends with a sequence showing a chicken dancing. Presumably this is the last movie Curtis, who was a fan of Herzog’s, saw on the BBC the night he hanged himself. All of this, and pretty much everything else, is common knowledge now, and features in the film’s Wikipedia page.

I walk upstairs to smoke a cigarette. I am vaguely hopeless but not angry as I gaze dreamily at Hollywood Boulevard. I think about what Joy Division meant to me then, what the sound signified and triggered. A floating atmosphere of defeat. Things that would unfold later, once I’d patiently deciphered the clues and researched the influences contained in the records. The two news stories I remember most from that time: the Tenerife Airport disaster in ’77, the deadliest accident in history and so close to Morocco. Jim Jones’s Guyana cult suicide on the cover of Paris Match in December ’78, a green-tinted black and white photo of bodies face-down on the ground. Leaders of men, made a promise for a new life.

An atmosphere in search of a sound. Where I grew up in Morocco, the only music we ever heard on the radio or at home was hippie music, preferably from those who had spent some time there in the ’60s—The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Tim Buckley. Or reggae and Arabic pop music. Flashbacks of hanouts, tiny Moroccan convenience stores, plastered with posters of Bob Marley playing soccer or Bruce Lee. They both died tragically. Men out of work hanging out inside smoking and drinking mint tea. How to describe it? Shanty towns a couple of blocks from my father’s house; the poverty, Sunday weddings, a procession, donkey carts, wild dogs tortured by children, unpaved dusty roads, a pungent smell of garbage in the summer that is almost sugary and pleasant. None of it belongs to me.

The country, in economic turmoil, stopped importing goods in the late ’70s, and the record stores that remained open just kept selling their stock as if history had stopped. The first 7-inch I remember buying was Visage’s Fade to Grey during a summer vacation to France in 1980. It was a total aesthetic shock to hear that particular mix of dance music tainted by melancholia, the sound that would later be perfected by New Order, Depeche Mode, and the Pet Shop Boys. An atmosphere in search of a language. ESL, half-understood lyrics, words became triggers. The meaning was always delayed by the discrepancy between the music and the lyrics.

I remember how unhappy I was then while listening to Closer. The drum roll at the beginning of Atmosphere a secret signal, “Don’t walk away in silence.” I can’t listen to their music very much anymore. Its meaning has been emptied out. “Oldness comes to rile the youth who dream suicide,” sang the Red House Painters. I think of the last page of Pierre Guyotat’s Coma, about what replaces that space, “a heart that only pumps blood, and blood that is no longer warming.”

—

Hedi El Kholti is a cultural presenter who has worked with Tony Duvert, Abdellah Taïa, Gary Lee Boas, Grisiledis Real, Holy Shit and other intellectual luminaries. He is Managing Editor of Semiotext(e).

www.semiotexte.com

— I have a notebook which I had forgotten writing, some 5 years ago, and I came across it in the Fall. Each page, which I never do in a notebook, was part of a sequence of some 50 pieces or more. I find/found myself doing this over the past 12 years or so, perhaps it was another way to kind of forget that I had written something, to then come across it sometimes, quite a few years later, and read it as a ‘stranger’. Similarly some of the poems below, such as The Artist, I found written on a Neruda book.

DEATH IN REVERSE
Some index for clerical men and clerical women.
Some shadows. Some thin green.
Some index for men and women of the clergy.
A patient throbbing meant for them.
Pain: found. Loneliness: to a wound and an ear.
Starlight odd, much else. Death
in reverse, minimized, backwards.

NORTH OF YOURSELF
“I don’t mean
north of 14th Street,
I mean north of
yourself.”

NECESSARY
A bed in another corner of the house.
Or the house in the dreamer’s dream.

Darkness and more darkness and then a face renamed.
In a neighborhood without much space.

Eva Hesse – partly killed or diseased by necessary chemicals.
Which were also as part of the structures killing the structures.

The space is altered.
Not tiny like your changed name but tiny and still.
—

Michael Burkard was born in 1947 in Rome, New York. He is the author of eleven collections of poetry, including ENVELOPE OF NIGHT: SELECTED AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS 1966-1990. He has received numerous awards, including the Alice Fay DiCastagnola award (1986) and the Whiting Writers’ award (1988). He teaches at Syracuse University.

— Existing imagery, eg. postcards and their vantage points are a great point of reference and I often use them when researching ‘new’ photographs – there is no point to start from scratch on a picture that has innumerous predecessors. More copies of a subject make it more valuable to me.

Which is easy for the Alps, as they have been photographed plenty from the early days on (think of the Bisson brothers, or Eduard Spelterini) and it lives on in its cheap brother, the post or travel card.

The sameness of these postcards, sort of the consensus on subject and vantage point might off-set the idea of originality; to me they validate and prove right the depicted scene, and are a reason to acutally take the photograph myself.

My kind of landscape photography is less expedition than reenactment. It is not about the landscape and spritual experience, nor about a pioneer vision. It is just about an ‘original’ picture of a worn-out genre that I hope to find and I am usually happy when I am back home from the adventure.

Snow has always been a tremendous phantasy for me and – growing up in Germany – there was never enough of it. I only got snowed in once in my life in the Swiss Alps: It was an unforgettable 2 days.

In my pictures snow becomes a blank sheet of paper, an imaginative white space. It is the romantic counterpart to the technical side of photography, the fictional over the rational.

Looking at images of the Furka region in Switzerland – the Grimsel- and the Furkapass, all the imagery happened to be taken in the summertime. Since those passes are snowed in and therefore closed during the wintermonths, there are no images of it in the wintertime. Moreover the streets hardly exist anymore, covered and temporarily erased under the white snow.

When I hiked up the Grimselpass in March 2012 – on a maintained trail – unusual amounts of snow had blanked out the entire area, but my photo, almost the reverse of the found postcards, can’t keep up with the spectacular summer scene, so I am not sure what to do with it yet.

—

Florian Maier-Aichen was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1973. He studied at the School of Photography and Film, University for Gothenburg, Sweden and the University of Essen, Germany before earning his M.F.A from the University of California Los Angeles, CA. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid and his work is included in such public collections as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Denver Museum of Art, Denver, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He lives and works in Cologne, Germany and Los Angeles, CA.

www.303gallery.com
www.blumandpoe.com

The terminus of the Dialectic as a photomicrograph.

—

Mike Davis is the author of several books including City of Quartz, Ecology of Fear, Late Victorian Holocausts, Planet of Slums, Magical Urbanism, and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Davis has been a fellow at the Getty Institute and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. He teaches at the University of California, Irvine.

— I file these pictures in my computer under double vision. They have to do with seeing something twice, or remembering something you can’t quite put your finger on having known in the first place. I like to look at them when I’m feeling stuck, maybe because they all seem to pivot on a point just outside the frame, that no one inside the picture knows about yet.

—

Lucy Raven is an artist living and working in Oakland, California and New York City.

www.lucyraven.com

I was recently shown these photos. They’ve never been published, and I don’t remember having them taken, but that’s me. I’ve paired them with a poem from the ’80s. You know, whatever.

Taylor Mead in Paris circa 1967
Photos: Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation


Freedom is the trick word
of the century

Let’s go to Capri this spring
*
Out of Show-Business into a real love affair.
*
It’s dangerous
–– this world
*
I don’t know whether it’s
good
or bad
or sad.
*
In my field I’m the best!
And I don’t know what that field is ! !
? ?

Spontaneity is better, but
it’s better not to worry
about it––or, you better
not worry about it––or
your grandmother’s
drawers are hanging on
the line or the lawn
has been trimmed,
or Uncle Henry is going
down on the Mimosa.
And Aunt Hank-O-Hara
is doing
too many genuflexions.
And her hands are
wandering––
I may do this play
All by Myself.
God Has No Talent!

The Pod People will all
All take over and we can
crawl in and get warm
A Fellini Movie
Mea Fellina
You genius of the Italian
Suburbs…
*
The Fear of Taylor Mead
The Fear of Taylor Mead
The Unequivocal Street
Celebrity
Fear of his…….


Taken from SON OF ANDY WARHOL: VOLUME FOUR: EXCERPTS FROM THE ANONYMOUS DIARY OF A NEW YORK YOUTH (1986)
—

Taylor Mead was born in 1924 in Grosse Point, Michigan. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including TAYLOR MEAD ON AMPHETAMINE AND IN EUROPE (Boss Books, 1968) and, most recently, A SIMPLE COUNTRY GIRL (Bowery Books, 2005). His first venture into film was in Ron Rice’s THE FLOWER THIEF in 1960. Soon after Mead relocated to New York, where he acted on stage and made numerous films, including a starring turn in Warhol’s TARZAN AND JANE REGAINED… SORT OF (1964). Mead was the subject of William A. Kirkley’s 2005 documentary EXCAVATING TAYLOR MEAD, appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s COFFEE AND CIGARETTES (2003), and continues to read at the Bowery Poetry Club every Monday night.

www.churnerandchurner.com

Alex Olson for Alex Olson.

As demoed by LeRoy Stevens.
—

Alex Olson was born in Boston, MA in 1978, and she currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

www.shanecampbellgallery.com
www.laurabartlettgallery.co.uk

December 4, 2011
Week 13, MetLife Stadium
PACKERS vs. GIANTS
Win 38-35

Passing: A. Rodgers 235 yards
Rushing: A. Rodgers 66 yards
Receiving: G. Jennings 94 yards

The game shall be played upon a rectangular field, 360 feet in length and 160 feet in width. The lines at each end of the field are termed End Lines. Those on each side are termed Sidelines. Goal Lines shall be established in the field 10 yards from and parallel to each end line. The area bounded by goal lines and sidelines is known as the Field of Play. The areas bounded by goal lines, and sidelines are known as the End Zones.

—

Michelle Grabner was born in Oshkosh Wisconsin in 1962 and lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois and Waupaca County Wisconsin. She is a professor in Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and she is a regular contributor to Artforum, Art-Agenda and X-tra. In 2010 Grabner co-edited THE STUDIO READER (University of Chicago Press, 2010). She has exhibited nationally and internationally including Musée d´art Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Tate St. Ives, UK; Kunsthalle, Bern; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, MN; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Milwaukee Art Museum; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, Kansas; among others. With her husband Brad Killam, she also runs the artist spaces, The Suburban in Oak Park, IL and The Poor Farm in Northeastern Wisconsin.

www.michellegrabner.com
www.thesuburban.org

—

Simryn Gill was born in Singapore in 1959. She lives in Sydney and spends a few months of every year in Port Dickson in Malaysia, the town where she grew up. She uses many different methods and materials—photography, making objects, collecting things, making assemblages, drawing, writing—in thinking about how we inhabit the places we live in. She also makes artist’s books. Some recent ones are: GARDEN published by Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2010); PEARLS published by Raking Leaves, London & Colombo, (2008); GUIDE TO THE MURALS AT TANJONG PAGAR RAILWAY STATION, SINGAPORE, published by Singapore Biennale (2006).

www.amritajhaveri.com
www.breenspace.com
www.tracywilliamsltd.com

I came across this in a roadside shrine in Italy. The Madonna of the Numinous Palette.

—

Mark Leckey was born in Birkenhead, Merseyside in 1964 and lives and works in London. Leckey has exhibited his videos, multi-media installations and collages widely and has had solo shows at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2011); Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, U.K. (2010); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2009); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2007); Portikus, Frankfurt (2005); and Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland (2003). He’s been included in several important international exhibitions including 10,000 Lives: The Eighth Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2010); Moving Images: Artists & Video/Film, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2010); Playing Homage, Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery, Canada; Sympathy for the Devil, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2007); Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey (2005); Manifesta 5, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, San Sebastian, Spain (2004); Fast Forward. Media Art Sammlung Goetz, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2003); and New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, UK (1999), among others. Leckey has presented his lecture/performances at the ICA, London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2008 Leckey received the Turner Prize and the Central Art Award, Kölnischer Kunstverein. From 2005 to 2009 Leckey was Professor of Film Studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His work is included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Het Domein Sittard, The Netherlands; Tate Gallery, London, UK; The Trussardi Foundation, Milan, Italy; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

www.gavinbrown.biz
www.cabinet.uk.com
www.galeriebuchholz.de

— I recently scanned an old ‘zine I made with a good friend of mine Dan in Portland Oregon, in 1995. Dan is now a professor of Anthropology. We worked in a funeral home in Portland and documented our jobs there with drawings and writing. We borrowed from industry magazines, the funeral home library, inter-office memos and personnel files. It’s pretty rough in parts but I still really like it.

THE REMOVAL TECHNICIAN, Issue One.
Click image to see inside.

THE REMOVAL TECHNICIAN, Issue Two.
Click image to see inside.
—

Alex Hubbard was born in 1975, in Toledo, Oregon, and lives in New York. He received his BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. One-person exhibitions of his work have been presented at venues such as Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Gaga Contemporary, Mexico City; Standard (Oslo), Oslo; and the Kitchen, Maccarone Gallery, and Team Gallery in New York. A two-person exhibition with Oscar Tuazon was presented at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in 2008. Hubbard’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Compulsive Jalouse, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2006); NOTHING AND BEING, Jumex Collection, Mexico City (2009); THE REACH OF REALISM, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2009); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (2010); KNIGHT’S MOVE, SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York (2010), and LE PRINTEMPS DE SEPTEMBRE, Festival of Contemporary Arts, Toulouse (2011).

www.maccarone.net
www.standardoslo.no
www.simonleegallery.com

Here is a collection of recent photography and field recordings documenting research trips, over the past year, to the few remaining local textile factories in the Philadelphia region. The last image is a stock photo of a colocation server center visited (no cameras were allowed inside).

Velvet loom at MTL (Jessup, PA)

MTL LOOM 1

Jacquard weaving at MTL (Jessup, PA)

Thousands of spools of thread for the velvet loom at MTL (Jessup, PA)

Yarn through a loom at Langhorne Carpet Company (Langhorne, PA)

LC LAYER 1 CLAPS, WITH BREAK

Keeping time at Penn Wire Works (Philadelphia, PA)

WIRE LOOM 1

Yarn dyeing at Caledonia Dye Works (Philadelphia, PA)

CALEDONIA DYEING PROCESS 1

Punched cards with the designs of jacquard textiles for looms at MTL (Jessup, PA)

Stock image of a colocation server center (somewhere in Philadelphia, PA)

PTP SERVER 1

All photos by Carlos Avendaño, Tyler Henry, Mika Tajima. This research is for a project at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA.
—

Born in 1975 in Los Angeles, California, Tajima is a New York based artist. Tajima received an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2003. Select solo exhibitions include Seattle Art Museum; Visual Arts Center at University of Texas; Bass Museum, Miami; X Initiative, New York; The Kitchen, New York; RISD Museum, Rhode Island; Circuit, Switzerland. Group exhibitions include Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; 2008 Whitney Biennial; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Art Center Cincinnati, OH; PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; Swiss Institute Contemporary Art, NY; among others. Tajima is also founding member of New Humans, a moniker for collaborative music, art, and actions. Collaborations include Charles Atlas, Vito Acconci, C. Spencer Yeh, Philippe Decrauzat, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, among others. Group and Solo performances include South London Gallery, UK; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; ICA Philadelphia; Artissima, Italy; Ballroom Marfa; Swiss Institute, NY; Walker Art Center, MN; Whitney Museum, NY.

www.mikatajima.com

— In 1976, when I was eight years old, my father made a sort of storyboard, in the manner of the fotonovela magazines of Mexico during those years. The story is about a child with learning problems at school, probably related to the problems derived from poverty, in a country already breaking apart since then. The main actor was myself, a troubled mind as well since then.

—

Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in 1968, in Mexico City. He lives and works in Mexico and Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris (2010); kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2010); Thomas Dane, London (2009); Californian College of the Arts, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2009); Redcat, Los Angeles (2009); The Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2008); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca (MACO), Oaxaca, Mexico (2005).

www.thomasdane.com
wwww.kurimanzutto.com

FOUR REJECTED ALBUM COVERS: PHOTOGRAPHS OF PHOTOGRAPHS IN MY STUDIO, 2010

—

Tim Hecker is a composer and sound artist, based in Montreal, Canada. He has worked with a wide array of sound recording imprints over the last ten years. His current work is situated around electronic abstraction and the entrails of psychedelic American minimalism. Other recent work has included commissions for dance, film and several collaborations.

www.sunblind.net

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

— In 1976, when I turned sixteen, I realized I was on my own. That is, I realized the world I wanted for myself was distinctly different than the world my parents wanted for me, because the world I wanted for myself included art. Now, my parents weren’t against art; in fact they saw art appreciation as part of a well-rounded education, an education they were struggling to send me to an expensive private school to get. Because they believed in the value of art they also scraped together money for me to attend pottery classes in Greenwich Village when I was ten, a neighborhood very distant from the South Bronx housing project where we lived, and, when I was older, they sent me to after-school drawing classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No, it wasn’t that my parents were against art; it’s just that they didn’t understand what being an artist meant. “The only artist I’ve ever heard of,” my mother told me, a whiff of terror in her voice, “is dead.” I knew she meant Picasso, whom she had probably read about in a profile in Life magazine, but what she really meant was she didn’t know anybody making a living as an artist and she was scared about my future. Like my mom, most of my relatives were civil servants, working in the Post Office, Department of Motor Vehicles, or some other government agency. For my relatives, just one generation away from a sharecropper’s cabin in rural South Carolina, the notion that one could be an artist, much less raise a family on an artist’s salary, was foreign to them. Art was ultimately something for white folks and although my mother thought that I should know about things that white folks do (hence the pottery classes) she did not necessarily think I should emulate their behavior.

When I turned sixteen something changed. I had gotten a job as an office assistant at a social service agency, joined an extracurricular poetry workshop lead by a beloved creating writing teacher in my school, and slowly, tentatively, realized that I was attracted to other boys. These activities and revelations took me out of the South Bronx and the orbit of my family and towards a place where I could begin to imagine my life beyond the limits of my parent’s experiences and expectations. That’s the moment when I bought my sketchbook. At some point I must have been told that to learn about art you had to draw art, so I started carrying a sketchbook around to record the things I saw on trips to museums and galleries. It was a spiral-bound, five by eight inch book with an orange cover. Bizarrely, when I wrote my name on the book I spelled it wrong, as if the person I wanted to be in the sketchbook was a slightly different version of the person I was. I was enamored with French or French-identified artists and the sketchbook is full of drawings after works I saw on the walls of MoMA or the Met. Cezanne, Matisse, Picabia, Picasso, Duchamp and Modigliani were my heroes, with an odd Munch or Feininger thrown in the mix. Rendered in pencil or a now faded-to-green black magic marker, these drawings represented travel without traveling; my adolescent self imagining a world that I didn’t quite have access to but somehow knew was waiting for me. That the drawings heavily favored European modernism, non-western art being represented by one cursory sketch of an Inuit canoe prow, did not seem to be a problem at the time. Art, as my mother said, was what white people did and so that’s what I recorded in my sketchbook. Although I knew I wanted to be an artist it did not occur to me to seek out ones that looked like me. Besides, artists that looked like me were scarcely represented on the walls of major art institutions in the mid 1970s, unless it was February––black history month—when curators would grudgingly go down into the vaults to find something to stick up for a couple of weeks.

At some point I started drawing still lifes and pictures of buildings from magazines. The drawings were strange. The still lifes were clumsy and sentimental, whereas the ones of buildings and architectural fragments were graphic and bold, if not a bit obsessive; every brick on a church steeple or window in a skyscraper rendered in loving detail. By that time I had been swayed by my parents’ concern about my nascent artistic career and had begun telling them that I wanted to study architecture when I got out of high school. Although nobody in my family had studied architecture, I figured my parents would be more at ease if I told them my drawing classes, sketchbooks and trips to the museum were all toward my career goal. To be sure, I was genuinely interested in architecture, but it was merely the wig with which I covered my real desire to be an artist. I wore this wig until I graduated from college, knowing that if I had failed the undergraduate perquisites for an architecture major I could not still convincingly pretend I was headed for an architecture career. Instead, I got a job working as a proofreader in a corporate law firm, working nights and weekends so that I could paint and draw during the day. In 1989 the National Endowment for the Arts gave me a grant for excellence in drawing. It was five thousand dollars, a fortune at the time, and I decided that no matter what my parents thought if by giving me a grant the government said I was an artist then it was my job to be one..

—

Glenn Ligon was born in 1960, in the Bronx and continues to live and work in New York. He received a BA from Wesleyan University in 1982. In 1985, he participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Ligon has had solo shows at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (1993), Brooklyn Museum of Art (1996), Saint Louis Art Museum (2000), the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), Dia Center for the Arts in New York (2003), and The Power Plant in Toronto (2005), among other venues. Group shows in which he has participated include the Whitney Biennial (1991 and 1993); Biennale of Sydney (1996), Venice Biennale (1997), Kwangju Biennale (2000), Documenta 11 (2002), and Learn to Read at the Tate Modern, London (2007). He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1989, and 1991), Art Matters (1990), the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1997), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2003). In 2006 he was awarded the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. Upon entering office and moving into the White House, President Barack Obama installed Ligon’s 1992 Black Like Me No. 2 in his family’s private living quarters. In 2011 Ligon had a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

www.luhringaugustine.com
www.regenprojects.com
www.thomasdane.com

— This poster was available free to visitors of the Kunstmuseum Luzern as part of the exhibition “In Search Of…” from October 22, 2011 to January 15, 2012. The text in the poster was edited from a previous work entitled The Bummer Tour, which I vowed to never show again.

Click image to enlarge text

www.mdjracing.com
—

Matthew Day Jackson was born in 1974, in Panorama City, California, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag; Kunstmuseum Luzern; MAMbo, Bologna; the Walker Art Center; Princeton University Art Museum; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Hayward Gallery; Vanabbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Barbican Gallery, London; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; 1st Athens Biennale; 2nd Moscow Biennale; 3rd Beijing Biennale; Herning Kunstmuseum; Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Greater New York, P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York.

www.hauserwirth.com
www.hnicoleklagsbrun.com
www.grimmgallery.com

—

Ed Atkins was born in 1982, in the United Kingdom. He works predominantly in high-definition video, drawing, and writing to explore thoughts around materiality and corporeality. Recent solo projects include Tate Britain and Cabinet Gallery, London, both 2011; recent group exhibitions include A DYING ARTIST, ICA, London (2011), TIME AGAIN, Sculpture Center, New York (2011) and AN ECHO BUTTON, with James Richards and Haroon Mirza, for Performa 2011. He was shortlisted for the Jarman Award, 2011. In 2012 he will present solo projects at Chisenhale Gallery, London, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.

www.edatkins.co.uk
www.cabinet.uk.com
www.bortolozzi.com

RITUAL AT IVAN’S SMITH ST BARBERSHOP

Photos by David Gallagher
—

Based in Melbourne, Australia, Oren Ambarchi has been active as a composer, improviser and curator for over 20 years. He has collaborated with a diverse array of artists including Keiji Haino, Thomas Brinkmann, Jim O’Rourke, Sunn 0))), Charlemagne Palestine, Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Phill Niblock and many more. Ambarchi’s solo recordings are released by the UK label Touch

www.orenambarchi.com

Calcutta served as a basis for British expansion in the East.

—

Joachim Koester was born in 1962, in Copenhagen, Denmark. He has had numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world including Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels (2011); Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid (2011); Gallery Greene Naftali, New York (2010); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2010); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover(2010); Turker Art Museum, Finland (2009); Frac Lorraine, Metz (2009); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2007). In 2008 he was a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize.

www.greenenaftaligallery.com
www.janmot.com
www.grimmgallery.com

— I am very fond of my sketchbooks that I began in the 50s and still work on today. I think there is a certain freedom when you are absorbed in painting a sketchbook. You are not burdened to do something important. You are not dealing in big things. You are just thinking and the sketchbooks are a way to express your thinking. They are very intimate. I work on my sketchbooks almost every day. If I had to choose what I value the most in my work I might choose my sketchbooks. Here are two of my favorite sketchbooks. There are four here which are just covers titled, My Father and I. The other is Sketchbook #1 which I hope to publish as a book one day. Some of my sketchbooks will be on display at my show at the Deichtorhallen House of Photography, Hamburg in February 2012.

—

Saul Leiter was born in Pittsburgh in 1923, the son of a rabbi. Leiter’s interest in art began in his late teens, and at 23, he quit theology school and moved to New York to pursue painting. That year he met the Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart, who was experimenting with photography. Leiter’s friendship with Pousette-Dart and, soon after, with W. Eugene Smith inspired his involvement with photography. Leiter’s earliest black and white photographs show an extraordinary affinity for the medium, and by the 1950s he also began to work in color. Edward Steichen included 23 of Leiter’s black and white photographs in the exhibition, ALWAYS THE YOUNG STRANGER at the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. Leiter’s first exhibition of color photography was held in the 1950s at the Artist’s Club-a meeting place for many of the Abstract Expressionist painters of that time. In the late 1950s the art director Henry Wolf published Leiter’s color fashion work in Esquire and later in Harper’s Bazaar. Leiter continued to work as a fashion photographer for the next 20 years and was also published in Show, Elle, British Vogue, Queen, and Nova. Leiter’s work is featured in the book THE NEW SCHOOL: PHOTOGRAPHS 1936-1963 by Jane Livingston and in APPEARANCES: FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY SINCE 1945 by Martin Harrison. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Baltimore Museum of Art; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and other public and private collections. A major retrospective of Leiter’s work will be on show at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen Museum, from February 2 – April 22, 2012

www.howardgreenberg.com

EDWARD SAID, MUSIC AT THE LIMITS AND PARALLELS AND PARADOXES: EXPLORATIONS IN MUSIC AND SOCIETY

— I first read the author of Orientalism many years ago, and (along with Chomsky, Finkelstein and Khalidi) began to develop an understanding of the Israel/Palestine conflict and its history. Although penned in 1979, The Question of Palestine remains perhaps the most beautifully written, penetratingly critical (of both sides) and compassionate argument for the Palestinian cause. His 1993 lecture that was published as Representations of the Intellectual brought the ethical dimensions of being an intellectual (or cultural producer) into sharp focus, one can’t escape the seriousness of his argument: we are involved in what we see, hear and read in the news every day- the barbaric things that the powerful do to the powerless (otherwise known as civilization)- whether we like it or not, as Howard Zinn succinctly put it, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train”.

The fact that this same man was also, arguably, the most deeply and broadly knowledgeable interpreter of “western” classical music in the U.S. didn’t really dawn on me until relatively recently. I would occasionally read his music columns in the Nation, where he was music critic for many years, simply taking his brilliant, literary and often scathing reviews for granted. Now I know better. I am still angry that he died much too soon and Music at the Limits reminds me again of how much has been lost with his passing, and for me personally, how much I missed by just not paying close enough attention.

It’s hard to understate how completely in another realm Said was as a music critic, you can’t really compare his work to other music criticism (except perhaps Adorno), he was just doing something completely different. I bought Music at the Limits initially because of the essay on Sergiu Celibidache, the legendary and eccentric Romanian conductor of the Munich Philharmonic who never made a recording, insisting that music must only be heard in live performance. Celibidache turned the New York concert world on its ear (no pun intended) when he performed only one piece, Bruckner’s 4th Symphony, at Carnegie Hall for an entire two-hour program. Said understood and wrote about every aspect of the musical performance; the piece of music, its history, the history of its various performances (many of which he attended), the conductor and his history, the composer and his history, the orchestra and its history, its board of director’s history, the audience and the history of audiences, the form of the two hour concert, its history, etc, etc. Nothing was left outside the frame, nothing taken for granted or assumed neutral or natural. He performed a nearly complete analysis on the institution of classical music and did so in virtually every column he wrote while maintaining some of the most compelling and graceful prose in the english language.

In Daniel Barenboim’s forward to Music at the Limits there is a passing reference to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the collaboration that grew from Said and conductor/pianist Barenboim’s friendship. The two men became very close friends after their now legendary chance meeting and a volume of their conversations Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society was published in 2002, the year before Said’s death. The conversations between the Argentine-Israeli Jew (who also holds Palestinian citizenship) and the displaced Palestinian reveal a shared passion and deep commitment to the idea that intellectuals and cultural producers have a special imperative to struggle for justice. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, started in 1999, is the concrete result of their commitment. It is an ongoing project for young musicians in the Middle East where Jewish children from Israel come together with Palestinian and other Arab children to rehearse, perform and live together. Although Barenboim insists it is not a peacemaking effort, the children’s shared love of music and the pedagogical framework of West-Eastern Divan at least creates the possibility for understanding and non-violence and is certainly an alternative that is in opposition to the logic of the Israeli occupation. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (along with the rest of Edward Said’s work) offers a powerful example of the role art has to play in producing the world we want.

Above: Photos taken from West-Eastern Divan

Jesus Barraza
EDWARD SAID, 2005
Hand Silkscreened
—

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and in the United States. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Dusseldorf, S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium, and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Zealand. His work has been included in the Panamá, Sydney, Venice, and Whitney Biennales. Durant shows with several galleries including Blum and Poe in Los Angeles, Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Praz-Delavallade in Paris and Sadie Coles Gallery in London. His work has been extensively written about including seven monographic catalogs and books. In 2006 he compiled and edited a comprehensive monograph of Black Panther artist Emory Douglas’ work. His recent curatorial credits include EAT THE MARKET at the Los Angeles County Museum and BLACK PANTHER: THE REVOLUTIONARY ART OF EMORY DOUGLAS at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the New Museum in New York. He has co-organized numerous group shows and artists benefits and is a co-founder of TRANSFORMA, a cultural rebuilding collective project in New Orleans. He was a finalist for the 2008 Hugo Boss Prize and has received a United States Artists Broad Fellowship and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Grant. His work can be found in many public collections including The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, Tate Modern in London, Project Row Houses in Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Durant teaches art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California.

www.blumandpoe.com
www.transformaprojects.org

—

Tris Vonna-Michell was born in 1982, in Southend-on-Sea, United Kingdom and currently lives in Stockholm. Previous solo exhibitions include: Metro Pictures, New York (2011); NOT A SOLITARY SIGN OR INSCRIPTION TO EVEN SUGGEST AN ENDING, Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles (2010); TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2010); FINDING CHOPIN: ENDNOTES 2005-2009, Jeu de Paume, Paris (2009); STUDIO A: MONUMENTAL DETOURS / INSIGNIFICANT FIXTURES, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy (2009); AUTO-TRACKING-AUTO-TRACKING, Kunsthalle Zürich (2009); and TRIS VONNA-MICHELL, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2007). His work has been exhibited in group-shows at institutions and biennials that include: X-Initiative, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; 5th Berlin Biennale, Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Performa 07, New York; and Manifesta 08, Cartagena and Murcia, Spain. In September 2011 a new catalogue of his work was published by JRP|Ringier, in collaboration with Kunsthalle Zürich, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg eV, and Fondazione Galleria Civica – Centro di Ricerca sulla Contemporaneità di Trento.

www.mountanalogue.org

— Deep within the spirit and flesh of my being, the fretting breath of Ancestors guides the burning faith. Sacred are the visions ingrained like gleaming sermons, preached far beyond the face of my nights. Give me the courage to know the things of life, that I may be worthy of my place. Above all, teach me to share the gifts.

With some of my brothers and sister on the porch of the home where we all were born, when I was around 13 years old. From left to right: Freddie, me, Gloria, Warren and Marvin, all now involved in the arts.

Me in my studio. Photograph by Peter Tolkin

My studio. Photograph by Peter Tolkin

My studio. Photograph by Peter Tolkin
—

Born and raised in Greenville, North Carolina in 1933, John Outterbridge is an artist, educator and community activist. He was founder and Director of the Communicative Arts Academy, Compton from 1969-1975, and Director of the Watts Towers Arts Center, Los Angeles from 1975-1992. His work has been included in five PACIFIC STANDARD TIME exhibitions as well as in shows at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; a retrospective of his work was held at the California Afro-American Museum in 1993. He is represented by Tilton Gallery, New York.

www.jacktiltongallery.com

—

Huma Bhabha was born in 1962 in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. Most recently, she was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and participated in an exhibition of sculpture at City Hall Park in New York organized by the Public Art Fund. In 2008 she participated in the 7th Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, Korea, and received the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Emerging Artist Award. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; S.M.A.K., Ghent, Belgium; MOMA PS1, New York; Royal Academy of Arts, London; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and Arena Mexico Arte Contemporaneo in Guadalajara, Mexico.

www.salon94.com

CAN I COME BACK AS A BIRD

— I was born in Charleston, South Carolina. My mother, Amelia Richardson who was born and raised in Charleston, met my father Elmore Gaines, a native of Madison, Fla., while he was stationed at the Charleston Naval Base. Obviously, these facts are important to me, but what may be important culturally and historically is that my parents were part of the Great Migration, the migration of southern blacks to the north between 1915 and 1970. During those years, “more than 6 million African-Americans moved out of the South…”¹ mostly for greater employment opportunities. My parents joined this migration in 1946, settling in Newark, New Jersey where my Father’s mother had already settled. His grandmother raised my father in Madison. My sister and I remained in Charleston with our maternal grandmother and grandfather along with our 13 aunts and uncles until my parents came down to get us a year and a half later in a new “used” car my father purchased from income he earned from his new job driving a bakery truck.

This house, from a photo taken in 1940, is the same type my mother was born and lived in until she was 26 years old. I was born by a midwife in the same house and lived there until four years old. Photo taken from ATLANTA HOUSING AUTHORITY PHOTOGRAPHS

In Charleston I lived in an extremely humble wooden house along a dirt road that served about 5 other similar type houses. This was my first view of life: an urban residential site where pigs and chickens lived among people, rather than the agrarian or agricultural site where one would normally find this co-habitation. In this community small livestock was necessary for survival. A site where Jim Crow laws and segregation, along with deep poverty would make life itself seem like a punishment were it not so commonplace, in which case it just seemed like life. It is simply understood as life, not a great injustice.

In many ways my mother was the agent of my understanding, she was the person I could learn from and could talk to since I could not ask for an explanation from the chickens and the pigs, nor the dirt road, nor the wooden “huts” and other figures of poverty that surrounded me. Although I think I understand that my surroundings represented a great injustice, I also saw in them a remarkable fantasy world of black people going about their lives in a landscape of dirt roads, old trees, and crowing and grunting animals. The occasional white person would show up for any number of reasons, but I would know him only as an unknowable alien. Ultimately, beyond the political implications of Jim Crow life, this was simply the place where I lived for my first four years. And this allowed speculations about it that was born out of innocence. I saw the racial separation but I did not see injustice. And although I questioned this separation (I knew somehow it was wrong), in my mind these questions allowed me to deal with racism, not through political activism but through imagining it as a fantastical construction, a moment among changing moments, whose destination was to me uncertain. I could construct fantastic narratives of escape, rather than practical strategies to achieve political emancipation. And I would live out these narratives through conversations with my mother.

“I remember my walks as a child . . . in Charleston, South Carolina. I remember images of trees and the flickering shadows they cast, of cackling hens and grunting pigs behind fences, of barking dogs and singing birds, of neighbors talking. I would look to my mother and ask unanswerable questions about the differences between all of these things. […] Amidst the noise of animals I looked at the birds in the trees. “Can I come back as a bird?” I asked her. As I [now] think back on those moments I realize that my present interest in (art) and (philosophy) grew out of my experiences in the South, where, even at the age of three, existential questions were as much a part of me as the toys I played with.”²

My mother, Amelia Gaines, at 86.

In many ways this is a testimony to my mother. I knew 149 Congress Street (where I lived in Charleston) only through our conversations; what was uplifting was that as I speculated about the nature of things, I could feel her tolerance of my imagination. I saw in her a remarkable spirit that allowed her to convert a tough, hellish life with few rewards into a space of unlimited possibilities. For this was her reality, and in many ways it still is. As a young woman in Newark she worked long hours sewing dresses for $16 a week. And although my father worked construction, he made half the wages of the white worker. This was not enough for him to properly support a family of a wife and three kids. Despite my mother’s admonitions my father would borrow from loan sharks to “Put bread on the table,” as he would say.

On one occasion a Shylo (debt collector or “leg breaker”)³ came to the house and asked for my father. He was late on a payment and knew they were coming; he made himself absent. My sister was in my parent’s bed, very sick, coughing continuously. The Shylo asked my Mother where my Father was, and she said she did not know. The entry to the apartment was through my parent’s bedroom. When my mother opened the door, the Shylo could see my sister lying in bed. He asked, “What is wrong with your little girl?” “She is sick,” my Mom answered, “But we don’t have the money to take her to the doctor.” The Shylo gave my mother money. “See that she goes to the doctor,” he said.

At certain moments times were good, but not for long. Just as we were about to achieve what looked like lower middle-class status, something would happen that jerked us back into poverty. This was a tough life for them. But miraculously my mother was able to enjoy her kids, friends and neighbors in those days, and found joy without giving in to the constant weight of injustice that hung over all of us. In a lifetime of no if little material rewards, my Mother was happy. Although she is very sick now and often appears depressed, I believe she is, on the whole, still happy. Her inner glow has always infected all who happened to be around her. It was a glow that was produced by her ability to see the injustice that engulfed her as an impermanent moment in a long and fantastic voyage. It was always impermanent, temporary. Her tendency to see the world this way was not based in a belief in some futile hope that the future will make things right, as was the case with my father, who believed that providence will change things. Her view of the world was based in her remarkable ability to see the world that surrounded her differently. This gift, I believe, she gave to my brother, my sister and to me.

Many African Americans migrated to the North in search of a better life. The Great Migration was another narrative of transformation, a change, but for the better. But I learned from my mother that there are two ways of looking at change. One as part of a system of progress, whether earned or ordained by providence. The other change is a function of the imagination and happens as the result of magic where the world takes on new meaning.

Postscript
My father, an old Navy man, suffered miserably for twelve years with Parkinson’s disease. He said to me just before he died, “Do you remember how I would always tell you not to worry because someday our ship will come in?” “Yes,” I answered, “What ever happened to that ship?” He quickly responded, “It got torpedoed in the harbor.”

¹ GREAT MIGRATION: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXODUS NORTH, Oct 9, 2011
² Charles Gaines, “Metonymy and the Defamiliarization of Objects,” from the catalog, LURID STORIES, (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Institute), 2001, p.2
³ THE AMERICAN MAFIA – UNDERWORLD SLANG
—

Charles Gaines was born in 1944 in Charleston, South Carolina, and raised in Newark, New Jersey. He received his M.F.A at the Rochester Institute of Technology, School of Art and Design in 1967. He has been on the faculty at the California Institute of the Arts since 1989 and has had a crucially important influence on generations of artists emerging from the west coast. His work is included in the collections of the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MOCA Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla; the Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum Harlem, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Oakland Museum, Oakland, the Lentos Museum, Linz, Austria; the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, among others. Solo and two person exhibitions include the 2007 Venice Biennale; LAX>

www.vielmetter.com

— Grover Lewis’s name passed in front of me recently, after almost fifty years. Don’t remember where I saw it; maybe in someone’s writing in This Long Century.

This happened by coincidence just about at the same time that I, way past midnight and unable to sleep, had looked up Godwin Matatu on the internet, setting up a channel of thought that stays with me, about old friends who are dead.

Primo Levy wrote a poem about how we all influence each other; how we are both the stamp and the malleable wax imprinted. But we remember some people because their presence in our lives is so acute—as though they are both lovers and teachers.

I knew Grover in Houston, not too long after John Kennedy was killed. He must’ve been a bit older than me but not much. He liked, though, as a defensive gesture against his vulnerability, to seem older and more skeptical than his years and spirit. At the same time, his love and care, solidarity, with all of us, men and women, was like bright sunlight.

He thought we were all important.

What did I learn from Grover Lewis? That we each are in a situation wherein we must bear witness. That I am called upon to look carefully, to think about what I see, and therefore to act; to be a witness.

Silvano Lora was ten years older than me, from the Dominican Republic. He was tall with long black hair and the most beautiful long hands I’ve ever seen.

He came and stayed with me in Geneva for a few days as part of a tour around Europe to speak to other artists and convince us to make more politically active and aware work.

The U.S. war against Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos was in full horror, but so was the U.S. war against the people of Latin America.

How could we as artists, as thinkers, therefore as people with a moral duty, ignore the daily reality of our world?, he asked us.

I could not then do the kind of work that he did, but after he left I could not go back to my usual practice.

We stayed in touch, even when I moved to New York, but I never saw him again. His best gift to me was his simple question. He gave me doubt—a lasting gift.

Godwin Matatu gave me an address book. He also came and stayed with me in Geneva, but many times over the years. Godwin was from a horrible place called northern Rhodesia but sometimes lived in London. He and his beautifully crazy cousin Wilson Katiyo were political organizers and fundraisers. This country now called Zimbabwe had two rival organizations fighting for liberation from the English colonizers. I forget which one Godwin was officially part of, but he had friends and enemies in both of them, as well as in ANC and other South African groups.

Those days of the early nineteen-seventies were very hard for people in Southern Africa. Comrades were arrested or killed regularly. Those from South Africa were always grieving. Their determination was hard, solemn and severe. The Zimbabweans, though, knew that they would win, and won. In the midst of death they sang and had parties.

Godwin was a Marxist Leninist of the Mao Tse Tung school but none of the Africans spoke or acted in the ways of factional disfunctionalism as I saw later among European and American leftists.

They pretty much looked at Marxism as a tool for liberation from colonial oppression.

Godwin, younger than me, was a joyous and funny teacher. He said the first thing a political organizer needs is an address book. Every useful contact I met was to go in, with telephone, address and brief description. Not my own people nor people who might be caused trouble if the notebook were confiscated; money people, organization people, famous people instead.

He said that the key to successful resistance was discipline within the organization (he was Chinese-trained), something we could never grasp back home.

I heard that he was shot in Zimbabwe. Wilson lived long enough to become a published novelist, died young in London.

Visiting New York in the eighties when I lived in Mexico I would stay with Sandy. Dr. Sandra Shepherd. Without her there I think I could not now bear the emptiness of New York.

She was the first Black woman to graduate from Yale Medical School, and was a pediatrician/gynecologist who worked at one of the large hospitals. In the evenings she had her private practice in part of her house on the edge of Harlem. This was a non-paying practice for the poor people of the area.

She would work into the night and then perform various organizing tasks for support work around South Africa, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Once I went into her office and found her stitching up a head wound for a teenage activist who had been clubbed by the police at a demonstration in front of the Apollo Theater. He had run to her place to hide and to get fixed up.

Sandy had a degenerative lung disease and sometimes could not get her breath. She hoped for a transplant but it never came.

I’ve written a poem about the Filipino artist, Santiago Bosé who seemed irresistible to all women and wanted to love them all.

SANTIAGO BOSE’S POEM

Far in the (not really so cold!) north of Norway
But not yet Karasjok where I hope to go
Next year, I was not shocked but struck;

Surprised by a display of woodcut prints
By John Savio. “John?” I asked
Myself, “Why isn’t he called ‘Jan’ or ‘Johan’
Or even something close to the Cherokee
‘Tsani’?”

I want to ask Santiago Bosé.
In the whole world, not only the South Pacific,
There is no Santiago Bosé.
—

Jimmie Durham was born in Arkansas, in 1940. He lives and works in Europe. From the early 1960’s he was active in theatre, performance, and literature in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. In 1973 he became a member of the American Indian Movement (AIM), from 1974-1980 he was the Director of the International Indian Treaty Council and representative to the United Nations. From 1981-83 he was the Director of the Foundation for the Community of Artists (FCA) New York City. His work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Venice Biennale; Whitney Biennial; Christine Koenig Galerie, Vienna; kurimanzutto, Mexico City; Matt’s Gallery, London; Documenta IX; DAAD Gallery, Berlin; SMAK Museum, Ghent; and the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, among many others.

www.christinekoeniggalerie.com
www.kurimanzutto.com

—

Roe Ethridge was born in 1969 in Miami and received a BFA in Photography at The College of Art in Atlanta, GA. His work has been shown extensively in the United States and internationally, including: GRETER NEW YORK, MOMA/PS1 (2000); THE AMERICANS, Barbican Center, London (2001); HELLO MY NAME IS…, Carnegie Museum of Art (2002), MOMENTUM 4: ROE ETHRIDGE, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2005); The Whitney Biennial (2008); Les Recontres D’Arles, France (2010); and NEW PHOTOGRAPHY 2010, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010).

www.roeethridge.com

— I plan to build a home on a field that’s located just outside downtown Athens, Georgia. There were once houses on the field but these were damaged beyond repair in a huge gas main explosion that took place back in the 70s – I was told this event had made the national news and that windows as far as several blocks away were broken. Since then the field has been left alone except that some construction debris from various downtown building projects was dumped down its steep back slope for land fill. Kudzu and privet and other invasive plants have grown rampant. The lot is fenced in so it was possible for me to bring in a couple dozen sheep to see if they could help clean up the field, which they did.

—

Mark Steinmetz was born in Manhattan, in 1961. He has had several books published with Nazraeli Press including SOUTH CENTRAL, SOUTH EAST, and GREATER ATLANTA. Another book with Nazraeli, SUMMERTIME, a collection of photographs of kids and teenagers made in the late 80s and early 90s, is due this fall. His book PHILIP & MICHELINE, about his parents at the end of their lives, came out this Summer with TBW books. He lives and work in Athens, Georgia, and hopes to travel more often to France and Italy.

www.marksteinmetz.net

For two years, between 1995 and 1997, I lived on the Rue Ménard in Nîmes. When, not long after, in England, I happened across the last line of Pierre Ménard, author of the Quixote – “Nîmes, 1939” – I found the precision of the coincidence very pleasing.

—

Raphaël Zarka was born in Montpellier, France in 1977. He lives and works in Paris. In 2008 he was awarded the Ricard Foundation prize for contemporary art. Previous solo exhibitions include: GIBELLINA, CAN, Neuchâtel, Switzerland (2011); PRINCIPLES OF ROMAN KNOWLEDGE, Pastificio de Cerere, Rome, Italy (2011); Stroom, Den Haag, Netherlands (2011); PERGOLA, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2010); GEOMETRY IMPROVED, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, England (2009); DOCUMENTARY SCULPTURES, Motive Gallery, Amsterdam (2009), RATIOCINATION, Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, France (2008); PADOVA, La Vitrine, Paris, France (2008). Forthcoming exhibitions include; Le Grand Café, Contemporary Art Centre, Saint-Nazaire, France (2011) PERFORMA 11, New York, USA (2011)

www.michelrein.com
www.bischoffweiss.com

— A short while ago, my son-law Vhannes Koujanian and my daughter Sophie came to visit us on a too rare occasion. Early in their visit I was telling Vhannes about my habit over many years of getting up early to avoid the morning rush hour on my way to teach at Cooper Union in New York and about getting dressed in the dark to avoid waking up my wife Kate. I bragged that in fact, though long retired, I still do get dressed before sun-up!

He said “I KNOW!”

Surprised, I said “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

He said “LOOK AT YOUR SHOES!”

I looked down and saw that I was wearing two distinctly different shoes!

—

Robert Breer was born in Detroit in 1926. Having entered film through painting in the early 1950s, Breer was at the forefront of experimental animation for over sixty years. In 2005 Breer received the prestigious Stan Brakhage Vision Award in Denver, Colorado. More recently the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, held the most comprehensive exhibition to date of Breer’s work; ranging from early paintings, abstract films and kinetic sculptures. Robert Breer sadly died on Thursday August 11, 2011, aged 84. Anthology Film Archives continue to preserve the films of Robert Breer.

www.gbagency.fr
www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Thank you to Nathalie Boutin and gb agency without whom this entry would not be possible.

GELATIN CENTURY

— My grandmother, Vivienne Wooster Brewer, began taking her own photographs in 1906. That’s when the photo booth picture was made in Hartford, Connecticut. Vivienne studied to be a nurse in Philadelphia and traveled to Denver to intern. All along the way she took photographs of her friends, of her merry schoolmates and of landmarks. In 1912, my grandfather, Howard Brewer proposed to her in a Colorado Hotel and they were married a year later in Connecticut. Vivienne and Howard raised five children in Hartford: Louise, Norman, Mary, Harriet, Barbara. All but my mother are now deceased. My grandparents both died in 1968 and Vivienne’s scrapbooks and negatives made their way to my possession a few years ago.

I knew my grandmother as a stern, laconic woman who suffered from Parkinson’s Disease; I did not fully comprehend that she was the photographer of the family. Vivienne took great joy in photographing her husband, her friends and her family. She assembled beautiful scrapbooks with carefully inked captions. Although the pages are now disintergrating, the photographs are still extraordinarily fresh and alive. I scanned and printed about 250 of Vivienne’s pictures for my cousins this summer.

A lifetime in gelatin, here is a selection from her scrapbooks. From the first joyful image made at 18, to the last, a blurry picture of my Aunt Mary and her two children, made by Vivienne in 1964 at age 76.

—

James Welling was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1951 and lives in Los Angeles. Welling works with a variety of photographic materials: large scale color photograms, Polaroid photographs, gelatin silver prints, tricolor prints, multiple impression inkjet prints. Welling has had over 50 solo and group exhibitions and his work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Pompidou, Paris, The Whitney Museum, New York, MoCA, LOs Angeles and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. In 1995 Welling became a Professor and Area Head of Photography in the Department of Art at the University of California Los Angeles. He is currently working on a project about Andrew Wyeth that will be shown at Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, in January 2012.

www.maureenpaley.com
www.jameswelling.net

— During my teenage years in Southern California, I spent three summers at a “marine biology” camp on Catalina Island. It was a total dream, and in the midst of the scuba diving lessons, the shark identification exams, the golf cart rides into town (cars weren’t allowed), the meteor shower make-out sessions, and my awkward ascent out of adolesence came Boyz ‘n The Camp – not only the first video I ever made, but also the first collaborative underwater remake I was ever party to.

Loosely based on John Singleton’s Boyz n The Hood (1991), our Boyz features an embarassing array of butt jokes, (un)popular music synched to diving footage, unplaceable ‘hood accents, and a neverending credit sequence seemingly peopled by everybody in camp. Among the gems: underwater drive-bys and taggings, a genuine pot paranoiac, bat-ray licking, ocean floor gangster strutting, and a tear-inducing finale featuring the slo-motion death of yours truly. Edited on VHS using an analog tape system, I remember being especially proud of my synch edit of a yawning rockfish and the orchestral warm-up of R.E.M’s Nightswimming.

It’s worth noting that while I’m super-uncomfortable putting this work back into the world (and even went so far as to make an alternate 15:00 layered edit to get around it, a lá Michael Snow’s Wavelength For Those Who Don’t Have the Time), I decided a while ago that discomfort is worth confronting head-on – so here it is. There were three set of hands involved in Boyz, so at least I can’t take all of the credit. I should probably list Time as a fourth collaborator, or at least as some sort of analog plug-in – it’s added a remarkable gloss of drop-out and decay to the VHS object that has been newly preserved for your internet eyes. Special thanks to Jesse McLean for planting the seed and preparing the formaldehyde, and a shout-out to Burt and Kurt (and John Singleton) – wherever you are.

—

Ben Russell was born in 1976. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He is a media artist and curator whose films, installations, and performances foster a deep engagement with the history and semiotics of the moving image. He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the Wexner Center for the Arts, threewalls and the Museum of Modern Art. A 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship and 2010 FIPRESCI award recipient, Ben began the Magic Lantern screening series in Providence, Rhode Island, was co-director of the artist-run space BEN RUSSELL in Chicago, IL and performs in a double-drum trio called BEAST.

www.dimeshow.com
www.magiclanterncinema.com

ON OLD TIGE BY JIM REEVES

— I first heard Old Tige as a young child. My dad would come in from the pub on a Sunday afternoon and play his favourite Country and Western ballads on his record player and one of these songs was Old Tige by Jim Reeves and I’ve cried to this particular song ever since.

Our relationship with dogs is often very close and this song epitomises that bond.

I’m often saddened by the tragic stories in the news of people who have made the ultimate sacrifice in protecting their dogs. I’ve collected some stories from around the world that exemplify the strength of our relationship with our beloved dogs and how, when tested, that bond goes beyond any concerns for the self.

This song is dedicated to Snowy, Sheba and May.

—

Michael Landy was born in London in 1963. Recent solo exhibitions include National Portrait Gallery, London (2011); South London Gallery, London (2010); Nathalie Obadia, Paris (2009); Galerie Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam (2008); and Sabine Knust, Munich (2008).

www.thomasdane.com
www.galerie-obadia.com

— The three most important tools in my studio are Improvisation, Spontaneity, and Intuition. If I can muster up the three at once when I am working there is a flow of honesty and creative union. The materials, the presence, and image of the work is unique and complete.

If they are not present or only partially there, the work shows it. All art works are pieces of evidence of an ongoing investigation of something. In my case it is the interface of light and surface. I work with a lot of different materials but it is the surface of those materials that intrigues me.

Life is made up of layers of things, in our body layers of tissue compose the structure of our physicality. In our personality layers of who we are and who we were and what we want to be determines our social presence. I use layers a lot in my works.

In paper I use them as collage to reflect and absorb the light differentials that determine the image. When I do glass sculptures the layering is thin films of metals and quartz that interfere with the light that transmits, reflects or absorbs in the interface with the glass. I think of my sculptures as tapestries of those inherent qualities of a piece of glass.

—

Larry Bell was born in Chicago in 1939. He lives and works in Taos, New Mexico and Venice, California. Bell is one of the most prominent and influential artists to have come out of the Los Angeles art scene of the 1960s, first showing at the Huysman Gallery, and then at Ferus. He has work in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Musee d’Art Contemporain, Lyon, France, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among many others. Bell was the recipient of the NM Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, 1990.

www.larrybell.com

MAKE IT HARD, 2011, Video, Copyright HL-ART
—

Helmut Lang was born in Vienna, Austria in 1956.
He lives and works in New York and Long Island.

www.helmutlangstudio.com

— I was out of the United States from 93-98. Most of these photos I took during that period. They’re not something I look at often, not even yearly, but in a way I feel I am working in opposition to these memories. I do not include them in the paintings in a literal sense though experiences can sometimes be described in formal terms, and many of the places I visited had a mysterious tension, a buzz in the air that resembles perceived space within a painting.

—

David Ratcliff was born in Los Angeles in 1970. Recent solo exhibitions include Team Gallery, New York (2011); Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Belgium (2010); Tomio Koyama Gallery, Kyoto (2010); Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles (2010); and Maureen Paley, London (2009).

www.teamgal.com

I AM MY FIRST PHOTOGRAPH

1974: My father and older sister. Photographed in front of naked winter trees, close to home, in Hafrsfjord, Norway. Years passed before I was allowed to make another exposure. Father probably concluded I was too young to support a camera for 1/30th of a second. I was four years old.

Obstructing twigs / Cool grass / A hand on a vertical trunk / An introverted girl / Her white head / A man making himself photographable / Warm low light and long shadows

Refute your parents’ project and forget your childhood; they are still who you are. The shock of my first photograph is a shock of continuity. I would spend ten years as an artist unpacking and reworking these motifs, these modes of representation.
—

Torbjørn Rødland lives and works in Los Angeles. His photographs have been exhibited at Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Stedelijk Museum CS, Amsterdam; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; the 48th Venice Biennial; among others. His films have been exhibited at venues such as Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art; the 2007 Athens Biennial; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid. Project books include ANDY CAPP VARIATIONS (Hassla, 2011); I WANT TO LIVE INNOCENT (steidlMACK, 2008) and WHITE PLANET BLACK HEART (steidlMACK, 2006). Upcoming solo exhibitions include STANDARD OSLO (December 2011) and Air de Paris (January 2012).

www.airdeparis.com
www.standardoslo.no

—

Rachel Harrison lives and works in NY and rarely sees Hollywood blockbusters. Her most recent work INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL IN YUCATAN, 2011 is currently on view at Le Consortium in Dijon, France, until November 2011. Other current projects include sleeping, eating and watching dogs chase butterflies.

www.greenenaftaligallery.com
www.alpertawards.org

Mix by Mike Hajar, made for the exhibition CABINESSENCE, 2001, 65 mins

MORE ECHOES, 2010, 11’32 mins
Audio by Psychic Ills

WEREWOLF KARAOKE, 2010, 1’15 mins
—

Justin Lowe was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1976. His installations recreate, only to disassemble, sub-cultural benchmarks such as, meth labs, bodegas and club bathrooms. Lowe’s work has recently appeared at Deitch Projects, New York; Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut; Galerie Frédéric Giroux, Paris; Gagosian Gallery, New York, and elsewhere.

www.countryclubprojects.com
www.fredericgiroux.com

— While at CalArts for graduate school from 1990 to 1992 I had the fortune of bonding with a group of fearless and powerful young women. Catherine Lord had just left as Dean of the School of Art, so feminism and gender equality were key topics. Tom Lawson stepped in as Dean and created an open atmosphere that allowed for experimentation; frankly, he looked the other way with some of our antics. These women included Denise Prince, Beata Henrichs, Ann Faison, and the Hubshman sisters (Linda and Sandy)—just to name a few. I was invited by Denise and Beata to join Speaker Death, a conceptual all-girls band they had formed, named after a KTEL album. The band began as an advertising campaign with DIY fliers before any of us even picked up an instrument. We eventually performed on a regular basis, jointly writing songs that were solely about women—Denise on drums, Beata on base, me on guitar and Linda as our kickass lead singer. I was in my first year of the graduate program, they in their 4th year of the BFA program. I was simply in awe. They were the most beautiful, powerful and outrageous women I had ever met. When Speaker Death finally played we borrowed instruments from the likes of Eddie Ruscha, Sam Durant, Adam McEwen and Anthony Burden. On the subject of feminism the school was somewhat ideologically divided between a focus on theory or behavioral action, with my group corresponding to the latter. At times we went too far, but we pushed boundaries in our search for empowerment. Nothing was off limits. Some of our behaviors resulted in a number of performances and, of course, the band was at the center. With their support I was determined to overcome some of my greatest fears, as well as push social boundaries. I don’t think I could pursue the current political direction of my work and activism if not for these formative years.

The particular performance shown in the video clip took place at an alternative space called The Other 15 Minutes, in 1990. The three performers are Denise Prince, myself, and Ann Faison, from left to right. We wanted to unhinge some of the sexual stereotypes of femininity, as well as literalize other male sexual fantasies in attempts to undermine them. I was thinking about a “Give’em their fantasies and scare ‘em” approach. We decided to make a satirical piece commenting on the fact that men always pee in public, yet women rarely do. The performance was an attempt to parody sexy female dancers epitomized in the 1980s weekly TV show Solid Gold, a program that played the top 10 music hits for the week. The show had a very tacky and sexy group of dancers called the Solid Gold Dancers. The New York Times referred to the program as “the pop music show that is its own parody…[enacting] mini-dramas…of covetousness, lust and aerobic toning—routines that typically have a minimal connection with the songs that back them up.” Denise Prince named our performance, “Gold in Unison”. She lent the footage to me so that I could present it here. Many thanks to our male background dancers; if you look carefully you will see Adam McEwen. Denise is still a close friend and huge inspiration. Currently she is making the most incredible work of her life that challenges my own, like few other contemporary practices.

—

Andrea Bowers received her MFA from CalArts and currently lives, works and teaches in Los Angeles, CA. Since 2003 Bowers’ work has focused primarily on direct action and non-violent civil disobedience enacted through the lives of mainly women. She presents the stories of activists to express her belief that dissent is essential to maintaining a democratic process, as well as to illustrate the importance of a political strategy that stands in opposition to violence and war.

Bowers recent solo exhibitions include THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, MERCY MERCY ME at Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, which also traveled to the MCA Sydney, and NI UNA MUERTE MAS at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Recent group shows include DRAWN FROM PHOTOGRAPHY at the Drawing Center, NY, THE LAST NEWSPAPER at the New Museum, NY, THE SEVENTH HOUSE at Project Row Houses, Houston, and PROGRESS at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York. She was also included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2008 California Biennial and has exhibited at Secession in Vienna, REDCAT, Los Angeles and Artpace, San Antonio. Bowers is a 2008 United States Artists Broad Fellow and 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant recipient.

www.vielmetter.com
www.helenapapadopoulos.com
www.andrewkreps.com

RESTAGING THE DISCOVERY OF THE ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM, Kythera Island, 2009
Photo by Alexandra Gaty

— The Antikythera mechanism is the most technologically sophisticated artifact that survives from antiquity. Currently dated to 150—100 B.C.E., it has also been described as the world’s oldest known analog computer. A shoebox-sized assemblage of 37 interlocking gears and dials, the Antikythera mechanism is an astronomical calculator complex and precise enough to predict eclipses and track the positions of the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn down to the hour, even compensating for their elliptical orbits—contradicting the prevailing Greek philosophical belief of its time that all orbits were perfect circles.

Discovered in a Roman shipwreck by sponge divers in 1901 off the southern Greek island of Antikythera, the first scholars to observe the device considered it an anachronism—an object that challenged conventional historical chronology, too complex to have been constructed during the same time period as the bronze statues and other objects discovered along side it. Devices with the level of complexity of the Antikythera mechanism would not appear again until the 12th century.(*)

Today some researchers believe that though Greek, the Antikythera mechanism actually embodies Babylonian not ancient Greek astronomy, pushing its origins even further into antiquity as well as geographically eastward. Finally, though thought to be rare if not unique, many researchers say that its refined design and manufacturing suggests that it had a number of undiscovered predecessors and perhaps was even the product of an as-of-yet unknown guild.

This is a photo of me taken through a double-axis diffraction grating film off the coast of Kythera, the island just north of Antikythera. It documents here more of a ‘parachronism’, something along side of or adjacent to something else in time and place.

(*) The notion that the Antikythera mechanism is anachronistic (from the Greek ana: against and chronos: time), reveals more our expectations and ignorance of history rather than anything about the actual material circumstances of the device. Declaring artifacts anachronistic springs from, as well as reinforces, the commonsense perspective of history as a uniform and continual unfolding of a primitive past into our uniquely technologically advanced present.
—

Mark Hagen was born in Black Swamp, Virginia in 1972. He lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include TBA, China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles (2010). Upcoming solo exhibitions include Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain in September (2011), and Almine Rech, Paris in January (2012).

www.chinaartobjects.com
www.alminerech.com

—

Nick Mauss was born in New York, in 1980, and raised in Munich, Germany. He has exhibited at Galerie Neu, Berlin; 303 Gallery, New York; and, most recently, at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims. This fall he will exhibit at Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis, release the LP CRYSTAL FLOWERS on Dial records, and begin a guest-professorship in the department of Painting and Drawing at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg.

www.303gallery.com
www.galerieneu.net

GALICIA

— For my next two fashion collections I am focusing my attention on Galicia,
the area which used to exist in eastern Europe, spanning over southeast Poland,
the Ukraine and Austria / Hungary.

It was a landscape best described in the works of one of my favourite writers,
Joseph Roth. The place doesn’t exist anymore, it only survives in stories,
old postcards and books.

Here is an assembly of vintage, colored postcards from Galicia, research for
my collection. These are mixed with items found in my studio, chosen for their
symbolic connection to Galicia.

—

Frank Leder is a german fashion designer based in Berlin. After studying at Central Saint Martins, London, Leder moved on to developing his heavily conceptual signature style deeply rooted in german culture. Leder’s collection references might include anything from small town fire brigades, local butchers or Germanys colonial past, combined with a healthy sense of humour. He designs limited furniture pieces and interiors for selected clients. Leder’s work has been published and exhibited internationally.

www.frank-leder.com

MESSAGE FROM THE CRYPT

— A selection of images from artists who are inspiring me and informing my work at the moment. Older or dead artists that I’m reassessing and younger artists who are making things that look old.

William Turnbull

Aaron Angell

Mike Barrow

Antoni Tàpies

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Des Hughes

Carl Andre

Hans Hartung

John McCracken

Craig Kauffman

Absalon

Ulrich Rückriem

Oscar Tuazon

Oscar Tuazon

Carl Andre

Alan Shields

Bob Law

Lynn Chadwick

Jannis Kounellis

Scott Short

Dorothea Rockburne

Günther Uecker

William Tucker

Andrei Tarkovsky
—

Born in 1970, Peter Davies lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include The Epoch of Perpetual Happiness, The Approach, London 2009, and New Paintings, Gagosian, London 2001, and forthcoming The Approach 2012. Recent group exhibitions include ART, Galerie Haas Und Fuchs, Berlin, Germany 2010; THE MAKING OF ART, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany 2009; Starstruck: CONTEMPORARY ART AND THE CULT OF CELEBRITY, The New Art Gallery Walsall, UK 2008; and forthcoming THE INDISCIPLINE OF PAINTING, Tate St Ives, UK, 2012.

www.theapproach.co.uk

Grcic in the V&A / Grcic in my room.

—

Nick Relph was born in London in 1979 and currently lives in New York City. Solo exhibitions include Gavin Browns enterprise (2010), Overduin and Kite (2010), Herald Street (2010) and Standard, Oslo (2011). He is a participant in the current Venice Biennale and recently published the artists’ book VESTIARIUM SCOTICUM.

www.gavinbrown.biz
www.heraldst.com
www.overduinandkite.com
plasticforthefirsttime.tumblr.com

“I did like them … I do like them, but … well…”
“Well, what?”
“Well… it’s just that last year, when you started calling them The New Way… and said you were only going to paint pallets from now on… I got a bit… apprehensive.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”

— This was the anti-climax to a few months of vague planning. My friend Jake has a gallery, and early last year I emailed him some photographs of a wooden pallet that I’d painted. He got quite excited about it and we started to talk about doing a show of painted pallets – nothing untoward, maybe me and another artist in a small show at his gallery, we’d work out the logistics with Herald St.

I hadn’t just sent the pictures to Jake. Fishing for expertise and justification, I’d sent them to a lot of people; curators, writers, critics and my own galleries … and a museum; but there was little or no interest. Neville said he liked them, but offered no more than that. Most people just didn’t reply; a clear sign that they thought the painted pallet was terrible. Nicky at Herald St ignored me until I pressed him for an answer. Finally he emailed me back; ‘What do the colours mean? Do they represent something? Is there a system? ’ The email ended ‘Why did you do this? x.’

At the start of 2009 I was in a slump; 2008 had looked so promising but had ended in disappointment. As I sat looking out at the snow from my studio/dining room in January 2009, I wished I could be anywhere else, doing anything else. I needed to find The New Way, I needed to break the ‘idea/computer/printer/show/gallery/storage’ axis. I needed to make work that I could engage with; physical, real work, because The Old Way wasn’t working.

So, I started making mobiles out of scraps of wood that I’d found around the house. Brightly coloured mobiles adorned with stenciled fragments of conversation. But the mobiles were crap. Eventually, the only wood left in the house was a pallet that our new washing machine had just arrived on. Wooden pallets … of course!

I started to think about pallets: The pallet is kind of ‘ready-made’, but it’s also an essential part of the ‘business’ of art. It’s the workhorse of the gallery system and of almost every other form of shopping. All supermarket products arrive on pallets from a warehouse; in fact almost all consumer goods of any kind arrive at their ‘release point’ at the shop, on a pallet. The pallet is the last contact these goods have in the world as a ‘unit’ before they are re-presented as ‘brands’. The pallet is the mule of capitalism!

It was simple – I’d just paint pallets in the fluorescent colours that I’d been using for my mobiles. No words needed, no crude stenciled lettering – just the pallet and the paint. But – did I really need to paint them? I knew immediately that a ‘cooler artist’ wouldn’t bother to paint the pallets. A cooler artist would just declare the pallet to be the artwork. I thought about this a lot. A better artist would work on a theory of the pallets’ role in consumer society, thinking carefully about the pallet’s link with the transportation of artworks and the transportation of soap powder boxes, tumble driers or piles of freshly boxed Miu Miu shoes. This artist would just show the ‘raw pallet’. I knew that. But I thought ‘Fuck it. I must paint something. I must engage! I’m sick of their conceptual reasoning and kowtowing to art history. SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE at SOME TIME must have just made ART without knowing why – without fucking tactics – without making ART ABOUT ART. AND FUCK THEIR THEORIES! AND FUCK FUCKING CRITICS AND FUCK FUCKING INTELLECTUAL ART PARASITES! … BRING BACK POL POT AND CLEMENT GREENBERG.

It was a bright, freezing cold morning as I scoured the snow covered streets for discarded pallets. I had one, but needed more. I needed a convincing set. I didn’t need to buy overalls, rigger boots and a woolly hat to do this, I’ll admit, but I did anyway. It was the right thing to do – Robert Rauschenberg stalking stuffed goats on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, 1959.

It took me all day to find eleven pallets, and it’d been dark for three hours when I brought the last one into the house. I carried them home one by one – backbreaking real work. The hallway and kitchen were now lined with pallets – I thought about Fordism and factory work, but the BIG idea was doing it, don’t get distracted by thinking. On the second day, I got up at 7am and began dismantling the first pallet with a claw hammer. After complaints from a neighbor, I was forced to work in the back garden. A cigarette clasped between my teeth, tools hanging from my overalls pocket. I started to sweat under my woolly hat. My breath made steam train clouds in the freezing air as I ripped the pallet to pieces – smoking and sweating – Jackson Pollock, overlooking Accabonac Creek, Long Island, New York, 1948.

Once I’d broken the first pallet down to all its component parts, I took the bits back into my studio/dining room. I sanded all the rough edges off by hand: proper hard work. As I worked I forgot about what I was doing, just doing was enough. I did not want to be distracted by logic. I was determined not to Google in search of explanation. I kept trying out names in my head for the genre I was inventing ‘Industrial Decoration’, ‘Post-Industrial Minimalism’, ‘Fuck Off Conceptual Art Groupie Archeologist Wankers’. It was bliss. One day turned into four days as I sanded, primed, painted and varnished. The first pallet would perhaps be called Pallet #1, a nod to Jack, “Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is – pure painting.”

Finally, on the fifth day, I assembled the pallet. If I studied the nail holes, I could figure out exactly how to put everything back in it’s original place. Bingo! That’s all I’d done – spent 4 days in real work heaven, only to reassemble the pallet exactly as it was, albeit in different colours. The futility of this excited me. Someone, somewhere would recognize the parallels between pallet reassembly and painting, Pollock and Ikea… perhaps ‘Point #1’ in the Industrial Decoration Manifesto: Re-paint the inane.

I had to wait a week for a plinth to be built. Annoying, but it did give me time to finish 4 more pallets. The plinth was essential. Some rule of Minimalism would no doubt dictate that I didn’t need a plinth, that the pallet should be shown on the floor… maybe unpainted; a different mindset. I emptied out our living room and carefully placed the plinth in at one end, as near as I could get to a gallery setting. I cut the bubble wrap from the finished pallet and gently lifted it on to the plinth. With great excitement, I sat down on the sofa and stared at the pallet.

THE NEW WAY
2009
wood, nails, acrylic paint
110 x 90 x 12 cm
—

Scott King was born in Yorkshire, England, in 1969. He currently lives and works in London. He worked as art director of i-D and as creative director of Sleazenation magazines. Occasionally he produces work under the banner CRASH! with writer and historian Matt Worley. King’s work has been exhibited widely in London, New York and European galleries including the ICA, KW Berlin, Portikus, White Columns, Kunstverein Munich and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. ART WORKS, King’s first monograph, was recently published by JRP|Ringier, Zurich.

www.scottking.co.ukwww.heraldst.comwww.bortolamigallery.comwww.soniarosso.com

Dedicated to Brendan Majewski, a great influence in my life.
—

Mira Billotte is an artist, vocalist, pianist and composer performing as White Magic. She performed and composed for Quix*o*tic along with her sister, Christina Billotte (Casual Dots, Slant 6) and Brendan Majewski (Orphan), and later Mick Barr (Orthrelm, Krallice). She creates art, using sand paintings and film projections and performs inside her installations, with solo shows in Baltimore and New York City. She recorded Bob Dylan’s AS I WENT OUT ONE MORNING with Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) for the soundtrack album for the film I’M NOT THERE directed by Todd Haynes. She was featured actress in the film CHAIN by director Jem Cohen, performing some of her own compositions in character. White Magic have released numerous recordings, with the label Drag City, and also recorded LONG TIME AGO with producer Hal Willner for the compilation album ROGUE’S GALLERY: PIRATE BALLADS, SEA SONGS AND CHANTEYS (Anti-). Mira Billotte recently started her own label, The Mysteries, releasing the new White Magic single WHITE WIDOW which includes a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’.

whitemagiccult.tumblr.com

KALMAR… UH…

A QUESTION OF WHERE TO COMMENCE NEW STRUCTURES IN LIGHT OF SOME RETURNS AND EMERGENCES:

THE POSTWAR AS A FINISHED MOMENT: IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT AND GLOBAL CONTEXT VIA COLD-WAR INDENTIFICATIONS.

THE INABILITY OF THE ART CONTEXT TO IDENTIFY WITH THE NEW CONDITIONS.

THE FRAGMENTATION OF LABOUR IN DETAIL. SPECIFICALLY IN LIGHT OF VARIED FREE-TRADE AGREEMENTS.

THE NECESSITY TO POSIT A NEW FRAMEWORK OF ACTION THAT CAN ACCOUNT FOR THESE LOSSES AND GAINS AND PREVENT THE MOST DYNAMIC WORK FROM BEING UNDERSTOOD AS OPERATING WITHIN AN INSTRUMENTALIZED TERRAIN.

IMMATERIAL LABOUR.

ANALOGOUS MAPPING.

CULTURAL ECHOES.

SITES OF PRODUCTION.

AGENCY IN RELATION TO ECO-POLITICS.

COALESCENCE/RETURN OF CLASSICAL RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION.

CONSENSUS MODELS AS A PHANTOM PARALLEL.

DETAILED WORK IN THE CULTURAL FRAME.
—

Liam Gillick is an artist based in London and New York. Solo exhibitions include THE WOOD WAY, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2002; A SHORT TEXT ON THE POSSIBILITY OF CREATING AN ECONOMY OF EQUIVALENCE, Palais de Tokyo, 2005 and the retrospective project THREE PERSPECTIVES AND A SHORT SCENARIO, Witte de With, Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, Kunstverein, München and the MCA, Chicago, 2008-2010. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2002 and the Vincent Award at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 2008. Many public commissions and projects include the Home Office in London (2005) and the Dynamica Building in Guadalajara, Mexico (2009). In 2006 he was a central figure in the free art school project unitednationsplaza in Berlin that travelled to Mexico City and New York. Liam Gillick has published a number of texts that function in parallel to his artwork. PROXEMICS (SELECTED WRITING 1988-2006) JRP-Ringier was published in 2007 alongside the monograph FACTORIES IN THE SNOW by Lilian Haberer, JRP-Ringier. A critical reader titled MEANING LIAM GILLICK, was published by MIT Press (2009). An anthology of his artistic writing titled ALLBOOKS was also published by Book Works, London (2009). In addition he has contributed to many art magazines and journals including Parkett, Frieze, Art Monthly, October and Art Forum. Liam Gillick was selected to represent Germany for the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. A major exhibition of his work opened at the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in April 2010. He has taught at Columbia University in New York since 1997 and the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College since 2008. Public collections include: Government Art Collection, UK; Arts Council, UK; Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

www.liamgillick.info

IN DARKNESS LET ME DWELL (2010, 7:49 min), extracts
—

Born in 1976, Mai-Thu Perret lives and works in Geneva. This year, Bice Curiger included Perret in ILLUMINATIONS, the exhibition for the International Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Perret was recently awarded the Zurich Art Prize; an associated solo show dedicated to her work will open at Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, in August. Perret’s 2011 solo exhibitions include MIGRAINE, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles; Mamco, Geneva, Switzerland; Le Magasin, Grenoble, France; and Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau, Switzerland. Recent solo exhibitions include AN IDEAL FOR LIVING, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan; 2013, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO; NEW WORK, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; AN EVENING OF THE BOOK AND OTHER STORIES, The Kitchen, New York; and LAND OF CRYSTAL, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland. In the past few years Perret’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including ABSTRACT POSSIBLE, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden; GOLDENE ZEITEN, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; HEAVEN -SPLENDID ISOLATION, 2nd Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece; and A SPOKEN WORD EXHIBITION, Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England, among many others. 2011 will also see the release of MAI-THU PERRET, a monograph published by JRP|Ringier that includes texts by Diedrich Diederichsen and Elisabeth Lebovici.

www.davidkordanskygallery.com
www.francescapia.com

These two photos I took at a car race in Germany.

—

Andro Wekua was born in Georgia, in 1977. He currently lives and works in Switzerland. He has been depicted as a master of suggestion, of small gestures. His narrative structures are deadly focused on their targets, yet remain astonishingly open. Wekua locates his drawn, collaged or sculptural images in a No-Man’s Land between East and West, aesthetic exactness and improvisation, confidence and melancholy. He creates his own highly visual scripts which play with his past and stylize it into fiction

www.gladstonegallery.com

— I am making a new body of work about painting, geometry and dance. I came across a picture of a dancer called Erick Hawkins performing in Martha Graham’s Stephen Acrobat, from 1947, and decided to make a poster starting with his body over a watercolor ground. Here are three outtakes for the poster, which were not used.

—

Sarah Crowner received her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA from Hunter College in 2002. Recent solo exhibitions include ZIG ZAGS AND CURVES at Helena Papadopoulos Gallery in Athens, Greece, in 2011 and PAINTINGS AND POTS at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York in 2009. Crowner participated in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and exhibitions worldwide, including PAYING TO VISIT MARY PART 2, Kunstverein, Amsterdam; LOOKING BACK: THE WHITE COLUMNS ANNUAL, New York; and FOR THE BLIND MAN IN THE DARK ROOM LOOKING FOR THE BLACK CAT THAT ISN’T THERE, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (traveling). Crowner is currently working towards two upcoming solo exhibitions in 2011 at Catherine Bastide, Brussels; and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York. Crowner also works on various collaborative projects with Dexter Sinister.

www.caseykaplangallery.com
www.simonleegallery.com

— In 1962 Alex Liberman, the artistic director of Vogue, asked me to do a series in which he wanted to reflect different shapes, different than what we normally see the model doing. He wanted this because the collections from Paris were of different shapes.

I used to spend a lot of time at the Palladium on Broadway, watching the real people dance the Cha Cha Cha and although their clothes were not what you would find in Vogue, I thought their movements were as elegant as anything I had ever seen. So I hired two dancers from West Side Story and in my studio I had them dance, and when I liked a movement, I would have the model copy it. In order to make it appropriate for Vogue I would just give them a little extra to do like ….holding a glass of wine, holding a compact, managing a cat or dog and the accompanying photos were the result. Whenever I look at them I can hear the music and feel their movements.

—

Jerry Schatzberg was born in 1927 in Bronx, New York. Over the past three decades Schatzberg has excelled in both the realms of photography and filmmaking. Published in Vogue, McCall’s, Esquire, Glamour, and Life in the 1960s. Schatzberg captured intimate portraits of the generations most notable artists, celebrities and thinkers (from Bob Dylan to Robert Rauschenberg), and he pushed on in the 1970s to the medium of film and participated in the renaissance of American cinema, directing films such as: PUZZLE OF A DOWNFALL CHILD, THE PANIC IN NEEDLE PARK, and SCARECROW. His films mark a significant time in the history of film when the importance of solid and introspective narrative proved paramount. WOMEN THEN, a collection of Schatzberg’s rarely seen black-and-white photographs, taken of women in the 1950s and 1960s, was published by Rizzoli in 2010.

www.jerryschatzberg.com

BLESS Nº42 PLÄDOYER DER JETZTZEIT

The German title defines precisely the actual BLESS state of mind. A plea for the here and now, the present time, this very instant and the joy that comes along with being ‘present’.

— This video below shows a selection of winners, taken from an evening of ‘pleas’; an event that we held at both the MMK in Frankfurt and the Ofr Bookshop in Paris. The usual, very simple, monetary exchange between consumer and brand object was transformed into a dialog, in which the consumer was given the opportunity to elaborate on their needs and make their very own product. Rare thoughts as a currency for rare products: Rather than buy our products we asked participants to engage in a creative exchange; to indicate clearly the product they would like and then “plead” for it. The responses could either be brought or posted to the BLESS SHOP, or sent in via email.


—

Bless is a fashion/design studio created in 1997 by Ines Kaag, based in Berlin, and Desiree Heiss, in Paris. The two designers escape from any calibrated definition of fashion, faithful to their initial concept, dividing and combining creation, between fashion, art, design and architecture, they engage an independent work method, which often implements collaborations and interactions with friends, customers and other contributors. BLESS is a project that presents ideal and artistic values by products to the public. Recent group exhibitions include N°26 CABLE JEWELLERY, N°35 CARCOVER (2011 Festival de la Mode à Hyères, France) and large scale accessories as some sort of livingtools for every day life (2011 Arnhem Mode Biennale, The Netherlands). Recent solo exhibitions include WINDOW GARDEN INSTALLATION (2011 Craft Victoria, Australia).

www.bless-service.de

POINTS ON A LINE, 2010, 35:48 min
—

Sarah Morris is an internationally recognized artist known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture, design and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings as parallel to her films – both trace urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In both these media, she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics. Born in 1967, Sarah Morris lives in London and New York. Solo exhibitions include the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover and Hirshhorn Museum Washington D.C.

www.whitecube.com

— 1955 was a time of much stress between the USSR and USA. I felt that both sides needed a more humanized view of each other for things to get better. There was very little in the American media to bring us closer to the people of the USSR. These photographs got us walking along with these ordinary Russians and allowed us to feel what it might be like to be one of them. Thus helping to break through barriers that the media had set up. The same is true for these two Russian girls in their backyard, designing a house–they could be our own children.

—

Albert Maysles is a pioneer of Direct Cinema who, along with his brother David, was the first to make nonfiction feature films (GIMME SHELTER, SALESMAN, GREY GARDENS) where the drama of life unfolds as is, without scripts, sets, interviews or narration. With his first film, PSYCHIATRY IN RUSSIA (1955) he made the transition from psychologist to documentary filmmaker. In 1960 he served as co-filmmaker of PRIMARY. His numerous films include WHAT’S HAPPENING? THE BEATLES IN THE USA (1964), MEET MARLON BRANDO (1965), five films of the projects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude (1973 to 1994), and recently a sixth, THE GATES (2007), as well as four documentaries for HBO. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1965), a Peabody, an Emmy, and five Lifetime Achievement Awards. He won the award for best cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival (2002) for LALEE’S KIN: THE LEGACY OF COTTON, which was also nominated in 2001 for an Academy Award. Albert received the Columbia Dupont Award in 2004. Eastman Kodak has saluted him as one of the world’s 100 finest cinematographers.

On 10/15/07, Robert Nickqs wrote:
I am more than a little bit wasted, so please don’t be unkind. I was watching
that Wire DVD we’ve seen, live on German TV in 1979, still so riveting, and
I realized that a really good band comes down to one basic principle: The idea of
a band as: A shared belief. Shared beliefs — under any circumstances — are difficult
to sustain. Why privilege bands? Because they are these random/volatile/precarious
constellations of people and emotions/egos/volatility? What about just friends?
We don’t have it any easier. Even if we don’t go on tour, we have to see
each other with some regularity, and it’s not always easy. When you called from
Boston the other night your main message was that I need to take better care of
myself. Even if old habits die hard, I do think that I am taking care of myself,
and I realize that you say this because you really care about me. I may be defensive,
but you have to know that it means a lot to me when you express yourself in this
way. I get seven to eight hours of sleep every night, don’t smoke, have a good
meatless diet, and drink a ton of water. The bad news is always the good news, and
I will probably live forever. And even then … it won’t be over.
I really love you a lot.

Your friend in this life and the next.

+B

From: brendan
To: Robert Nickqs
Subject: Re: bob for brendan
Date: Oct 16, 2007 5:07 AM
b-

i’ll haunt you first

+b

Orient Point, August 2008

Brendan, Orient Point, July 2010

TARANTUALA DOWNFORCE by Orphan
Video by Brendan Majewski
Photos by Ryan Foerster
—

Bob Nickas is a critic and curator based in New York. His books include LIVE FREE OR DIE (les presses du réel, 2000), THEFT IS VISION (JRP/Ringier, 2008), and PAINTING ABSTRACTION (Phaidon Press, 2009). CATALOG OF THE EXHIBITION, a retrospective of his exhibitions from 1985 to 2011, is forthcoming from 2nd Cannons Publications in April, and he is one of the contributors to HISTORY ENDS TODAY, a survey of the 200 most important artworks of the past 25 years, to be published by Phaidon in October.

POST-ECONOMY TATTOOS

— The following collage details some recent home made tattoos I’ve given people and some of the things received in exchange, including food, books, a haircut, transport, films and artwork.

I’ve been loosely considering the term ‘post-economy tattooing’ to describe these exchanges. No money is involved, and there is no sense of set value that carries over from one exchange to another. This approach helps to take the seriousness out of what is usually considered serious.

—

Thomas Jeppe was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1984. He is author of the book HOME MADE TATTOOS RULE (Serps Press 2006). Forthcoming shows include, Art Gallery of Western Australia; Curro Y Poncho in Guadalajara, Mexico; and Galerie Conradi in Hamburg, Germany. He lives and works in Melbourne Australia.

www.galerie-conradi.dewww.thomasjeppe.com

HITCHCOCK DIDN’T HAVE A BELLY BUTTON

— There was this story going around on the internet that Hitchcock actually didn’t have a belly button. It was Ron Burrage, a professional Hitchcock doppelgänger, who first mentioned this during an interview at his place in London. Together with Hitchcock himself, Ron Burrage went on to become one of the protagonists in Double Take (2009), the film I was working on at the time. I liked the story of Hitchcock not having a belly button, as it sort of alluded to the fact there might not have been an original Hitchcock after all. If he didnt have a belly button, so I reasoned, he might be a clone and there might actually be many doubles of the master, of which Ron Burrage was one. Ultimately this became also part of the plotline in the film.

I was able to verify this anecdote when I stumbled onto the transcript from an all women’s panel on Hitchcock (**) during the research stage of the film. Indeed Karen Black, the last in a row of Hitchcock’s famous female protagonists who featured in the master’s final film Family Plot (1976), recounted this little story as participant in the panel, invoking in a funny way Hitchcock’s sardonic way of speaking. Now while I was completing Double Take with editor Tyler Hubby in Los Angeles, he mentioned that his wife was big pals with Karen Black. Maybe we could interview her for the film and check if the story of Hitchcock not having a belly button was really true? So, in August 2008 that’s what we set out to do: Karen Black, who really is the most wonderful storyteller, honored us in her house and this is her testimony she told us about the master without a belly button.

“See the 100 movies I’ve made in a few moments”. A link to Karen Black’s film work.

A VOICE AS SOMETHING MORE by Jodi Dean.

—

Belgian filmmaker/artist Johan Grimonprez caused an international stir with his first feature DIAL H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) after its premiere at DOCUMENTA X. An exploration into media’s mutating collusion with mass perception, this dizzying chronicle of airplane hijacking eerily foreshadowed the events of 9/11.

His recent feature DOUBLE TAKE (2009) questions how our view of reality is held hostage by mass media, advertising, and Hollywood. In a plot written by award-winning British novelist Tom McCarthy, the film targets the global rise of fear-as-commodity in a tale of odd couples and hilarious double deals.

Traveling the main festival circuit from the BERLINALE to SUNDANCE, his critically acclaimed films have garnered Best Director Awards and were acquired by NBC UNIVERSAL, ARTE, and CHANNEL 4. In addition, his works are part of the permanent collections of the TATE MODERN and the CENTRE GEORGES POMPIDOU. In 2011 HATJE/CANTZ published a reader on his work called IT’S A POOR SORT OF MEMORY THAT ONLY WORKS BACKWARDS. His distributors are SODA PICTURES (London) and KINOLORBER INTERNATIONAL (New York).

www.johangrimonprez.com
www.zapomatik.com
www.doubletakefilm.com
www.skny.com

(*) Karen Black interview with Johan Grimonprez, 2008.
Recording by Tyler Hubby and Cole Akers.
Montage by Sarah Dhanens.
1min, stereo, English.
A zapomatik production in collaboration with the Hammer Museum Residency, LA.

(**) Karen Black in HITCHCOCK’S WOMEN ON HITCHCOCK: A PANEL DISCUSSION WITH JANET LEIGH, TIPPI HEDREN, KAREN BLACK, SUZANNE PLESHETTE AND EVA MARIE SAINT, Literature Film Quarterly, 1999 by Greg Garrett.

A COLLECTION OF WEATHER REPORTS

—

Daniel Turner was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1983 and currently lives and works in New York, NY.

www.danieladamturner.com

WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

From left to right:
Henri Huet, Helicopter landing, Saigon, 1967
An-My Lê, Untitled, Mekong Delta, 1994
Lê Family Photograph, Huê, 1961
Royal Australian Air Force, Operation Baby Lift, Tan Son Nhat, Saigon, 1975
Ted Partin, An-My and Marine Force Recon, USS Peleliu, Coast of California, 2006
Full Metal Jacket, 1987
Platoon, 1986
An-My Lê, Untitled, Nam Ha, 1994
An-My Lê, Line Shack Supervisor, USS Ronald Reagan, North Arabian Gulf, 2009
Bob Cole, Combat Photographer Catherine Leroy, Saigon, 1967
An-My Lê, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam, 2010
Vo An Khanh, Vietcong Improvised Operating Room, U Minh Forest, 1970
Pilson-Lê family photograph, California, 2008
Pilson-Lê family photograph, Rhode Island, 2010
—

An-My Lê was born in 1960 in Saigon. She came to the United Sates as a political refugee in 1975. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches photography at Bard College. She has had solo exhibitions at DIA: Beacon (2007-2008); the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007); the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
(2006); and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2002), among many others.

www.murrayguy.com

— Along with the cairn at Kilmartin Glebe, the Nether Largie Cairns, mid, north and south, make up the Linear Cairn-cemetery running along the floor of Kilmartin Glen, Argyll. They are tombs that once contained inhumations dating from the Neolithic and bronze age. For those researching the sites; the still unexplained ‘cup and ring’ marks, carved by Neolithic peoples into rocks here and at nearby locations, form one of a number of sites of extensive archaeological interest in the area. Manchester based sound artist Lee Patterson was invited by Arika and NVA to produce a series of outdoor sound installations in and around Kilmartin Glen. For several months Lee gathered field recordings from the area using air mikes, hydrophones and contact microphones, I accompanied Lee on these excursions with thoughts towards producing a portrait of the process (which eventually morphed into A Grammar For Listening Part 1, 2009). Though Lee preferred in most cases not to ‘play’ or make interventions whilst recording in the sites, in this instance he considers possibilities for a version of Christian Wolff’s seminal text score Stones – the instructions of which read:

“Make sounds with stones, draw sounds out of stones, using a number of sizes and kinds (and colors); for the most part discretely, sometimes in rapid sequences. For the most part striking stones with stones, but also stones on other surfaces (inside the open head of a drum for instance) or other than struck (bowed for instance, or amplified). Do not break anything.” Christian Wolff. STONES, (Prose Collection, 1968-74)

In the covered cairn, utilising locally sourced stones, Lee highlights the distinct acoustic resonances and phasing that can be produced in cramped conditions. Following earlier attempts to interpret the score within quarries and other stone walled enclosures, Lee here uses the stone as a reflective surface, whilst also experimenting with rubbing quartz together, producing a series of shrill shrieks.

The film was shot on one 100ft roll of Fuji colour film with a Bolex H16 and available light. The sound was recorded with a pair of Sennheiser microphones, set to record a stereo Mid-Side configuration.

NETHER LARGIE NORTH-STONES (2007, RE-EDITED 2011)
By Luke Fowler and Lee Patterson (after Wolff)
—

Luke Fowler was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1978. A central figure in Glasgow’s vibrant art scene, Luke Fowler creates cinematic collages that break down conventional approaches to biographical and documentary film-making. Solo exhibitions include Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2011); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2009); The Serpentine Gallery, London (2009); X Initiative, New York (2009); Kunsthalle Zürich (2008); and White Columns, New York (2006). In 2008 he was awarded the Derek Jarman Award.

www.themoderninstitute.com
www.galerie-capitain.com

Lee Patterson was born in eastern England, in 1971, he resides and works in Prestwich near Manchester. Working across disciplines, Lee Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings by using both the aided and the naked ear. Recent commissions include Bouillon de Sons Frioulais, MIMI Festival, Marseille, Catchments (for The Glen and The Till), AV Festival, Newcastle and A GRAMMAR FOR LISTENING PT1 (with film maker Luke Fowler)–featured in The British Art Show 2010: In The Days Of The Comet. He is currently artist in residence at Stour Valley Arts, Kings Wood, Ashford, Kent, where he created the installation, Elemental Fields in July 2010.

Solo releases include EGG FRY #2 and SEVEN VIGNETTES. WUNDERKAMMMERN with David Toop and Rhodri Davies was released in December 2010. His solo and collaborative works have featured in shows, festivals and radio stations worldwide as well as on UK TV.

FOR THE ARCHIVES

— In 2006 I began working on a project about mothers with young children, filmed in Italy. The search was massive (for me anyway), taking me into homes across the country. There were 2 women with whom I shot some test footage, Maria Mauela in Biella and Ulli in Milan. Neither woman made it into the final work, for reasons I do not remember. I’ve always thought of that footage with longing, wanting to acknowledge it somehow. I love the idea of pillaging my own archives (being thrifty, not wasting good footage) and essentially finding a way to use the outtakes as a separate work, a shadow work. It hasn’t happened yet, so here are some scraps to share, for the archives, the lovely Ulli and Maria Manuela. Funnily the footage for Maria Manuela appears in an interview I did for a BBC special about Technicolor. We shot a scene of me editing the vibrant color footage in the basement of the Royal College of Art, while I clumsily tried to describe my practice in voiceover. The reversal stock does look pretty good though and the shine on her top is pretty exciting…

That same year I was in NY and heard about a new truck that was going to be “christened” at our local fire company – what firemen call a Wetdown. Buying a new firetruck is a very big deal for a fire company (I’ve been told) and when a new truck arrives they host a big party for all of the volunteers and their family and friends. Other surrounding companies will send a truck and some men to deluge the new truck. They drive up, one after the other, and blast the truck with water for a few minutes. I really have no idea why I filmed this! Some of the footage is pretty strange though and I’ve always remembered it as something fantastical and exotic.

—

Born in 1975 in Suffurn, New York, Margaret Salmon lives and works between Kent, London, and New York. She creates filmic portraits that weave together poetry and ethnography. Focusing on individuals in their everyday habitats, her films capture the minutiae of daily life and infuse them with gentle grandeur, touching upon universal human themes. Margaret Salmon won the first Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2006. Her work was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2007 and the Berlin Biennale in 2010 and was featured in individual exhibitions at Witte de With in Rotterdam and Whitechapel Gallery in London among others.

www.officebaroque.com

A selection of unused source material from the series Noise & Capitalism.

—

Marco Fusinato
Born: 1964

www.marcofusinato.com
www.annaschwartzgallery.com

ADRIFT IN SPACE. ASK ME HOW.

— After school we hitch hiked to Carbondale, Illinois for the weekend. It was 1970 and I was 16. On the way we took some acid. I didn’t know it was supposed to be split up and did too much. Things got so weird so fast that there was nothing to hold on to in the world. The trees were total cartoons with lots of mouths, etc. I had to get out of there and ran into the woods. I began floating around in blackness in outer space or inner space. Maybe it’s the non-material universe. I was alone, disconnected, even though it was packed with souls floating around. I think you could see through them. A terrible negative suction was pulling downward in a sickening and horrible way. If you connected with others you could avoid it. But your thoughts, feelings and actions were all the same and hard to control. The whole time I was receiving tons of important truths that I forgot. It seemed I was floating around for eons. I was surprised when I slowly began to make out the details of Allen, who was asking me a question. I said wryly, “you asked the question, you must have some idea about the answer.” Unfortunately I also explained to him that I wasn’t from the same planet. The next morning I did not awaken refreshed. I had to watch the people of this planet carefully—how they used their legs to walk, for instance. We went to a diner for breakfast. Of course I had no idea what people ate, so I ordered the same thing as the person sitting next to me and I think no one knew.

I recently read that Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence 1966-1973, admitted to bringing in 100,000 tabs of LSD to distribute to the youth. Boy do I feel stupid.

www.globalresearch.ca
www.projectcensored.org
www.michael-hudson.com
www.allthingspass.com
www.voltairenet.org/en
www.chavezcode.com
www.uruknet.info
www.heyetnet.org
www.freedocumentaries.org
www.pierogi2000.com/artists/mark-lombardi

Creepy Links:
www.worldsecuritynetwork.com
www.freedomhouse.org
—

Sue Williams was born in Chicago Heights, Illinois in 1954. She lives and works in New York. Williams has had solo exhibitions at the Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institut Valencia d’Art Modern, Valencia; Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; among others. Her work is currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s exhibition “Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion” and has recently been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY; Whitechapel Gallery, London, England; Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada; Museum of Contemporary Art Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, New York.

www.303gallery.com

PETRA, JORDANIA PHOTOS, 21ST JANUARY 2011

— This incredible place has many of my absolute favorite ingredients: rock-carved temples and tombs (alleged usage), caves, proto-Biblical references, pre- and post- human civilization overtones, Alexander the Great, spiritual infusion, monolithic man made structures, monolithic natural structures, density and mass on an epic scale, super-realism, surrealism & incredible hallucinatory factors (such as mind-bending color shifts, defacings, dense organic stone patterns, miraculous lighting and natural theatre), gorges, craggy peaks and fierce winds, blood altars, donkeys, etc.

Unbelievable.

Here are some attempts to capture that perspective with iphone camera.

RIP Brendan Majewski.

—

Stephen O’Malley is a founding member of several groups including Sunn O))) (1998–present), Burning Witch (1995–1998), KTL (2005–present), Khanate (2000–2006). His collaborations include projects with Banks Violette, Gisèle Vienne, and Dennis Cooper, amongst others.

www.ideologic.org

To a palace made
Of wind

To a palace whose towers
Are pillars of fire by day

To an opal palace
In the sky’s zenith heart

The bird of pale air
Flies

In a swift white line
On a black space

A brushstroke
Signifying absence

“Vacancy in Glass,” Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

—
Rita Ackermann, Hungarian born painter/artist, lives and works in New York. She is currently editing a monograph with Rizzoli, working on a short film “Pure War”, and a organizing a mob flash performance for a festival in May for New Museum. In November 2011, she will be showing her new paintings at the Ludwig Museum, in Budapest.

www.ritaackermann.com
www.andrearosengallery.com

— Listening this morn to a nice, formal piece of music derived from Near Eastern sounds, extremely nice. (CD, Dream of the Orient, orig. in Turkey). Like to do some filming if younger and stronger out in the deserts of Arabia! Mysterious worn and weathered edifices of various sorts appearing here and there in the vastness of the Arabian Desert. An apartment building from three millenia past, still protruding from the red desert sands, former town, now occupied by 3 or 4 families, hot east wind blowing thru the darkened interior, window openings, some screened by articles of clothing. Child’s bicycle on “the street” below, in front of this ancient apt doorway. A single tree at the end of what was several thousand years ago a village main street. Nothing else on the horizon to suggest civilization, humanity. Naught ‘cepting wind, desert, time.

From top to bottom:
QUIXOTE (1965), 45 minutes
QUICK BILLY (1970), 56 minutes
VALENTIN DE LAS SIERRAS (1968), 10 minutes
MASS FOR THE DAKOTA SIOUX (1964), 24 minutes
All stills provided by Chuck Stevens.
—

Bruce Baillie was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, in 1931. He is one of the pioneers of the Avant Garde film movement in San Francisco, as well as a founding member of Canyon Cinema Cooperative, 1961 to the present. In 1992 his film CASTRO STREET (1966) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. He is currently undertaking the task of putting his work into a series of DVD albums, some of which are already available through Canyon Cinema.

www.brucebaillie.com
www.canyoncinema.com

— This Fall, while I was in San Francisco, my friend Bonnie Camplin sent me an invitation card to Creative Growth. Following her advice the first chance we had, my partner and I took a motorbike trip to Oakland.

It was a Tuesday—a regular day of work in CG. The doors were wide open, we heard the sounds of hammering, scribbling, conversations and giggling. Behind the doors was a gallery covered with collages, watercolours, oil paintings, pencil drawings, ballpoint drawings, crayon drawings, decoupage, and all kind of paper mache figures, cardboard vehicles, abstract ceramics and wool works.

This was not a usual gallery, everything looked attractive, unpretentious and extremely imaginative. From the gallery you can look into the workshop—a large open space with working tables and studios for all sort of media.

In the studio there was around 40 artists varied in age, all working on their artworks. The results were fabulous—from a video of Star Wars puppet theater, to ceramic waves, to amazing abstract wool scarves and collaged pictures of dogs in 1970s sweaters.

What caught my eye and made my legs soft was a series of loose interpretations of fashion catwalk drawings, from 2007. This is the work I want to share.

Above:
Artist, Barbara Rice.
Designer, Lanvin.

Above (top to bottom):
Artist, Merritt Wallace, Paulino Martin and Barbara Rice.
Designer, Isaac Mizrahi.

Above:
Artist, Merritt Wallace.
Designer, Prada.

All images from Paper Magazine, September 2007.
Copyright Creative Growth.
—

Paulina Olowska was born in 1976, in Gdansk, Poland. Solo exhibitions include Metro Picture, New York; CCA Wattis Institutefor Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln; the Abtelberg Museum, Monchengladbach; the Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; Cabinet Gallery, London, UK; Public Space Commission (with Lucie McKenzie); the Gdansk Shipyard, and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw. In 2007 she was the recipient of a DAAD (Berlin).

www.metropicturesgallery.com
www.galeriebuchholz.de
www.simonleegallery.com

Creative Growth is a non-profit visual arts center, located in Oakland, California, providing art programs, educational and independent living training, counseling and vocational opportunities for disabled adults.

www.creativegrowth.org

LOST

—

John Stezaker was born in Worcester, in 1949. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and currently teaches Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. Stezaker’s work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990’s and has been adopted in renowned museum collections around the world such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Saatchi Collection, London, and the Tate Modern, London.

www.theapproach.co.uk
www.petzel.com
www.galerie-capitain.com

— 3 very different images, a photo I bought recently of Laurel and Hardy in the UK, they undertook a number of tours after the war when their film career was more or less over and here they are pictured with I think cinema managers or executives from the Odeon chain, the guy in the middle looks like the director of the company, I can’t think of anyone in the 20th century I would have wanted to have my picture taken with more than Laurel and Hardy, an enveloppe/letter sent to me over christmas that took 2 weeks to arrive, lastly an almost impossibly colourful image of a crab, I just went to the Galapagos Islands for work if you can beleive it, and if you can’t take a good photo of nature there then you might as well give up as nothing runs away from you, not even crabs.

—

Jeremy Deller was born in 1966, in London, England. In 2004 he won the Turner Prize for MEMORY BUCKET, his documentary about George W. Bush’s hometown, Crawford, Texas and the siege in nearby Waco.

www.jeremydeller.org

UNCONSUMMATED

— I recently received a commission to make documentary photographs somewhere in the United States. I have chosen as my location the place where I grew up, and where I shot much of my first film. Since I am no longer very familiar with the region, I have started doing research. To my intermittent regret, I keep few things from my distant past, aside from the negatives of photographs I took while I was in college, and a collection of books and records. Some of the survivors appear below.

The March 3, 1981 column World of the Unusual by “famed Romanian psychic” Pauline Bendit included the following item:

A woman kept her mother’s mummified body on a couch in her living room for 10 months and told stunned cops it was her voodoo doll. Police Chief Addison Woods of Massillon, Ohio, says he went to Helen Merry’s home after her uncle, Jim Harris, said she had been acting strangely. Jim said the woman wouldn’t let him in the house and worried about her mother, his sister. Cops said they entered the home and found Lena Merry, 83, dead on the couch. Her daughter, Helen, 60, told them the body was her voodoo doll and that she didn’t know where her mother was.

These women were once my neighbors. Every summer, I used to see Helen gathering dandelions in our yard. I was a child when I saw her for the first time, and she explained to me that the greens were good for salad. I thought that was odd, since my family’s salads were iceberg lettuce from the supermarket. I understood her name as “Miss Mary.” I didn’t know her correct surname until I read it in the newspaper. Apparently, her story got national attention, and not just in the tabloids. When I went away to college, I discovered that the only association anyone had with my home town was its famous “voodoo doll.” Helen Merry died in 1993 at age 73.

Semiotext(e), vol.4, no.1 (1981)

I didn’t see New York City until I was an adult. My parents spent part of their honeymoon in New York and didn’t enjoy it, so we never went there on family vacations. Had I any inkling of what disasters were in store, I would have lingered a while and soaked up the atmosphere of Times Square or the West Village. Instead, I haunted the Collective for Living Cinema, St. Mark’s Bookshop, and sometimes Lincoln Center. On one of my first trips to New York, I bought this issue of Semiotext(e). Of its contents I was most fascinated by the case study of a masochist who, under his “respectable” clothing, had been thoroughly tattooed and mutilated. When I saw Kathryn Bigelow deliver her acceptance speech at the Academy Awards ceremony of 2009, I thought of her name on the masthead of this journal and remembered that she had first come to Hollywood hoping to make a film adaptation of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye.

June 1983, Massillon, Ohio

I was in downtown Massillon shooting for a photography class when this kid asked me if I wanted to see a picture. I said yes, and he retrieved a creased “beaver shot” from his back pocket. The boy in the photograph must be nearly middle-aged by now. I wonder what has become of him, and I invent possibilities: he watches Fox News and disdains the “brown menace” of California, a place he barely knows; he sucks off married men he meets online and drinks at the area’s only gay bar, once called Booby’s Why Not Club, now surely called something else; he got the hell out of town, landed in the Inland Empire or the Metroplex, and searched in vain for decent work; he went to an Ivy League school, then worked as a producer in the adult video industry before it all went bust. In pursuit of the American Dream, he may have done all of the above, though not necessarily in the order listed.

Jess, ONCE UPON A TIME… FOR ROBERT, 1966, collage. In Michael Auping, JESS: PASTE-UPS (AND ASSEMBLIES) 1951-1983. (Sarasota: Ringling Museum of Art, 1983) p.77

During the 1980s, I saw a Jess exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and his work made a strong impression on me, but to this day, I still haven’t found a worthy use for its inspiration. At the time I wasn’t aware that Jess had dedicated Once Upon a Time… to his lover, the poet Robert Duncan. The two created a gay bohemian gesamtkunstwerk at various locations around San Francisco. When he was 17, Stan Brakhage stayed in their basement and had the transcendent experience that led to him becoming the great American filmmaker. Wallace Berman sought refuge in their house after the LAPD closed down his Ferus Gallery exhibition for alleged obscenity. Jess and Robert Duncan met in 1949, and they came to reside together at 3267 Twentieth Street in the Mission District until Duncan died in 1988. Jess passed away in 2004.

THE SMITHS, album released February 20, 1984 by Rough Trade Records (Rough 61)

The Smiths’ first album suggests the world of a working class youth with a taste for revenge. There is no role for him to play in the industrial wasteland where he was raised, so he writes his own story. He assumes poses that will be useful when fame and fortune beckon. He tries to avoid being beaten up or ground down. He wants to relive the old school days, this time with a sense of mastery. He relies on the favors of older men and ultimately resents the situation, or perhaps he only fantasizes about it. He rejects the advances of well-meaning female friends. He falls into the abyss of unrequited passion. A sense of menace pervades the scene, but the action remains unconsummated.
—

William E. Jones, born 1962 in Ohio, now lives and works in Los Angeles. His films and videos include MASSILLON, FINISHED, THE FALL OF COMMUNISM AS SEEN IN GAY PORNOGRAPHY and IS IT REALLY SO STRANGE?. His work has been shown at Tate Modern, Cinémathèque française, Musée du Louvre, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sundance Film Festival, Whitney Museum of American Art and Museum of Modern Art, with retrospectives at Anthology Film Archives (2010), Austrian Film Museum and Oberhausen Film Festival (2011). His books include KILLED: REJECTED IMAGES OF THE FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (2010) and HALSTED PLAYS HIMSELF, forthcoming in 2011.

www.williamejones.com
www.davidkordanskygallery.com
www.galleriaraffaellacortese.com

PONCEY HIGHLANDS, INMAN PARK, CABBAGE TOWN, 1977-2010;
LA FEMME AU PERROQUET, EDOUARD MANET, 1866

— Georgia Baptist Hospital is on Boulevard in the Old Fourth Ward of Atlanta. The Ward was home to Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC among many other outposts. I was born at this hospital and brought home by my mother in 1977 to Inman Park, the neighborhood just blocks to the east. The city was my home until age 19. Most of my hours wiled away within a few zip codes all on the east side of town—liberal pockets in, at that time, a Dixiecrat city.

It was my early metropolis, another side of Paris.

From top to bottom:
Ponce De Leon, 1983 photo George Mitchell
The Trolley Barn, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Gale, Holly Allen & Wayne Mull, Tom Tuten, photo Vivian Mull, Elizabeth Street, circa 1978
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
Elizabeth Street, Inman Park, circa 1978, photo Gale Mull
The right of way, 1983 photo George Mitchell
Plaza Drugs, 1983 photo George Mitchell
Outside Plaza Drugs, 1983 photo George Mitchell
A painting by J.J. of L.A., 1983 photo George Mitchell
J.J. of L.A., 1983 photo George Mitchell
From Inman Park to Cabbage Town, December 31, 2010, shot by the artist
Stratosphere House, Cabbage Town, December 31, 2010, shot by the artist
Stratosphere House, Cabbage Town, December 31, 2010, shot by the artist
Green’s Package Store, 1983 photo George Mitchell
Ponce De Leon, 1983 photo George Mitchell
La Femme au Perroquet, Edouard Manet, 1866, Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art
—

Carter Mull is an artist living and working in Los Angeles. His work addresses the intertwined relationships between consumption, time and everyday life via the production and exhibition of matrices of drawing, video, photography and installation.

www.marcfoxx.com
www.taxterandspengemann.com

BILLY RUANE (1957 – 2010)

— Billy first appeared in my peripheral vision sometime in the mid eighties, looking like a junior law partner in the middle of a lost weekend: blazer, good shoes, trench coat if the weather required it, hair perpetually growing out of a respectable cut. I would see him at parties looking glazed, tie hanging loose or stuffed in his pocket, shirt unbuttoned to reveal a hairless chest, flushed from his spastic-balletic Cossack dancing. I got to know him a little when I was dating a motorcycle mechanic who he called on—weekly, it seemed—to patch up the scooter that got him around town. He would wheel his bashed-in Honda up to A—’s driveway after a late-night fender bender and then stay on talking to whoever was around. He could hold forth on a sweeping range of cultural topics… Hank Snow, covers of Hank Snow songs, snowshoeing, the snowy climes of Eastern Europe, until eventually he was extolling the healing properties of his favorite brand of Russian mineral water or critiquing Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin. I got the idea that there was nothing about which he was not enthusiastic, or at least curious. His voice—stentorian, urgent, rushed—told me that his enthusiasm was shot through with mania.

I know now that Billy was a fixture on the Boston rock scene long before I met him, but I wasn’t really traveling in those circles yet, so I began with a different set of associations. My siblings and I were then still operating a rooming house our father had left us when he died, a large Queen Anne Victorian in a quiet West Cambridge neighborhood, which he bought in 1968 and filled up with rent-paying eccentrics. Throughout my childhood, we shared bathroom and kitchen privileges with graduate students, émigrés, intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, psychics and skeptics, melancholics, alcoholics, and psychotics. Many of them were permanently unattached men, often brilliant, who lived apart from the traffic of majority opinion and followed no career path of any normal kind. Our dining room was a salon, most active in the small hours, where they aired their counter-intuitive opinions about diet and medicine, government, culture—high, low, and other. Without thinking about it much, I understood Billy as someone who, though he didn’t, might have lived in our house.

When I saw one of our tenants around town there would be a slight hiccup, a momentary adjustment of the domestic/public alignment. It was something I felt with Billy as well. And I began seeing him everywhere: downstairs at Cheapo Records, or in the next aisle at the Russian grocery store, or coming out of the Hong Kong with bags of reeking food, or—this happened often—I would be at the Brattle Theater watching, let’s say, The Reckless Moment, and I’d hear raucous and inappropriate laughter from the dark balcony, and it would be Billy.

Once, he called up and invited me to a movie. We sat in the balcony. He’d brought along a knapsack bulging with bottles of beer, and he offered me one as we sat down. Soon, empties were clanking around at our feet, and my right ear rang with his inappropriate, shouting laughter. (And people were hissing at us in the dark. Let’s say the movie was In a Lonely Place.) He suggested we go for a bite to eat after, and he asked over cheeseburger specials if I wanted to be his girlfriend. I demurred. It wasn’t awkward exactly, but it broke my heart a little the way he looked at me: fondly but with disappointment, like maybe he had overestimated me. There were no hard feelings, though.

By that time, Billy had begun his legendary run booking music several nights a week at the Middle East restaurant. We all knew, even at the time, that we were living through a fertile period of club music, and that Billy was making a lot of it happen. Under the auspices of Helldorado Productions, Billy’s programming was astonishingly eclectic and sometimes visionary. He lived frugally on an allowance from his wealthy father and quietly subsidized his Middle East shows, padding guarantees for bands who needed gas money, or who had equipment stolen on the road, or who just hadn’t drawn the crowd he felt they deserved. It’s a story often told, and I wouldn’t be the one to tell it anyway. I spent my share of time in the back room at the Middle East, though, where he presided: greeting and kissing and dancing shamanically, screaming encouragements, taking the stage between acts to spin marathon toasts and free-associate from stacks of index cards (and, sometimes, to carry on shouting matches with off-mic staff members).

As for me, I was cocktail waitressing at Green Street Station in Jamaica Plain—a roadhouse on the gloomy fringe of the scene, popular with bikers and local drunks, or at least those who were sufficiently wet-brained or deaf to tolerate the all-ages metal shows. The air was heavy with the sadness of a thousand coke binges. Compared to the Middle East, it seemed like a terrible place to work, but it was all I could get. I wanted to tend bar, but the manager only hired his kickboxing buddies for that. I did a lot of languishing and fuming at Green Street. From my vantage point Billy’s Helldorado Productions cast an Apollonian glow. On my nights off I’d head over to Central Square, where I’d be greeted by Billy (if by no one else) like a visiting dignitary.

My solution, eventually, was to move out of town. We had long since gotten rid of the rooming house, and the tenants had scattered or been reabsorbed into the city. Many old friendships didn’t hold up, but Billy, in his way, was constant. I’d run into him on the street or in a bar, or I’d stop by his apartment and find him amid the teetering stacks of VHS tapes and Chinese take-out containers, and he would press into my hand one of his wonderful mixtapes, annotated in tiny Helldorado font: music for the drive home. India Adams, George Shearing, T.S.O.P., Terry Allen.

Once, I dropped in on Billy’s Monday night show at the Green Street Grill (the one in Central Square, not my old haunt, which had since become an Irish pub, then the world’s most sinister preschool, until finally it was knocked down to make room for condominiums.) Billy spotted me from the stage and worked me into his introduction: “A special surprise guest tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen, all the way from Philadelphia, Miss Mimi Lipson. Give her a hand, people.”

The thing to remember here is that I was one of hundreds, maybe thousands of people who got the royal treatment from Billy Ruane.

Fifteen years went by in snapshots. Sometimes Billy was doing well, sometimes not. There were occasional phone calls, a few inexplicably angry ones, but he was always glad to see me. Once, for no apparent reason, he wired me $300 Western Union. I called him and told him I wouldn’t accept the money. I was a little hurt, actually; it felt like the friendship equivalent of a $50 bill on the dresser. But I came to realize that, as he became less involved in booking music, his epic generosity took on other forms. When I saw him now, he always seemed to be buying rounds for his ever-expanding public. His father bought him a condominium, but he let friends stay there and kept to the teetering stacks and leaky roof of his old apartment. Eventually, I took him up on his repeated offer and stayed at the condo myself.

Billy was sitting at his computer in his apartment in Cambridge the night his heart gave out, probably weakened by decades of guzzling caffeine pills, prescription speed, and mega-doses of B vitamins. Within hours, the Internet was crowded with reactions to his death. A vigil was announced, and a wake, and plans were set in motion for a memorial. I was in another city, seeing the events unfold on my own computer screen. I googled, refreshed, clicked on links, looking for consolation. After a few days, though, I began to sense my own Billy Ruane vanishing in a snow globe of public commentary.
The last time I saw him was New Years Eve at the Plough and Stars. He was wearing a black overcoat and, as always, a plungingly unbuttoned shirt. His hair was brushed back from his bloated face in two white crests. I introduced him to my boyfriend and tried, unsuccessfully, to buy him a drink. Later, my boyfriend said Billy reminded him of an old Tammany Hall ward heeler. Actually, that’s not a bad analogy for the thing that Billy did. Look through the comment threads, the bouquets left on his Facebook ™ Wall ™. You’ll see there a tag cloud of corporeality: Billy Ruane conjured by kiss, laugh, dance, sweat and stubble.

This is what we’ve lost: a physical, door-to-door kind of scene-building that will never rule the day again in this age of so-called social media. I refer not just to his tireless distribution of Middle East fliers in six-point font, his mixtape cassettes and free drinks, but also the stubble, the sweat, the crazy spastic dancing, the hooting laugh, the persistent odor of fried won tons that collectively, urgently signified: Billy Ruane.

All images by Wayne Valdez.
—

Mimi Lipson was born in Ithaca, NY in 1965 and grew up in Cambridge, MA. She currently lives in Kingston, NY. She works at Bard College, writes, and makes rather unusual stained glass. Her chapbook FOOD & BEVERAGE is available from All-Seeing Eye Press.

ONDAK 1972/2010

—

Roman Ondák was born in 1966, in Zilina, Slovakia. He is currently considered one of the most significant representatives of neo-conceptual strategies. He was a DAAD scholarship holder in Berlin (2007 – 2008) and he has presented his projects at individual exhibitions, among others, at Kunstverein Cologne (2004), Tate Modern, London (2006), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2007), Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2008) and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009). His works have been displayed in many group exhibitions and projects including Manifesta (1996 and 2000), Utopia Station at the 50th Venice Biennial (2003), Sao Paulo Biennale (2006), and at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2005) and Centre George Pompidou, Paris (2009), etc.

www.gbagency.fr

This post is in the hope that the dead finally have decent internet access.

FOR WALTER HOPPS, who taught me so much.

JG

Walter said upon seeing this, “It looks like I am trying to hold myself together”.
—

John Gossage was born in New York City, in 1946. He is an artist who makes history present in photographs. He photographs places and sites that tell an everyday story: paths worn through abandoned tracts of land, corners where debris collects, markings on a wall, a table after a meal. Gossage photographs that which has just occurred to remind us that we may have already forgotten it happened or that we were there. By asking us look at what we have misplaced or abandoned he brings us face to face with the present as it becomes history. Throughout the 1980s Berlin became Gossage’s overriding focus. The art from this period is arguable his most important and has unquestionable influenced all his subsequent work.

www.stephendaitergallery.com

— Born in Norway in 1814, and having graduated from the art academies of Copenhagen and Düsseldorf, Adolph Tidemand became one of the central figures of Norwegian National Romanticism. A sub-genre of Romanticism, National Romanticism was instumental in crafting an identity of “Norwegian-ness” as tied to the specific nature of the country, thus setting it apart from Denmark and Sweden. The only painting I ever bought, Woodland Interior is a minor work for sure but to me a reminder not only of the pliable nature of national identity but of the political nature of any aesthetics.

Adolph Tidemand,
WOODLAND INTERIOR, 1869
—

Gardar Eide Einarsson was born in Oslo, Norway, in 1976. He lives and works in New York. Einarsson’s installations often contain text-based works and props that investigate social transgression and political subversion through their juxtaposition.

www.teamgal.com
www.honorfraser.com

MOTHER AND TOKYO

— I was scheduled to go to a dance festival in Japan. Mother seemed on the verge of dying but there had already been some false alarms. Years earlier, on my way to that same festival, I had gotten sick and had canceled at the last minute. I didn’t want to do it again.

Before leaving Los Angeles, standing at Mother’s bedside I told her, “I’m going away for a few days. I’m going to Paris.” I said Paris because I often worked there and she had once lived in Paris and could envision it. In fact when she heard “Paris,” she broke into a smile. Briefly. But mainly that look of blankness, some recognition that I was going away, her voice low, just raspy sound. Eyes imploring to connect.

I arrive Tokyo. Humid, hot, big wind. Many buses with big writing, yellow and white on black and red rising sun. Loudspeakers blaring, almost bring-fingers-into-ears loudness.

At hotel desk:

I ask: “What are they saying?”

Young woman: “Black cars? Election coming.”

Me: “Oh. Vote this one.”

“Yes.”

From my seventh-floor window I see treetops wild moving. Imagine steamy hotness whipping fragrance from the leaves. My room hermetic and gently air-conditioned, I placed phone calls. “Yes, I’m trying to call from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Your system isn’t accepting my account number.” And finally, “Hello Mommy! Hello Mommy! Hello Mommy!”

Then going out to change money, stopping again by front desk.

I say: “I see park from window. Where is park?”

She looks questioning.

Me: “Trees. Many trees. Park.”

“Oh.”

She pulls out map.

“Hotel here. Park here. But typhoon coming.”

In street some rain, big wind but all have open umbrellas. Department store, fourth-floor exchange booth, fifty dollars for five hundred eighty yen. Coming out again I feel the power of the wind; a little afraid, I move fast. Some still have umbrellas open.

Back in hotel, at front desk to get room key.

Young woman: “Not elections. Memorial Day. Those people support emperor. Today is anniversary Nagasaki. The black cars saying ‘Remember.’”

Me: “Oh. Thank you.”

Young woman: “I don’t want you have wrong information.”

“Oh, thank you. I appreciate.”

We linger, full of wanting to tell more, to hear more. She is young, sweet and clear behind desk. Thoughts bouncing around in both our minds as in a few seconds we micro-signal: “…there’s more to say, no, yes, no…” slight bows shared, “Thank you.” Again, “Thank you.” I go to elevator, my eyes leaving hers a little too quickly. Memorial Nagasaki.

Again wild moving trees seen from above. Waves of biomass crashing, running light and shadow. Finally I go down to the park. Working umbrella like kite, now with soaked shoes and pants legs. Through the locked gate I see the park’s dark floor. Take in its stillness. Breathe rich typhoon breath. A crow stands there, quiet. Earlier, a crow-call urgent, loud, and some hollow reedy sounds, first just hearing sound, then realizing it’s a call.

Mother loved languages and she gave me that love. I love to try, from one language to another, a word that is similar in French and Spanish and Italian, but in English different. Like “pioggia,” “lluvia,” “il pleut.” And then, “Rain.” “Speak” is sharp. “Parola,” “parlare,” “parlance” rolls from the tongue. “Tongue” taps at the root of the teeth and finishes back in the root of itself. “Tongue.” “Teeth” is very to the teeth. In Mother’s earlier old age she would slip from language to language to language and I would slip around with her. When she was still walking we sometimes would go to the Japanese Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum and walk down the spiral ramp looking at the prints, or the calligraphy. Ink that strokes the subject, and can, for a moment, change your breathing.

When I got back to Los Angeles and entered her room, Mother dug her face toward the pillow, looking away. Then I read to her in English, brief poems by Japanese women, soft and rhythmic, for her to have the activity of sound-listening, activity being so scarce in her last days. We fall silent, a peaceful moment, the brittle edge gone, we linger. I resume reading, Mother long beyond following meaning but sensing the meaning of being read to. And the grace of the sound.
—

Simone Forti is a dancer, choreographer and writer. Based in Los Angeles, she directs the ensemble, Sleeves, with whom she has just performed CONVERSATION PIECE at Highways Performance Space. She is interested in conversation as an important element of civic life and in the juxtaposition of, or space between, different people’s different ways of doing and seeing.

2003

2010

“Seven years, they say, and my organism exchanges most of its cells; therefore and ahead, forgetting begins; seven years and love unrequited is a blank to be refilled, a wormhole between bliss and loss; seven short years and you go from that darling fetus position to crouching as a child among beasts; seven years later and life still seems so very long, possibilities manifold; seven more years and the congregation, community, tribe, republic, empire, village or island nominate you Adultly Master Of Your Own Failures, sacrificial lamb to the procreation of the species, ripe genitals, seven times seventy-seven as often as you shall remain unforgiven, seven lovers, that´s what it takes for post-breakup oblivion and calmness of being numb, seven, perfection, the number of suspects in all my crimes, the number of all my deadly sins, fourth prime number, factorial prime, lucky prime, safe prime, happy number, all my cycles of seven, vulgar fraction, may the weather and the forthcoming erosion make me a seven-sided shape, like a succession of semicolons is this job of breathing, had I only seven lives and enough mistakes with which to grace you, or only a few sevenly seconds with myselves, so I could finally bow unto you until my body assumed the shape of a 7.”
Ricardo Domeneck
—

Heinz Peter Knes was born in Gemünden am Main, Germany, in 1969. His work has been exhibited in New York, Oslo, Paris, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Berlin and Cologne. He has also been published in various magazines including 032c, Iann, Spex, Dutch, Readymade, Freier, i-D, Art Review, Butt and Purple.

www.heinzpeterknes.de

— I took these photos during various journeys through Europe for the shoot of a documentary. I am working on this project with two companions since two years and we will finish it next year. The documentary is about people who are able to sense nature spirits and live in close contact with them. It´s been an amazing experience so far and we met the most inspiring people.

—

Till Gerhard was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1971. Gerhard paints large-scale canvases of rural communities, but with an unsettling atmosphere. He uses delicate spills of colour and heavy brushwork, as well as drips, splashes and smears. He has exhibited in shows including MAN SON 1969 at Hamburger Kunsthalle; ALTERED STATES OF PAINT at DCA, Dundee and UNHOLY TRUTHS at Initial Access, Wolverhampton. Gerhard has also shown at the PORTUGAL ARTE 10 in Lisbon, Galleri LOYAL in Stockholm and Stellan Holm Gallery in New York.

www.thefairytrail.com
www.stellanholm.com
www.galleriloyal.com

— I have a long-term project that mostly revolves around Polaroid pictures. The bulk were shot in the last six years, though some go back over twenty. The work took on a certain urgency with the announcement in 2008 that the film would no longer be made. Last call… This news triggered no small alarm in many who loved the format, tied in with a perhaps predictable analog homesickness abetted by the fact that many are still trying to come to grips with the escalation/takeover of digital photography. How could two kinds of ‘instant’ picture-making feel so dissimilar, or were we just kidding ourselves that they were? Could they actually be different kinds of proof? I can’t say I really know.

Anyhow, the facets of my project may or may not eventually shelter under a roof I connect with the phrase “permanent ghost.”

Sometimes I make the images big and entirely remove the Polaroid borders, but occasionally it’s nice to be reminded of their fragile, relatively primitive origin.

I’ve provided a somewhat random train of pictures here. They’re mostly tied in with wandering, circumnavigations in cities, mostly my own. Sometimes on a given walk I’ll shoot just two or three. If it’s at night I may well find myself pressed against a lamp-pole holding my breath for a long exposure wherein, incidentally, the viewfinder goes dead black.

Looking at these it occurs to me that I’m often instinctively in search of a city freed from advertising campaigns, which take over whole buildings and buses and even creep onto public sidewalks now, a kind of corporate dogshit someone is desperate to get on our shoes. It’s a city that may not exist anymore, but hey, here it is.

I always think I’ll remember exactly where and when I took each picture but I already don’t. If they mark something, I’m not sure it’s time. I do know these were all taken within the last nine years and I’m reminded that this is the same period in which something over a trillion dollars was spent on two U.S. wars. (Is it more grotesque to toss that in here, or to leave it out? Please have a look at www.costofwar.com and make up your own mind).

When I took the pictures, my head may have been full of light, weather, or some weird shape-sense, but it was ideally full of nothing (a blessed respite) or maybe some song. And if it was a song, it might well have been by my friend Vic Chesnutt, who died late last year. So this final one is of Vic, one of the most permanent ghosts I’ll ever have the luck to know.

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Jem Cohen (born 1962, Kabul Afghanistan) is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker/photographer. His films include CHAIN, BENJAMIN SMOKE (with Pete Sillen), LOST BOOK FOUND, and INSTRUMENT (with Fugazi). His recent portrait of artist Anne Truitt showed with her retrospective at the Hirshhorn Gallery and in the Toronto Film Festival. He is currently making projections for Godspeed You! Black Emperor, working towards a new feature film, and teaching. Cohen was intensively involved in safeguarding the rights of street photographers in New York City. A one-sheet summary of the laws protecting those rights can be downloaded at his website or at pictureny.org Cohen’s photographs were shown in 2009 at Robert Miller Gallery and he had a recent retrospective of his films at Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival in Spain, where a book on his work, Signal Fires, was published. He will have work in the upcoming Sharjah Biennial.

www.jemcohenfilms.com

These drawings come from a sketchbook I was working in sometime in early 1999. the book was given to me as a birthday present from my old friend Nathan Maddox. He was a very influential force in my life. He passed away in 2002.

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Mick Barr is an avant-garde metal guitarist and composer. He has been a member of many bands including Orthrelm, Crom-tech, Krallice, Quix*o*tic, and Oldest, as well as part of a duo with Hella drummer Zach Hill. He has numerous solo recordings released under different monikers such as Ocrilim, Octis and Or:12r3. In 2009 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is currently working on a string quartet that will debut in early 2011.

ocrilim.blogspot.com

— Within the context of curatorial practice’s ongoing fascination with its own history, one very decisive item has so far received very little attention: VOTI (The Union of the Imaginary), a short-lived but nevertheless important network of curators, formed in the late 1990s.

The list of original VOTI members reads like a who’s who of the international curatorial world: Francesco Bonami, Bart de Baere, Bice Curiger, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Hou Hanru, Iwona Blazwick, Dan Cameron, Maria Hlavajova, Charles Esche, Ute Meta Bauer, Udo Kittelmann, Jose Ignacio Roca, Nancy Spector, Okwui Enwezor, Octavio Zaya, Rosa Martinez, Maria Lind, Robert Fleck, Vasif Kortun, myself, and a handful of others.

VOTI was founded in 1999 by the Swiss born curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, the Argentine curator Carlos Basualdo, and Jordan Crandall, former director of the X Art Foundation in New York, which hosted a permanent online forum for VOTI. The main goal was to foster discussion and conversation among curators, to develop a more progressive understanding of curating, and to fight homogenization at all levels of culture. What is interesting is the fact that most of the members worked independently, outside of museums. There was the strong desire to form a platform that would represent the interests of freelance curators while also facilitating exchange and discourse. Almost all of VOTI’s members have been pioneers of the field, given the innovations their exhibitions brought about.

Curating would not be what it is today if it had not been for this particular group of curators, who, in many different ways, strongly influenced the development of curating on a global scale through highly unorthodox exhibitions and other projects. Perhaps it is part of the “current” past and therefore too recent to analyze, but this period of curatorial emancipation will need to be looked at in detail at some point. I would consider it the origin of much of what curating is about today.

Vasif Kortun, director of Platform Garanti in Istanbul, is currently putting together an archive of the activities of VOTI.
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Jens Hoffmann is a writer and exhibition maker and currently the Director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the curator, with Adriano Pedrosa, of the 12th International Istanbul Biennial in 2011 and a curator for the 3rd Biennial of the Canary Islands in 2011 for which he is developing an exhibition on Christopher Columbus. With Harrell Fletcher, Hoffmann developed the People’s Biennial, presented in 2010 and 2011 at five US museums, organized by Independent Curators International in New York. In 2009 he founded The Exhibitionist: A Journal for Exhibition Making.

www.the-exhibitionist-journal.com

Jen–in parts

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Kate Gilmore was born in Washington D.C. in 1975 and lives and works in New York. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include: 2010 Biennial, Whitney Museum of Art, New York (2010); REFLECTIONS ON THE ELECTRIC MIRROR: NEW FEMINIST VIDEO, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (2010); GREATER NEW YORK: 5 YEAR REVIEW, PS1/MoMA, Queens, New York (2010); ONE MINUTE MORE, The Kitchen, New York (2009); Maisterravalbuena, Madrid, Spain (2011); REAL THING, Braverman Gallery, Tel-Aviv, Israel (2008); Parasol Unit, London, England (2011); PERSONA: A BODY IN PARTS, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (2011); and FRAMED, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana (2010). Her work has been included in several national and international exhibitions including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California, Rose Art Museum, Waltham, Massachusetts, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, New York, Haifa Museum of Art, Haifa, Israel, MAK Museum of Art, Vienna, Austria, Istanbul Museum of Art, Istanbul, Turkey, and Greater New York 2005 at PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY.

www.kategilmore.com

— Years before I knew him as the author of Jurassic Park (1990) and many other popular adventure novels, I knew Michael Crichton as the author of a monograph on Jasper Johns. The book, simply titled Jasper Johns, was published in 1977 by Harry N. Abrams Inc., in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art. The book accompanied a major retrospective of Johns’s work at the Whitney that year, organized by David Whitney. The exhibition traveled to Cologne, Paris, Tokyo, London, and San Francisco. As a four-year-old in Wisconsin at that time, I missed the show. But I can say, without question, that Crichton’s monograph was the most important book in the world to me when I was 16 or 17 years old.

I think I was probably introduced to Johns’s work by my high school painting teacher, Mrs. Belling, though I also remember my A.P. English teacher, Ms. Adams, had a poster of Johns’s Three Flags, 1958, on the bulletin board on the back wall of her classroom. I’ve forgotten the order of events, so I’ll thank both of these hip ladies for the introduction; it apparently led me to seek out Crichton’s book, which I found and checked out from the Janesville Public Library. I’m not sure how much of Crichton’s text I actually read at the time. In retrospect, the essay is pretty unusual—often fragmentary and given to meandering. It’s frequently speculative, searching. He relies heavily on the writing of critics such as Leo Steinberg and David Sylvester (and rightly so), but goes beyond the more-familiar terrain of modern art to consider Johns’s relationship to everything from cave painting to Hitchcock’s Psycho. It’s a pretty wild ride.

I didn’t grow up visiting the museum: As far as I knew, art was something that happened in sketchbooks and scraps of paper, by virtue of my own hand. Looking back, I now realize the bustling margins of Crichton’s book provided my first exposure to Marcel Duchamp, who appears frequently throughout its pages, along with Merce Cunningham and a bearded John Cage. There’s also Manet’s Bar at Folies Bergères, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and an exquisite corpse by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, Max Morise, and Man Ray—probably my first encounter with that favorite Surrealist game. I also remember being struck by a small black-and-white image of the interior of Johns’s house in Stony Point, New York, with glass-paneled, roll-up garage doors serving as walls. Windows as walls! Who knew?

Above all else, I suspect I was more taken with the book’s numerous color plates (ale cans, targets, and flags—oh my) including a handful of splashy foldout spreads: Crichton’s book was like a thick Playboy for a teenage art nerd, with Johns’s multi-canvas assemblies of the 70s standing in for naked beauties, with hatchmarks and flagstone patterning replacing goosebumps and tanlines. I don’t remember when I realized that the guy behind Jurassic Park, Rising Sun, and The Andromeda Strain was the same person behind Jasper Johns—the monograph slipped from my attention for many years. But when Crichton died in 2008, I immediately thought of the book, still likely sitting on the shelves of what is now known as the Hedburg Public Library, not dinosaurs. I also finally bought a copy of the Johns monograph for my own shelves—not the revised and expanded 1994 edition, but the 1977 version I remembered, more or less clearly. Of course it’s impossible to know for sure, but I wonder if I would have become an art critic, writing catalogue essays of my own, had I not found this book.

Images: JASPER JOHNS checked out from the Hedburg Public Library, Janesville, Wisconsin, October 2010. Beer cans from the Frederick M. Holte collection.
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Michael Ned Holte is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles. A regular contributor to Artforum International, his writing has also appeared in print periodicals such as Afterall, Domus, Frieze, Interview, Pin-Up, and X-Tra, as well as the online journal East of Borneo. He has provided texts for numerous books including RICHARD HAWKINS—THIRD MIND (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale), STEVE RODEN: WHEN WORDS BECOME FORMS (Pomona College Museum of Art), and ROY MCMAKIN: WHEN IS A CHAIR NOT A CHAIR (Skira/Rizzoli). He has organized exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Torino, Italy. He was born in Janesville, Wisconsin.

TOURISTS’ TAXI RIDE TAKES WILD TURN

— It was a wild scene Wednesday night when two Italian tourists got into a dispute with a Beverly Hills cab driver over their fare. It all ended with a crunching crash into the front door of a Hollywood Hills home.

At about 8:30 p.m., police were dispatched to 71 Woodrow Wilson Drive where they found a cab smashed into the front door of a home in the hills above Hollywood, just west of the Cahuenga Pass. As the dust and debris settled, investigators took statements from all involved. The Italian honeymooners claimed the cab driver got lost in the hills and drove in circles. When they finally arrived at their destination, an argument started over what was fair payment for the fare. The Italians paid 10 bucks less than the cabbie thought he was owed, and jumped out of the taxi. This is when things really take a turn. The driver left but moments later–to the surprise of his passengers and the Hollywood Hills homeowner opening his front door to greet his European friends–circled back with his cab. It smashed through the front of the home. It’s unclear whether the cabbie crashed the car on purpose or if it was an accident. One person suffered arm injuries. The taxi driver was identified as Robert Kazaryan. He was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, a North Hollywood Station watch commander told City News Service. Kazaryan, 45, was locked up in Van Nuys and his bail was set at $30,000, according to inmate records.

First Published: Aug 4, 2010
By Jack Noyes, NBC Los Angeles

Image of Piero Golia’s Hollywood Hills home, after the taxi crashed into his front door.
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Piero Golia was born in Naples, Italy in 1974. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been shown in major galleries and museums in Europe and United States and featured in numerous exhibitions including P.S.1 in New York, Moderna Museet in Sweden and the 2010 California Biennial. In 2004 his feature film KILLER SHRIMPS was selected for the Venice Film Festival. In 2005, he founded with his long time friend Eric Wesley, the MOUNTAIN SCHOOL OF ARTS, an educational institution that rapidly became a new spot on the cultural map of the city of Los Angeles.

www.bortolamigallery.com
www.galleriafonti.it
www.themountainschoolofarts.org