THIS LONG CENTURY

LORCA, PLEASE HELP ME!

— I was seventeen years old, and had just begun my freshman year at Columbia College in New York. About two weeks after I arrived, on September 14, 1954, Tuesday in the early evening, I was in my room sitting on the green leather armchair doing homework, reading for the Humanities Core Curriculum class tomorrow.

I was looking out the wide window from the 8th floor of Livingston Hall at the view over the Quadrangle, and the classic Georgian buildings designed in 1893 by architect Sanford White, who created a master plan in the grand style of great palaces and beautiful arrays of trees and English landscaping, and the broad green South Field. It was warm and balmy, hazy, a sylvan glade, and a vivid rose-grey sunset, heavenly, smack in the middle of New York City. It also seemed like a joke, a young man in an ideal situation reading Plato and the classics. On the surface it was idyllic, but beneath I was filled with anxiety, confusion and doubt. I was reading, had a hangover, and a depression problem.

There was a loud knock on the door, and John Kaiser, a new friend, who was also majoring in Literature, came in and visited. “I just learned the most amazing bit of information,” said John, “a monumental fact. Federico Garcia-Lorca lived here!”

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Garcia-Lorca lived in John Jay Hall.”

“What?” I was completely taken by surprise. I hadn’t thought about Garcia-Lorca in a long time. “When?”

“In 1929 and 1930,” said John. ““and wrote Poet In New York, his greatest work, here!”

“This is 1954. Twenty-five years ago,” I said. When you are seventeen, twenty-five years ago seems like ancient history. I remembered Lorca had traveled to Cuba, and came to New York; and he was gay and I was gay. “Lorca did not live in a dormitory room in John Jay Hall! I don’t believe it!”

“It’s true! Garcia-Lorca lived here.”

“For one night by mistake, because he couldn’t get a hotel.”

“For two years!” said John.

“In what room?”

”On the 12th floor of John Jay, room 1231.”

“Garcia Lorca did not live in a dormitory,” I said. “It’s not possible. I don’t know where he lived, he lived in a god world!” It was very confusing. I did not want Lorca living in my dumb, middle-class, bourgeois, fucked up world. He would hate it. It would be horrible for him, and cause him suffering. Anything, but this! “What room?”

“Room 1231” John and I rushed to the window, and leaned out with our elbows on the broad granite ledge, and looked to the left at John Jay Hall.

“Oh, no! I know those rooms.,” I said. “I know someone in room 1225. They‘re all tiny, single rooms, like prison cells.” We gazed in astonishment at the red brick building speckled with lighted window.

I counted up to the 12th floor, and across the windows. “It is that one! The one there with no light! Ah!”

“That’s it!” said John.

“This is so weird! Garcia-Lorca!” The 12th floor of John Jay Hall was almost on the same level as the 8th floor of our building. It was built in the 1920’s with low ceilings, and ours in the 1890s with tall ceilings. “Garcia-Lorca saw what we see,” I said.

John Kaiser seemed deeply moved; was having a small, but profound experience. ”I had a funny feeling, a strange feeling, when I learned Lorca lived here.”

“What did he do when he lived here?” I said. “Read books, sleep, have friends, have sex. Dormitory life is so ugly and boring.” Lorca slept alone in a single bed every night like me. Garcia Lorca chose to live in this stifling, straight, academic world from which I only wanted to escape. “His greatest poems could not have been written here.”

“But he did and they were!” said John. It was very exciting.

“Lorca brought guys to that room, and had sex!” I said.

John Kaiser, who was straight, chuckled happily. “Yes!”

“Lorca picked up guys and fucked in that room. I’m gay, and that’s what I do here. It is pretty astounding!” I said in awe.

“It’s extraordinary,” said John. “It changes the way I feel about being here, and going to school here,”

“Room 1231 is a sacred place, like Bethlehem or Bodhgaya,” I said “We should do a pilgrimage. Knock on the door, and sniff with our eyes and hearts.”

“Yes, let’s do it!” said John.

“I would even go so far,” I said, “as making it with the guy whose room it is, just to make it where Lorca made it, The bed must be in the same place,”

“Yes, you should do it,” laughed John.

I thought, but did not say, “To fuck with a guy and come in the exact same space where Lorca fucked with a guy and came, is some kind of blessing, no matter how distant and faint, two minds mixed in one taste beyond death.” And I said, “The desk and chair must be in the same place, although they’ve probably been replaced, updated. Lorca sat in the exact same spot, and wrote his greatest poems. ” To sit where he wrote, seemed a blessing beyond incomprehension. In a place which for me was a stifling, dead prison, my hell world. I also saw it, reluctantly, as a teaching, poems of great wisdom can be written anywhere; and if I was to do it, I had to do it here.

Somehow came an unknown, distant memory of Lorca’s betrayal. “He shouldn’t be here. Get Lorca out of here! He will become defiled, and suffer; he is a god of poetry.”

Night came suddenly, John left, and I sat on the green leather chair in the dark near the window, not looking at Lorca’s room, nor the lamp lit sparkling campus, just letting my mind rest with my eyes open. I started crying, weeping big fat tears, a flood of water with muscles convulsions and wind gusts of despair. I was here, and did not want to be here. I was a poet, and why? What was I supposed to do? I was at the beginning of my life, and if I had to endure a lifetime of this, oh no! A fate worse than death! In the flood of tears, from an unlocatable place in my mind, and it surprised me, came a primal scream, “Lorca, please help me! Lorca, please help me!.”

Even though it was early, I went to bed, and sleep to forget about everything completely, dissolving it into nothing in a deep heavy sleep of exhaustion and oblivion; and the next morning everything was OK.

—

About four months later, when I was eighteen years old, in January 1955, about five in the afternoon, I had come up from having a beer in the Boar’s Head Tavern in the basement of John Jay Hall. I ran into John Kaiser and some friends in the lobby near the elevators, and we stood there talking.

“Have you gone up to Lorca’s room,” said John, softly.

“What?” It was noisy, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Have you gone up to Garcia Lorca’s room?” said John, loud and clearly.

“No!” I was taken by surprise again, had forgotten about Lorca again. “Have you?”

John pushed the elevator button. “Let’s go!”

I was a bit shocked that he had done such an aggressive thing, and I reluctantly got in. I was not prepared for Garcia Lorca, and did not want to be. I became the straight guy being forced to do some sexual thing with a fag. My second thought was, “John, what a great idea! Thanks!”

We got out on the 12th floor, turned left, and John lead the way to room 1231. We stood there in the dim light of the tan-colored, grungy corridor, and looked at the dark-stained pine door, and the metal tag 1231. This was the door into Lorca’s room.

Eyes open, no thoughts, fearlessly, I reached out, and knocked gently on the door three times. In the ringing silence, there was no answer. I could feel John’s expectation, next to me. I knocked more strongly three more times. “Oh, no! Nobody’s here.” I knocked loudly a third time.

“He’s not home,” said John.

“Or he is and the guy isn’t.” We laughed. “It’s great, it’s so dumb.” We stood in front of Garcia Lorca’s door from the 1920’s, the dark brown, almost black, and doorframe painted many coats of brown. Surprisingly shabby! “Happily, they haven’t updated.” I touched the brass handle, and the wood where he would have touched. It was a loving moment, like giving Lorca a little kiss, totally wonderful, and it didn’t matter if nothing else happened. And maybe that’s all a blessing was anyway.

“How extraordinary!” said John. “Garcia Lorca wrote his greatest poems a few feet away!”

“And he was thinking the words in this space, going in and out, before he wrote them down.”

Suddenly, it seemed a million miles away, and instead of feeling good, a wave of great depression, a black cloud like a baseball bat walloping my head, hit my mind. This was life, and if Lorca couldn’t change it, I can’t change it, which led to a downward spiral, whirl-pooling maelstrom of hopelessness, as if the floor had been pulled out from under me. It included a deep, heartfelt love of Lorca, which somehow included joy. What remained was a pool of cold heavy water. I worried it was a bad sign, an omen. I did not let on, acted happy, cheerful and funny. “It’s worse than I thought!” Which helped suppress the tears and overwhelming sadness.

“Poeta en Neuva York,” said John in a deep unrecognizable voice.

The scene was both corny and profound, the cliché metaphor of a door, the unknown, unseeable, god, emptiness, bullshit; and a black door in a Lorca play behind which sadness screamed in silence.

“Let’s go!” said John.

We left, and I walked away on wobbly legs down the dim corridor, with a headache, and an echo in my mind. “Lorca, please help me! Lorca, please help me!”

John Giorno,
2010
—

John Giorno was born in 1936, in New York. Giorno created DIAL-A-POEM using a telephone service to communicate poetry in a modern idiom. More than one million people used the service, which inspired a range of artistic and commercial applications such as DIAL-A-JOKE, DIAL SPORTS, and DIAL-A-HOROSCOPE. Between 1984-1989, The John Giorno Band performed in New York at the Bottom Line, Ritz, Beacon, Palladium, and CBGBs, and toured extensively across the US. John Giorno also performed and toured together with William Burroughs for more than thirty years, including The Nova Convention 1974, and The Red Night Tour 1981.

www.nicoleklagsbrun.com

These are some pictures I took over the past few years with my mobiles, just as they were lying on the table. I do not remember exactly where and when, and I do not know why I took these pictures, but I like them.

—

Alicja Kwade was born in 1979 in Kattowice, Poland. She lives and works in Berlin. In 2008 she won the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, which was conjoined with a large solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art, in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster (2010); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2010); Peep-Hole, Milan (2010); Johann König, Berlin (2009); Galerie Christina Wilson, Copenhagen (2009); Galerie Lena Brüning, Berlin (2007).

www.alicjakwade.com

THE OWL IN DAYLIGHT

— During one of the last interviews that Philip K. Dick granted a few months before his death, he recounted in detail the novel that he was planning to write. The title of this novel, which in the end he never wrote, was The Owl in Daylight. He had already been paid for this book and thus had to work overtime; he recalled during the same interview that he had written 16 novels in five years – The Owl in Daylight would have been the seventeenth. K. Dick died of a haemorrhage leaving his collected words from the interview and numerous research notes. The idea for the novel was inspired partly by an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica where Beethoven is referred to as the most creative genius of all time, partly by traditional views of what constitutes the human heaven (visions of lights) and partly by the Faust story. But the entire plot really turned around one scientific piece of information that K. Dick found about nanotechnology that constituted a breakthrough in information theory, something that had never happened before: the possibility to store on a chip one meter squared all the information contained in all the computers of the world, and more importantly all the fantastic possibilities for a fiction to be written.

The Owl in Daylight is about a planet where the atmosphere is not like ours. It is about mute and deaf aliens developing a culture based not on sound but on light. Without sound, they have to use colour for language. Just as humans have audio frequencies, their world strictly employs vision and visual things. Our mystical vision of heaven is the light. Light is always associated with the other world. And the alien world is made of that, their world is made of heaven. So instead of the mystical vision of this civilisation being about vision of light, it is about the supernatural experience of sounds. K. Dick says, “What if their world is our heaven and our world their heaven.”

When this other species finds the human civilisation, which uses sound and has developed music, they cannot hear it because they are deaf so they build transduction equipment to transform phosphines or non-retinal images into sound, and sound into non-retinal images.

They are able to produce some kind of visual score. As we have known for a long time, sound does not occur in the atmosphere, it occurs within the body. So the aliens have to somehow create a symbiotic relationship with the human brain so they can use it to conceptualise the music. They can see the music. The assumption was that any civilisation that can build a rocket ship to come to Earth must have a knowledge of biochemestry and semiconductors on which biochips operate.

When the journalist Gwen Lee stops K. Dick in his flux of words to ask him if this constitutes a real scientific fact, he responds in a panicked instant, “I am assuming this is not a joke article, I just hope to God this guy’s not over there laughing about me writing a book on a non-existent thing. In fact I saw the friend of mine who gave me the article in a store and I said to him, ‘I hope it‘s not a joke you gave me, I hope there wasn’t a thing at the beginning you didn’t Xerox which said that this is something unbelievable, that might happen you know in a million years’, but my friend said that no that this article was genuine, ‘I guarantee it’, he said”.

Why did Philip K. Dick, one of the greatest world-makers of the last century, one of the greatest inventors and imaginers, need to justify his delirious worlds with reported concrete facts? Why did he even need to start from the real? Besides, is this really whats going there? Is it that the real is called upon to legitimize the imaginary?

Or is it that this overwelming heritage of cinema which is again prevading our thoughts. This definition of the cinema as an art form that reflects a gaze. Cinema as a recording tool of a world pre-existing us. A producer of History.

André Bazin, a French film critic in the 50s, argued that cinema depicted what it saw as “objective reality”, as in documentaries and films of the Italian neorealist school, but also in the work of directors who knew how to make themselves “invisible”. He advocated using the deep focus of Orson Welles, the wide shots of Renoir and the “shot-in-depth”. He preferred what he referred to as “true continuity” through the mise-en-scène to experiments in editing and visual effects. He was the adversary of a film theory that chooses to emphasize how the cinema can manipulate reality. Bazin believed that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator. Here was the idea that theatre was this unique architectural invention of a place built to see something that already happened. It was seen from the point of view of somebody else and was reported in order for you to judge it with your own eyes.
—

Philippe Parreno was born in 1964, in Oran, Algeria. He rose to prominence in the 1990s earning critical acclaim for his work that employs a diversity of media including film, sculpture, performance and text. His major shows include Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Center for Contemporary Art, CCA Kitakyushu, Japan, Kunstverein Munchen, Kunsthaus Zurich, Kunsthalle Zurich. His work is represented in the collections of MOMA New York, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Guggenheim Museum New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century, Japan. Most recently, Parreno has presented a series of related but distinct retrospectives at Kunsthalle Zürich; Centre Pompidou, Paris (both 2009); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2009–10); the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York (2009–10); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2010-2011). Parreno lives and works in Paris.

www.petzel.com
www.pilarcorrias.com
www.airdeparis.com

“By their very a priori assumption or idea, if you prefer, works of art become part of the context of culpability. When they succeed they transfer blame, only to find themselves having to atone for trying to escape.”

T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

1970

1997

1988

1986

All images from TIMM RAUTERT, KOORDINATEN, 2000
—

Timm Rautert is a photographer born in 1941 in Tuchel, Western Prussia. After studying at the Essener Folkwang school under Otto Steinert, Rautert worked for ZEIT and GEO magazine in the 70s. From 1993 to 2007 he held a professorship at the School of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany. In 2008 Rautert was the first photographer to be awarded the prestigious german Lovis Corinth award for his life’s work.

www.galeriekleindienst.de
www.parrotta.de

This is a still of a film about boyhood. I shot it a few days ago. The boy walking is my son Eleazar and those are some of our dogs. The place is a beautiful football pitch. It is very near our house. We like to walk there at dusk when dragon flies are abundant in the rainy season. I appreciate the lack of light at this hour, which will be lesser in the film, because sound becomes evidently present.

C.R.
August 15th, 2010

—

Carlos Reygadas was born 1971, in Mexico City. He Became a Lawyer in Mexico and specialized in Armed Conflict Law in London. He worked for the European Commission and was a member of the Mexican Foreign Service. Between 1998 and 1999 Reygadas made four shorts in Belgium, learning film in a self taught manner after being rejected from film school in Brussels. In 2000 he shot his first feature film, JAPÓN (JAPAN). The film was presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival and received a special mention for the Caméra d’Or Award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, as well several other prizes. He presented BATALLA EN EL CIELO (BATTLE IN HEAVEN) in 2005, which was selected for Competition in Cannes and won the FIPRESCI Prize at Río de Janeiro International Film Festival among others. In 2007 his film STELLET LICHT (SILENT LIGHT) competed once more for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival winning the Jury Award. He also won the Grand Prize at Riga International Film Forum ‘Arsenals’, the Golden Colón at Huelva Latin American Film Festival, the Grand Coral – First Prize and Best Director at Havana Film Festival, the Gold Hugo at Chicago International Film Festival, the Jury Award at Bergen International Film Festival, among others.

This is a xerox copy of a photo taken of me by “Coach Jeff” who ran a summer kids program at Topanga Elementary in Topanga Canyon, California in the 70’s. I dared him to take the photo. He made a hand-painted pink frame (I was wearing dirty pink leotard + tights) and painted the words “fuck you” in white. He gave this to my parents as a gift. I’ve had this photo on my wall at various points throughout my life—this xerox here is the only remaining copy. I’d like to thank Coach Jeff for encouraging a healthy dose of fuck-you-ness at an early age.

SMELLS LIKE A DARKROOM
These are the first photographs I ever made. I used a copy stand to shoot photos of Mick Jagger that I had found in magazines. Then I processed the black and white film and printed them in the dark room. I think I was in 7th grade, so I must have been about 12 years old, and going to public school in Denver, Colorado. I remember so well the swishing of the film back and forth in the cannister, the washing and hanging to dry of the negatives, the smells of the developer and fixer, using the tongs to fish them out and the red light in the room. I was instantly hooked on that moment where the image starts to appear in the developer. I was also hooked on the power.

Notations for the Mick Photos.

SMELLS LIKE A FRIDGE
A snapshot of my fridge today. I had the idea to make my first cameraless film in 2003 from three cans of old 16mm color negative that were in and out of my fridge for over 10 years, living in different cities and getting aged by the process.

SMELLS LIKE FIRE
Topanga Beach was a private beach back in the day—like Malibu Colony—with homes built in the 1920’s. It became a bohemian community full of hippies and surfers in the 60’s and 70’s, and became known as “Lower Topanga” because it mirrored what was happening culturally up in Topanga Canyon. Like the other “private beaches” around, you couldn’t really go there unless you knew someone. There are and were many other communities along the West Coast with homes built right on the beach even though no one is actually allowed to own the beach—its all public space. You just need a way through the gates and fences to the beach and anyone can be there.

In the late 70’s, LA County decided that it should do away with the community and set out to bulldoze all of their homes using the law of Imminent Domain to make way for Topanga State Park Beach—its a seriously crowded surf spot now. But at least it’s “for the people.”

As I kid I believed the rumor that the owners of the beach houses burnt them down as an act of defiance to the county before they could be bulldozed. Since I grew up in Topanga I was fascinated by that story—and for years had been telling everyone that the Topangans “burned down all their houses”.

I was researching the story for one of my films and found a trove of archival photos, snap shots, magazine pictures and movie stills that showed the bulldozing of the houses on the beach. But then, there it was, near the end of my search—I discovered a small bit of proof that the myth was at least partially true—a photo credited to J. Murf of a burning house captioned: “Locals set fire to the last house on the beach.” Several of the photos with the homes still standing were used as material for a film this year.

Photo c/o Carole Winter.

The Malibu Times. Photo by Gary Graham.

Locals set fire to the last house on the beach. Photo by J. Murf.

Photo by J. Murf.

Photo by J. Murf.

Grant Rohloff and friends in front of Dr. Schweiger’s circa 1966. Photo by John Clemens.

Photo c/o Claudia Taylor.

Inez on Katano, Feb 73. Photo by Woody Stuart.

Photo by John Clemens.

Photo by John Clemens.

Photo by Marlies Armand.

Miki Dora at Topanga Beach. Photo c/o Bob Feigel.
—

Jennifer West was born in Topanga Canyon, California. Recent exhibitions include Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2010); PAINTBALLS AND PICKLE JUICE, Kunstverein Nuremberg, Germany (2010); POMEGRANATE JUICE & PEPPER SPRAY, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2009); LEMON JUICE AND LITHIUM, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2008); ELECTRIC KOOL-AID AND THE MEZKAL WORM, Vilma Gold, London (2008); OCCAMY, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2007); The White Room, White Columns, New York (2007). Group shows include IN FULL BLOOM, Galleria Cortese, Milan, Italy (2010); KURT, Seattle Art Museum, Curated by Michael Darling (2010); CELLULOID. CAMERALESS FILM, Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, Germany, curated by Esther Schlicht (2010); SKATE THE SKY, part of LONG WEEKEND, Tate Modern, London curated by Stuart Comer (2009); NOW YOU SEE IT, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, curated by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson (2008); DRAWING ON FILM, Drawing Center, NY (2008) curated by Joao Ribas; HERE’S WHY PATTERNS Misako and Rosen (2008); IF EVERYBODY HAD AN OCEAN: BRIAN WILSON, AN ART EXHIBITION (touring) Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, England; ; CAPC Musee d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2007-08) curated by Alex Farquharson; COME FORTH! EAT, DRINK, AND LOOK…, Gavin Brown at Passerby, New York (2008); WORDS FAIL ME, MOCAD, Contemporary Art Museum, Detroit, Michigan, curated by Matthew Higgs (2007).

www.marcfoxx.com
www.vilmagold.com

RADIO LOVE

— I got my life from the radio. When I was a kid growing up in the 1940s and early ’50s in the little farming community of Davison, Michigan, radio was still the primary entertainment medium in America and I listened to all sorts of programs from the Green Hornet, the Fat Man, the Shadow, and the Lone Ranger to Amos & Andy, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee & Molly, and Our Miss Brooks.

The beautiful thing about the radio was that you had to make up the pictures in your mind while you listened to the programs. But between 1948 and 1952 popular radio programming was switched over to television and this new medium quickly replaced radio as the place where people went for their entertainment. Many of the popular radio shows were translated into the one-dimensional imagery of the square box that would become the centerpoint of American life.

The one positive result of the advent of commercial television was that radio programming became predominantly music-oriented. Record shows almost completely replaced the wide range of entertainment programming as well as the “live” music of the studio orchestras of the 1930s & ’40s, and the disc jockey began to reign supreme over the radio airwaves.

The greatest thing happened in 1948 when WDIA radio in Memphis switched to a musical format aimed at the city’s black population, utilizing African American deejays like Nat Williams, Rufus Thomas and the young B.B. King to play popular blues and R&B releases and sell black-oriented products over the air. This sparked a movement to serve black audiences in all the major cities of America and a wave of black deejays who enjoyed the freedom of selecting the songs they played on their shows.

When I was a kid of of 12 and 13 I listened religiously to the local broadcasts of the inimitable Frantic Ernie Durham on WBBC radio. The colorful deejay who rhymed everything he said and played the greatest records in the world also owned a pair of low-rent record shops in the North End of Flint: Ernie’s Record Rack #1 at 943 Leith Street near Industrial, and Ernie’s Record Rack #2 on St. John Street, corner of Easy.

My dad worked at Buick Motors in the North End, and every Friday morning when he left for work I’d hand him a list of the 10 new records I most wanted to possess. He’d go to Ernie’s #1 on his lunch hour and apply my weekly allowance of $2.00 to the purchase of a pair of sides off my list, like “I Asked For Water” by Howlin’ Wolf on Chess, or “Nip Sip” by the Clovers on Atlantic, or “Mary Lou” by Young Jessie on Modern Records.

The Frantic One and the records he played on the air literally reshaped my life and lent it the foundation the rest of my years would be built on. His opening invocation would go something like this:

The Frantic One on the scene
with his crazy playing record machine
We start at nine and don’t put the twister to the slammer
Until the clock chimes 12 times
Oooh-weee!
Great googa mooga, shugga wooga!
Nothin’ but the best and later for the rest!
We got that jumpin’ jive that’s truly alive
& the musical sounds to caress your ears,
my dears

Then the parade of records would begin, as detailed in the playlist below:
______________________________________________________________

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
VINTAGE RADIO VAULTS 01
Great Googa Mooga with Ernie Durham—The Frantic One
WBBC-AM, Flint, Michigan, November 1958 [VV-0001]

[01] Opening: Theme Music with Voice-over Intro
[02] Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops
[03] The Quintones: Down the Aisle of Love
[04] Ernie’s Record Racks commercial
[05] The Miracles: Money
[06] Kenny Martin: I’m Sorry
[07] Al Smith: Wabash Blues
[08] Little Anthony & the Imperials: Tears on My Pillow
[09] The Spaniels: Here’s Why I Love You
[10] Dale Hawkins: Cross Ties
[11] Theme Music with Outro to first segment
[12] Theme Music & voice-over Intro to second segment
[13] Jimmy Reed: Down in Virginia
[14] Chuck Berry: Vacation Time
[15] Ernie D. Movers & Groovers Club Card Promotion
[16] Bill Doggett: [Unidentified]
[17] Jackie Wilson: I’m Wondering
[18] Texas Red & The Contours: Turn Around
[19] Peggy Lee: Fever
[20] Thurston Harris: Over and Over
[21] Ernie D. Movers & Groovers Club Card Promotion
[22] Ivory Joe Hunter: Yes, I Want You
[23] Theme Music with Outro to second segment
[24] Theme Music & voice-over Intro to third segment
[25] Joe Williams & Count Basie: Hallelujah, I Love Her So
[26] Ernie D. Flint IMA Pre-Thanksgiving Dance/Concert Promo
[27] Bill Doggett: Hold It
[28] Cozy Cole: Topsy (Part 2)
[29] Ernie D. Steve’s Auto Repair Commercial
[30] Dakota Staton: Confessin’ the Blues
[31] Sam Cooke: Win Your Love for Me
[32] Ernie D. Nature Boy Wine Commercial
[33] Ivory Joe Hunter: Yes, I Want You
[34] Eugene Church: Pretty Girls Everywhere
[35] Theme Music with Outro to third & final segment

A JOINT PRODUCTION
Produced by Ernie Durham for WBBC Radio, Flint MI, November 1958
Post-production, editing & annotation by John Sinclair,
Detroit, December 6, 2005
Special Thanks to Jim Shaw & Bruce Cohen
______________________________________________________________

On school nights, as memory serves, the Frantic One beamed out on WBBC from 6:00 to 9:00 pm, making way for Noble Gravelin’s country music show. But on Saturday afternoons he broadcast from noon to 6:00 pm, and while my little buddies and pals would be out playing some kind of rudimentary sports, I would be in my room glued to the radio set (this was before portable transistor radios) so I wouldn’t miss a minute of what Ernie D. was putting down.

On weeknights, when the Frantic One ended his show it was time to turn the dial to the other end, from 600 to 1420 AM, where you could find WLAC blasting out from Nashville, Tennessee with 50,000 watts of clear channel power and sending forth the finest in R&B throughout the Midwest and the East Coast from 9:00 pm till 2:00 am, with a series of nightly programs hosted by Jumpin’ John R [Richbourg], Gene Nobles (and later Bill “Hoss Man” Allen), and Herman Grizzard.

Each show was sponsored by a local record shop that specialized in sending 78s and then 45s by mail order throughout the South to satisfy the recor dneeds of their mostly rural listening audience without access to local record emporia.

Ernie’s Record Mart (“179 Third Avenue, in Nashville, Tennessee”), Randy’s Record Shop (“in Gallatin—and only Gallatin, Tennessee”), and Buckley’s Record Mart could provide you with any and all of the records played by the deejays, and there were regular groupings of hot records offered as, for example, the “Blue Star Blues Special—six records, 12 big sides, for the low, low price of $2.69 plus packing, mailing, and C.O.D. Send no money, just your name and address, to Blue Star, or to me, John R, at WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee.”

I obtained my first rhythm & blues recordings by following the excellent advice of Gene Nobles and sending away to Randy’s Record Shop for one of the specials when I was 12 or 13 years old, and I can still savor the beautiful memory of tearing open the mailing package and lifting out the six big, fat, juicy, 10-inch, 78 rpm records by Ray Charles, the Moonglows, the Drifters and their ilk.

I got my first 45 player for my 14th birthday in October 1955, just in time for rhythm & blues to explode into rock & roll, but my first 45 single was a hard-core blues item by Big Walter Horton on States 154, “Hard Hearted Woman.” I got the initial rock & roll recordings by Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley as soon as they were released, and I stayed with this music all the way through high school.

I was 16 when I started playing records for people in public, spinning 45s in the high school gymnasium on Friday nights after the football and basketball games had been played. My theme song alternated between “Handclappin’” by Red Prysock on Mercury, “Walkin’ with Mr. Lee” by Lee Allen on Ember, and “The Big Wheel” by Clifton Chenier on Argo Records, but every dance ended with the Spaniels singing “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite” from their VeeJay Records release..

Soon I started hawking my services to my friends at other high schools in the Flint area and got some gigs spinning at other venues than Davison High. When I went away to college in the fall of 1959 I lucked into a spot on the campus dorm station and got my first exposure to the other side of the microphone, playing R&B sides from 7:00 to 8:00 in the morning and kicking off every show with Chuck Berry singing “Up in the morning and off to school.”

This seminal experience with radio stirred new passions that have never cooled in the 50 years since. In the late ‘60s I did a slew of guest spots with my friend Jerry Lucin at WABX-FM in Detroit and then got my first real show at WNRZ-FM in Ann Arbor in 1972, a six-hour stint on Sunday nights from 7:00 pm to 1:00 am called “TOKE TIME: The Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festiival of the Air” and featuring “those tasty tads of rhythm & blues, soul and jazz.”

When WNRZ abruptly switched to a country music format I moved to the University of Michigan’s student station, WCBN-FM, where I produced a series of programs between 1973-1981 called variously “Ancestor Worship,” “RE:VISIONS—Another Look at Modern Music,” and “The Sound of Detroit.” I was off the air for a few years after I moved back to Detroit and then found a place on public Radio, WDET-FM, producing and hosting “Blue Sensations” every Saturday night at midnight, at the time (1989-91) the city’s only genuine rhythm & blues radio broadcast.
______________________________________________________________

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
VINTAGE RADIO VAULTS 19
Blue Sensations 67 with John Sinclair: Red Prysock at the Mardi Gras
WDET-FM, Detroit, February 1991 [VV-0019]

This special edition of the Blue Sensations program with John Sinclair was produced as the sequel to a show broadcast as part of the Spring 1990 Fund Drive at WDET-FM in Detroit with Martin Gross riding shotgun which advanced the theme RED PRYSOCK INVADES NEW ORLEANS, pitting the great rock & roll tenor saxophonist against an all-star Crescent City line-up in a simulated free-for-all boxing match at the Superdome in New Orleans that results in an inevitable victory for the John Coltrane of Rock & Roll—Red Prysock! In this episode Red Prysock goes to the Mardi Gras and encounters the Mardi Gras Indians, the Dixie Cups, Irma Thomas, Barbara George, Professor Longhair, Champion Jack Dupree, Roy Brown, and Smiley Lewis.

[01] Yusef Lateef: Happyology with John Sinclair WDET ID & Intro
[04] Professor Longhair: Go to the Mardi Gras
[05] Red Prysock: Blow Your Horn
[06] John Sinclair Comments
[07] Golden Eagles: Two-Way Pak-E-Way
[08] Wild Magnolias: Fire Water
[09] Wild Tchoupitoulas: Golden Crown
[10] Red Prysock: Happy Feet
[11] John Sinclair Comments
[12] James Brown Live at the Apollo: I’ll Go Crazy
[13] John Sinclair Comments
[14] Dixie Cups: Iko Iko
[15] Irma Thomas: Don’t Mess With My Man
[16] Barbara George: I Know
[17] Red Prysock: Zonked
[18] John Sinclair Comments
[19] Professor Longhair: Big Chief
[20] Champion Jack Dupree: When I’m Drinking
[21] Roy Brown: Let the Four Winds Blow
[23] Red Prysock: Red Speaks
[24] John Sinclair Comments
[25] Smiley Lewis: Rootin’ & Tootin’
[26] Red Prysock: Rock & Roll
[27] John Sinclair Closing Comments & Outro

A JOINT PRODUCTION
Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Produced & recorded to cassettes by John Sinclair at WDET-FM, Detroit
Digitally transferred from cassettes, edited & assembled by John Sinclair
at the Headpress Bunker, London, June 13, 2010
Posted by Larry Hayden
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Martin Gross & Celia Sinclair
© 1991, 2010 The John Sinclair Foundation
______________________________________________________________

I moved from Detroit to New Orleans in July 1991 and got my first show at WWOZ-FM in February 1992, playing jazz on Tuesday nights. Soon I established my “Blues & Roots” program on Saturday nights at midnight to 2:00 am (later, when the station initiated its 24-hour service, from 2:00–5:00 am) and then added my “New Orleans Music Show” on Wednesday from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm.

My adventures at WWOZ from 1992 till May 2003 must be explored in a subsequent writing, but suffice it to say that I had the time of my radio life in New Orleans on a station that every music-lover in town listened to at all times. My New Orleans show became wildly popular and I was voted New Orleans’ favorite radio personality for the last five years I was on the air there, but the series ended when I moved to Amsterdam in 2003.

I missed doing radio like crazy but otherwise life in Amsterdam agreed with me beyond measure. One evening in September 2004 I was sitting in the Coffeeshop Amnesia having a coffee and a smoke with a new acquaintance named Larry Hayden and lamenting my absence from the airwaves. A little guy who turned out to be called Henk Botwinik was passing our booth and stuck his head in to say, “We could do that right here.”

It was at that point that I entered the brave new world of internet broadcasting, and by November we were on the net with our first 16 episodes of the John Sinclair Radio Show from the 2004 Cannabis Cup, producing every show on location in coffeeshops, dancehalls and cultural installations and mixing great music from the African-American cultural tradition with interviews and commentary from a host of characters in the Dam. We expanded to Radio Free Amsterdam on January 1, 2005 and made our first podcast with our 38th program—podcasting was brand new then—and we’ve posted a show every Monday at 4:20 ever since.

There’s a lot more to tell about Radio Free Amsterdam and our affiliated station in Detroit called Detroit Life Radio, but I’m entirely out of time now and I’ll have to leave you with the latest episode of my show, #338, from Café The Zen in Amsterdam last Friday night. Thanks for listening.

John Sinclair,
Detroit, July 28 > Amsterdam, August 23 > Rochefort, France, August 26-27, 2010
______________________________________________________________

The John Sinclair Foundation Presents
JOHN SINCLAIR SHOW 338
Café The Zen, Amsterdam
Saturday, August 22, 2010 @ 2:00-3:00 am [20-1034]

Our program this week emanates from Café The Zen in Amsterdam where we’ve been based all week with the New Orleans action painter called Frenchy and 101 Runners pianist Tom Worrell plus guitarist Vincent Pino (from Venezuela), drummer Steve Fly (UK) and bassist-engineer Leslie Lopez (Puerto Rico)—the International Blues Scholars. We’re listening to music we made here at Studio Zen on Monday night (16) and at the 420 Café on Wednesday (18), where we were joined by Chris Jones (New Orleans) on bongos during his brief visit to Amsterdam, and we’ve got a few records to add by Alberta Adams & the Planet D Nonet, Kermit Ruffins, Lenny Bruce on airplane glue, and Brother Jack McDuff. Ras Dan makes a brief recorded announcement from Café The Zen while he presently languishes in a Dutch jail waiting to be deported back to Surinam for lack of proper paperwork. Free Ras Dan!

[01] Opening Music: Tom Worrell & the International Blues Scholars: Tipitina
[02] John Sinclair Intro Comments with Larry Hayden & Steve Fly
[03] Ras Dan: Pasa Ding De Café Zen
[04] John Sinclair & His International Blues Scholars: Louisiana Blues
[05] John Sinclair & His International Blues Scholars: The Delta Sound
[06] John Sinclair Comments & Conversation with Larry Hayden & Steve Fly
[07] Alberta Adams & Planet D Nonet: Say Baby Say
[08] Kermit Ruffins: I Got a Treme Woman
[09] Lenny Bruce: Airplane Glue
[10] Brother Jack McDuff: Smut
[11] John Sinclair Comments & Conversation with Larry Hayden & Steve Fly
[12] Closing Music: John Sinclair & His International Blues Scholars: Friday the 13th > Monk in Orbit > My Buddy

Hosted by John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Produced, recorded, edited & assembled by John Sinclair
Posted by Larry Hayden
Executive Producer: Larry Hayden
Special thanks to Celia Sinclair, Frenchy, Tom Worrell, Vincent Pino, Steve Fly & Leslie Lopez—Leslie Lopez, The Man
© 2010 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
—

Author, poet and activist John Sinclair was born in 1941, in Flint, Michigan. He mutated from small-town rock’n’roll fanatic and teenage disc jockey to cultural revolutionary, pioneer of marijuana activism, radical leader and political prisoner by the end of the 1960s. Between 1966-67 he founded the DETROIT ARTIST WORKSHOP and joined the front ranks of the hippie revolution; managing the ‘avant-rock’ MC5 and organizing countless free concerts in the parks, which included White Panther rallies and radical benefits. He has since published several collections of his poetry along with the major work in verse, FATTENING FROGS FOR SNAKES: DELTA SOUND SUITE. In 1998 he first visited Amsterdam as High Priest of the CANNABIS CUP and relocated to The Netherlands in the fall of 2003. One of the pioneers of podcasting, his weekly internet program, THE JOHN SINCLAIR RADIO SHOW, is the flagship of Radio Free Amsterdam.

www.johnsinclair.us
www.radiofreeamsterdam.com

— These are a few pages I have photographed from a couple of my scrapbooks. I have been making these scrapbooks since I was at college. I now have about a dozen of them. I find that they are a great source of inspiration. Browsing through them unnoticed details or unexpected juxtapositions present themselves. Also I don’t like to hoard magazines, they take up so much space, so once I have read them I harvest them for the images I like and then they are recycled. The saved images are kept in a box under my bed and every so often I will have a rummage through and perhaps spend an hour or two sticking them in a book. It’s not done methodically, I choose whatever images grab my attention at that time.


—

Simon Foxton is a London based stylist and creative consultant born in Berwick Upon Tweed in 1961. Having graduated from St. Martin’s College of Art and Design with a degree in fashion design, he set up his own label Bazooka in 1983. He started styling for i-D in 1984 and is currently Consultant Fashion Director at both i-D and Fantastic Man magazines. His work is represented in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Modern and he is currently a visiting lecturer for the Menswear MA course at the Royal College of Art in London.

We will open eyes. And we will look around us. We will notice what everyone of us is doing. We will take an interest only in what is already here. We will not conceive too much. We will make no plans. What is important is what is now. Maybe we will see something that we did not see yesterday, although it was already here. Maybe we will look at somebody’s eyes and take his/her hand. We will try not to perceive hierarchies. Dust is dust, gold is gold. Is it consciously possible to make art, if we do not make art, but we declare it art in the end?

MECH/MOSS, July 10th, 2010
An unprepared ‘performance’ with some of my students, in front of a country pub.
Photo Jiří Maha
—

Jiří Kovanda was born in 1953 in Prague, Czech Republic. He is an artist, known for his discrete actions and installations which begun in the late 70s, as well as a lecturer at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, a position he has held since 1995.

— Since school I’ve had a drawer full of images. Its grown over the years and the contents has been forced to move drawers with my own moving house. Some of these images go on the wall for a while, sometimes years, others stay in the drawer and wait to be looked upon when they’re needed. These images instigate things, ideas or parts of films. There are drawings, photos, paintings, postcards, newspaper and magazine clippings, storyboards. A lot of found stuff. They just sit in private most of the time, waiting their moment, unless it’s already passed. Here’s ten of the hundreds…

My first storyboard, drawn when I was a teenager at school. I never made this film but I wish I had. I look at it occasionally to have a laugh and wonder what would have happened if I had made it.

This has gone on and off my wall for years – two hands to make films with, one real, one fake.

First attempt at learning Japanese so I could move there and make films (not realised).

The mystery of painting found on the street.

Newspaper clipping that sent me driving to the south coast of England to make a film called WE THE PEOPLE.

Postcard of a man sitting in a post-war landscape.

You can’t see it clearly but this house is held down by steel cables – that’s how windy it is in this valley, up in the Arctic Circle in Norway. I tried breaking in but failed, so camped next to it. I was pretty scared at night and spent most of the time listening through the wind for bears. I was laughing at the absurdity of travelling all that way on my own, with the possibility of being mauled and not being found for weeks, to make a tiny quiet film of an abandoned film set – but in the end that felt pretty great.

A more recent sort of storyboard for MAY TOMORROW SHINE THE BRIGHTEST OF ALL YOUR MANY DAYS AS IT WILL BE YOUR LAST. I don’t do storyboards anymore, but as I was taking out 12 Japanese girls to film in the forest I thought it wise to have a few shots planned.

Photo found on the street.

This king was in the drawer for a while, but has spent more years than any other image on at least three studio walls – I’ve been waiting to put him into a film, and now, within weeks of writing this, his time has come.


—

Ben Rivers was born in 1972, in Somerset. Recent exhibitions include ON OVERGROWN PATHS, Impressions Gallery, Bradford (2010); SLOW ACTION, Picture This, Bristol (2010); ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, Kate MacGary, London (2010); A WORLD RATTLED OF HABIT, A Foundation, Liverpool (2009); SLOW ACTION/ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES, Picture This, Bristol (2009). He has been the recipient of a number of commissions, including LAFVA 2007 and Vauxhall Collective commission 2008. Also in 2008 he won the Tiger Award for Short Film, IFF Rotterdam.

www.benrivers.com
www.katemacgarry.com

Recent untitled small sketches. India ink on paper.
—

Steven Shearer is a Canadian artist living and working in Vancouver, B.C. He will be representing Canada in the 2011 Venice Biennial.

www.modernart.net
www.presenhuber.com
www.gavinbrown.biz

— This is a photocopy of the first book I ever made. The cover depicts what I think is a cop or sheriff (the star on the chest, the cowboy hat), and the words, “Jon R’s Book.”

The inside spread—the only spread—depicts (as far as I can tell) a man crossing the street against the stop light (that box with the word “Stop” in it) to get to a pizzeria (that house, with the pizza slice on it), and a cop (this one more like a British bobby) yelling, “Fuck You!”

What was I thinking?? I have no clue. Why is this cop so angry? Why is the pedestrian smiling? Is that even a pizza place he’s going to? All the creative intentionality of this project is lost to time. All I can say is I was probably four or five years old, living in the Bay Area, and it was the mid-seventies. Pizza and cops were on my mind.

—

Jon Raymond is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of THE HALF-LIFE, a novel, and LIVABILITY, a collection of stories, two of which became the movies OLD JOY and WENDY AND LUCY. He is also the writer of the forthcoming feature film MEEK’S CUTOFF, and cowriter of the forthcoming HBO miniseries MILDRED PIERCE.

THE LANDSCAPE OF BERLIN 1980

— In 1980 I spent a year in living in West Berlin as a guest of the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst). They provided me with an apartment, a stipendium and the resources to complete a silent film study of Berlin. It was dreamlike. I’d never been treated so well. I told people it felt like I had won a Nobel Prize. I was initially situated in Wannsee, a bucolic suburban section outside of the city where many rich German industrialists lived during WWII. Far from the city center, Wannsee, with its trees, lakes and spacious homes, was in stark contrast to my image of Berlin, an image based on Walter Ruttman’s film Berlin Symphonie der Großstadt. Two weeks later I moved to an apartment near Berlin Mitte and began wandering around with my Bolex. The Berlin of 1980 was steeped in the atmosphere of a John la Carré novel. The cold war was on. Reagan had just been elected president in the US. The city I saw felt more like Ruttman’s Berlin after a lobotomy: vacant lots, ugly modern architecture, a lot of negative space. It was also in color, albeit a brownish gray. Clouds of coal ash would drift over the wall from the east on certain nights, adding a sulfuric patina to the atmosphere. I spent a considerable amount of time wandering around an area between Kreuzberg and the Tiergarten. The landscape was more rural than urban. There were a great many open spaces, no man’s land evoking scenes from Ozu’s, I was Born…. But, where the boys played baseball in the fields between the city and the country. There were modern structures here and there, but I was attracted to the abandoned quality of the landscape. I rarely met people when I was shooting, but when I did, I filmed from a distance. Almost everything I filmed at this time was either damaged architecture or a broken landscape that was reminiscent of another time (the 1920s or the 1950s). A feeling of alienation pervaded this area. In retrospect, I realized that I was attempting to construct in film a scale model of the city as it existed in a time period shortly after the end of the war, about the same time my knowledge of German history stopped. I was drawn to one particular area in Kreuzberg: an overgrown field behind the Anhalter Bahnhof. A chunk of the original façade of the train station remained standing, like a piece of brown bread that had been partially eaten by rodents. Behind the façade was a vast field, crisscrossed with many worn paths, where trucks occasionally parked. Beyond the field were old industrial structures, including a bunker, originally part of the railroad yards, now collapsed and overgrown with trees and bushes. The area was both mysterious and foreboding. This was my favorite piece of landscape, and I returned to it many times throughout the year. The site became popular with punks who used it as a kind of nihilistic playground. German punks were scary.

One day I was quietly filming a configuration of plants that had grown through a broken window in one of the crushed buildings. Someone had given me some hashish, which I had been smoking. I became transfixed by the quality of light in the shattered window, which evoked an image from Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Suddenly a tiny woman jumped out of the bushes. I just about had a heart attack! “Mein Gott!” I said. “Was machts du?” “Und Sie?” she responded. “I’m looking for history,” I said. My German was terrible. Realizing I was not a native speaker, the woman answered in English: “I’m a botanist and I’m collecting plants.” I was a bit stunned. I wanted to make a portrait of her, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. She went on to explain that in this particular area of Berlin there were more species of plants than anywhere else in Europe. “Why is that?” I asked, still not sure if I was talking to a real person or a hallucination. She explained that trains came to Berlin from across Europe, carrying on their surfaces hundreds of seeds and spores. Upon arriving in Berlin the trains were washed. The seeds then germinated, and many species of plants that had not been indigenous to Berlin began to grow. Because the train station was almost completely destroyed during the war and had remained virtually untouched for 40 years, the plants continued to proliferate. ”This is my laboratory,” she said, surveying the ruins. I was dumbfounded and feeling a bit uneasy. I thanked her, picked up my camera and wandered off. The woman disappeared into the bushes.

I’m currently editing the footage I shot 30 years ago, and I still wonder if the little woman was real. The larger question is why it has taken me 30 years to finish this film. I think Berlin was a “work in progress” in 1980. The wall was a point of immense psychological fascination—a symbol of what was beyond, further to the east. West Berlin was culturally familiar to me despite being foreign. I made several trips to the USSR via East Berlin during this time and shot footage in Moscow and Leningrad. In the years following my Berlin adventure I made films in Hungary (Memories of a City) and Poland (Lodz Symphony). The cold war was for me a time of forbidden pleasures, a time to wander across a landscape frozen in another era and fraught with abstract danger. It was exciting and mysterious. I became a peripatetic spy stealing dead history with my Bolex. In the Eastern Bloc countries I traveled to and filmed, I was frequently stopped by police and questioned. This never happened in West Berlin, despite all the anarchy of the 1980’s and the feeling of living in a police state. I was, however, occasionally stopped from filming by radicals who thought I was the police. This was really weird.

Recently I discovered Google Earth and went to Berlin on my computer. It was amazing how tiny and alien the landscape was from outer space (I’ll never find that woman now), and how little I could recognize from the city I knew in 1980.

—

Peter Hutton was born in 1944, in Detroit. He is one of cinema’s most ardent and poetic portraitists of city and landscape. A former merchant seaman, he has spent nearly forty years voyaging around the world, often by cargo ship, to create sublimely meditative, luminously photographed, and intimately diaristic studies of place, from the Yangtze River to the Polish industrial city of Lodz, and from northern Iceland to a ship graveyard on the Bangladeshi shore.

www.canyoncinema.com

—

Valentin Carron was born in 1977 in Martigny, Switzerland. Selected solo exhibitions include Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2010); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich (2009); AURORE, 303 Gallery, New York (2009); LUISANT DE SUEUR ET DE BRILLANTINE (curated by Milovan Farronato), Via Farini, Milan (2008); Kunsthalle, Zürich (2007). Group shows include DISTANT MEMORY, Kunstverein Solothurn, Solothurn (2010); XIV Biennale Internazionale di Scultura di Carrara (2010); WE ARE SUN-KISSED AND SNOW-BLIND, Galerie Patrick Seguin, Paris (2009); BLASTED ALLEGORIES, Works from the Ringier Collection, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Luzern (2008); THE HAPPINESS OF OBJECTS, Sculpture Center, New York (2007); THE THIRD MAN (curated by Ugo Rondinone), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007).

www.303gallery.com
www.presenhuber.com

FREEDOM AT LAST… ESCAPE AT LEAST

— What is freedom and what is escape? I wonder if they are one and the same. They seemed to mean the same thing to a generation of cynics when the border between east and west was closed. My parents called them shestedisyatniki – the 60s generation. I think they are known in the West as dissidents. Their ideologies were broadcast left and right in militant secrecy. Now I am here, in post-everything chaos. No one can see their own shadow and everything has a feeling of entropy and decay. I am born out of entropy; I am from neighborhood soviets and 5 year plans. I am from the cold war, glasnost, perestroika, and Coup d’états. Who could define themselves under such pressure to define? Who can have a connection to the world when the world that you were raised in is erased? All I have left are transmissions and analog signals. The same signals that once threatened The State have now become its relics.

There was such preoccupation with freedom and escape when I was growing up. The thoughts of escape, utopia and desire were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Older brothers and sisters listened to smuggled rock n’ roll tapes, read banned poetry books, watched grainy soft core porn, dubbed over and over again until the sounds, images and words resembled abstractions. They imagined that somewhere over the border was another world. To be non-political and to escape into the analog transmissions from a foreign place was a defying stance. Metaphysical escape was to be had at any cost.

Somehow this re-dubbing and decaying created something new, a distorted grainy memory bank that did not correspond to anything other then itself. The freedom we all desired was a bitter fruit; there was no utopia out there just as there was no utopia as promised to us by the communists. But there was always Siberia. There was always Kamchatka. One could go east and test his strength or dream and stay home. We stayed home.

When I was a kid growing up in Moscow there was the one band. K I N O. The lead singer was Victor Tsoi and to me he was the only one that represented something that was not transparently state propagated. It’s strange to think that I would have been preoccupied with such lofty ideals as a kid but that was the only thing that my parents and their friends whispered about. The state was shit and everyone knew it by then. I refused to wear the red pioneer tie although I did not have a good reason for this misconduct; it represented nothing to me. The only thing that held any meaning for me was KINO. Many years later I read that one of my artistic heroes Nam Jun Paik was fascinated with this kind of transfer of freedom through culture, specifically the way rock n’ roll and video transmissions could direct a flow of ideas and with them freedom and/or escape over borders into repressive regimes. This realization made this singular Russian band seem even nobler and three years ago I began to revisit songs that I had not heard since I was really young.

One song stood out to me for its mystifying beauty and strange name, Kamchatka. Kamchatka is the furthest point east in Russia. The peninsula is past the Urals, past the tundra, past the gulags, past everything. It’s the end of the world. Nature rules the few inhabitants that are descendants of explorers, prisoners, and indigenous Koryaks. The Kamchatka peninsula is separate from everything, existing in it own universe.

How could Kamchatka inspire Victor Tsoi?

In 1980s Leningrad the underground rock club that bands played in was called Kamchatka. I guess they wanted the club to be like the peninsula itself, as far and isolated from the world as possible, a freedom refuge where kids could escape to roam. Great poetic irony, something so close to the Russian heart, went into naming this club. The name was a refusal to participate in hopeless banality all around them. Tsoi’s Kamchatka was a love song to freedom in all its beauty. I listen to it over and over again. The lyrics brim with prophetic sadness and loss but also with a drunken optimism. The analog signal goes in every direction full of hope, promise, and desire for brotherhood. The singer, an itinerant migrant searching for a face in a vast crowd with whom to connect, but finding only his own.

I look for old recordings of this song, for old footage of the band and I play them over and over again until they erase themselves in electromagnetic patricide, and then I think about what happened to all of us. What did we destroy to get here?

Victor Tsoi died on the 14th of August 1990 in a car crash outside of Tukums in Latvia. The impact of the crash was so great that one of his car tires was never found and he perished immediately. My family immigrated to America a month after his death and a year later I watched CNN on our second-hand television in Philadelphia as Yeltsin stood on a tank and The Soviet Union fell to pieces. Freedom at last… Escape at least…

Kamchatka

Oh, such a strange place, “Kamchatka”,
Oh, such a sweet word, “Kamchatka”.
I don’t see you here on earth,
I don’t see your ships,
I don’t see a river or even a bridge,
Oooh well…

Oh, such a strange place, “Kamchatka”,
Oh, such a sweet word, “Kamchatka”.
I’ve found rich ore, I’ve found love,
I’ve tried to forget, and I did
I remembered my dog, she’s a star,
Oooh well…

Oh, such a strange place, “Kamchatka”,
Oh, such a sweet word, “Kamchatka”.
I don’t see them here, I don’t see us here,
I was looking for wine, I found my third eye,
My hands made of oak, my head made of lead,
Oooh well…

Below are sketches for a new series of paintings that I am working on named Transmission. They are portraits that lack identity.

—

Kon Trubkovich was born in 1979 in Moscow, Russia. Selected solo exhibitions include Museum 52, London (2009); ALMOST NOWHERE, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2008); WORK STUDY, Museum 52, London (2007); KON TRUBKOVICH: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006). Group shows include OVER BEFORE IT STARTED, West Street Gallery, New York (2010); THE PENCIL SHOW, Foxy Productions, New York (2010); Athens Biennial of Contemporary Art, Athens (2009); NEW YORK MINUTE, Macro Future Museum, Rome (2009); 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2007); SIX FEET UNDER, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2006). Trubkovich’s next solo exhibition opens September, 2010, at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.

www.marianneboeskygallery.com
www.museum52.com

—

Lutz Bacher lives and works in Berkeley, California.

— “Medieval alchemists and mystics believed they were justified in their search for the mythical elixir of life, a universal medicine supposedly containing a recipe for the renewal of youth. The search for this elixir and a quest to make gold became the grand goals of alchemy.”

I was born and bred in Dresden. From an early age on as a a child, two places and their stories always held a magical fascination for me: the Grünes Gewölbe in Dresden, Europe’s largest collection of jewels and treasures collected from all corners of the world, and the city of Meissen, home of Meissen porcelain and the story of alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttcher who was locked up by the King of Saxony in order to produce gold. He failed. Instead he discovered white porcelain, which ended up saving his life.

I was fascinated with the medium of chemistry and decided in the late 70s to study in Berlin. After two years however I ended up giving in to my artistic streaks.

Now, starting work on a new collection always reminds me of the alchemist’s search for the true and perfect formula. Mixing ingredients that might clash, repulse or compliment each other always leads you down new and exciting paths.

The fragility of this process is an aspect which describes me quite well. I love questioning this balancing act again and again – to experience vulnerability as strength.

I find glass for instance is an exciting medium – transparent, cool, reflective, hard yet fragile. Molecules and chains of molecules, a symbol, like siamese twins – what role does time play in the mix?

Kostas Murkudis, July 2010, Berlin
—

Kostas Murkudis is a Fashion Designer and Creative based in Berlin. After launching his career at Wolfgang Joop he started a 7 year long collaboration with Helmut Lang. In 1996 Kostas Murkudis founded his own label, launched in Paris with his debut Spring Summer 1997 collection.

kostasmurkudis.net

[neuespalte]

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Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Selected solo exhibitions include REFLECTION, Nyehaus, New York (2009); JG READS, Gavin Brownʼs enterprise, New York (2008); PALM PAVILION, kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2008); FOSTER, YOU’RE DEAD, Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan (2008); UNTITLED 1992 (FREE), David Zwirner Gallery, New York (2007). Group shows include the 27th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2006); DAY FOR NIGHT, Whitney Biennial 2006, New York (2006); and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003).

www.kurimanzutto.com
www.gavinbrown.biz

—

Born in 1946, singer and pianist Patty Waters emerged from the underground/free/avant-garde jazz scene in New York in the mid 60s. She was inspired by Billie Holiday and no doubt the free players of that era — in a roundabout way, Waters is to jazz singing what Albert Ayler was/is to the saxophone. Bio by Mark Keresman.

www.pattywaters.com
www.espdisk.com
www.jazzreview.com

—

Pedro Costa was born in 1959 in Lisbon, Portugal. His first feature O SANGUE (BLOOD) premiered at the Venice Film Festival, in 1989. His most recent film NE CHANGE RIEN was screened at the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, Cannes Film Festival, 2009. His work has been shown in various galleries and museums around the world and later this year he will be one of the featured artists at the 29th São Paulo Bienal, Brazil, 2010.

WELL LEAFED

— I have taken this opportunity to ‘out’ a snap shot of my reference library, accumulated over about 25 years. I have made no effort to tidy or edit the selection. I hope this will relieve me of the guilt I feel when I take a magnifying glass to a photo in a magazine of someone, anyones bookcase in a magazine editorial. I am dead nosy and curious to know what unexpected surprises or cliches might be in evidence on their shelves.

It’s a rather sad, bad habit and I hope by exposing my shelves (or lack of shelving) in a totally unedited, unselfconscious mode I might feel less judgemental of others.

I take little, to no care of my books, but I reference them often and furiously. They do indeed exist in a state of disarray and it often involves less effort to go to the public library than attempt to dislodge a book from its book tower at my studio.

—

Julie Verhoeven is an artist and designer based in London. After studying fashion she began her career assisting John Galliano before working in the fashion industry as illustrator, designer, creative director and tutor. Verhoeven published A BIT OF ROUGH, FAT-BOTTOMED GILRS and JULIE VERHOEVEN GAS BOOK 13 and regularly exhibits internationally.

www.julieverhoeven.com

——–(<

I am often conflicted when it comes to contributing video ephemera to a place that is housed by the internet.
A part of me always wants to show and tell,
another part of me wants to horde certain images to myself and my immediate family.
This conflict proves even stronger when the imagery includes a friend whom is no longer within reach.

Death is a sensitive matter and it is certainly something i spend a great deal of time thinking about…..though as time passes i try my best to think of it as something that is equal parts tragedy and beauty….or perhaps its neither, it could be nothing more than a blip, a false conclusion to what is merely a small segment within a never-ending fantasy. I’d like to think there is no closure in death, and that there is no physical reincarnation, that nothing ends and nothing begins, but rather this fantasy of the earthly realm simply folds in upon itself…the outsides become the insides, and soon enough it cycles back through to its original form and continues on in slight repetition …..an infinitely morphing and melting donut shaped mass of energy.

………>>>>>!^^^*N*^^^!<<<<<……….
Nathan helped me understand different ways of seeing and different ways of being. He helped me to recognize the atmosphere and gracefully encouraged me to listen to it. When i was given this footage of him i was so struck by the way it captured him interacting with his space and harnessing the sky. There is a moment of tape distortion that happens as Nathan is seen acting out some sort of magnetism between his body and the sky. That is a heavy moment.

When i watch this footage i don’t find it haunting tho……… i find it to be a portrait of a true alliance with the sky.

–Brian DeGraw

/—-^<>^____>>—-000

NATHAN AND LEIF (AROUND ’95 OR ’96)
Filmed by David Leonard. Edited by BDG

—
Brian DeGraw was born in 1974. He lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Le Confort Moderne, France (2008); BEHEAD THE GENRE, James Fuentes LLC, New York (2007). In 2008 his work was featured in The Whitney Biennial. He is also a member of Gang Gang Dance.

www.jamesfuentes.com
www.nowarforged.blogspot.com

THE CLOSEST EXIT MAY BE BEHIND YOU

CHEAT SHEET
I made this crib note during my freshman year of high school in order to cheat on a Biology exam.

THONG/THONG
Not once, but twice I left a pair of undies in the dryer of my boyfriend’s mother’s home.
She was nice enough to return them promptly both times, priority mail.

`
MARCH 1991
As a teenager I was an avid journal keeper. It was an activity I occupied myself with primarily while cutting class—I think I thought I was leading myself in some sort of alternative curriculum. I compiled the following list over the course of several days in March of 1991.
Click image to see more pages.

SHOVE IT
Disgruntled by a day job sometime during the mid to late nineties, I made a large stack of these Xeroxes. My intent, I think, was to replace the legitimate work documents in every drawer and file folder of the desk I kept in the office—a paper transfusion to be discovered later by my boss or co-worker. I wussed out and never did it.

GO WILD
This card was sent to me by my aunt P on the occasion of an exhibition of my
artwork opening in New York City.

JIGGLY AND SOFT
A ‘Hot Pic’ featuring Tyra Banks and Katharine McPhee.

MY EBAY
I received this thank you note from an Ebay seller named pollyannagrammy in 2010.

WHERE’S WALDO
My mother stood in the front row in Grant Park, Chicago the night Obama was elected.
She sent me this annotated Xerox copy of the NYT a few days later. Her face is in the left circle.
—

Amanda Ross-Ho was born in Chicago in 1975. She lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include SOMEBODY STOP ME, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York (2010) and HALF OF WHAT I SAY IS MEANINGLESS, Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles (2008).

www.cherryandmartin.com
www.miandn.com

Several family photos from my mobile.

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Wilhelm Sasnal was born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland. Selected solo exhibitions include 16MM FILMS, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2010); Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2010); Hauser & Wirth, Zurich (2009); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2009); Swiss Institute, New York NY (2007); Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2007). Group shows include CONVERSATION PIECES. A CHAMBER PLAY, ACT III, SCENE 3, Johnen Galerie, Berlin (2010); THE REACH OF REALISM, MOCA Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2009); WHEN THINGS CAST NO SHADOW, the 5th Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art (2008); PAINTING OF MODERN LIFE at The Hayward, London (2007), WHAT IS PAINTING, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). Also in 2007 he was commissioned to create a new film as part of Frieze Film.

www.antonkerngallery.com
www.hauserwirth.com
www.sadiecoles.com

THIS BOX

— In my book Deformer (Damiani, 2008) I used ephemera saved from my youth along with photographs to illustrate my thesis about growing up in suburbia. A big part of the ephemera was letters from my Grandparents, and especially my grandfather, William, who served as my father after my dad had ran off with our 16-year-old babysitter.

One letter in particular was sent because of a caption on a photo of me in a skateboard magazine said, “Ed Templeton subliminally worships the devil” (written because of the hand gesture I was subconsciously making in the photo.) My grandparents took this 100% literally and demanded that I get a public apology from the magazine to protect my image, – or that if I had “indicated an interest in satanic worship” that I would do well to keep it out of the public light.

Not only is this generationally comedic, it’s also very touching. It showed me that even if I had become a devil-worshipper, something that to them as born-again Christians would be the pinnacle of disappointment, they would still love me.

Of course, the minute I finished Deformer this box was hand-delivered to me by my grandparents amongst all sorts of other items from their house they thought I might want. It said, “To Be Opened Only By Ed.” and was taped shut. I am 34 years old.

I present to you the content of this box:

Figure 1: The box
Figure 2: The box opened

Figure 3: The letter

Figure 4: A clipping from TWS skateboard magazine about my friendship with fellow pro skater Geoff Rowley that may have been the start of this whole idea that I am some sort of porn addict. The text that is circled says: Ed, in turn, attempted to organize Tuesday Night Porno Night. (This didn’t go over too well; he rented MIDGETS ON GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, and after an hour of watching midget sex, the event was killed.)

Figure 5: A tear sheet of a Toy Machine ad. (Toy Machine is a skateboard company I own and run from 1993 to present.)

Figure 6: Another clipping from TWS skateboard magazine discussing one of my exhibitions, and mentioning “explicit” artwork.

Figure 7: A clipping from TWS again, mentioning my exhibition in 1998 at Space 1026 in Philadelphia.

Figure 8: A clipping from BUSINESS WEEK MAGAZINE.

Figure 9: A tear-out of a Toy Machine ad with me skateboarding, I don’t know how this relates to pornography. Maybe the portrait of me with an angel on one shoulder saying, “Do good.” and the devil on the other one saying, “No. Evil.”

Figure 10: A clipping blown up via copy machine from the American Family Association. He circled two items from a poll related to pornography or sex on TV that are contributing to the United States’ moral decline.

Figure 11: Another Toy Machine ad pulled from a skate magazine. Perhaps the language was offensive to him?

Figure 12: A photocopy from a skate magazine covering my first exhibition with Roberts and Tilton gallery in LA with the headline “Rawness Prevails…”

Figure 13: A booklet from RBC ministries titled, A MAN’S EYE WANDERS, BREAKING THE POWER OF PORNOGRAPHY.

Figure 14: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 15: A photocopy from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 16: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 17: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 18: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 19: A photocopy of a newspaper clipping.

Figure 20: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 21: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 22: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 23: A tear-out from the AFA JOURNAL.

Figure 24: At the bottom of the box was a VHS video from Focus on the Family Films starring Dr. James Dobson titled, PORNOGRAPHY: ADDICTIVE, PROGRESSIVE AND DEADLY.

I have never sent the postcard to them, and it has never come up in conversation. I can’t imagine how long he had been collecting these things, and it disturbs me a little bit that every time he sees the word ‘porno’ he thinks of me based on a few jokes found in skateboard magazines. I am more disturbed by his mass consumption of the AFA, Focus on the Family, and James Dobson. My grandfather is 90 years old. Like many things in life, this is a double edged sword, it’s sharp on both sides. The continuing love and concern for his fully grown grandson, and the delusion of a devoutly religious human being.
—

Ed Templeton was born in 1972 in Huntington Beach, California, where he continues to reside. The Cemetery of Reason, Templeton’s first solo museum exhibition is currently on view at the S.M.A.K. in Gent, Belgium and will travel to the Museo Dell’Arte in Nuro, Sardinia and the Ernst Museum in Budapest, Hungary. Selected group exhibitions include the International Center of Photography, New York, NY (2010); SCHUNCK Glaspaleis, Heerlen, The Netherlands (2009); ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2007); Pinchuk Art Center, Kyjiv, Ukraine (2007); Australian Center for Photography, Sydney, Australia (2007); Kunstalle Vienna, Vienna, Austria; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom (2006); Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004); Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Holland (2003). DEFORMER, Templeton’s 2008 publication, won ‘book of the year’ at the 2009 International Festival of Photography in Rome, Italy. Ed Templeton is represented by Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA.

www.robertsandtilton.com

Gene Beery, REIFICATION, 2006, Acrylic on Gessoed Canvas, 14×11″
www.genebeery.info
—

Wayne Gonzales
paulacoopergallery.com
stephenfriedman.com
patrickdebrock.com

— This is the back cover of a book I made in the 3rd grade titled Masterworks and Things. I wrote two to three sentences about each artist and drew the illustrations–pencil drawings, mostly copying paintings. The last of the book’s 18 pages promises future volumes on Jimmy Carter and Alexander Calder but I never got around to doing those.

In 2005 Eva Prinz contacted me about writing a book about sound art for Rizzoli, where she was then an editor. I happily accepted, although most of my writing up until that point had been for music magazines, so in my mind working with an art book publisher seemed a bit anomalous–even though I felt that a lot of the profiles I’ve done for magazines were, in a way, an extension of the interest in portraiture and drawing that I had as a kid (Masterworks and Things is virtually all portraits). I had forgotten about Masterworks and Things until several months later, when my mother was selling the house I grew up and I was going through my old belongings there. Looking at it again, for the first time in ages, I realized that I had actually envisioned writing, and made, an art book thirty years before. Rizzoli’s commission fulfilled an ambition I had forgotten ever having.

—

Born in 1968, guitarist and author Alan Licht has been active in New York’s rock and experimental music scenes for the past two decades, as composer, improvisor, curator and lecturer, while also engaging in performances and installations that intersect with his interests in film and art. He is the author of SOUND ART: BEYOND MUSIC CATEGORIES (Rizzoli, 2007) and AN EMOTIONAL MEMOIR OF MARTHA QUINN (Drag City, 2002) and has appeared on nearly 100 recordings.

www.myspace.com/alanlicht

— This is the campus where I lived for three months in the summer of 2002. It’s located in the outskirts of St. Petersburg, on Vasilievsky Island. I was studying Russian at the University of Amsterdam and had come here to do a language exchange program, with the State University in St. Peterburg. I shared my room with two other guys. It was during this summer that I came up with the idea and script for Nummer twee, Just because I’m standing here doesn’t mean I want to. This was my first ever film and later became the standard for all my works. It was a work in which a lot of things came together and the first work that I ever made, that I liked. This picture was taken in March 2010 when I was in St. Petersburg and decided to go back for a visit.

Photo by Johanna Ketola
—

Guido van der Werve was born in 1977 in Papendrecht, The Netherlands. His works have been exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions, including the Tate Modern in London, De Appel in Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, De Hallen in Haarlem, MoMa New York, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Sevilla, Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, National Centre for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Manifesta 7, the Torino Triennial 2008, the Hayward Gallery London, the Royal Academy London, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington.

www.marcfoxx.com
www.luhringaugustine.com
www.monitoronline.org
www.juliettejongma.com

WALLPAPER

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Florian Süssmayr is a painter born 1963 in Munich, Germany. Süssmayr draws inspiration form his roots in the german leftist political scene of the 1980s – being a part of the punk movement FREIZEIT 81 and the band LORENZ LORENZ. His work touches on topics such as social marginalization and civil disobedience and has been exhibited internationally including Haus der Kunst, Munich.

www.suessmayr.de

A selection from my personal collection of historical artifacts. In this case photographs of men, specifically American soldiers. The identities of most are unknown to me except for the portrait of my father, from basic training when he was 18 years old.

From left to right:
01 PORTRAIT OF A UNION SOLDIER FROM THE CIVIL WAR, year unknown, tintype.
02 PORTRAIT OF A UNION SOLDIER FROM THE CIVIL WAR, year unknown, ambrotype.
03 PORTRAIT OF A UNION SOLDIER FROM THE CIVIL WAR, year unknown, tintype.
04 PORTRAIT OF A UNION SOLDIER AND HIS WIFE, FROM THE CIVIL WAR, year unknown, tintype.
05 UNITED STATES ARMY GROUP PORTRAIT, 1942. Camp Tyson, Tennessee.
06 PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN MILITARY MAN, year unknown.
07 PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN NAVY SAILOR, OR MARINE, May, 1943.
08 PORTRAIT OF ARMY PRIVATE CHRISTOPHER LEE HELMS, 1958. Fort Jackson, South Carolina.
—

Adam Helms was born in 1974 in Tucson, Arizona. He lives and works in New York. He works with a variety of materials: charcoal, graphite and gouache on paper, ink on Mylar, silkscreen, assemblage and sculptural installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Kathryn Brennan Gallery, Los Angeles (2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2008); Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2007). Group exhibitions include The Imaginary Museum: The Dakis Joannou Collection, New Museum, New York (2010); Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010); Every Revolution is a Roll of the Dice, Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2007); Just Kick it Till it Breaks, The Kitchen, New York (2007); Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian, Walker Art Center, Minnesota (2006).

www.marianneboeskygallery.com

— In all my performances I write both the music and the stage direction. The scores of all my performances are exactly fixed, what I am doing is staging real situations and happenings. There does not exist any choreography; the actionist knows exactly what he has to do. It’s like when there is a fire and it has to be put out. I rehearse with my action artists for 4 weeks before the performance.

OMT, 1998
—

Hermann Nitsch was born in Vienna in 1938. In 1957 he created the concept of the Orgies Mysteries Theater (OMT), a six-day event that continues to captivate him throughout his career.

www.mikeweissgallery.com
www.nitsch.org

— The phenomenon of dreaming is pretty intriguing. There are a lot of obvious things about it that come to mind instantly. First, that one’s dreams with very rare exceptions are boring to everyone but oneself. Second, that, first hand, dreams are indistinguishable from waking “reality.” Third, that supposedly, even “scientifically” (with the advent of psychoanalysis) dreams can reveal information about a person that would otherwise be hidden. And, for me, fourth is that they’re a source for a lot of art, including some of the very highest quality. The instance of that which surprised me the most was when I found out that Jasper Johns got the idea for his flag paintings by seeing one in a dream. Maybe the most impressive example is Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” which ravishing, timeless 54 lines he brought back with him from a laudanum nod. Speaking of nods, William Burroughs also scavenged a huge proportion of his fiction from his dreams. I don’t know if a distinction should be made between narcotic nodding and conventional dreams. I think possibly–my impression is that a nod is a light doze that permits easier access to detail than a full-fledged R.E.M. dream normally does.

I’ve had a lot of revelations about dreams in a long appreciative intellectual relationship with them. In fact it’s been exhaustive enough that I was astonished recently to find myself tired of dreaming. I have been in a state where I awaken multiple times a night in such a way that I almost always recall my dream of the moment and consequently they actually started seeming annoying, pestilent, like uninvited experience nagging at me again and again without consideration: brain spillage, runoff.

I also recently had the experience of clearly perceiving, in situ, the actual process that creates the substance of dreams. I’ve for a long time, basically ignorantly, been sceptical of Freud, not trusting any science of psychoanalyis (penis envy, Oedipal complex, what have you). But I’ve found Jung’s approach to dream interpretation practical and useful. Namely to regard all the characters in a given dream as being aspects of oneself and, instantly, while the dream is fresh, to ask oneself what personal mental activity is suggested by the relationships and activities of the people (all oneself) in the dream, and, in my experience, quite consistently, an answer will immediately suggest itself which often is revelatory, exposing what’s going on in one’s psychology. But, the experience I mention of getting a kind of unimpeded front-row view of the process that forms dreams has given me a new respect for Freud, since it seemed to support his method of dream interpretation (as I understand it).

I have over the years compiled a small collection of sentences brought back from dreams. An example is, “All you have to do is pick up that front door and write ‘Charles Brodley’ on it,” and another is, “…spilled by the biggest airtime images in the Carbonville pap.” The other day I had the fluke luck to retain observation of the actual sequence of events underlying how such sentences are formed, which was self-evidently the same process, on a simpler scale, as for dreams themselves. You start with a unit of meaning–a word (in the case of sentence-forming), an image, or what have you, and instantly that unit spins off an array of associations that could have been suggested by any quality of the object–its shape, its sound, its color, its utility, anything. Largely by chance, one of these associations (all of which are inherently psychologically relevant or revealing to some degree because they’re limited to one’s personal repertoire) falls into the slot (like a reverse roulette wheel–many balls and one slot–, or like a shotgun fired at a target and it’s the ball of shot that hits one particular randomly placed shot-sized mark that gets chosen from the blast), and it’s that new object in the string (now two units long) that sets off the next array of associations, and the dream proceeds like that. The combinations are largely chance, but not only are they limited to one’s stock of associations, but the number of related associations will increase according to one’s preoccupations, so the dream is personal.

Anyway, over the years, I have exploited into my published works a number of dream images, words, and narrative threads. Maybe a third of them came from my drug days. In a way it’s a disservice to the works to identify them as rooted in dreams, because it risks inclining readers to trivialize them and class them as forms of anecdote, but what the hell. How much can I lose, and I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Real appreciators of art know that the “source” is irrelevant, it’s the execution that matters. My favorite is a poem (that came after I’d stopped using drugs) that uses for its title a phrase from a dream, and then describes in a kind of indirect, carefully composed, and annotated way an experience of succumbing to sleep and dreaming:




Another, the earliest one, came from before my drug period. I was about 21 when I wrote this poem that was a pretty faithful rendering of a nightmare I had:




One of my favorite of my drawings came from something I saw in a dream. It was a fountain made of iron, the design components of which are a simple pipe, maybe three inches in diameter, gushing water straight up from near the top of the contraption, and a couple of feet below that, maybe seven feet off the ground, a set of riveted slats in the crude shape of the outline of a horse’s head that mechanically swivels back and forth in an arc of maybe 100 degrees, with one extreme of the arc ending at the spot most convenient to turn itself upwards and open its jaw as if drinking from the fountain. All the mechanics of the machine are exposed (though I didn’t try to show them in the drawing, but rather just sketched a large cone instead):




Another poem I like was a slightly reframed, but fully faithful dream transcription:




The most astonishing experience I had in these lines does come from a period of heavy drug use. I was a heroin addict and one morning after a long night of supplementary cocaine consumption, I woke up from a delerious sleep in the late morning alone on the floor mattress in my girlfriend’s loft, with an entire novelistically complex, or film-ready, plot complete in my consciousness. Nothing like that had ever happened before and nothing like it since. It was all there, a detailed narrative (grand guignol, noir, pulp) from beginning to end:

Finally, another visual image. This is a painting that I actually saw myself painting in a dream. I had to go buy paint and try to reproduce it. I didn’t fully succeed. My painting is superficially true to the dream, but (though you can’t really tell here, where there’s not a sense of scale) the one in the dream was much larger, maybe five feet tall, and the paint application in the dream was more painterly, dense and rich. Some day I’d like to try to get it right. In the dream it was a good painting. (The painting is the area that has the white background–the red-brown frame around it is where it’s propped up on my sofa.)




I used a computer-graphics wallpaper version of it for the back cover of the dust-jacket for the first (“preliminary”) version of my book Hot and Cold:


—

Richard Hell first came to public attention as an originator of punk. His highly influential album BLANK GENERATION was released in 1977. Hell’s DESTINY STREET REPAIRED CD was released by Insound in late 2009, his most recent book is the novel GODLIKE, and he’s nearly finished an autobiography, tentatively entitled I DREAMED I WAS A VERY CLEAN TRAMP.

www.richardhell.com

INVISIBLE WORK

— Because my paintings often seem so extremely far apart from each other and of such different types, I think a lot about the way they are connected. Actually I see them as the visible parts of a larger invisible work. They’re the elements facing both outwards and inwards.

In this drawing above, from 2007, my paintings are represented by the small rectangles. The paintings function as panels, faces, signals, eyes, entrances and exits; surfaces layered with information. They are attuned to one another. When I made this drawing I was thinking about this space as a ‘body’ of work and how the paintings were kind of scouts; roaming in the dark and expanding their territory, therefore the title Vampires, Thieves and Poachers. Then burrow-like, it has now transformed into a kind of crystalline formation. Experiment, experience, drifting, the processes that surround, and sometimes lead, to a painting are the dynamics that are at work. The paintings, in correspondence with each other and in opposition to one another, structure this invisible architecture.


UNTITLED, 2010, 50×70 cm, oil on canvas
—

Monika Baer was born in 1964 in Freiburg, Germany. She lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (2009); Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich (2009); and Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2008); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2006). In 2005 a retrospective of her paintings, collages and drawings was organized by the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht and In 2007 her work was featured in documenta 12.

www.galeriebarbaraweiss.de
www.tellesfineart.com

— These records are; cumbia, heavy metal, urban rock, punk, tropical, reggae. I got them in diferent places, I found some in a recent trip to Monterrey, others in London, Mexico City, and Oaxaca. I bought the Motorhead record in Italy, and I got some in exchange of tattoos. Besides the music I am interested in the covers, but sometimes I just get them to remember a period of my life or because they have a visual value for me. They become a graphic object more than a musical product. I like some records for both their music and their covers, as with the GBH record or the Srachleeperry record, which I use as a reference in my work. 15 Joyitas is really a gem, I have followed that label for years.

—

Dr. Lakra is an artist and tattooist. Born in 1972 in Mexico, he lives and works in Oaxaca, Mexico. Recent solo exhibitions include: The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2010); kurimanzutto, Mexico City (2009); Kate MacGarry, London (2009); Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2006). Group shows include: Modern Ruins, Kate MacGarry, London (2009); Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican, London (2008); Hammer Contemporary Collection, Hammer Museum, Los
Angeles (2007).

www.kurimanzutto.com
www.katemacgarry.com

— In 2002 I had an exhibition of these images. Everybody came to the exhibition excited; they were going to see a Lillian Bassman show. And they looked at it and said, ‘This isn’t fashion.’ So nobody bought anything. Nobody bought a thing.

MEN, 1980, cibachrome prints, 48 x 60 inches

In the early 1980s Lillian Bassman started re-photographing images of male bodybuilders that she found in muscle magazines. Shooting in color, she would pose the figure so that it was reflected in a mylar material that produced visual distortion. The results were in sharp contrast to the fashion work that she was known for. In 2002, almost twenty years after they were taken, the Ricco/Maresca gallery exhibited them. The show, simply titled MEN, went almost unnoticed by critics accustomed to her fashion work. For Bassman, this project gave her a sense of independence. Having voluntarily left editorial fashion work behind in the 1960s, she had continued to shoot commercially. However, her passion for portraying the human form and discovering new techniques never diminished. Projects such as the muscle men are a small example of her constant pursuit of happiness, which is to create.
—

Lillian Bassman was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, USA. In 1945, she was appointed Art Director at Junior Bazaar, giving projects to photographers such as Richard Avedon, Robert Frank and Paul Himmel (her late husband). Later, in 1947, she became the Art Director at Harper’s Bazaar. Bassman received the Agfa Life Time Achievement Award in 1996. At 93, she continues to live and work in New York City.

www.peterfetterman.com

THE SAVAGE ANOMALY

—

Roger Hiorns was born in 1975 in Birmingham. He lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Chicago Art Institute, Chicago (2010); Marc Foxx, Los Angeles (2009); Corvi-Mora, London (2008); Seizure, Harper Road, An Artangel/Jerwood Commission, London (2008); Glittering Ground, Camden Arts Centre, London (2007); Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes (2006). In 2009 he was one of four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize.

www.corvi-mora.com
www.marcfoxx.com
www.annetgelink.com

— When I’m not out of my Pedro town on tour, I paddle my kayak every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday usually from inside the Los Angeles harbor at Cabrillo Beach and then out past the breakwater through the Angels Gate in to the open sea to say hi to the pelicans, sea lions and dolphins and then paddle back. Zaby is the name of my kayak, it’s after a character in Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon.

Photo by Evangeline Barrón
—

Mike Watt was born in 1957 in Portsmouth, Virginia. He is an American bass guitarist, singer and songwriter. He is best-known for co-founding the rock bands Minutemen, dos, and fIREHOSE; as of 2003, he is also the bassist for the reunited Stooges and a member of the art rock/jazz/punk/improv group Banyan as well as many other post-Minutemen projects.

www.hootpage.com

— These five images come from a body of work begun about ten years ago, and originally intended to be seen as paper prints. Their images derive from a collection of textbook illustrations and advertising art from the first half of the 20th century. The manner in which they are combined is a function of digital imaging technology, and an art heritage that goes back to Max Ernst, by way of Bruce Conner.

At a time when film, a photomechanical invention of the late nineteenth century, is being quietly put to bed, it may be interesting to think about another practice that was similarly replaced. Prior to the invention of the halftone screen, which allows photographs to be reproduced, all visual representations had to be drawn by hand, often by an engraver. The quality of vision obtained by an engraver, using photographic references, can be truly amazing. But the part I find really interesting is at that time all those people knew how to draw!

—

Pat O’Neill is a visual artist and filmmaker who is a native of Los Angeles and still lives near there. His film work over the last forty-some years has often been concerned with the adaptation of old images into new narrative constructions. He has also been absorbed with the ways in which language seems to alter vision, and ways in which images alter one another. Past work was in 16mm and 35mm film and collage: presently, he is working with digital video and with hand tools to make a series of tiny wooden monuments.

www.lookoutmountainstudios.com
www.rosamundfelsen.com

A letter by Rodolphe Boulanger de Huchette to Emma Bovary written by
Gustave Flaubert in my hand.
—

Janice Kerbel was born in 1969 in Canada and lives in London, UK. She works with a range of materials, including drawing, text, audio and print to explore the indefinite space between reality and fiction, abstraction and representation. Solo exhibitions include: Chisenhale, London 2011; Art Now, Tate Britain, 2010; Greengrassi, London, 2009; Optica, Montreal 2008 and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2006. Group shows include: Montreal Bienniale, 2007, ‘Always for Love’, Grazer Kunstverein 2007; and British Art Show 2005. In 2006 she wrote a radioplay with Artangel for BBC Radio 3, and in 2007 she was commissioned to create a new work as part of Frieze Projects.

www.greengrassi.com
www.galerie-karin-guenther.de

— Looking in boxes of old stuff I found some snapshots of myself; two with some friends and one with my first camera, I am guessing from 1976 or so. I also found a paper that I wrote for school, when I was 15, about the 1972 US elections. It is basically my first book. It also goes deep into my early influences, that were really Time and Life magazine. My father had given me a subscription to Life magazine and when Life folded, I chose to get Time instead. Though it was a sad day when Life folded.

I read through my school paper and to my surprise discovered many things are still very much the same. I had created a whole section that identifies some of the financiers behind the Nixon campaign and here we are almost 40 years later and the Supreme Court has just condoned corporate sponsorship for political campaigns. As a caption to a picture of Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon I wrote, “Two gangsters”. I show another picture of Nixon with Taft Schreiber of MCA and Charlton Heston. I also call George Wallace, “A racist, who appeals to the most primitive feelings in man”. As a 15-year old I also knew what was the left in the US was basically considered right of the middle in Europe, so whenever I referred to the left in the text I wrote “left”.

The most interesting discovery is one of personal note. In 2000 my gallery sold one of my works to senator Eagleton. I had never heard of him; I thought, but here in this paper I describe Eagleton’s demise as vice-president candidate after he publicly announced that he had suffered several nervous breakdowns, basically crippling McGovern’s campaign for president before it even started.

—

Ari Marcopoulos was born in 1957 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He lives in Sonoma, California. WITHIN ARM’S REACH, the first monograph on Marcopoulos’ work, was published in 2009. He just finished WHERE THE WIND BLOWS a 60 minute film on his friend, snowboarder Craig Kelly. Marcopoulos will be featured in the 2010 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

www.ratio3.org/artists/ari-marcopoulos
www.exfed.blogspot.com

— Here’s a look at my studio, the Boat Room, where I write and record my songs. I made my record here, as well as various other projects. This is also where the Feelies rehearse. I think the environment plays a big part in the process of creativity and I find this room to be very inspiring.

—

Glenn Mercer is the lead singer/guitarist/composer for the Feelies, the recently re-united alternative band from Haledon, New Jersey. He released his first solo album WHEELS IN MOTION in 2007. He also was a member of Wake Ooloo, Yung Wu, the Trypes and the Willies. He is currently writing songs for an upcoming Feelies record.

REMEMBERING PARKER

Franklin Parker, performance participant, CEREMONY FOR FREEWAY FETS, 1978.
Headdress constructed & performance orchestrated by Senga Nengudi.
Photo by Roderick “Quaku” Young.

Parker was a trip! Born in Pittsburgh, PA, we met in California by Venice Beach. Later our friendship was cemented in L.A. in the back end of the 70s. We connected on the grounds of our desire to move art forward in our own way. We were a part of an artist collective that needed to stretch beyond what was considered the Black art norm of the time, a loose band of visual artists wanting to explore performance through our cultural matrix.

From left to right: Parker, WIRE CABLE, circa 1980s. Parker MATTRESS WALL ART, circa 1980s. Parker, WIRE CABLE, circa 1980s.

David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Parker, Barbara McCullough (filmmaker), Ulysses Jenkins (videographer), Houston Conwill and I, amongst others, would utilize each other to thrash out ideas and methods of doing. All of Los Angeles was our playground. This thrashing out took place on the shore line of Venice & Malibu beaches, abandoned swimming pools, under the freeway, assorted city parks, even during the demolition of a decades old Catholic school and the like.

Ulysses Jenkins & Franklin Parker, FLYING, performance, 1982.
Barnsdall Park, Hollywood.

We each had our own careers, but our time together provided communal support when there was little support to be had then outside of ourselves. Parker was an integral part of that merry band. He brought his own brand of cool & wired nuanced complexity (like his namesake Charlie Parker) to anything we did, as well as his own individual works.

Another casualty of the Big “C”, weak, yet still A sharp, this is the last drawing he made before the ancestors welcomed him back home.

Parker we love you~
Franklin Parker ~ 1945-2001
—

Senga Nengudi was born in Chicago, raised and educated in Los Angeles and Pasadena, with a year of post grad study in Tokyo, Japan. She resided in New York during the early 70s and now lives in Colorado. Interested in the visual arts, dance, body mechanics and matters of the spirit from an early age these elements still play themselves out in ever changing ways in her art.

www.sengasenga.com
www.aapaa.org.com (African American Performance Art Archive)

STILL LIFES ARRANGED AND PHOTOGRAPHED IN THE STUDIO, 2009-10

These compositions are the starting point for my paintings.
—

Lesley Vance’s work will be on view in the 2010 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Other group exhibitions include Sam Moyer & Lesley Vance & Stan VanDerBeek (The Front Room, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis), Rich Aldrich, Zak Prekop, Lesley Vance (Roger Björkholmen Galleri, Stockholm), and Painted Objects (Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York). Recent solo exhibitions include Finer Days (David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles) and Lesley Vance and Violet Hopkins: Against The Sky (Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London).

www.davidkordanskygallery.com

MY OWN PRIVATE LIBRARY

— Book collecting is and has always been for me an overwhelming experience, both physically and psychologically and emotionally as well. Poets and writers are inveterate collectors of books. Museum directors and curators, I imagine, come in for a close second or in some instances beat out the competition. I once got a glimpse at Adam Weinberg’s collection when he moved back to New York in his new position as director of the Whitney. His library is as daunting as it is tall. I knew Henry Geldzahler’s collection pretty much, having visited his flat on numerous occasions. Ditto.

When I began jotting down notes, as what to say regarding my own experience with collecting books for fifty years now, I found myself getting caught up in a labyrinth of my own imagining for which I might not be able to break the spell. That’s how dangerous it could become—and so I’ve decided not to revisit every experience I’ve had with my books. Suffice to say, it was never a marriage of convenience, but an outright passion! So what I’ll do is start at the very beginning and attempt an incredible leap of faith to where I am now.

This has involved many back-breaking moves, East Coast and West, and at great cost; a down-sizing here and there; a shifting of specific collectible interests; at the very least three incarnations out of necessity; and on occasion a certain small number that became irretrievably lost along the way.

While hanging out with Elsa Morante at her flat in the Via dell‘Oca in Rome, I happened to glance over to one of her Danish Modern bookcases and noticed a whole grouping devoted to but one author, Robert Nathan (Yes, the Robert Nathan of Portrait of Jennie fame). I asked if I might borrow one to read—Elsa said she never lent out books, that she’d rather give me a book as a gift than wait for it’s impossible return. A lesson well-learned.

When I was a kid growing up in the Bronx, there was hardly a book in the apartment. My mom read the Daily News and I would pour over the Sunday Coloroto supplement. My dad who was not very fluent in English would read Il Progresso, an Italian weekly, as I recall. He was also for a time a union member of the ILGWU (International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) as a professional tailor back in the 1930s and so he was still on their mailing list for the union paper, but I doubt he ever read it. That was as far as reading material went in the household. I still covet my original edition of Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. I haven’t a clue as to who gave it to me.

My love of books started when, after school let out at 3 o’clock, I’d head straight for the neighborhood branch New York Public Library over on Bainbridge Ave. near Fordham Road. It literally became my home away from home for two or three hours. My favorite pastime was leafing through the bound volumes of LIFE magazine, especially the full-page movie ads, and taking out books by John Hall Wheelock and Frank O. Braynard, two authors whose work I admired and whom I would end up photographing many, many years later.

It wasn’t until 1960, my senior year in high school, that I began collecting books in earnest, encouraged by my home-room and creative writing teacher Miss Daisy Aldan. She was the first turning point in my life that led me to become a poet. Around this time I joined the Book-of-the-Month Club, my first membership purchases were a boxed set of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet; Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and the collected poetries of T. S. Eliot and e e cummings. Thus my book collecting began. I’d just turned seventeen.

When I went off to college in the Midwest I shipped out my books to keep me company. The student newspaper at the University of Cincinnati ran an ad for 1st and 2nd prizes for the best student library on campus—$100 prize money and $50 runner-up. I took 2nd prize. Fifty bucks went a long way for someone who was struggling to get by on a shoestring, while also expanding my library. You can’t eat a book!

By the end of the Spring semester, when I flunked all my course work, my library consisted of three or four liquor cartons which I managed to ship back to my parents, who were none too pleased. “Whataya going to do with all these books? Get rid of them”, was the quip.

During the early ’60s my library was rapidly growing at a fever pace and included literary magazines as well. My dad had hightailed it, not leaving a word where he’d gone. My mom, alone in the flat, was always complaining, especially about the books, like they were some kind of threat or something. She was very resentful. It seemed like every time I headed downtown on the D train I’d invariably end up at the 8th Street Bookshop or sometimes at the Gotham Book Mart (where I eventually landed a part-time job as a packer in the mail-room. I can still make a mean package). From those forays into Manhattan I’d be sneaking books into the apartment.

Ok. So here comes the big leap. Ready? Watch me. Whew! Just made it, like in a Maya Deren flick.

In 2008, after purchasing the cheapest house on the block in a small town of upstate New York, I managed to re-unite with my library and rekindle that love affair started fifty years earlier. Nearly all my books are with me now, over 5000 volumes and still counting! Four cats as well; cats and books go well together, look what happened to Hemingway! After having some exquisite shelving installed I suddenly realized I’d run out of shelf space!

Walter Benjamin, in his erudite essay Unpacking My Library, remarks that “every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories”. I’m not gonna go there with that. Another one of those labyrinths. So what I’m surrounded with are the thousands of creative souls looking down on me from the comfort of their random places in my life. They are a joy and then I get on with my day.

Doctor Benjamin seems to be asking me about this love affair I’m having: “For what else is this collection, Gerard, but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?” Where do you want me to start, Herr Professor?

Let me say this, though. On the surface, my library may appear chaotic, but I’ll have you know that I know where every book is, or nearly every one. On occasion, I still make a happy discovery! Also, there are entire shelves devoted with love and care to just one author, like yourself even. So there.

Walter Benjamin so beautifully associates the book collector with a return to one’s childhood, that’s what I love about him; he gets it right every time. Yes, here’s where it all began, on those cold winter weekdays after school I’d find myself rushing off to the library of dreams to keep warm with a book and go on a journey. I was ten, then I was eleven. I like to think of my books not just as a collection but as my own private library, replicating those childhood dreams and memories. I find myself still always using it the way one would go to the library, but now I’ve had to put the brakes on. Who am I kidding?!

The irony is that my library will outlive me because I will never in this one lifetime be able to read them all. Which reminds me of a very funny, poignant anecdote in Benjamin’s essay, where someone who’s been visiting Anatole France and admiring his library asks the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?”

I’d better stop here, otherwise I’ll want to seek out Anatole’s books for one of my shelves—that’s if I have any space left! Oh dear.

Gerard Malanga
January, 2010
—

Gerard Malanga is the author of a dozen books of poetry and two books of photography for which his work has achieved an international following over the years. He lives with his four cats amid thousands of books at a country retreat outside New York City where he finds the solitude necessary for his writing. A fanzine, ARCHIVES MALANGA, the first of its kind for a U.S. poet, is currently being produced by Lid magazine, for release later in the year.

www.gerardmalanga.com

[neuespalte]

Gerard Malanga with his high school creative writing teacher, Daisy Aldan, at the exhibit she organized to commemorate her publication of A NEW FOLDER, AMERICANS: POEMS AND DRAWINGS, Spring 1960. Photo credit: ©Archives Malanga.

Carlo Collodi, THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO, illustrated by Frederick Richardson; published by The John C. Winston Co. 1927. Gerard Malanga Personal Collection.

THE HARRELL FILES

— Harrell Lee Litrrell, a.k.a. Vanjohnson Vonjones, is an African American artist living and working in Sylmar, California. Litrrell is a writer of prose and poetry, produces audio recordings, drawings, collages, and photographs. He carries his camera wherever he travels and takes photographs of commonplace subjects and surroundings. Littrell often appears in his photographs, spontaneously handing his camera over to strangers to take his picture. Around music circles, Harell is also known as “Jarell” when he performs as the singer of his rock ‘n’ roll band, “Spacecraft Shuttle Star” who have been active since 1966.

Mr. Vanjohnson Vonjones
13864 Foothill Blvd.
Sylmar, CA 91342 U.S.A.

—

Cameron Jamie (born in Los Angeles,1969) is an American artist. His work has explored and analyzed how the structures of mythology in popular and vernacular cultures are shaped and shared, and the extent to which they participate in the creation of individuals’ fictional worlds and fictional selves. His work has been shown widely and internationally. Jamie was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2006 which traveled to MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2007. He lives and works in Paris, France.

www.gladstonegallery.com
www.galerie-obadia.com
www.bernier-eliades.gr

— In 1980 when I made The Decline of Western Civilization, it was impossible to get distribution. The theater owners said no one cared about punk rock, no one would come to theaters to see a documentary. I finally convinced one unsuspecting Hollywood Boulevard theater owner to give us a single midnight showing. So many punks showed up that the LAPD sent out what appeared to be the entire force. Edward Colver, a brilliant photographer that had himself documented the scene in still frames, captured the moment as proof. Had he not no one would have believed it — hundreds of cops… astounded and bewildered by the sea of Mohawks, leathers and studs. I soon received a letter from Police Chief, Daryl Gates, requesting that I not show the film ever again in Los Angeles.

Realizing the difficulties with distribution of a non-narrative film, I wrote Suburbia. I was fascinated with the movement, especially the squatter aspect. Suburbia only made it into a limited theatrical run, but somehow survived as a cult classic. In 1997, while totally disenchanted with making ‘Hollywood movies’, I saw a resurgence of punk rock and shot The Decline of Western Civilization: Part III. The new punks were virtual replicas of the originals in many ways — music, attitude, style and principals, except now so many more were living on the streets or in squats. If there was anything redeeming about their circumstances, it was the fact that they banded together and formed new families. Most of the kids came from broken homes with abusive parents. I had set out to make a feature documentary about the new music, but as documentaries often do, I was led down a different path. Decline III turned out to be about gutterpunks… squatters, just like in Suburbia.

The Decline of Western Civilization: Part III never got distribution, because the only way for me to get it was if I gave up my rights to the first two films, which I would not do. It’s hard to believe that I made the first Decline thirty years ago. In retrospect, I wonder: does history impact art or does art impact history? As I was making Decline III, I began to notice that so much of the scripted, imagined story of Suburbia which I had written in 1982 had become reality. Maybe I saw it coming or maybe Suburbia paved the path.

Edward Colver, THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION OPENING NIGHT, 1980


SUBURBIA, 1984


THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: PART III, 1997
Photo by John Joleaud
—

Penelope Spheeris is often referred to as a Rock ‘n Roll anthropologist. Spheeris currently lives in Los Angeles with her six cats and four dogs.

‘LIQUID BLACK’ AS AN INCIDENT

— When I prepare exhibitions, it is hard for me to calculate in advance how that will
work technologically. Every new work is born from an incident connected with the
previous one. Sometimes, an incorrect calculation of pressure leads to a tear in the
oil aorta. As a result, on several occasions, oil has spilled in the gallery, splattering
the walls. Once (in Chelsea) it seeped into the galleries below, where the works
of other artists and several installations were located. It’s a good thing they were
insured. The curious thing is that the spattered wall is a ready-made work of Art.
Thus the accident created a new series of works co-authored by oil.

Andrei Molodkin
December, 2009

—

Andrei Molodkin is a Russian artist who shares his time between Moscow, New York, and Paris. In 2009 he represented Russia at the 53rd Venice Biennale and has previously been featured in a variety of publications, such as Art Forum, C Magazine, Art Press, Third Text, Kh/Zh, The New York Times, The Village Voice. He is best known for his 3-dimentional pieces consisting of oil barrels and pipes connected to transparent acrylic boxes, each with a hollow sculpture or phrase inside — half-filled with Chechen or Iraqi oil.

www.kashyahildebrand.org
www.daneyalmahmood.com
www.priskapasquer.de
www.alminerech.com
www.orelart.com

THIS IS IT

— A bit of a departure for me but I have been working on this for the last couple of years believe it or not. The new series of work is called God & Man (after Leopold Godowsky & Leopold Mannes who invented Kodachrome in 1935). The original source material is taken off the internet as extremely low resolution digital files, printed at a high street lab then re-photographed / double exposed onto Kodachrome and then printed again on Cibachrome.

Primarily it’s meant to be a bookending of colour photography through maybe the most cliched (and unifying?) photographic image of all time, the sunset / sunrise. I think I mentioned to you before that these last years I have been struggling more and more with adding to that slag heap of photographs we all moan about and are implicated in and that I had been touched by Joachim Schmidt when he said something like ‘no more photographs till all the old ones have been used up’.

The idea first came to me when I woke from a sleep on a long haul flight and looked out the window onto a crazy beautiful sunset (or a sunrise I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter really, though they are quite different visually… something to do with the particles in the evening air refracting light I think) but you know it was one of those times on a plane when all is still and dark, everyone asleep and then you open the shutter a touch and BOOM straight to the brain. That line from Bladerunner came to mind… you know when Rutger Hauer says ‘I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark…‘. It took me back to a rave south of England early nineties (Is this the way they say the futures meant to feel or just 20,000 people standing in a field. JC) when I took three purple microdots and amongst other things over the course of a long night, hid from the Viet Cong up trees in deep jungle and watched monolithic skyscrapers grow up to the stars before collapsing in on themselves turning the world inside out in a psychedelic demolition day bathed in (what I remember as… don’t you hate it when people bang on about their trips?) red and orange apocalyptic twilight. Life changer. Deep breath.

Well back to the plane window and it got me thinking how much I would like to make a fuck off 35mm film of this endorphin triggering, awe inspiring, (forgive me brother) spiritual / I am but a speck in the Universe experience… but lacking the conviction to fill out an Arts Council application for the hire of a Boeing 747 and a film crew I thought I would take the punk / DIY cheapo approach and make one myself from images I found on Flickr and Google (there about 20 million plus easy). So I scoured the internet and found / stole / appropriated the tiny little files I liked the look of (people put them on very low resolution so they can’t be reused ha ha) printed them and loved them for the way they broke down and then re-photographed them on a rostrum camera onto slide (liked the mix up of analogue and digital, pixel & grain) and tried to figure out a slide dissolve… which after much dicking about didn’t really work. From this I got into the idea of double exposure (the original amateur photographer trick no photoshop… back to basics and also quite filmic). Then I started printing them and realised that this absolutely needed to be analogue so it had to be Cibachrome (which is a dye destruction process with high archival quality and coincidently far more environmentally friendly than other colour processes… also more or less extinct).

The final and most important decision was that I needed to use Kodachrome as it had just been announced that Kodak was ceasing production of what was the first mass marketed colour film. So back to the computer and to Ebay where I bought the film, which once exposed was sent off to the last lab on earth processing it, Dwaynes Photos in Kansas, USA. From these I have the prints made (72 x 48 inch)… and add to the slag heap after all.
—

In the bohemian tradition Gareth McConnell is attempting to cast off the fetters of bourgeois ideology. He has no home, no studio, no agent, no gallery and is currently with his family on an island in South East Asia en route to Australia.

www.garethmcconnell.com

[neuespalte]

Gareth McConnell, from the series
GOD & MAN 2009

NO PASARA…

My experience of life is like looking through glasses that deconstruct.
Looking for a point of distortion: when a car is not a car; when a tree should be there.
Our connections to an object or event – our reactions.

1.

Inside you it travels
Meandering stream

Outside you it devours
The ocean

Touching the screams
No more humanity
All below, sweet beds of boils

2.

Can you become darker in the flames?
Licking your skin

3.

Inside… licking your wounds

4.

Above the shadow
Peering the corner
Allowing the substance

Seeping alone

Wobbling confusion – jumping.
Tedious I know – special effects.

Culpable driving
Surviving

5.

Beware the ventriloquist




6.

Out in the type

Sunk in the type

Between the type

Antelope the type




7.

Forgive the threat
For it is only in your enemies mind
—

Brook Andrew is an Australian artist working with installation, mixed-media, neon and video. He challenges cultural conventions surrounding issues of identity, consumerism and history. These themes inspire Andrew to travel locally and internationally, visiting museum collections and local communities to research and make new work.

www.brookandrew.com
www.tolarnogalleries.com

MY TWENTIETH

1900. My great-grandfather Armand Sante dies, age 49, of pulmonary gangrene, whatever that entails. How he, an illiterate day laborer from southeastern Belgium, came to die in a suburb of Düsseldorf is something I will probably never know.

1910, approximately. My maternal grandfather, Édouard Nandrin, a country boy from the tiny village of Odeigne, is sowing his wild oats in the big city, in this case Liège, where he is employed for a while as a streetcar conductor and inhabits the role with military bearing. It gives him probably the greatest authority he will enjoy in his life.

1920, or actually 1921. My father is born, the one and only postwar issue of his parents, who are by then aged 42 and 33. His father works in the textile mills while his mother stays at home to look after the infant and his older sister, Armande, who is 8. They live in Verviers, in a tenement near the river, in a neighborhood that has been home to the family for centuries.

1930 or so. My mother’s family, tenant farmers from the Ardennes, undertake the hejira to the city in the face of the worldwide economic collapse. My mother is here shown outside their farmhouse, charged with entertaining rusticating city-dwellers who have stopped on their walk for a glass of milk. Very soon she will be living in a tenement flat, surrounded by textile mills.

1940. My mother’s family flees the approach of the German army, for whom Verviers is the first stop in Belgium. By bicycle, foot, and train they will eventually reach Alaigne, in the foothills of the Pyrenées. They will stay for a few months, eating primarily rabbits trapped by my grandfather, until Belgium calls back all the exiles in 1941. My father spends the war in disguise, avoiding being sent to a labor camp in Germany.

1950. My parents marry, in February and wearing dark postwar colors. My father’s prospects are good–he is bright and energetic–although he is largely uneducated, having left school at 14, and he will always stand just a few steps down from the landing on the stairway of success. My mother, who stayed in school until she was 16, works as a secretary in the state family welfare agency. After a few tragically unsuccessful attempts at bringing forth progeny they will finally succeed with me four years later.

1960, or the very end of 1959. My father and I stand by the S. S. Tervaete, the Belgian freighter that will take us on our de-emigration journey from New York to Rotterdam. My parents and I had arrived in the United States the previous February, but they didn’t like the place. Because of various familial tensions, however, we will return to America within six months. My parents will attempt to return to Belgium three more times, the last when they have retired from their jobs, but they will die in New Jersey.

1970. I am in high school in New York City, to which I commute by train and subway two hours each way every day from the New Jersey suburbs. Here I am at an antiwar rally in Central Park (that’s me with the peace button on my shirt). I have arrived at what I think of as the summit of the world. Everything is within my reach in New York, and the intoxication of it is such that I will be expelled from that high school before the end of the year.

1980. The framing and focus of the photograph reflect the circumstances. I am out at night–here at Tier 3, on West Broadway and White Street–and I probably have ingested a complex pharmacopeia of substances. This is what I do most nights. I get by on minimum-wage jobs, intend to become a writer without doing anything much about it, and live most fully within the music that surrounds me.

1990 or actually the last months of 1989. I am receiving an award, wearing a suit, impersonating an adult, with assistance from the male-pattern baldness that has afflicted me in waves since age 17. I am actually a writer by now, with clips to show for it and soon enough a first book. The money that accompanies the award is the first significant sum that I have ever seen. For better or worse I am now charged with an additional load of responsibility.

2000, or to be more precise September 11, 1999. My son, Raphael, is born in Cooperstown, New York, the first and to date only Sante ever to be born outside an eight-block area in Verviers, Belgium. I am a terrified and psychologically unprepared father, and I am just grasping that people are born with personalities. Raphael as an infant is no more a blank slate than I am. His theatrical inclinations and I could almost say his sense of humor are apparent almost the instant he exits the womb.
—

Luc Sante’s books include LOW LIFE, EVIDENCE, THE FACTORY OF FACTS, KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS, and, most recently, FOLK PHOTOGRAPHY. She teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

— The people are holding the snakes, the snakes don’t care. The people are fascinated
by the snakes, the snakes are not fascinated by the people.

PEOPLE HOLDING SNAKES, 2007
—

Eva Rothschild was born in 1971 in Dublin. She lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include the Modern Institute, Glasgow (2008), South London Gallery, London; 303 Gallery, New York (2007), Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich (2006); Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; Modern Art, London (2005). Rothschild’s work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions including Un-monumental: Falling to Pieces in the 21st Century, The New Museum, New York (2007), Tate Triennial (2006), The British Art Show (2005), The Carnegie International, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg (2004). In 2009 she was awarded the Tate Britain Annual Duveens’ Commission.

www.modernart.net
www.303gallery.com

— I always high-jack my fashion shows to talk about culture and politics. The AW09/10 Gold Label collection is called +5°. Somewhere between 400 parts per million (ppm.) and 500 ppm. of CO² in the atmosphere the earth will settle down to a new equilibrium of +5° hotter than now. Our luscious comfortable world will be gone. What is left will support hopefully 1/5 of the present world population. The atmosphere is already 430 ppm. according to the measurements of James Lovelock. He originated the Gaia Theory and is the inventor of the machine which is capable of measuring atmospheric CO². We must plan. I am helping to form a focus group to face the problem on 2 levels: how do we prepare for a world to help survivors; just in case there is time to affect this irreversible event, what can we do?

Read James Lovelock. The present outlook is certainly something we didn’t expect.

James Lovelock in his lab. Image from COSMIC SEARCH: ISSUE 8 (VOL 2, #4; 1980)
—

Vivienne Westwood has been designing for almost 40 years. She first began in 1971 with partner Malcolm McLaren, showcasing their ideas from the shop at 430 Kings Road, London. Together the pair redefined street culture with punk, SEDITIONARIES and PIRATES which led to the New Romantic movement. In 2004, a major retrospective of her works was shown at the V&A in London. It was the largest exhibition of its kind put together for any living British designer. It subsequently toured the world for 5 years and was exhibited in over ten cities. In 2006, her contribution to fashion was officially recognised when she was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire by Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth the Second.

www.viviennewestwood.com
www.activeresistance.co.uk

Maybe God is money
If he is I don’t think that’s very funny
That makes life a game
Where the price is right

—

Llyn Foulkes is an American artist. Born 1934 in Yakima, Washington. Foulkes began exhibiting with the Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles in 1959. By age 30, Foulkes had been given one person exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum (1962), the Oakland Art Museum (1964) and further gallery exhibitions with the Rolf Nelson Gallery, Los Angeles (1963, 64). Through the late sixties into the seventies, Foulkes would create trademark landscape paintings that utilized the iconography of postcards, vintage landscape photography, and Route 66 inspired hazard signs. By 1979, Foulkes returned to a childhood interest in one-man bands. Today he still performs with The Machine regularly on the West Coast.

www.kentgallery.com

OZZY ARMS UP

—

Peter Sutherland is a photographer and filmmaker. Born in Michigan and raised in Colorado, he lives in New York. His first feature documentary, PEDAL, premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in 2001 before airing on Sundance Channel. In 2006 he finished his second feature, TIERNEY GEARON: THE MOTHER PROJECT; an intricate portrait of the artist and her unconventional family relationships. Sutherland has also published numerous artist’s books with powerHouse Books, Nieves, Art Beat Press, and P.A.M. Books.

www.atmgallery.com

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN 1357 AND 1369 MINUTES

— In the spring of 1987 I was finishing a chemistry degree at UC Davis. In what would have been my graduating term, I took a beginning drawing class for fun, taught by visiting artist Scott Bell. Our assignment was to draw the same thing at least once a day in our sketchbook. A Japanese monster toy that spit sparks when you spun its wheels. Having never really drawn before, a new door opened.

Scott Bell, wherever you are, thanks.

A reproduction of Dave Muller’s first ever sketchbook.
Click image to see inside.
—

Dave Muller is an artist/musician/curator/dj. In 1994 he founded THREE DAY WEEKEND, a nomadic exhibition project. Dave Muller was born in San Francisco and lives and works in Los Angeles.

www.blumandpoe.com
www.gladstonegallery.com
www.theapproach.co.uk

Alan Watt, Wu-Tang, Royal Robertson, Funkadelic, Cutting Through The Matrix dot com, Forever disc two, Cipher, Tyson, Easter Everywhere, Inoculation, Simply Saucer…

IMPOSSIBLE, Fall 2009
—

Erik Parker is a New York based artist. He was born 1968 in Stuttgart, Germany. Informed by a variety of sub cultural themes, including music, graffiti and illustration, Parker offers a profound visual experience beyond his intensely layered forms of text and imagery. His work has been widely published and has earned him several awards. He has exhibited in solo shows in Tokyo, Milan, Manchester, Cologne, New York and Los Angeles, as well as in group shows around the world.

www.honorfraser.com

— My self-portraits are most often done when a scheduled sitter has canceled our sitting at the last moment. If I have a strong urge to work and can find no one ready to sit at short notice, I sometimes set up a mirror and paint myself.

The portrait with the white ground was painted on unprepared paper and the other on paper prepared with a dark purple ground of acrylic paint. Though the style of both paintings is similar, the experience of doing each was very different. For the first, I used the white ground of the raw paper for the shirt and the facial highlights. For the second, I mixed opaque white paint with various colors for the hair and to build up the facial highlights.

The two approaches are very different. Using the isolated patches of unpainted paper surface to create the highlights of the first, for the other I painted over the purple ground with ever heavier layers of opaque white paint mixed with color to achieve the flesh tones and highlights.

Painting pictures of myself is for me a hollow experience, since what I enjoy most in my sittings is my sense of identification with my sitter, of getting immersed in the exploration of another personality. By comparison, the experience of identifying with my mirror image seems somewhat redundant, like an impersonation of an impersonation.

Don Bachardy
October 27, 2009

—

Donald Jess Bachardy is an American portrait artist. Born 1934 in Los Angeles, California. He currently resides in Santa Monica, California.

www.cheimread.com

STARLING

—

Photographer Alec Soth was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1969. His work is represented in several major collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His first monograph, SLEEPING BY THE MISSISSIPPI was published in 2004. Since then Soth published NIAGARA (2006), FASHION MAGAZINE (2007), DOG DAYS, BOGOTA (2007) and THE LAST DAYS OF W (2008).

www.alecsoth.com
www.gagosian.com

— The Monster Masher trading cards are an unbound art catalog produced for the Destroy All Monsters archive exhibition Hungry for Death, first shown at the Printed Matter gallery in New York over the summer of 2009. Each card is blended from a variety of sources that contain works or references to the works on display.

The cards can function as a single photo, images that can form a story, a commentary and index from the exhibition or as a chronological diary/journal entry. The card set is also the archive exhibition, and (playing off of Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise) can be rearranged as a portable gallery or ‘traveling museum’.

The deck was inspired by classic horror trading cards from late 1950s and early 60s––Mars Attacks, The Addams Family, Outer Limits, Creature Features, Horror Monsters, The Munsters, and The Twilight Zone––many old-time trading cards became subjects themselves. The deck also surveys my personal journey with Destroy All Monsters and touches on intersections of family history, popular culture, music adventures and my own art practice.

There were a total of 250 hand-numbered sets produced, each containing 40 cards, double sided for a total of 80 images in each deck. They were printed on glossy UV coated card stock and measure 3×4”––a slightly larger format then the standard trading card. The card sets also contained buttons, a small monster toy and an 80 card checklist on two postcards with identification titles and a one line description.

Click on these cards to read some commentary, and glean a glimpse into the Destroy All Monsters way of life.

—

Cary Loren is a filmmaker, musician, photographer and founding member of the Destroy All Monsters collective. He lives in Detroit and is the proprietor of The Book Beat, a visual arts bookstore.

www.thebookbeat.com

FROM THE ARCHIVE [For Willoughby]

Box from Liza Béar archive in Highbridge, the Bronx, inventoried this summer.
Archived images are linked below.

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Unless otherwise indicated all archival rephotography is by Liza Béar, from her archive.
—

Liza Béar is a writer/filmmaker and the author of Beyond The Frame: Dialogues With Filmmakers. She met Willoughby Sharp when she moved to New York in 1968. They founded Avalanche (1970-1976) almost immediately. A facsimile edition of the complete set of Avalanche is being reprinted by Primary Information. www.avalanchemagazine.org

Liza’s reminiscence of Willoughby can be found here

July 2009. Hollywood, California.
—

Evan Holloway is an American artist. Born 1967 in La Miranda,
California. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

www.theapproach.co.uk
www.marcfoxx.com

—

Susan Hiller is a visual artist born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1940. She has been living and working in London since the early 1970’s. Using sound, text, video, drawing or photography, her work has been been recognized for its excavation of everyday phenomena that lie within blind spots of our cultural surround. Her work can be found in the public collections of Center Georges Pompidou Paris and V&A Museum London amongst others.

www.susanhiller.org

—

Jonathan Meese was born 1970 in Tokyo, Japan.
He lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg.

www.cfa-berlin.de
www.diktatur-der-kunst.org

And as to being in a fright,
Allow me to remark
That Ghosts have just as good a right
In every way, to fear the light,
As Men to fear the dark.

“Phantasmagoria,” Lewis Carrol

—

Hellen van Meene was born in Alkmaar, The Netherlands, in 1972. Her recent solo shows include Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany, 2007; C/O Berlin, The Cultural Forum of Photography, Berlin, Germany, 2007; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Holland, 2006; Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, 2006; and a touring show which was first exhibited at Pump House Gallery, London, and travelled across the United Kingdom, also in 2006. She has taken part in various group shows, including ME, OPHELIA, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2008 and FAMILY PICTURES, Guggenheim, New York, 2007. Her fourth monograph, TOUT VA DISPARAITRE, will be released soon by Schirmer/Mosel Verlag GmbH.

Typescript from HARRY CREWS PAPERS, MS 3340,
Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Collection,
University of Georgia Libraries

Carleton Auditorium, University of Florida, Gainesville. ca. 1980,
Photo courtesy of Harry Crews

In 1968 Harry Crews published THE GOSPEL SINGER, and in 2006 he published his 20th book, AN AMERICAN FAMILY: THE BABY WITH THE CURIOUS MARKINGS. Now retired from the University of Florida where he taught for thirty years, Crews often wrote as hard as he has often lived — “Like a house afire,” in his words. Nonetheless he has published two collections of essays and journalism in addition to his seventeen novels. He has also authored a play, BLOOD ISSUE, and his 1978 memoir A CHILDHOOD: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A PLACE is considered by many to be an American masterpiece. A Depression-era tenant farmer’s son, Crews grew up “in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia,” where “stories were conversation, and conversation was stories.” For the past forty years he has lived in Gainesville, Florida, and he intends to keep writing “until the curtain comes down.”

Harry Crews’ collection of manuscripts and personal correspondence is housed in the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, which submitted these materials. Thank you to Melissa Bass and Skip Hullet without whom this entry would not be possible.

THE ASYLUM PROJECT

— In the early seventies I was a young man with a strong interest in art and photography. My upbringing however, had brought me in another direction, to the study of medical science. I was particularly interested in the “ways of the mind”. After highschool I decided to take on work as a nightguard at the local psychiatric hospital, before I started studying at the University of Oslo.

At night, most people sleep. If patients have trouble sleeping, they get medication, and they sleep. The mental hospital was a very quiet place at night, and at some point I took out my camera and took some photographs. I was interested in finding out how the place looked photographed. At the time this was more a result of boredom and experiment than a result of planning and thought. Still, a hospital is very much a hospital, even at night.

My interest in art and photography continued to grow, and finally, I chose that as my profession. After a year of photographic studies at Trent Polytechnic in Nottingham with Paul Hill, Thomas Joshua Cooper and Christopher Seiberling my ideas of photography were clearer.

Through the study of the history, and my own praxis, I had developed a vision, a belief that photographs may be found everywhere, a belief that it is possible to make interesting photographs anywhere as long as there is light. Hence I used to carry my camera around with me at all times.

At some point in the late seventies I realized that my first photographs from the mental asylum were powerful. I started to work as a nightguard again – but this time in order to make photographs from the asylum. I smuggled in my medium format Rolleiflex camera and a small tripod in my bag and continued to work night after night. I even took an occasional photograph of a patient and once posed myself, in my underwear. I told no one at the mental hospital what I was doing, most likely I would not have gotten a permission.

I started to take an interest in the surfaces, textures, the residue of the day gone by, the traces of the actions being performed during the daytime, the quality of the neon light at night. I started to see the loneliness of the place, especially during Christmas. The daytime staff put up the Christmas decoration in a rather arbitrary, sloppy fashion, and I focused on that during the night.

Gradually the photographs started to grow on me, and I was more able to see the story they tell.
I showed the work to Svein Christiansen, a friend who was also at that time the director of the Trondheim Art Museum, and he wanted me to do a show with that work. The first show took place in 1983. The book Asylum was published in 1987. The book had to be handbound and I could only afford to bind 400 copies. In the nineties the american gallerist Holly Solomon saw the book, and wanted to do a show in New York. We had another 100 books handbound for that show. Now the book is very hard to find, one was auctioned at Christie´s this spring.

After the first show I wanted to continue to work on the project, but I did not get any more nightshifts. Most likely the rumour had spread to the direction of the hospital, the photographs were probably considered bad publicity. I had to leave my project at that. Though I never published a photograph of a patient, the pictures are saturated with human emotion – they tell a sad story of loneliness, despair and pain.

Above, an unpublished self-portrait from ASYLUM.

—

Dag Alveng was born in Oslo in 1953. His work has been shown in solo and group shows around the world. His photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums in America and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedeijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; and Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum. Alveng has published several books, among them ASYLUM (1987), THE SHIPYARD AT SOLHEIMSVIKEN (1990), LAYERS OF LIGHT (1995) and SUMMER LIGHT (2001). He has organized many exhibitions. Between 1986 and 1996 he commuted between Oslo and New York, and now lives in Oslo.

www.alveng.com

ROSIE (2006)

— This is a cell phone portrait of my dog, Rosie, in a park in San Diego during the last year of her life. I was kind of obsessed with writing poems she appeared in always, but as the walks slowed and her strength weakened I just became obsessed with her death and her relationship to it. I mean I realize that is a romantic idea and that poets have long had romantic ideas about dogs and death i.e. Rilke, but as a figure who occupied my “I” for almost seventeen years it was at least a deeply experienced romanticism. Here I see her pondering her mortality. If a dog could do that she would either do it in terms of light or food, the presence or the lack of one or the other. I guess the dogs or people she is surrounded by also figure into the constellation of the dog’s identity but since I mostly walked her during the day it’s patterns seemed to be the place where both of our obsessions met. She virtually died eating; having had a handful of carne asada fed her just before she went into the room. Interestingly I’ve not so much gained weight as seen it shift since she died especially around my waist and hips. I could credit it to the damage driving does to a former and now again New York body, but I think it’s about the walks I took with her for nearly seventeen years and how they inadvertently consumed calories and so now in effect my body is a memorial to hers. I have a little dead dog wrapped around my waist and hips. So walking Rosie continues daily but the longer I live again in New York where I’m always more active I can feel her presence fading.
—

Eileen Myles’s collection of essays THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ICELAND, for which they received a Warhol / Creative Capital grant is just out from Semiotext(e)/MIT. Eileen also writes novels (CHELSEA GIRLS, COOL FOR YOU) and libretti (HELL) and is mainly a poet (SORRY, TREE, NOT ME…) They ran St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the 80s. In 1992 they conducted an openly female write in campaign for President. They’re a Professor Emeritus of Writing & Literature at UC San Diego. They live in New York.

94 AT 34, MY GRANDMOTHER AND ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

— Somewhat recently, my ability to remember historical details has been impaired. I had forgotten that my grandmother died. One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in a lecture when my phone vibrated. I looked down to see my cousin’s name. He lives in San Francisco, and we rarely speak. Surely he was calling to notify my immediate family and I of my 90-something-year-old grandmother’s passing.

The next morning, I spoke to my sister, “B. called me last night. I think he was calling to tell me that our grandmother died.” My sister answered, “but Lisa, she’s already dead.” I had forgotten. Apparently, it was just last year that he had called to let me know—and helped facilitate the ordering of a flower bouquet on our behalf, for the funeral.

Shortly after my cousin’s phone call, I was chitchatting with two people following the aforementioned lecture. We were talking about movies. I relayed that BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), was to be screening Alain Robbe-Grillet films next week. I added, “Not the ones where he was the screen-writer, but the films that Robbe-Grillet wrote and directed himself, like L’Immortelle and Trans-Europ-Express.” One person in our trio then asked me if Robbe-Grillet was still alive. I answered, “…I think…so…didn’t he recently write a book called Repetition or something like that?”

The next morning, after I had spoken to my sister about my grandmother, I realized that Alain Robbe-Grillet was dead too. On the day he died, I had texted a friend with the following postmortem communiqué: “Robbe-Grillet died.” My friend and I had this morbid tradition of sending each other truncated “Who Died” texts every now and then (“Yves Saint Laurent died”, “Boris Yeltsin died”, “Bergman AND Antonioni died!”—dreading the “David Bowie died” text). But going back to Robbe-Grillet, the day of his death, I had read at least three obituaries from various sources.

Robbe-Grillet’s writing from the 1950’s and 60’s had inspired me for several consecutive years. I liked the way his novels rhythmically lulled me into a pensive and nonproductive state. In sharp contrast, my grandmother had barely any effect on me at all—we were not close. Even with the mediation of an expert translator (the Richard Howard equivalent for Cantonese!), I doubt I would have found much in common with her. But still, she was my last surviving grandparent, a minor historical detail to be remembered.

If we meet, feel free to remind me about all of the above.

Lisa Tan, TWO IN THE LABYRINTH, 2006, c-print
—

Lisa Tan received her B.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern California (USC). She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work draws from personal and collective history, particularly in the realms of literature and cinema to deal with longing and loss as constant conditions of being. Many of Tan’s works involve an interest in the conditions of nighttime and solitude as experienced in the context of iconic urbanism. Her work is in the current issue of Blind Spot (#40), and has been recently exhibited at venues such as El Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and Kadist Art Foundation (Paris). She spent last spring in Dijon doing a residency with Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain – Région Bourgogne (FRAC Bourgogne).

www.lisatan.net

COLLECTING + MATERIALS + FORM + PERCEPTION + SURFACES

— When reeling in the line from art and pop what makes the environment so different today, as opposed to fifty or one hundred years ago, is that the real world of Web 2.0 keeps your mind in the ether. As images transfer to hands, file extensions get trashed and everything sourced, found, junked; then somehow materializes again. Putting everything back together, the image of the object never returns as it normally should. This makes perfect sense to me: it is the battle of representation rather than the reality itself that concerns me most. Things can always be a bit more insane.

Work in progress, 2009
—

Misha Hollenbach, one half of antipodean “life partnership” art / design / fashion / publishing / etc. team Perks and Mini (P.A.M.). Born last century. Lives and works in many languages, times and places. Feels the future holds the keys to the past.

www.perksandmini.com
www.pambook.com

THE CLASH

The Clash live at the Royal College of Art on 5 November 1976 (© John Ingham). The show ended when Joe Strummer dropped his guitar, leapt off the stage and attacked the long-haired students who had been pelting them with beer mugs. They were rolling around in front of me while the Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog sucked in all the air –- a synaesthesia of violent confrontation.



THE SEX PISTOLS

The Sex Pistols live at the Notre Dame Hall, Leicester Square, 15 November 1976 (© John Ingham). I’m at the very back left. It’s the first time I’ve seen the Sex Pistols, and I’m fascinated: within two songs I’m up at the front, watching the crowd spitting on the TV crew who are filming the event. (To see the clip, go to www.youtube.com)



THE CLASH GRAFFITI

Frame 34, Uninhabited London Series, January 1977 (© Jon Savage). The city seemed poised between Victoria dereliction and Bal-lardian hyper-speed. The only signs of life came from the Punk Rock groups, which is why the sequence ended with this photo taken underneath the Westway. Everything to one point. Black and white, as stark as the choices made.
—

Jon Savage was born in 1953 and was raised in West London. His books include ENGLAND’S DREAMING: SEX PISTOLS AND PUNK ROCK (1991), TIME TRAVEL (1997) and TEENAGE: THE CREATION OF YOUTH 1875-1945 (2007). He was the writer on the award winning documentary JOY DIVISION (2008). Jon Savage lives in North Wales.

www.jonsavage.com

— My 10 Favorite Biographies of Drug Addicts, Alcoholics & Sybarites
(In No Particular Order)

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay
By Nancy Milford

Nico: The End
By James Young

Lee Miller: A Life
By Carolyn Burke

Traci Lords Underneath It All
By Traci Elizabeth Lords

De Kooning
By Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell
By Marilyn Manson and Neil Strauss

Edie: American Girl
By Jean Stein and George Plimpton

Been There, Done That: An Autobiography
By Eddie Fisher and David Fisher

A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles
By Millicent Dillon

No One Here Gets Out Alive
By Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman
—

Marilyn Minter was born in Shreveport, Louisiana and currently lives and works in New York. She has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions including a show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2005. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Miami Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Minter was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. This spring Minter had a solo exhibition at Salon 94, New York. In September, both the Zaha Hadid designed Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati and the newly opened contemporary art space ‘La Conservera’ in Murcia, Spain will present installations of Minter’s work, including large scale projections of her video, Green Pink Caviar.

www.salon94.com
www.laurentgodin.com

GESCHICKT

— This is a selection of photographs sent to me over the last 2 years. ‘Geschickt’ in German means ‘well crafted’ and ‘sent’ at the same time. These are photographs by artists and non-artists that I like a lot.

—

Walter Dahn was born 1954 in St.Tönis/Krefeld, Germany. From 1971 to 1979 he studied at the Art Academy Düsseldorf, being the last master scholar of Joseph Beuys. During the 80’s, Dahn gained an international reputation as one of the leading painters of the artist group MÜLHEIMER FREIHEIT. After exploring a variety of different medias, he now concentrates on painting, taking inspiration from found images, song texts and poetry. In 1995, Walter Dahn was nominated professor of fine arts at the University of Art in Braunschweig, Germany. He lives and works in Cologne.

www.spruethmagers.net
www.elisabethkaufmann.com

DARK ALBUM

— Make of this what you may: We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or so, at least, I have been told. The princess is caged in the consulate. The dog barks and the sybarite sleeps on the sixteenth floor, dreaming perhaps of empty deserts from which the smoothened boulders of history have recently rolled. The landscape of this dream is level like the ocean, which it is not. Its surface bears the record of existences other than our own. It is the vacant lot into which all dreams of final theories, departure countdowns, sermons, and suicides have been decanted. Its geology is the sand of Borges and the rock of Smithson. Its presence is the non-site of the unrealized idea, the dark matter of excerpted testimony, of lip syncs and Park Hyatts, of shooting stars and narrative trails. It is where we go to transcribe our beliefs.

But this is a place that doesn’t necessarily exist except in the mind of the self-described woman with long straight hair who wears a migraine and a bikini to every eruption of zeitgeist, waiting, perhaps, for the tidal wave that will not come. Next to the bright rictus of her social ring flash is the man who wears headphones and darkness tuned to the residues of silence, of drum trigger and distortion. A skeleton attached by earpods to an iPod, he is the librarian of his own metal congress. Choosing loneliness over vulgarity has become a national pastime for those who live, like him, with an apprehension of what it might be like to open the door to a stranger and find that the stranger does indeed have a knife. And now it seems that stranger is all around us in the malevolent conga line of images and events, of hooded prisoners and un-Genevered conventions, suicide bombers and sex videos, Tinkerbells and mink-lined mukluk boots. These are the narratives that couldn’t be dreamt because they have indeed come to pass.

Joan Didion described a time, around 1971, when she began to doubt the premise of all the stories she had ever told herself; a common condition, but one she nonetheless found troubling. Different sounds now fill the empty lots and the angle of those daylight political shadows may have changed. But now, more than ever, we seek to find the narrative line that strings together ever more disparate experiences, that makes sense of worlds where it is possible to watch porn and preach religion at the same time. For the man with the basement headphones and the woman on the sixteenth floor, that sense may be one of competing theories, the most workable of multiple choices drawn from the offerings of creationism, intelligent design, bad gurus, and the policy voodoo otherwise known as government rule. Some, if not all, of this abiding uncertainty inevitably seeps into the things we make.

In this view, the groundwater from which we drink has already been contaminated, and perhaps Victor Hugo was right all along to claim the sewer as the resting place of all failure and effort. And as far as I’m concerned, any choice carries the potential for abandonment and betrayal, not just those of the political sermonizers, whose dreamworks are devised to obscure any intelligence that might trouble the dreamer, but also those of common neurasthenics, like myself, who rub themselves up on a daily basis against nameless derelictions of personal conscience, dubious sexual conducts, inexplicable bereavements, jackknifed relationships, and other proteins of normalcy and fear.

And so we look out from places like these, places of personal moral scrutiny, into the cloudy imperium of national conscience. In an effort to discover senses greater than our own, we turn from local malfeasance to primal decree, hoping, perhaps, that in the interrogation of notions about how we came into being might also be found the template of our own creative aspiration. But the turn from the sewer to the wellspring offers few reassurances. After all, the view that we, along with the rest of the earth’s plants and animals, have evolved via the accumulation of the tiny fraction of random mutations that proved useful— a view that commands solid majorities in most of the developed world and has the near-unanimous support of scientists everywhere—turns out to be just one option in an equal opportunity buffet that has science and superstition served up side by side.

And, as our least privileged die in crusades conducted against the infidels of progress abroad, faith-driven anti-rationalism at home unravels the premise of social evolution, dumping it without regard like the secular fuel of an airliner bound to go down. On this, the bad-weather channel, we learn that science is marginalized precisely because it now lies outside the interests of the governing conservative coalition. That’s why the White House—sometimes in the service of political Christianism or ideological fetishism, more often in obeisance to the baser motivations of the petroleum, pharmaceutical, and defense industries—has altered, suppressed, or overridden scientific findings on global warming; pollution from industrial farming; forest management and endangered species; environmental health, including lead and mercury poisoning in children and safety standards in drinking water; missile defense; HIV/AIDS; and nonabstinence methods of birth control and sexually transmitted disease prevention. That may also be why, in contemplating the abduction of American democracy, I can only understand it in terms of a loss of faith in my own method and powers of narration. At once seduced and abandoned by those narratives that supported the endeavor of finding and making images that can adequately reflect the mendacity of our sad and frightened times, it’s easy to understand why Gitmo has become a verb as much as a place, why blindness in faith and in war has cast its shadow across all descriptive effort.

Let me go further. I do not know why I did or did not do anything at all. Perhaps it’s because fighting for peace is indeed like fucking for virginity. Wrong means to a right end. Perfect anodyne solution to a situation where nothing is true and everything is permitted. The Situationists, at least, got that much right. Ours is indeed a culture of palindromes that achieves its full despair-producing effect through the recognition that our sense of the beginning is arrived at only through our knowledge of the end. In foreign as in personal policy, we have become accustomed to graduating through all rituals of self-annihilation in similarly unseemly haste, as if hesitation of any sort would be to open oneself up to the objections of rationality, or to expose a lack of steel for this premature confrontation with the end. In this cultural mosh pit, boredom and violence find their perfect détente. Slamming quickly through homegrown pleasures to the importation of other more threatening species of blankness, we create out of circumstances and predilection our own self-styled laboratories for testing death. Hence the prevailing darkness, the litter of broken pixels, the preference for black paint on top of embroidery, gnomic haikus, and SMS exchanges over rhetorical dialectics. These are the cultural products of the good-faith inroads we made toward the extinction of personality as sought by adolescence and clung to in adulthood as a hope unfulfilled. They are also the fatalities of ignorance and innocence, the collateral damage of our personal wars.

Honking helps, and war in this case seems to be the answer. Militarizing against evil, terror, and drugs gives local cant to global abstractions. In foreign and domestic policy, the caricature of the evil-doer has become a one-size-fits-all boogie man as effective in the mobilization of American might against one-eyed Muslim clerics— our version of Rambo versus the Hobbit— as it has been at home, where the rural fabric is being torn apart not by the consolidations of corporate farming but by high school kids freelancing as chemists. But in truth it’s not the meth-lab aneurisms that darken the CAT scan of rural North America. Rather, it is a more insidious, sub-audible Armageddon that leaches out from the prescription pads of the pharmaceutical interests and into the heads of those for whom the Esperanto of Xanax has created a language of pain management, a muffled syntax of absent subjects and late-in-the day verbs. Everything around has the soft, disinterested feel of conversations belonging to others.

As with our heads so we furnish our homes. In the vicinity of airports and other spaces recognizable by the failed prevalence of any history, we buy into flat-pack socialism turned to a profit— sensible Scandinavian furniture that measures in the metric system and suggests the region’s famous long winters and high suicide rate. Dave Hickey may have been right when he described his personal Vegas as “the only indigenous visual culture on the North American continent, a town bereft of white carpets, ficus plants and Barcelona chairs— where there is everything to see and not a single pretentious object to be scrutinized.”1 From such a lack the isolation of substance can itself become a state of interest.

And if we have become used to a type of art that speaks in ad hoc responses to the driving forces of the market and taste, we have also become accustomed to the platitudes that seek to make sense of the senseless by incorporating the things we know among the things we don’t and perhaps never can. Here our art is served as seismograph, alert on the fault lines of culture to every tremor of the fashion plate. And while it would be not only curious but wrong for the texture of now not to reflect these uncertainties, it is also hard not to think of the dark troika of dislocation, dreaming, and dread as narratives told only in self-defense. The woman on the sixteenth floor and the man whose world is drowned in distortion have in common the intuition that these stories we tell ourselves in order to live may yet be inadequate. Their descriptions fall short in ways not fully understood. They leave me consulting menus of strange choices and calamitous consequences. Meanwhile, I receive emails and texts like nighttime companions, each with its insinuation of personal literature. I see typed passages in my sleep, underwater texts, almost decipherable. Looking at this carnival of unnecessary ideas, it’s easy to imagine them as the portents of other, better-rehearsed ends. At the same time, each local refusal of the narrative overview allows the bad disjunctive idea to breathe its own air. And with the inhalation of this ambivalence comes the exhalation of contradiction. And so we recognize ourselves encoded in the rhythm of these minor graces, and what, after all, is there not to like about that? Man, these antidepressants really are strong.

1. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), 23.
—

Neville Wakefield is a writer and commentator on contemporary art, culture and photography. He currently is creative director for Adam Kimmel Projects and co-creative director of Tar Magazine, first issue released, October 2008. He is also senior curatorial advisor for PS1 MoMA and the curator of Frieze Projects at the Frieze Art Fair. Among many projects, he is a co-founder and co-producer of DESTRICTED, a series of films that address the issue of sexuality in art. He most recently curated the exhibition BUILT TO SURVIVE THE REAL WORLD, in January 2009, at Andrew Roth Gallery in New York.

— Here are two related pieces: Self Portrait 1972 and 1972, created in the same week mid July 1972. They are from a memoir in progress, The Electric Kid, about my initial year as a writer, or in this case a poet. They mark a definitive turning point in my career. Both works made in London, England, were inspired by an extraordinary woman with whom I had just had a passionate love affair in the north. She released me from the strangle hold of other egos, cutting me loose to be myself. I was 21 and lived in Philadelphia.

Self Portrait 1972 presents a radically different face than the one on the cover of my first book of poems published three months earlier, In America. This is the first live picture of me, which reveals the face of punk three years before it emerged. 1972 was the first poem I wrote directly from my mind. Previously I had been writing under the influence of minimalism. 1972 is not just a list of names, it also opens up on its broadest scale the living, breathing universe of the counterculture that year. The darkening in bottom left hand corner is intended. It was also an introduction to the mythology of the counterculture, which I would dedicate my life to writing one year later.

—

Victor Bockris is the author of eleven non-fiction books, including a trilogy of portraits of Muhammad Ali, William Burroughs and Blondie, as well as a trilogy of biographies of Andy Warhol, Keith Richard and Lou Reed. He is currently writing a trilogy of memoirs.

— “It’s not you, Billy. It’s this town, it’s the people we know.”

Central Library, Manchester, 1976.
The young woman seated on the right was a librarian.
She left Manchester shortly after I took this photograph and
went to work in a boutique on the Kings Road in Chelsea.

Postcard from Morrissey to myself.
—

Linder Sterling is a visual artist, performance artist and musician. A well-known figure of the Manchester punk and post-punk scene, Linder co-founded the band LUDUS in 1978. She is known for her montages such as those featured on the record sleeves of BUZZCOCKS, LUDUS and MORRISSEY. Many of her works were published in the 70s punk fanzine THE SECRET PUBLIC which she founded together with Jon Savage. In 1992 Linder published MORRISSEY SHOT, a collection of photographs of her close friend Morrissey, taken on his 1991 tour. A monograph of her works, LINDER WORKS 1976-2006, was published by Jrp/Ringier. Linder recently collaborated with the fashion designer Richard Nicoll for his A/W 2009 collection. She has exhibited internationally and is represented by Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.

1) NEXT TO BED

Tissue box (Tempo)
Alarm (Braun, Quartz)
Alarm (Tempo, Quartz)
Claude Arnaud, Chamfort – Die Frauen, der Adel und die Revolution
Berliner Zeitung, 30-31/12/06, Page 4/5, Der Koch des Jahres
Henning Mankell, The Man Who Smiled
Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien Band 2; Männerkoerper – Zur Psychoanalyse des weissen Terrors
Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word – A Language History of the World
Karl Schloegel, Marjampole – Europas Wiederkehr aus dem Geist der Staedte
Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien Band 1 – Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte
Harper’s Magazine, August 2004
Remote control (Sony Trinitron, color TV)
Tin of liquorice pastilles, Liquirizia Due Sicilie (Leone / Torino)
2 packets of condoms (Curafam DeLuxe)
Red light lamp (Philips Infraphil)
Nose spray (Safeway)
Skin lotion (Bepanthol Roche, 400ml refill bag)
Lettre International 72″, spring 2006
Der Feinschmecker, December 2006
E. Bischoff / F.S. Meyer, Architektonische Formenlehre
Lettre International 71″, winter 2005
Pair of shoes (black, size 44, Canali / Italy)

2) ON TOP OF GRAND PIANO

9 CDs, Einstürzende Neubauten, Weingeister
White silk dress inside plastic bag (Real supermarket)
Berliner Zeitung, 23/03/07, Page 26, Lieber tot als ohne Selbstwiderspruch – Raymond Pettibon’s Musical über den Weatherman in den Sophiensaelen
Cover, lipstick (Dermatologica / Los Angeles, CA / USA)
Innocent When You Dream – Tom Waits: The Collected Interviews
Boris Akunin, The Winter Queen
Tony Parsons, Als wir unsterblich waren
Annemarie Firme, Ramona Hocker (Hg.), Von Schlachthymnen und Protestsongs
Recharger (Nokia)
CD-R Fishman Bass with info letter
Mario Vargas Llosa, Ein trauriger, rabiater Mann – Über George Grosz
Heiner Bastian (Hg.), Ron Mueck
Teacup (Arcopal / France)
Lip balm Blistex (Blistex Inc., Oak Brook, IL / USA)
Peppermint lollies Mentos – sugarfree (Perfetti Van Melle, Da Breda / The Netherlands)
Catalogue Drap-Art 06
Bowl (Arcopal / France) with green Tee (Lung Ching / China)
CD (in stylized cigar box), Egobar, Heiner Mueller – Ajax zum Beispiel
Sake glass (hand blown, Japan)
Carry case for digital camera, SonyCybershot
Laptop with power cord (Apple-Macintosh Wall Street)
CD Larry Young, Lawrence of Newark

3) ON TOP OF CUPBOARD

Document file (plastic, black) with user instructions for electronic goods, warranty papers
Mini-TIP, December 2001
Ruler (Leitern-Maiwald-Gerüste)
Matches (Europa-Hölzer),
Cassette (Bargeld Gut, Lala, two mixes)
Cassette (TDK SuperCDing 90 / gramophone version Happy End)
Cassette (TDK / Artgenossen „94″)
Leather bag (Targus, schwarz),
CD-R Klaverna
CD booklet Przeboje Henryka Warsa z lat 1927-1939
CD E. Wedel (Danone Polska)
CD Wspomnien Czar, Vol. 2
CD Wspomnien Czar, Vol. 2
Akku (Apple Macintosh G3)
Boules set (France)
Cardboard box with photos and a roll of color film (Fujifilm / Japan)
Plastic bag with liquorice cats
Plastic bag with chinese throat lozenges
2 instant cameras Funsaver 35 (Eastman Kodak Company / Mexico)
Instant camera Imation Magic (Imation Ltd. / UK)
Instant camera Quicksnap Jeans (Fuji Magnetics GmbH, Essen / Germany)
Instant camera Film in 24 +3 (Konica Corporation / Japan)
Box, Ricola Zitronenmelisse (Ricola AG / Switzerland)
Box, Ricola Kraeuter Original (Ricola AG / Switzerland)
Box, A. Vogel: Echinacea Kraeuter-Bonbons (Bioforce AG / Switzerland)
Bottle, Speyside Single Malt Scotch Whisky, Balmenach Distillery: Cask 1765, distilled 1976
Cylindrical glass vase
Fisherman’s Friend, Anis (Lofthouse of Fleetwood Ltd. / UK)
3 boxes Minox Minocolor color film
Hip flask (metall)
Cord, approx. 1.5m (color: green / white)
Cord, approx. 2m (color: white)
Hat brush
Eraser (blue)
Tablets Solidago Steiner (Steiner & Co., Berlin / BRD)
Nasal drops Olynth (Pfizer CHC, Karlsruhe / Germany)
2 A/V-Scart adapter
FM3 Buddha Machine (white / PRC)
5 batteries AA (Duracell / EC)
Nasal drops Euphorbium compositum (Heel GmbH, Baden-Baden / Germany)
Spray paint Aero Decor (Union-Chemie, Berlin / Germany)
Leukoplast (Beiersdorf AG, Hamburg / Germany)
3 adapter (international / UK, international / USA, international / Australia)
Travel sewing kit (Hotel Mercure)
Travel sewing kit (Hotel Inter Hotel Panorama Praha)
Vitamins Orthomol M, 1 month pack (Grapefruit flavor / Orthomol GmbH, Langenfeld / Germany)
CD booklet
Piece of paper with software serial number
3 CDs, Sony System Recovery Software
2 CD-Rs (TDK, unlabeled)
Postcard (image: St. Petersburg’s castle bridge)
Envelope
Glasses (Flexon 606, Marchon, San Francisco, CA / USA)
—

1959 born in Berlin. 1980, formation of the group EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN, as lead vocalist. From 1984 to 2003, guitarist of NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS. Numerous concert-tours through Europe, North and South America, Australia and Japan. Works as composer, author, actor, singer, musician, performer and lecturer in almost any field of interpretative art.

— I have always maintained an interest in uncovering photographic works that were neglected, never fully realized, or in need of reinvigoration. Here are three publications, released under PPP Editions, which illustrate this best.

Daido Moriyama, ’71-NY, 2002

’71-NY (2002) is an expanded version of Another Country in New York, a book Daido Moriyama made in 1974. He brought a Xerox machine into a Tokyo storefront, while outside people would line up to get a copy. Another Country in New York was assembled and staple-bound on location. You could choose from two variant silkscreen covers– a multiple image of the American flag, or an airplane taking off. The Xeroxes within were made from photographs that Moriyama shot during a one-month visit to New York City in 1971 — the first trip he made abroad. There were under 75 images reproduced in the original book, and at most 100 copies were sold.

Upon meeting Moriyama for the first time in Tokyo in 2000, I inquired about the remaining images he shot during his visit to New York. He told me they were still in negative form. There were over 50 rolls of half-frame film, at 72 images to a roll and no existing contact prints. I asked if he would consider allowing me to publish a book of photographs from the unpublished images; he agreed. A month later I received the contact sheets with Moriyama’s selections circled in yellow. I then went through them and circled in red the images I liked and sent them back. Shortly after, Moriyama sent over 200 photographs to reproduce in the book and to my surprise he turned the entire project over to me — asking me to make the book I wanted to and to send him a copy when it was complete.

I felt the only way to approach an edit of such a large quantity of images was to try and recreate Moriyama’s original experience — from the airplane to nearing the city, to being in the hotel, on the streets, during the day, at night, alone. While the title of the original Xerox book referenced James Baldwin’s classic Another Country (1962) — the painful life and eventual suicide of an overly sensitive, young African American man in New York City — for our expanded version I chose’71-NY from a marking that appeared on the contact sheets. I incorporated in the book a bilingual interview I had made with Moriyama about the original Xerox project, along with an excerpt from Baldwin’s Another Country, a commissioned essay on Moriyama’s photographs by Neville Wakefield, a selection of the original contact sheets with our markings on them and lastly, at the opening of the book, a facsimile letter Moriyama sent thanking me for making the book and giving him the opportunity to revisit the intensity of that time in New York.

I also wanted ’71-NY to reference For A Language To Come, a critical photographic book from the 70s by Nakahira Takuma, a close friend and colleague of Moriyama’s and one of the founding members of Provoke. For A Language To Come has a colorful, pop dust jacket while the book itself prints a somber black and white photograph that spans both front and back covers. I was always attracted to this kind of contrast between the jacket and what is hidden beneath, so for ’71-NY I illustrated the cover with vivid blue and white stripes while keeping the entire exterior jacket solid black except for two dye-cut elliptical holes that reveal the underlying stripes like searchlights in the night.

Although ’71-NY is a small chunk of a book, most every double-spread bleeds a single image at close to its original size. To read the vertical images the book must be turned on it’s side, a tradition in Japanese photographic books. There is no text on the jacket, cover or spine. Instead the title of the book, along with the PPP imprint, appears in white type on the spine and cover of a traditional Japanese, corrugated-cardboard slipcase — a carefully orchestrated package.

David Wojnarowicz, RIMBAUD IN NEW YORK, 2004

Rimbaud in New York (2004) is one of my favorite projects. It began with a question posed by the collector Philip Aarons, “What do you know about this series Wojnarowicz made in the late 70s?”

From 1978-79 Wojnarowicz produced a quantity of black-and-white photographs of a young man, posing as himself, wearing a mask with a reproduction of a portrait that Etienne Carjat had taken in the late Nineteenth Century of Arthur Rimbaud. Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud is viewed in locations and situations, both private and public, around Manhattan. Selections of these images had been published in journals and newspapers throughout the late 70s and 80s, but they were never fully realized as a series until 1990. Two years before Wojnarowicz’s death he selected twenty-five negatives and produced a portfolio of 8 x 10 inch prints in a proposed edition of three. He only realized one complete set; the individual prints were sold separately and traded infrequently in the market.

When I visited the Fales Library at NYU where Wojnarowicz’s archive is housed, I looked at and read everything — negatives, prints, diaries, correspondence, and sketchbooks. I realized that Rimbaud in New York, although created early in his career, was a critically important work for Wojnarowicz and in fact there were many more compelling photographs from the series besides the mere twenty-five Wojnarowicz had previously selected. With the assistance of Tom Rauffenbart, Wojnarowicz’s surviving lover and the executor of his estate and his dealers at PPOW, Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pinkleton, I took on the task of reconstructing Rimbaud in New York.

Some of the negatives from the original series were lost; others, from the larger body of work existed only as negatives; still others, merely as contact prints. We had to make new negatives from a hand full of early prints we located and in a few cases, new negatives from contact prints. The master print-technician Charles Griffin was instrumental in seamlessly fabricating the images to match the look of the prints from the original portfolio. I poured through these new photographs and culled a group of sixty-five that had potential, together we narrowed our selection to forty-four. These were editioned in a new portfolio of 11 x 14 inch photographs, which set them apart from the original 8 x 10s and became the raw material for our book.

Wojnarowicz was very versatile as a photographer and was comfortable shooting both vertical and horizontal images. This made it especially challenging to sequence and organize his pictures in a book format. I decided on a portrait-oriented book, presenting the vertical images as full bleeds on one side of a double-spread and the horizontals spanning the gutter and bleeding off either the left or right side, leaving a bold white margin. This layout maintains an active rhythm and presents a quasi-diaristic account of Rimbaud’s life in the city. The book opens and closes with drawings Wojnarowicz made of Rimbaud masturbating. Upfront there appears several pages from Wojnarowicz’s diaries, one showing photo-booth strips of him with the mask on posing with a gun in his hand. I wanted to transform the book into that mask, so I printed the front of the mask on the front cover and the back of the mask on the back cover, with no text on either side.

For the main text I commissioned Jim Lewis, as I specifically did not want a queer writer, no competition for Wojnarowicz’s iconography or personality. I also wanted fiction, not an essay.

Your head turns away:  O the new love! Your head turns back: O the new love!

This is a fantasy, an imagined meeting between a ghost from the time before the AIDS epidemic and a contemporary young man in the street. In addition Tom Rauffenbart presents an account of his first meeting with Wojnarowicz — his perception of him as a lonely man and his insights into the Rimbaud photographs. The book ends with a statement I wrote about the making of the book itself and how the project had unfolded.

Keizo Kitajima, BACK TO OKINAWA 1980/2009, 2009

Back To Okinawa 1980/2009 (2009) is my most recent book. It is a new version of Keizo Kitajima’s serialized, 4-volume publication Photo Express Okinawa (1980). The original self-published books were scheduled for release every other month, over one year, though only 4 volumes were ever realized. Together these 4 volumes form one work — an investigation into the nightlife in Kozu, the red-light district surrounding the Kadena Airforce Base in Okinawa. Kitajima immersed himself in the life of Okinawa’s nightclubs, bars and streets, photographing a mix of American military (chiefly African-Americans), Japanese prostitutes and drag queens.

The original volumes are extremely difficult to procure as a complete set, though they don’t amount to much — 4 slim, 16-page magazines with images of varying sizes bled across each double-spread and onto the covers. They are numbered consecutively and dated by month, along with the exact period of time in which the images were shot, as in 1.1-15. The typography on the covers are printed in vibrant 80s colors but the content is inked up with extreme black-and-white contrast.

I finally found and bought a set from a private auction in Tokyo last year and got in touch with Kitajima to propose republishing the book and making an exhibition. Regrettably, absolutely nothing from that work survived, not the photographs, not the negatives. Kitajima did not even hold in his possession a set of the original 4-volumes. Still he agreed to the project, even though he had nothing to offer! I decided to make the new book by scanning the photographs printed in the original volumes, even those that crossed the gutter — these I had to have digitally repaired. The images are printed on tabloid-size newsprint stock, the covers are screen-printed and then bound by hand-sewn black thread.

Back To Okinawa 1980/2009 reproduces every image from the original volumes in four separate sections, though re-edited. The images still bleed into one another — often across the gutter, hovering in the center of the sheet; they never touch the edge of the page, appearing as puzzle pieces. The silkscreen image on the cover — a street scene from Okinawa at dusk — is reproduced from the original volume #4 and does not repeat in the body of the book. This way the cover is integrated into the sequence of images within. Back To Okinawa tips its hat to Moriyama’s Another Country in New York.

Andrew Roth
—

Andrew Roth specializes in selling rare photographic and artist’s books from the 20th century, while also publishing limited edition books himself under his imprint PPP Editions. He maintains a gallery in a New York primarily exhibiting the work of photographic artist’s from the 60s and 70s, as well as contemporary art. Over the past 10 years he has presented exhibitions by key Japanese artists Makoto Aida, Nobuyoshi Araki, Ishiuchi Miyako, Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Tadanori Yokoo, and most recently, Keizo Kitajima. Along with exhibitions on the work of Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Robert Heinecken, Ed Ruscha, Collier Schorr and David Wojnarowicz. In 1999 he presented PROVOKE, the first exhibition in the US to outline a critical history of rare Japanese photographic books. In 2001 he published THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS — a primer on the history of the photographic book, which went on to help define the rare photographic book market of today. Recent publications include; Larry Clark’s PUNK PICASSO, Leigh Ledare’s PRETEND YOU’RE ACTUALLY ALIVE and MALE: FROM THE COLLECTION OF VINCE ALETTI. Forthcoming from PPP Editions is a fully illustrated, 450-page reference book IN NUMBERS: SERIAL PUBLICATIONS BY ARTISTS SINCE 1955.

andrewroth.com

— In early September 1981 I spotted John Belushi in the New York after hours club AM PM. I asked him when he was going to do a photo session with me for my series Bad Boys: A Compendium of Punks, Poets and Politicians. He said, “Now”. I didn’t believe him, until upon returning home at six am I saw a limousine waiting in front of my building. I turned on the music as John and his entourage filed into my loft. I then directed John to an area lit by strobe lights and I began shooting.

John paced around like a caged animal, fidgeting incessantly. He seemed unable to sit still for my camera, uncanny for someone known for being deliberate and fluid when performing. “Where are the props?”, he queried. I first gave him sunglasses, then a scarf. He requested a beer, then a glass. After donning a black wool ski mask that he took off a nearby mannequin, he settled into a chair. Only his eyes and mouth peeked through the openings in the mask. The large, ominous and anonymous ‘executioner’ had finally reached his comfort zone.

—

Marcia Resnick is a New York City photographer and educator. She is an alumnus of the Cooper Union and California Institute of the Arts. Her images have been shown internationally in galleries and appear in many major museum collections. Her work has been published in numerous counterculture periodicals, from THE PARIS REVIEW to ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE, self-published artist’s books and an autobiography in photographs, RE-VISIONS. Her confrontational images explore aggression, fame and sexuality while echoing the primordial audacity of punk music and punk style.

www.marciaresnick.com

— I recently rediscovered in my pile of clippings, pictures and papers, a diary that I found as a youth. I lived next to the nursing home, which my parents ran for 30 years in Newark New Jersey. Often I would go through the trash and find personal items that had been discarded by residents or their families after the residents’ death. This particular little book was owned by someone who recorded the names and dates of those that passed away. Through the years I got to know most of the residents quite well, then would come their inevitable failing of physical and mental health and then death. My mother was a nurse at the nursing home and would regularly return home teary eyed with the news that Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so had died. This was something I got very used to as a kid– aging and death.

—

Douglas Kolk is an American artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. He is known primarily for his drawing, as well as work in collage and mixed media. Kolk’s work has been shown internationally at galleries and museums including the Helsinki City Art Museum in Finland, Kasseler Kunstverein and Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, and The Royal Academy in London. His work features in several prominent collections including The Falckenberg Collection and the Saatchi Gallery. He is represented by Arndt & Partner in Berlin and Zurich.

FORECLOSED HOMES

— I made these photographs of foreclosed homes back in the mid-90s in Los Angeles —
the City of Dreams. I have always been haunted by these places, thinking of all the broken
lives, and how they mirrored my own unstable childhood.

When I made these images I was interested in places that were ultimately about people.

Homes and home loans are at the heart of our seriously troubled economic situation. 

Walls do talk. I hope these images get at this state we are in, in their own quiet way. 

—

Todd Hido is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist whose work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Face and I-D amongst others. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2001 an award winning monograph of his work titled, HOUSE HUNTING, was published by Nazraeli Press. Since then he has had several other books published, the latest being BETWEEN THE TWO in 2007. He is an adjunct professor at the California College of Art, San Francisco, California.

www.toddhido.com

BRUCE JR.





His family supports him; comradery between he and his fellow racers is strong. We all need challenge and inspiration in our lives. Bruce Jr. finds it on Friday nights at the dirt track in Ventura, California.
—

Keith Malloy can surf anything and everything from 2′ to 25′ waves. For many years he competed on the professional circuit, but eventually decided that traveling and surfing with his brothers and friends, making movies and having the freedom to go anywhere in the world on short notice for a huge swell was more to his liking. As an ambassador for Patagonia, together with his brothers Chris and Dan, Keith has been able to focus on various eco-friendly projects such as reviewing surfboard construction techniques, exploring the use of recycled materials and supporting coastal conservation efforts.

www.woodshedfilms.com

FEAR AND LOATHING GOES TO HELL

— Hunter S. Thompson and I were professional acquaintances for about 20 years. Along with Nick Tosches, James Walcott, Grover Lewis, Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, John Morthland, Chet Flippo and other speedy typists, we were what they used to call “new journalists”—free-style purveyors of “cultural reportage.” We wrote for the same magazines about subjects with the shelf life of milk. We prowled the same airports and lived the same sort of poorly regulated, profligate lives. Hunter, as it turned out, became famous for living this sort of life. Not one of us begrudged him his fame, since the toxicity of lurid fame was our one true subject. As Lester Bangs put it, our job was to report back to the kids in Omaha about the dead girl in the lobby. So if Hunter, who, like us, had seen the blood on the curtains, wanted to be Mick Jagger, he was welcome to it. And he had a right, because Hunter Thompson was a very good writer, a wonderful writer, in fact, for a one-trick-pony who did lyric bile, fear, loathing and rabid denunciation without much else in his quiver.

Given the times, of course, lyric bile was usually sufficient, but, as a writer and a person, Hunter was never in a place you wanted to be. It was no fun, and Hunter himself, whose life was redolent with opportunities for fun, never seemed to be having any, unless he was laying waste to something or someone. While you were chatting up the Valkyrie in the fuzzy, scoop-neck sweater that could barely contain her awesome, quivering breasts, Hunter was spraying the room with a fire extinguisher. This sort of jackass intervention was extremely exasperating. Eventually it became sad or disgusting depending on your generosity.

So if we, his fellow scribblers, begrudged Hunter anything, it was not his lifestyle. It was his writing about his lifestyle and, in the process, outing of our lifestyles by telling people what we were doing. There are some creatures who like to dance but do not like the light, and, for nearly a decade, before Hunter became a “name”—before “rock writer” became a part you played in the alley behind some concert hall—we were all invisible, a tribe of happy, insatiable shadows on the loose. We had all the perks of fame and none of the grief. We got the planes, the limos, the hotels, the good money and the back stage passes. We got the free cocaine, the speed, the smack and the barbits. We got the buffet, the tour jackets, the balconies and the beautiful girls (more of these than you can possibly imagine) that we selected after the band but before the roadies. Best of all, we got to write about music, to live in a bubble of music and music was a subject that never aroused Hunter Thompsons’s passion. He liked rich folks. If they were rich musicians, fine. He liked power players, Johnny Depp, racecar drivers, gun nuts, Hells Angels and politicians.

Hunter wanted to be the Sheriff of Aspen. We wanted to be Robin Hood’s merry men, because, being an inconspicuous merry man meant that when you were finally sated and demented, having sampled the spicy gruel of American celebrity, you could, if you wanted to, put on a Lakers cap and stroll away, just disappear into the night. Jimmy Page couldn’t do this, so he disappeared into his castle. So, when Hunter himself finally disappeared, when he shot himself, my first reaction was that it might have been slightly more respectful of the living had Hunter, who loved explosions, just strolled away into the woods and blown himself into slightly smaller bits. He chose otherwise, of course, and in the days after he died, a couple of journalists called for quotes. I told them that I liked Hunter as much as a lover could like a hater; from which I hoped they could infer that I meant “not very much.”

I did respect the dude, however, so, in his wake, I re-read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I found it as icky now as it did then. Laying the book aside I found myself, for the first time, feeling sympathy for Johnny Depp. My first beef with the book is that nothing happens in it that requires the city of Las Vegas as a setting. There’s no gambling. There are no money rolls, no whales, no whores, no crap tables, no showgirls and no scumbag hustlers. In fact, rereading the book now, at home in Las Vegas, it feels as if Hunter is simply not up to sharing the stage with the local color, no matter how vivid he might have felt. There is, however, a lot of desert highway in Hunter’s book, a lot of blistering Mohave, which Hunter mistakes for the landscape of the American soul. This is way too Hollywood to me. I love the Mohave and there are emptier and more desolate places in Providence, Rhode Island.

At any rate, the events in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could have taken place in any American city during the seventies–and they did, because there were no places then, just blur and drift–just cash transactions, night flights, smoking sections and no airport security. One night in the seventies, I climbed on a little plane to fly from Denver to Aspen. I noticed a songwriter friend of mine curled up in a front row. I stuck out my hand and said it was nice to see him. He made a tiny little wave, and said softly, “Excuse my manners, dude, but I’m just about to die.” I nodded in sympathy and walked past him into the dark plane, quite unaware they he was actually dying, remembering an afternoon in New York when I traded Lowell George’s phone number to a girl in the songwriter’s entourage for a bag of blow. Not my finest hour, although all the girl wanted to do was to fuck Lowell. That night on the plane, I ended up in the back row with two ski bunnies, sharing bumps to the shivering hum of the props in the cold air. When we landed in Aspen, a guy in a chauffeur’s uniform came on board. He lifted my friend out his seat and carried him down to a limo that was waiting on the tarmac. I waved good-bye to the receding taillights, then set off into the swirling, midnight snow after the ski bunnies.

That was the seventies—limos, homos, bimbos, resort communities and cavernous stadiums—the whole culture in a giant, technicolor Cuisenart, whipping by, and I did love it so. Thinking back now, I can’t help but feel that Hunter missed a lot of the stagy grandeur or had no taste for it. He never seemed to have much use for bimbos, or homos, like my songwriter friend, or even for casual romance. I did meet a porn star friend of Hunter’s one night at a dinner in Vail. Her name was Sharon Mitchell and she was a handsome and intelligent woman who now runs an AIDS clinic in Los Angeles. Hunter treated her with the kind of sullen disdain that was what you might expect from a boho snob with a hysterical loathing for working stiffs and service personnel. This remains inexplicable to me to this day. In Hunter’s Vegas book, the waiter at the Polo Lounge is a dwarf; the store clerk is a mongoloid; the room service waiter is a reptile; the lady at check-in is a gorgon, and I hate this. Savaging the weak is not funny, even if you’re purportedly “tripping.” Also, as a matter of journalistic practice, these working stiffs are invariably the sources from whom you get the story, because Lou Reed, for all his candor, is not going to share with a journalist his late night room service order for KY Jelly.

So, finally, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels feverish, squirmy, and genuinely afraid of itself. In this book, as elsewhere, one gets the sense that Hunter never really found his place, that he never really got over the La-Di-Da South, the Derby Cocktail Soiree, the Tea Dance and the strut of Southern Manhood. The manners were gone, of course, but the raw, hot, dirt plantation sense of empowerment remained. One night at a wedding in New Orleans, a cultured woman from Thompson’s part of the South, told me how easily she could imagine Hunter a hundred years ago as a Civil War dandy, in his whale-bone corset, his tailored uniform, his flowing locks, his riding crop, his silver flask and his dueling pistols always at the ready to defend his “honor.”

I could never quite make that leap but I could see the puritan do-gooder with a gun, and I can’t help feeling the bleak shadow of puritan revenge in Thomson’s Vegas narrative, during which the author describes himself committing a whole cornucopia of transgressions and felonies. He drives recklessly, wrecks cars, totes guns, drops acid, snorts coke, sniffs ether and smokes ganja. He insults civilians, walks checks, abandons rentals and dodges tabs at fancy hotels. All of these Mister Toad behaviors, I shamefully admit, were pretty much de rigueur for “cultural reporters” in those years. The strange thing is that, for all the crime and bad manners, for all the macho self-aggrandizement, there is no sin in Hunter’s “Sin City,” and, minus sin, Hunter’s Vegas tastes like sucking pennies.

In fact, there is no sex at all in “Fear and Loathing,” nor is there sex in any of Hunter S. Thompson’s writings, no encounters with whores, homos, bimbos, ex-wives, divorcees or members of the wait staff, and this glaring omission profoundly distorts the milieu he purports to portray. In fact, Hunter’s writing repudiates the primary vibe of the zeitgeist, because the post-flower-child seventies, I can assure you, were very, very sexy all the time—even sexier at night and a whole lot sexier in Las Vegas. In those days, one did not go out on the road with Aerosmith or even Hubert Humphrey to huff glue with celebrities. That is a contemporary kink. You went out there to bathe in the dazzled libido of shiny America—to promenade down glimmering streets with crazy girls in torn t-shirts under a blood-red sky—but not Hunter S. Thompson. Hunter hated it all, and this body hate , I suspect, made him the bard of choice for looky-no-touchy, “Less than Zero” America—the era of Post-Sex-Global-Fury—the age of AIDS and herpes, silicone and botox. This makes Thompson prescient, I guess, Jeff Skilling, avant le lettre, arrogant, wasted, drooling and snarling at the waiter. Oh, please, darling.
—

Dave Hickey is a writer of fiction and cultural criticism. He writes a monthly column for Art in America called Revisions and has served as Contributing Editor to The Texas Observer, The Village Voice, Art Issues, Parkett and Context. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum, Interview, Harpers, Vanity Fair, The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His published books include PRIOR CONVICTIONS, THE INVISIBLE DRAGON: FOUR ESSAYS ON BEAUTY, AIR GUITAR: ESSAYS ON ART AND DEMOCRACY and STARDUMB. Future publications include CONNOISSEUR OF WAVES: MORE ESSAYS ON ART AND DEMOCRACY, FEINT OF HEART: ESSAYS ON INDIVIDUAL ARTISTS and PAGAN AMERICA. Hickey was recently awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for 2002-2007 and received a Peabody Award in 2007 for his work as Project Advisor and Associate Producer for Ric Burns’ PBS documentary on Andy Warhol. Hickey presently holds the position of Schaeffer Professor of Modern Letters at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

— As above, so below. I keep coming across this line in books and even in the occasional pop song. The passage frequently pops up in occult and new age writing. It is a dictum taken from a longer passage of the Emerald Tablet attributed to the Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. The Emerald Tablet was a crucial text used by medieval alchemists and Hermetic orders/secret societies such as the Rosicrucians.

As above, so below: The concept is elegant and simple. We are each an expression of the universe and the universe is an expression of each one of us. In order to understand the microcosm one has to understand the macrocosm, and vice versa. What happens on one level influences every other level.

Der Blaue Reiter, a group of painters working in early twentieth century Germany approached art making as a spiritual vehicle. One of the founding members, Wassily Kandinsky sought to unite the microcosm and macrocosm through ritual, i.e., art. Together with other members of Der Blaue Reiter, Kandinsky embraced the notion of synaesthesia: the condition where senses blend such as hearing a painting or seeing music. Kandinsky was so moved by his own synaesthetic experience during a performance of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin that he cites it as one of the main motives behind becoming an artist. Paul Klee painted ‘fugues’ and ‘polyphonic paintings’ which he viewed as visual expressions of musical spaces through time (tempo). I’ve always been fascinated by total environments, which are capable of transporting you to non-ordinary, heightened, and synaesthetic states. Churches and nightclubs are both spaces charged via multi-sensory media; smoke-filtered colored light; incense/perfume; music; and costume.

Perhaps making art is a method of materially manifesting ideas and ineffable occurrences that exist on the ethereal plane, such as the Akasha. As above, so below. Clusters of light, thought and material aggregate or pass through one another. The boundaries separating ideas, senses and bodies are translucent and permeable.

A friend of mine in London, Susan Finlay turned me on to the British surrealist artist/occultist Ithell Colquhoun. Susan thought that I would prefer Colquhoun’s later abstract and empyreal images to the surrealist, pictorial work for which she is better known. She’s right. For Colquhoun, art and magic were indistinguishable. Her writing, painting and life were inextricably linked to her spiritual explorations. I’m intrigued by the covers of Colquhoun’s esoteric books. The Living Stones (1957), for example, is a cryptic title with an enigmatic design. I am intrigued by the overt femaleness in its symbolism. As a pagan, Colquhoun recognized and drew inspiration from the living energy found in all objects that she came across in the natural world. Based for most of her life in Cornwall, Ithell Colquhoun gave to the magical traditions in Britain: the land of ley lines and sacred stone formations.

Although crop circles appear throughout the world, they are associated with southern England in particular. Somehow this makes sense to me. As inexplicable phenomena go, there seems to be a particularly British air about them; eccentric, downplayed; witty even. I relate to writer/prophet Daniel Pinchbeck’s take on crop circles. Across the cultural spectrum, very little serious attention is paid to them. This is most likely due to the connotations made with pranksters and hoaxes, which hover directly overhead the crop circles. Of course there are many examples of crop circles, which fail to capture my imagination because of crude execution or because they communicate with written words or obvious pictorial symbols culled from popular culture (clichéd alien portraits and stickmen come to mind). They are made rather than appear. As visual communication, these examples fail to work beyond an obvious, one-dimensional way. There are however many more instances of incredibly complex, elegant, and perfectly executed abstract patterns. They seem to hum in the way that perfect, mathematical resolutions hum. They are ‘true’ in the way that tonic chords are ‘true’ in music. There are some crop circle visitors who claim to actually hear a hum emanating from the earth and the plants. Others claim to see floating beads of light. The patterns are harmonically pure visual configurations. True synaesthesia.

In the same way that Pinchbeck reflects, I also can not fathom why crop circles have been overlooked by the contemporary critical art world. Either they represent the artistic expression of non-human, intelligent beings (fascinating) or else they are the (collaborative) work of incredibly skilled and anonymous land artists working in the tradition of Robert Smithson or Richard Long (equally fascinating). Their anonymity and choice of medium allow these artists to completely evade the market driven, commodity based art world. Their impetus to make art seems to come exclusively from a desire to imprint complex, beautiful patterns on the Earth, perhaps to delight an audience, perhaps not.

Or perhaps crop circles just simply appear.

Steven Gontarski, May 2009, Long Beach, California
—

Steven Gontarski’s work has been featured in various solo and group exhibitions internationally including Le Consortium Dijon, Groninger Museum, Kunsthalle Wien and ICA London. He has produced permanent public works in Chaucenne, France, Paddington Central, London and Central St Giles, London (forthcoming, 2010). Concurrent to art making, he is actively involved in local community service and gardening. www.stevengontarski.com

[neuespalte]

Robert Fludd, title page of SUMMUM BONUM,
Frankfurt, 1629

DER BLAUER REITER almanac, 1912

Paul Klee, ROSEGARDEN, oil and ink
on paper and cardboard, 1920

Ithell Colquhoun, THE LIVING STONES, 1957

Ithell Colquhoun, L’ASCENSION,
mixed media on paper, 1974

Woodborough crop circle, England

Triskelion crop circle, England

Steven Gontarski, LUNAR OB 01,
fiberglass perspex, 2008

Steven Gontarski, LUNAR OB 02,
fiberglass perspex, 2008

Steven Gontarski, NEB 02,
colored pencil on paper, 2008

Steven Gontarski, NEB 06,
colored pencil on paper, 2008

Steven Gontarski, NEB 07,
colored pencil on paper, 2008

— I became interested in Cajuns in the late 50s when I was a student in New Orleans and wandered Westward, deep into Bayou and prairie country, discovering a dance hall deep in the woods where no one spoke English and the waiters wore revolvers. The dancing was hot and the beer icy cold. Fifteen years later, I met musician Dewey Balfa and his brothers at the folk festival at University of Chicago and shared Louisiana moonshine with them in their dressing room. I said I really liked their music and would like to do a film with them. They invited me down and I went.

Once there, I met Marc Savoy, who is at the core of Spend It All and ended up in three other films of mine on Cajuns and Creoles of SW Louisiana. Now, nearly 40 years later, Mark and I are performing / presenting in the Ozarks at an annual film festival there in 2010. Most of the band will be his wife and children.

Elsewhere D.L. Menard aka the Cajun Hank Williams spices up J’ai Ete Au Bal with his songs and manufactures handmade rocking chairs. D.L. actually met Hank Williams and asked him how long he takes to write a song. Hank replied “about 20-30 minutes.” Astounded, D.L. sat down to write a song, and in 20 minutes came up with his big hit Through the Back Door.

—

Les Blank was born in Tampa, Florida. His first independent films comprised a series of intimate glimpses into the lives and music of passionate people living at the periphery of American society — a series that grew to include rural Louisiana’s French musicians and cooks. Since then, major retrospectives of Les Blank’s films have been mounted at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Cinematheque Francais in Paris and as part of a major retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. In 1990 Les Blank received the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award for outstanding lifetime achievement as an independent filmmaker. In 2005 Criterion released a special edition of Les Blank’s extraordinary documentary BURDEN OF DREAMS — a unique look into the massively chaotic production of Werner Herzog’s epic FITZCARRALDO. The Criterion release includes the self-explanatory 20-minute short WERNER HERZOG EATS HIS SHOE.

SONGS ARE THE BEST PEOPLE

— The first songs I knew, got into, remembered without trying were all culled from the few audio cassettes my father owned that resided between the wheelhouse of his fishing boat, The Marie Glen Valena, and the glove compartment of our Ford Falcon. The combination of a moving vehicle and the right (frequently wrong) song was like extra company, the neutral family member no one disagreed with. All those albums: Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night; The Eagles Greatest Hits; AC/DC’s Back in Black and Dire Straits, Love Over Gold, are time machines for me, with individual songs containing ‘adult’ emotions and narratives that I’ve only just caught up with. My brothers and I knew from The Eagles, for example, that “city girls just seem to find out early, how to open doors with just a smile” long before we had any real reference for the words city or girls.

My grandparents only listened to opera and classical music, and generally only in the afternoons when they rested or in the car when running errands. I’d be talking with my brother, asking questions, and my grandfather would say, “Ricky, do you like music? You like good music right?” and I’d say, “Yeah, I like music,” and he’d get this stupid grin and say “Well shut up then!” This exchange happened every other day.

The morning I received the news that he’d died, I just went back to bed broken and played Simon Joyner’s Songs for the New Year over and over. It seemed like the only record I owned that was melancholy enough to keep me company, keep me as miserable as I wanted to be, and help me get out all the water before I had to face anyone. Listening now it seems more optimistic lyrically – the words just happen to be moored to music that keeps them down. It’s as if the recording itself, after failing to rise, has conceded to staying in bed for the day.

I’d like to lie down on the ocean
And clear the city from my lungs
Sometimes it rains while I’m drifting
But then I’m dried off by the sun

When something’s done you need a song. When I worked for my brother Lobster fishing, he would blast the music across the deck from the wheelhouse only after the last pots had been collected/baited and returned to the sea, and it was time to stream home. By that time the tapes were long gone and it was all radio. I’d hose down the deck mats and stack all the gear away neatly at breakneck speed for the reward of extracting myself out of my oilskins and boots, so I could sit up in the wheelhouse with the hum of the engine and radio hits tempered by the summer glare and the knowledge that the rest of the day was mine to burn. So I loved the radio, forgave the obnoxious morning banter between songs, allowed it to soothe the morning’s exhaustion and fill the remote silence in the cabin between Pierre and I. One morning the song Zombie by The Cranberries came on, the volume escalating, and I turned back from the deck to see my brother at the wheel banging his head back and forth out of time…the hilarious movements of a reformed metal head adrift with responsibility.

What’s in your head, in your head?
Zombie, zombie, zombie

I’m not even sure if it’s okay to listen to the Arcade Fire as a contemporary adult, but my wife started this tradition years back – of washing them through our speakers to mark the end of a struggle with a particular painting, or celebrate the completion of a group of work for an exhibition. Occasionally the ritual is applied to my studio accomplishments also, and yes, sometimes there is dancing. Of late The Fire has been replaced with Phoenix’s new album, in an attempt to bring summer nearer. But generally anything with an overtly triumphant tone, an uncomfortable uplifting feeling works.

People say that your dreams
are the only things that save ya.
Come on baby in our dreams,
we can live on misbehaviour.

Back when I was reaching out, feeling out the prospect of this perfectly serviceable friendship turning into something more romantic, I reverted back to the mix tape (actually a mix cd) as messenger. In a bold move I threw everything into that pot, everything short of ‘I just called to say….’ After all I didn’t write the songs and couldn’t be held accountable for them giving the wrong impression were the message not reciprocated. Winter by the Rolling Stones from the album Goat’s Head Soup was the first track on the compilation, and it was also repeated at the end of the mix. Call it maximum glitch, or the Tonight’s the Night approach*. At the time every line seemed an appropriate reconstitution of my own desires. Enduring winter in London was killing me. There’s a real longing in Jagger’s delivery that comes from the exhaustion of being without – waiting for the seasonal obstacle to pass in anticipation of a new cycle, a new someone to occur. I could never decide if the words were ‘sometimes I wanna wrap my cord around you’ or ‘coat around you’ (I’m now pretty sure it’s coat); in any case ‘sometimes I wanna head to California, sometimes I wanna keep you warm, warm, warm’ follows, the point being you had to be right beside someone in order to provide that kind of warmth. I never owned up to purposefully repeating the song, dodging the subject until the magic of the mix had taken hold and the confession could become part of a more permanent (LA) story.

And I hope it’s sure gonna be a long hot summer,
and a lot of love will be burning bright.

Some records arrive at the right moment both personally and collectively. At the time of writing I’ve been searching for some resolution to seemingly irreconcilable conflicts within my family, and the whole time Bill Callahan’s latest album Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle has been guiding me through. A prisoner of my car stereo, I return to my car, turn the ignition over and the album is automatically there, “you again” I think. Calm and direct, it has managed to keep me floating above the weirdness, perhaps because the album seems to be a personal evaluation/evolution of sorts, Callahan singing back to himself from a distance, leaving me thinking in the space between his well chosen words. I’ve also been reading Reveries of the Solitary Walker by Rousseau, and finding parallels with Callahan’s guarded and clever message – a message that’s always seemed so independent from the necessity of peers and the charms of conventional communication. It asks as many questions as it makes statements and in doing so activates the listener as participant, as accessory to the production. For me it holds a unique currency within the Smog archive. There’s something more inclusive in the tone this time around, a frankness to the lyrics promoting a simple wisdom without leaning too heavily on irony to remain intact. The personal played plural.

I used to be darker, then I got lighter,
then I got dark again

* Alternate versions of the song Tonight’s the Night, open and end Neil Young’s album of the same title released in 1975.

Ricky Swallow
Los Angeles, April 2009
—

Ricky Swallow is an Australian born artist living and working in Los Angeles. His detailed sculptures and installations explore the inexorable passage of time, and the enduring nature of objects. Swallow represented Australia in the 2005 Venice Biennale, and has recently participated in exhibitions at PS1, New York, The Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, Yokohama Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

www.rickyswallow.com

[neuespalte]

The Eagles, THEIR GREATEST HITS, 1971-1975

Raymond Rochecouste, 1918-1997

Simon Joyner, SONGS FOR THE NEW YEAR, 1996

Studio detail

Studio detail

Rolling Stones, GOATS HEAD SOUP, 1973

Studio detail

Bill Callahan, SOMETIMES I WISH
WE WERE AN EAGLE, 2009

Swallow’s record caddy

NOTECARD (NO THOUGHT EXISTS…), 1969
Ink on notecard, 5 x 8 inches

LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT, 1969
Rubber stamp on four sheets of paper, 7.25 x 6.75 inches

LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT, 1969
Rubber stamp on graph paper, 9.75 x 7.25 inches

LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT, 1970
Chalk on paint on wall, 72 x 48 inches

LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT, 1969
Rubber stamp on graph paper, 9.75 x 7.25 inches

LANGUAGE IS NOT TRANSPARENT, 1999
Oil on paper, 22 x 30 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Rubber stamp paper, 11 x 8.5 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Oil on canvas, 60 x 45 inches

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, 2008
Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches
—

Mel Bochner was born in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1940.
He lives and works in New York.

— Recently I have been informed that sometime in the near future I will be confronted, if that is the right word, which it probably isn’t, with the re-release of my first novel, Nog, followed in rapid order by two other novels, Flats and Quake. All three novels were written in the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, as far as I, or should I say, Nog, can remember. In the spirit of not knowing where this paragraph or contribution or possibly memories are electronically flying off to, or who it is that they might be addressed to, or why, I offer up the first paragraph of Nog. I have no traditional memory of who I was in those unhinged, free-for-all deluded days, nor, for that matter who I, or Nog, might be perceived now, although that isn’t really true and certainly not relevant. Or is it? At least I can be assured that nothing in particular and certainly nothing in general, is true inside this long-winded paragraph, a reassurance that offers a certain momentary relief. Such confusions, however deliberately perverse, allow Nog, or at least the memory of Nog, after forty or so years, to ruminate on himself, and where he might be crouched these days, burdened as he was and no doubt still is, with deliberate strategies bent on demolishing prescribed conventions of story telling, conventions which, for the most part assume that omniscient narratives are more comfortably accessible and authentic if arranged in linear progressions, insisting on a beginning, middle and satisfying conclusion, rather than allowing for a spontaneous process or non-process, one that involves Nog’s journey, a journey that consists of circular or cyclical chords that much like a manic jazz improviser exist furiously and exuberantly inside the present moment, establishing in their flow invented rhythms and unexplained shadows, illuminations that exist only to revolve endlessly around themselves. But to come back to Nog, not that Nog is or ever was away from Nog, given his engagement towards uncovering the illusions of self, or what used to be the ‘self’, as far as he can remember. In his desperation to free himself from the arrogance of omniscient reporting, Nog insists on releasing himself from what went on before, in order to free himself from what is going on now. In this way Nog defends himself from the agony of mechanical entertainment, agonies that, in his mind, always try to please and satisfy the reader, not that there are any readers, not now, or then. Nog’s promise to himself was to turn off, or delay or if not that, at least sabotage invented arrangements of words and used up insights, preferring out desperation to rely on a rush of elliptical passages arriving nowhere in particular, but still arriving, somewhere, anywhere, even if that somewhere is nowhere: a process that, along the way, embraces secret internal delights and obscure shadows; ironic surprises and humorous redundancies that seek to avoid, the literary stench of old fashioned information; information that is good, bad or indifferent, but that seeks to imprison him inside structural arrangements of time and space, which is not to say that Nog falls back on a nihilist or solipsistic view. Rather he embraces a spontaneous flux, a flux whose echoes are perfectly acceptable, given that such a flow releases egoic imprints of memory and narrative authority, imprints that depend on the illusions of memories for their location, and thus, even, perhaps, point towards false deliverance and redemption. No doubt Nog, despite his lack of ambitions, misses the usual attachments that make up recreational enjoyments and dramas, a lack which makes him attempt to corral them once again. But such attempts inevitably fail, leaving Nog even more exhausted than when he began and yet more determined than ever to push forward his attempts at inventing and re-inventing himself, In the end, or what passes for the end, he embraces his own drift, content to romp along for its own sake, and yet, despite all his efforts, coming back again and again, full circle, as it were, to himself, or what passes for himself. In this way, after all is said and done, Nog manages to breathe in and out, for his own sake, with no rewards in sight, continuing his hopeless journey to nowhere, walking and waiting at the same time, as if he has already arrived, only to find himself starting off again, towards nowhere in particular. Or so it seems.

NOG
Yesterday afternoon a girl walked by the window and stopped for sea shells. I was wrenched out of two months of calm. Nothing more than that, certainly, nothing ecstatic or even interesting, but very silent and even, as those periods have become for me. I had been breathing in and out, out and in, calmly, grateful for once to do just that, staring at the waves plopping in, successful at thinking almost nothing, handling easily the three memories I have manufactured, when that girl stooped for sea shells. There was something about her large breasts under her faded blue tee shirt, the quick way she bent down, her firm legs in their rolled-up white jeans, her thin ankles — it was her feet, actually; they seemed for a brief, painful moment to be elegant. It was that thin-boned brittle moment with her feet that did it, that touched some spot that I had forgotten to smother. The way those thin feet remained planted, yet shifting slightly in the sand as she bent down quickly for a clam shell, sent my heart thumping, my mouth dry, no exaggeration, there was something gay and insane about that tiny gesture because it had nothing to do with her.

NOG, Lynn Davis, 2009
—

Rudy Wurlitzer is an American novelist and screenwriter. While he is best known for his classic screenplays TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, Wurlitzer also co-directed CANDY MOUNTAIN with Robert Frank and has written over half a dozen produced films. Wurlitzer has authored five novels, including his most recent DROP EDGE OF YONDER, and one non-fiction book, HARD TRAVEL TO SACRED PLACES. His classic first novel NOG will be re-released this summer by independent New York publisher Two Dollar Radio, followed in short order by two other early novels, FLATS and QUAKE.

www.twodollarradio.com

Tiny is now almost forty-years-old and she has 10 children. As an April Fool’s joke she called to say that she was again pregnant — but it was just a joke.

“TINY” IN HER HALLOWEEN COSTUME, Seattle, Washington 1983
—

Mary Ellen Mark has achieved worldwide visibility through her numerous books,
exhibitions and editorial magazine work. She is recognized as one of our most
respected and influential photographers. Her images of our world’s diverse
cultures have become landmarks in the field of documentary photography and
her photo essay on runaway children in Seattle became the basis of the academy
award nominated film STREETWISE, directed and photographed by her husband,
Martin Be.

Her new book SEEN BEHIND THE SCENE: FORTY YEARS OF PHOTOGRAPHING ON SET is
out now on Phaidon.

www.trishsouth.com

— I recently read Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein in which she describes her journey from managing her New England garden according to an aesthetic of visual control and order to a plate heaped with questions and contradictions about how we and our gardens function in the larger world that we live in. She reveals how enormously, unthinkably complex the ecosystems are that function around us; and how thoroughly we have disrupted them. The book is also full of suggestions and optimism for how we all could make different small decisions in our back yards that could have great impact.

As I am a New England transplant, this book gave me for the first time some understanding of and feeling for the landscape I live in. It also led me to thinking about art in relation to landscape. My work is always, at least in part about landscape and it’s always about picture making. Picture making, I believe grows from windows in architecture, and also from our marking of boundaries in relation to property ownership – usually rectangular parcels of land that we “compose” gardens and houses within. In both cases, but especially in relationship to architecture and the white cube exhibition space there is a remove from the wildness of nature that is achieved though our formal devices.

I was recently in Denver looking at the Denver Art Museum designed by Daniel Liebeskind. I expected to hate the building – but I didn’t. I found it quite beautiful especially in terms of how it makes space for the public to be in the building looking at art. It is a building for people. I grew up in Vancouver where I was from childhood quite taken with the totem poles of the northwest coast Indian people. Some of this work was in the collection of the Denver Art Museum. It struck me that Liebeskinds’ architecture makes an effort to find another kind of space to show art in. The totem poles are very involved in picture making. They are “pictorial.” But they were intended to exist outside, among trees. They don’t propose the same kind of division between themselves and the outside world as my work does. Instead of proposing a look through a window they incorporate a stylization that points to the shape of the eye. Perhaps they propose that the eye is the frame that forms our capacity to make “pictures” in mind. Carving out space for picture making on totem poles, in gardens, in paintings, or in architecture seem all related. The space drawn out as separate acts as metaphor for the internal space of mind and feeling, and in that space we can struggle to make sense of living.
—

Jessica Stockholder received her B.F.A. from the University of Victoria in Canada in 1982 and her M.F.A. from Yale in 1985. She has exhibited widely in North America and Europe, at such venues as the Dia Center for the Arts and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her work is represented in various collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, The Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Ms. Stockholder was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1999 and is currently professor and director of graduate studies in sculpture.

www.miandn.com

[neuespalte]

Jessica Stockholder, BIRD WATCHING, 2001
Part of the Site Santa Fe Exhibition BEAU MONDE: TOWARD A REDEEMED COSMOPOLITANISM
Currated by Dave Hickey

The Denver Museum of Art designed by Daniel Libeskind

Douglas Cranmer, House Post, 1987-88, Denver Art Museum Collection 1988.19

All images and poems by Terence Koh
—

Terence Koh is a Chinese-Canadian artist who lives and works in New York. His work has been exhibited at several prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Zürich, Statements Art Basel and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. He is represented by Peres Projects.

www.asianpunkboy.com

LIGHT
“The light, reflected, its spirit contained in the stone”

“Once we had ascended its full height, the mountain turned back towards the white beach lying far below. It was at this beach the night before that we erected a wooden stand to greet the morning’s horizon. The first rays of light, skimming the surface of the sea, illuminated a path between the stand and the mountain’s crest. This is the trail that the animals have forever known. Even in the depths of night, there still remains the faintest trace of this light marking the path upwards. We placed a stone upon the stand and commenced our preparations for the eleven hour walk to the summit of the light’s path.”

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT, 2007
Installation view of MELLOW FEVER, La Galerie des Galeries, Paris
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

LIGHT DEPOSIT

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT DEPOSIT, 2008
Installation view of LIGHT CONSTRUCTION, Center for Cosmic Wonder
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

“Please leave (your) light in the space.”
This is a space where collected layers of light reverberate.
We are the souls and the light.

LIGHT LODGE

Yukinori Maeda, LIGHT LODGE, 2007
Installation view of SPACE OF YOUR FUTURE, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery

“Visitors to the Light Lodge may sense the presence of the light spirit. A vaporous inhabitor of the elements, this spirit transmits itself through the outer wavelengths, where sound bends toward light and the natural converges with the unnatural.”

HOUSE

Yukinori Maeda, HOUSE, 2003
Plywood, fluorescent light, fog, 130 x 130 x 99cm

Yukinori Maeda, House, 2005
Plywood, fluorescent light, fog, papier mache rock,
video projection various dimensions

Installation view of MAGIC VILLAGE COSMIC WONDER, YUKINORI MAEDA
MU Art Foundation, The Netherlands
—

Yukinori Maeda is an artist living and working in Japan. His work has been featured in multiple international art fairs such as LA Art, Frieze Art Fair, Art Nova and Art Basel Miami Beach. The central theme of Maeda’s projects has consistently been “light”. He has exhibited installations, consisting of reconstructed images of found photographs, objects, lighting systems and sound systems linked to the wave length of light. Maeda’s new solo exhibition UNIVERSAL LOVE will be held in Taka Ishii Gallery, February 7 to March 7, 2009.

www.takaishiigallery.com