like a death of the heart/jesus where do i start/but you are still the one pool/where i will happily drown...

lcd soundsystem, new york i love you, etc

de menil has a show of rauschenberg cardboards, cruising has been released, and the track new york i love you but yr letting me down by lcd soundsystem is a beloved indie hit---a trifecta of meaning, one of those coincidental hooks that is oddly fruitful, frissons of tension and nostalgia...

the cardboard compositions, done b/w 72-75, are filthy, flattened, badly painted, trodden down and ripped apart, in that weird way that you cant tell if they are sculptures or trash or drawings or collage--this is all rr--i know that, but his combines, even with the filth, the mourning, the reapportioned jokes, had a delicacy. he did the hoar frost series about this time, and with its whites, its shrouding, it had the elegance of a august gaden neo-classicism, or when Emily Dickinson used the word tomb. They were quiet, desperate, things which spoke in the same voices, barely attached to its framing---“Made of gauzy layered fabric printed and collaged with selections from the artist's stockpile of pop culture images, the hangings are loosely tacked to the wall to emphasize their soft, slightly amorphous character.” (October 2, 2005, NYT)—the gauze, like in surgery, like in the loose veil Milton talked about, was the exact opposite—the cardboard was brutally constructed—little screen printing, no gauze, no pale new England winters, that separated reality, that obscured politely, into a quiet discussion of what veiling and unveiling meant.

Nixon, Vietnam, bankruptcy, crime, bad food and impossibly cheap real estate, grindhouse, the Son of Sam killer, Charlie Manson, coke, I mean the list has been shown over and over again, but looking at these boxes—marked fragile, falling apart, crudely taped or slathered with staples—they aren’t pleasurable, they are desperate broken, sad exhausted, they are almost impossible to write about it—because its like if New York has given up, then Rauschenberg might as well. One of them is painted the colour of the virigin mary, and looks like a homeless man’s filthy blanket, one is reclaimed from the National Spinning Company—and red threads, like badly stiched scars, move across the label, in the middle of it, three boxes jut out from the middle—a geographic ideal of what new york thot of itself?

They have a grim dedication to the matter of dying, disruption, deconstruction, decay—he wrote, about that time “I was beginning to feel that so many of my friends—were having so many problems with happiness that perhaps I was responsible for some sort of evil spirit…” (quoted in Bruce Hanley’s review of the show in the Fall 2007 Art Forum)

Looking thru the glossy coffee table book that was produced in conjunction of the show—the printing, the photo repros, the weird thing is that (well literally), it has become a museum piece—not the Rauschenberg pieces, which are little known and apparently don’t sell well (lots were kept in rr’s private collection (but he moved from new york, he almost drank himself to death, maybe they were kept not because they couldn’t sell but because they worked as a memoir, a reminder of a sadder time, and his eventual triumph)—I keep thinking that with enough slickness, the most brutal work, looks elegant and refined—those gorgeous concrete bunkers that marked the architecture of the period---listening to that lcd sound system track again—there is a line where the singer intones: “our records all show you were filthy but fine”—those two pieces made in the late 70s, the last great series he did—one was fine but not filthy, and one was filthy but not fine…a 26 yr old reads about the sex but not the mugging, studio 54 but not the south Bronx—new york was dying, rr was dying, that the city has risen again like lazarus but lost its soul in the cleanliness is kind of a bizarre multi-phasic urban irony that seems only possible in America

Thinking of filthy and fine, thinking about the re-release of crusing, its been such an icon of filth—not on vhs, not on dvd, little snippets on late night television, on queer docs, as history, as victory. They made this awful homophobic movie and the good gays and lesbians defeated it—they thot we were all psychopaths and killers, and sedeuced everyone…I haven’t seen cruising yet-it’s a curio and so hmv doesn’t carry it in Edmonton—but I remember seeing boys in the band last june, during pride—and it was a little kitschy, and v. sad, and complicated, well written, wank worthy in places, with the self loathing and the radical honesty having as much in common with est and retreat sessions as they did with some kind of loathing—russo hated that movie too, and I found myself fond of it…reading the reviews of crusing, it seems so strange, so broken, so brutal…they remind me not of self loathing faggots but the death of the cities, one of the lines in that lcd soundsystem song is “ cops that were bored when they ran out of crime” –and the bdsm sex that I hear written about in the diaries of that period, in the reviews of that period, seems dutiful, dark, and urban (not urbane, not pleasurable, but as a revolutionary act of if not creation, then destruction---delaney has written about so many men fucking by the peirs that the rotting wood threatened to give way, that they would have been crushed or went into the water (LCD: new york is a pool in which I would happily drown” )—Geoff Parkes, an australian critic and writer talks about it “fisting is not aboutpenetration, nor is it to do with the superfice - it's to do with occupation of a space, with becoming joined, with swallowing not piercing... not to mention there's nothing to penetrate, the anus being a hole that has never represented absence - to the contrary often over-flowing fullness but in bodily terms the muscle is the only thing to be penetrated and yet it opens up to the fist, providing more space, schlurping around... to pierce the flesh with a sword or a bullet is to damage and destory, to make a hole where none was before; whereas fisting, if done properly, is to make a whole where there was just hole before.”

There is a hole in the work (literal holes, broken bits, uncompleteness, a partiality) in the work of Rauschenberg’s cardboard boxes, there are holes in the narrative’s of cruising—of Russo’s dishonesty in describing it, in its absence from the canon of Pacino (was his lauded role as Roy Cohn an attempt to make the hole whole?), there was a hole in new york, in he 70s—with those burnt thru buildings, and there was a hole in the states in the 70s—the entire id of a generation cast infitnetley on 17 minutes of absent tape, but there is a whole when LCD sound system sings “and oh/take me off yr mailing list/for kids who think it still exists” b/c it never existed, the filthy and fine new york city…?