Thursday, March 30, 2006
Vote on the ten worst Oscar Best Pictures of all time.
Mine:
How Green Was My Valley
Gentleman's Agreement
The Greatest Show on Earth
Marty
Around the World in 80 Days
Rocky
Rain Man
Dances With Wolves
Schindler's List
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
It was difficult not including American Beauty, Forrest Gump, Brave Heart, Out of Africa, Wings, Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, Gigi, Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, or Craft but i managed.
Mine:
How Green Was My Valley
Gentleman's Agreement
The Greatest Show on Earth
Marty
Around the World in 80 Days
Rocky
Rain Man
Dances With Wolves
Schindler's List
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
It was difficult not including American Beauty, Forrest Gump, Brave Heart, Out of Africa, Wings, Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, Gigi, Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, or Craft but i managed.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Jason Kroenenwald
Gum Blondes
le gallery
Jason Kronenwald’s portraits of blondes made from chewing gum on plywood are gimmicky, novelty obsessed, cheap, and disposable. He has appeared in soft cord lad rags, and fashion magazines, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and fashion television. They are in an art gallery, but does that mean that we should use art-talk to talk about them, or are they just another backyard project, like ships in bottles or world monuments made from Popsicle sticks.
I would argue that his use of materials, his art historicism, his formal skills, and the sheer material, fetish pleasure of these panels make them so exciting, wonderfully, conceptually strong. They are not only art, but some of the best art I have seen this year. The panels are plywood, and he makes detailed, loving portraits of blondes current and historical on them, he then varnishes them, for reasons of capital mostly.
Look at that list of material. Varnish, the most practical, it prevents the gum from drying and curdling. Its presence means the things are no longer ephemeral. He can’t sell anything that isn’t shellacked. But, there is metaphorical power in the varnish. We see these blondes through a glass lightly. They are mythic responders to the gaze, of men, women, children, cyborgs, and other living things. Every time we see them though, it is through televisions, or photographs, or advertisements, or magazine covers. Even in real life, they are varnished. As a culture, we are desperately preventing the brittleness that makes these women shatter.
The plywood backing is equally challenging, in formal and conceptual terms. The light wood, almost blonde itself, makes a perfect counterpoint, to the almost lurid colours of bubblegum. The material is also the colour of tanned caucasian skin, and in one lurid, suprising and deeply erotic example, the colour of Lil’ Kim, an African American as well. Conceptually, plywood is cheap and easy, it is the one that is used mostly by hobbyists, and it is the wood that good carpenters avoid using to finish projects. Aside from providing that delightful sheen, there is a conceptually oppositional working out of trashy vs. beautiful, fully formed vs. waiting to be molded, slick vs. raw, that denies clichés and processes our cultures omnipresent misogynist binaries.
This working out, comes fully formed, in his use of bubble gum. It doesn’t matter if this is a gimmick, all new art in one way or another is about whether the gimmick chosen works. Kroenenwald’s use of bubble gum works, so deeply, in its casualness, that the media talking about it has refused to treat it as art. Will Kucey, the director of the gallery, appear boggled by the amount of press he is receiving, and disappointed that the art journals aren’t picking up on it.
The bubblegum works perfectly while discussing these icons. Just the material asks questions of ubiquity, the nature of fame, and how things change so rapidly. Even a material so tied into ephermability, the cult of youth, novelty, commercially manufactured artificial sweetness, and other things that aren’t very good for you. Maybe because the process is so labourous, and maybe because the culture changes so rapidly, he has a stable of icons that are on the bleeding edge of being dated. For example: his Britney is still nubile and not trashed down; his Avril has yet to be glammed out and vogued up (he uses a licorice german gum for her, which turns almost black); his Jessica Simpson is still the boring church singer, and not the present day black widow/victim/slut/tabloid harridan. Having them work slightly backwards, when they were the most likeable, makes iconic women who never were.
The one icon he does show, is the best work, and transcends fame. It is such a deep, lovely, and complicated work, that any museum should be proud to collect it. The word masterpiece is over-used, and indelicate. It is clumsy to describe this kind of work. But his large canvas of Jane Mansfield, resting on a split field of red and white, is revelatory. The red has pulp in mind, the flesh of fruit, beef, humans, and the ink on those nasty magazines. The white has a purity of intention which Mansfield never touched. She was a blonde, who’s back story included Satanism, stag films, decapitation, and crossing racial lines. Her pneumatic tits were less motherly then Marylin’s, she lacked the crypticism of Hitchcok’s icebergs, and the amusing edge of Mamie Van Doren. She is the lesser Monroe, that has never been assimilated.
Kronenwald almost does it, and does it in ways that are more interesting then his predecessors. I kept thinking of Barnett Newmann when looking at the field, behind Jane—and it looks amazingly like one of his Zim Zums, Zips or Stations, with out all of that logophillic, obsessive search for the mystic non verbal center of something or other.Newman is still the philosopher king of too much information and not enough visual clues. Mansfield destabilizes this obsession, and recenters the mid-century fights as now completely irrealvent. Few critics have noticed that De Kooning and Warhol painted the same women, for similar means, in the same time period. Their work grinds with sibling rivalry. The watermelon and mint here shrugs, says isn’t this neat, and moves onto other referents. It’s jaw dropping, because he upends art historical precedents, with a studied non chalnce.
There are other things in that Jane Mansfield painting: it looks like Serrano’s milk and blood series, though Serrano connects Levitcal laws about food and language, in one place, while still engaging deeply in taboo. Kronenwald refuses taboo. There is a seductive corperality, a pagan pleasure center, and a fleshy perfection, that slides away from metaphorical readings.
Jane Mansfield posed for life magazine, in a swimming pool, with dozens of piggy banks, in her shape, floating like a halo, surrounding her. It was a pink to her commercial success, and to the artist in the age of mechincla reproduction, and a belief in her own pleasure, and a hope towards omnipresence. Hiding in the shadows like someone from Chandler’s Los Angeles, she never got it. Even Lana Turner, who had similar choices, and similar scandals, was given the gift of a poem by an American master (ironically, an expert in Pollock, connecting the Ab-Ex and Pop again and again). It seems like the rest of these portraits are fantastic, and grandly clever—but because of its clusterfuck of sexual, social, (art)historical, and tabloid signs, this is the only painting in the show that is important, vital even.
That said, there are other ideas here that are important. Our culture has become more and more obsessed with its own orality. From obsessions with obesity, to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, to Liz Phair singing about wanting “to be your blow job queen” and penning odes to “hot white cum”, continuing on to rumours of Rainbow Parties, and an oral sex panic in Canadian/American middle schools, we are now in the age of the oral fixiation. This show ties our celebrity culture, our general neuratice seeking of patterns, and an obsessive compulsive eroticism, and then gives it to other people—the viewer, of course, but other participants. There were packs of grape hubba-bubba at the gallery, and he is quoted as saying “the mixing of the colour takes place inside the mouth during chewing using an endless variety of companies” and that he has “a dedicated team of chewers” He has become an evangelical for oral obsessions, too tired to do it himself, involving polite removal, not consuming any calories, and being almost bulimic about it, there is a distinct criticism of the celebrity culture.
The show is never really deep, but depth is over rated. Think of it like laquer, an endless number of endlessly thin layers eventually making something solid and ever-lasting. It doesn’t hate culture, it doesn’t love culture, but it is the first show that I have seen in years that has understood culture straight from the id.
Gum Blondes
le gallery
Jason Kronenwald’s portraits of blondes made from chewing gum on plywood are gimmicky, novelty obsessed, cheap, and disposable. He has appeared in soft cord lad rags, and fashion magazines, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and fashion television. They are in an art gallery, but does that mean that we should use art-talk to talk about them, or are they just another backyard project, like ships in bottles or world monuments made from Popsicle sticks.
I would argue that his use of materials, his art historicism, his formal skills, and the sheer material, fetish pleasure of these panels make them so exciting, wonderfully, conceptually strong. They are not only art, but some of the best art I have seen this year. The panels are plywood, and he makes detailed, loving portraits of blondes current and historical on them, he then varnishes them, for reasons of capital mostly.
Look at that list of material. Varnish, the most practical, it prevents the gum from drying and curdling. Its presence means the things are no longer ephemeral. He can’t sell anything that isn’t shellacked. But, there is metaphorical power in the varnish. We see these blondes through a glass lightly. They are mythic responders to the gaze, of men, women, children, cyborgs, and other living things. Every time we see them though, it is through televisions, or photographs, or advertisements, or magazine covers. Even in real life, they are varnished. As a culture, we are desperately preventing the brittleness that makes these women shatter.
The plywood backing is equally challenging, in formal and conceptual terms. The light wood, almost blonde itself, makes a perfect counterpoint, to the almost lurid colours of bubblegum. The material is also the colour of tanned caucasian skin, and in one lurid, suprising and deeply erotic example, the colour of Lil’ Kim, an African American as well. Conceptually, plywood is cheap and easy, it is the one that is used mostly by hobbyists, and it is the wood that good carpenters avoid using to finish projects. Aside from providing that delightful sheen, there is a conceptually oppositional working out of trashy vs. beautiful, fully formed vs. waiting to be molded, slick vs. raw, that denies clichés and processes our cultures omnipresent misogynist binaries.
This working out, comes fully formed, in his use of bubble gum. It doesn’t matter if this is a gimmick, all new art in one way or another is about whether the gimmick chosen works. Kroenenwald’s use of bubble gum works, so deeply, in its casualness, that the media talking about it has refused to treat it as art. Will Kucey, the director of the gallery, appear boggled by the amount of press he is receiving, and disappointed that the art journals aren’t picking up on it.
The bubblegum works perfectly while discussing these icons. Just the material asks questions of ubiquity, the nature of fame, and how things change so rapidly. Even a material so tied into ephermability, the cult of youth, novelty, commercially manufactured artificial sweetness, and other things that aren’t very good for you. Maybe because the process is so labourous, and maybe because the culture changes so rapidly, he has a stable of icons that are on the bleeding edge of being dated. For example: his Britney is still nubile and not trashed down; his Avril has yet to be glammed out and vogued up (he uses a licorice german gum for her, which turns almost black); his Jessica Simpson is still the boring church singer, and not the present day black widow/victim/slut/tabloid harridan. Having them work slightly backwards, when they were the most likeable, makes iconic women who never were.
The one icon he does show, is the best work, and transcends fame. It is such a deep, lovely, and complicated work, that any museum should be proud to collect it. The word masterpiece is over-used, and indelicate. It is clumsy to describe this kind of work. But his large canvas of Jane Mansfield, resting on a split field of red and white, is revelatory. The red has pulp in mind, the flesh of fruit, beef, humans, and the ink on those nasty magazines. The white has a purity of intention which Mansfield never touched. She was a blonde, who’s back story included Satanism, stag films, decapitation, and crossing racial lines. Her pneumatic tits were less motherly then Marylin’s, she lacked the crypticism of Hitchcok’s icebergs, and the amusing edge of Mamie Van Doren. She is the lesser Monroe, that has never been assimilated.
Kronenwald almost does it, and does it in ways that are more interesting then his predecessors. I kept thinking of Barnett Newmann when looking at the field, behind Jane—and it looks amazingly like one of his Zim Zums, Zips or Stations, with out all of that logophillic, obsessive search for the mystic non verbal center of something or other.Newman is still the philosopher king of too much information and not enough visual clues. Mansfield destabilizes this obsession, and recenters the mid-century fights as now completely irrealvent. Few critics have noticed that De Kooning and Warhol painted the same women, for similar means, in the same time period. Their work grinds with sibling rivalry. The watermelon and mint here shrugs, says isn’t this neat, and moves onto other referents. It’s jaw dropping, because he upends art historical precedents, with a studied non chalnce.
There are other things in that Jane Mansfield painting: it looks like Serrano’s milk and blood series, though Serrano connects Levitcal laws about food and language, in one place, while still engaging deeply in taboo. Kronenwald refuses taboo. There is a seductive corperality, a pagan pleasure center, and a fleshy perfection, that slides away from metaphorical readings.
Jane Mansfield posed for life magazine, in a swimming pool, with dozens of piggy banks, in her shape, floating like a halo, surrounding her. It was a pink to her commercial success, and to the artist in the age of mechincla reproduction, and a belief in her own pleasure, and a hope towards omnipresence. Hiding in the shadows like someone from Chandler’s Los Angeles, she never got it. Even Lana Turner, who had similar choices, and similar scandals, was given the gift of a poem by an American master (ironically, an expert in Pollock, connecting the Ab-Ex and Pop again and again). It seems like the rest of these portraits are fantastic, and grandly clever—but because of its clusterfuck of sexual, social, (art)historical, and tabloid signs, this is the only painting in the show that is important, vital even.
That said, there are other ideas here that are important. Our culture has become more and more obsessed with its own orality. From obsessions with obesity, to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, to Liz Phair singing about wanting “to be your blow job queen” and penning odes to “hot white cum”, continuing on to rumours of Rainbow Parties, and an oral sex panic in Canadian/American middle schools, we are now in the age of the oral fixiation. This show ties our celebrity culture, our general neuratice seeking of patterns, and an obsessive compulsive eroticism, and then gives it to other people—the viewer, of course, but other participants. There were packs of grape hubba-bubba at the gallery, and he is quoted as saying “the mixing of the colour takes place inside the mouth during chewing using an endless variety of companies” and that he has “a dedicated team of chewers” He has become an evangelical for oral obsessions, too tired to do it himself, involving polite removal, not consuming any calories, and being almost bulimic about it, there is a distinct criticism of the celebrity culture.
The show is never really deep, but depth is over rated. Think of it like laquer, an endless number of endlessly thin layers eventually making something solid and ever-lasting. It doesn’t hate culture, it doesn’t love culture, but it is the first show that I have seen in years that has understood culture straight from the id.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
44) the mcsweenys kids anthogy, a great clement freud book about eating and nightmares and english private schools, a charming little neil gaiman about the extensions of appetite and snobbery, a jimmy k peice that reminded me why i liked him in the first place, a really nasty deconstruction of didatic school ready popular ficiton by "limony sickett" and lots of hipster filler...
(outlaws, blobs, etc...)
the illustrations were amazing though, david heatley, marcel dzama (better in books then on paper), a pop collagist, almost like braque, almost like the african american whos name i never remember, an american merzmeister by the name of lane smith, rachell sempter, etc.
i cant imagine reading it to children though)
(outlaws, blobs, etc...)
the illustrations were amazing though, david heatley, marcel dzama (better in books then on paper), a pop collagist, almost like braque, almost like the african american whos name i never remember, an american merzmeister by the name of lane smith, rachell sempter, etc.
i cant imagine reading it to children though)
Title Card from The 60s Batman, they have the colour, font choice, explictness, and poetic ambiguity of the best of ed ruscha, i wonder if he watched batman with adam west and company...all the rest here here
the rest are literal, oonmanepia meant to indicate the allegiance to the comics, and to make the texts merge, but later, it becomes allusive, illusionary, touche to the villian, to batman himself, and intertextually the viewer (him)self--i say him b/c i imagine them mostly done by women...
i think that we need to quit looking at fine art precedents for pop, b/c they come late to the game, the things painted first were street culture, bodies, movies, television screens, advertising, that what was so radical abouat pop work...
(compare this to the recent series of work done for the met, called american empire, based on the fredrick church or the work he did for the flordia library qouting shakespeare.)
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Saturday, March 25, 2006
and sometmes it reminds me of this auden poem, with food as usual replacing fucking:
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquorstraight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some , alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.
Ther Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.
T’he nightingale are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.
At Dirty Dick’s and Sloppy Joe’s
We drank our liquorstraight,
Some went upstairs with Margery,
And some , alas, with Kate;
And two by two like cat and mouse,
The homeless played at keeping house.
Ther Wealthy Meg, the Sailor’s Friend,
And Marion, cow-eyed,
Opened their arms to me, but I
Refused to step inside;
I was not looking for a cage
In which to mope in my old age.
T’he nightingale are sobbing in
The orchards of our mothers,
And hearts that we broke long ago
Have long been breaking others;
Tears are round, the sea is deep:
Roll them overboard and sleep.
i ha ddinner last night with ray, and company, for his bday, an excellent peice of orange roughy and a medicore risotto, brilliant, tangly, mussels, a v. nice beloujois(sp) and a decent martini (gin, v. dry--apparently my love for a dry martini makes people laugh), a double espresso, and a disappointing cheesecake
alex is with us, and its strange, the rituals you replace things with--i love the taste of wine, mostly dry, mostly a little acrid, though this was fruity, florid, sweeter then most...
but the cork, and the pour and the swish and the boquet, the knowing what wine goes with what, the being okay w. red for mussells (cause the tarrogon, rosemary, rich tomato sauce, etc made it closer to a meat dish then a fish dish)
i like that rite, i like those skills, im proud of being able to like adult things, and i realise, growing up, that one of the lds fears about coffee, wine, gin, etc is a inate fear of not only pleasure, but of comforting, bonding rituals, that are unstable and outside control.
its also v. funny to see me hold an esspresso cup, these big meat hands with something so delicate.
alex is with us, and its strange, the rituals you replace things with--i love the taste of wine, mostly dry, mostly a little acrid, though this was fruity, florid, sweeter then most...
but the cork, and the pour and the swish and the boquet, the knowing what wine goes with what, the being okay w. red for mussells (cause the tarrogon, rosemary, rich tomato sauce, etc made it closer to a meat dish then a fish dish)
i like that rite, i like those skills, im proud of being able to like adult things, and i realise, growing up, that one of the lds fears about coffee, wine, gin, etc is a inate fear of not only pleasure, but of comforting, bonding rituals, that are unstable and outside control.
its also v. funny to see me hold an esspresso cup, these big meat hands with something so delicate.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Bio: Anthony Easton is a poet, critic, and photographer from Edmonton, Alberta. His poetry has been published in Kiss Machine, Jones St, Fat?So! and others. His criticism has been published in Xtra, Xtra West, Flack, and Stylus and has appeared in end of the year polls for both the Nashville Scene and the Village Voice. A paper of his will appear in an upcoming academic monograph on the Magnetic Fields. His photography has appeared in group shows in Toronto, and New York. He has had a solo show of Polaroids in Fort Saskatchewan. His interests include post queer theory, rural issues, the intersection of language and politics, the implications of non-art disciplines into high art, and critical forgetfulness.
Synergy:
It comes from Jung, doesn’t it? I always liked Freud more then Jung. I liked the dark muck of sex and death, Jung seemed to neat, healthy, happy. But Africa has had enough of that dark muck, especially from us westerners, its all over people like Haggard and Conrad. But the opposite is true as well, small wallet size studio portraits from Mali become giant, glossy silver nitrate photos, important ritual objects from Nigeria become trophies for European museums, and slave ports in Ghana become tourist traps. We note Palestine but ignore Dafur.
This tug and pull, of colonial and colonised, of who gets noticed and who gets ignored, of how we use ritual, art and purpose, of the theoretical matrix of negritude and the critics of that framework, all corresponds to the definition of synergy given to me: "the simultaneous action of correlated energies which together have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects."
The best example of this are the technocrats of corporations, some aid organizations and certain NGOs, who try to convince that anyone owning the world was a moral good, a deep necessity. It is used it as a word to describe how the parts intersect, like a robot, like how an octopus kills its prey.
Synergy is in 1905 splitting up Africa, regardless of historical patterns, from a Berlin Conference room. Synergy is how the Americans and the Russians fought ideological battles through ought the continent, battles that were less about the good of Africa, and more about abstract ideologies. Synergy is the SI folks in 1968 getting clues from the film Battle for Algiers, and the same movie dictating strategy for the Pentagon in 2006. It's a German theologian telling a billion Catholics that the south will have to re-evangelize the north, and it's having nothing on the television but starving infants and corrupt warlords, and nothing in the movies but savages and jungle drums, in this age of global media.
It is refusing the real geography of a place so large and diverse, that it is patronizing and exhausting to talk about it as one place.
But all of this is general. I kept thinking about were Edmonton fits in with all of this. It dawned on me, what we have in common with Africa is oil.
As a photographer, I am often concerned with beauty, with making things pretty, and then having the larger politics be hidden within. The picture I chose to share with Hands across Africa could be considered literally synergistic, but it is also symbolically so.
Like ancient monoliths, in a slick modernist white, these containers hold thousands of liters of petroleum products. They are a part of a large web that transports the liquid worldwide. They are then one part in a larger machine. How they work in that machine is synergy—how they hold oil that will go north or south or east or west.
But money flows faster then oil. The money that these machines make, will go back to Europe, like the money from Prince Rupert’s Land went back to England. It will join money from the Middle East, from South America, and Africa.
I consider this small, 5x7 photo, in a discount frame a way to remember the ebb and flow of global capital. To put a crude point on it all, this photo in its beauty and its silence, reminds that the Royal Dutch Shell that refines and pumps gas in this plant near Sherwood Park is the same Royal Dutch Shell that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Another Note:
I alluded to this print being 5x7 earlier. I wanted to remind the viewer of prints taken by Malian photog Seydou Keita. Keita's work has been stolen, imported, imperialised, and broken of a very intimate context, part of that theft was formal. The orginals are small, intended for household use, and remind us of how snap shots build communities. Made much larger and much more glossy, they become exotics artifacts, for rich collectors, who reuse to believe in a modernist Africa. This has happened to a number of photographers, from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and other countries. Keita is the most famous, and the best documented.
Synergy:
It comes from Jung, doesn’t it? I always liked Freud more then Jung. I liked the dark muck of sex and death, Jung seemed to neat, healthy, happy. But Africa has had enough of that dark muck, especially from us westerners, its all over people like Haggard and Conrad. But the opposite is true as well, small wallet size studio portraits from Mali become giant, glossy silver nitrate photos, important ritual objects from Nigeria become trophies for European museums, and slave ports in Ghana become tourist traps. We note Palestine but ignore Dafur.
This tug and pull, of colonial and colonised, of who gets noticed and who gets ignored, of how we use ritual, art and purpose, of the theoretical matrix of negritude and the critics of that framework, all corresponds to the definition of synergy given to me: "the simultaneous action of correlated energies which together have a greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects."
The best example of this are the technocrats of corporations, some aid organizations and certain NGOs, who try to convince that anyone owning the world was a moral good, a deep necessity. It is used it as a word to describe how the parts intersect, like a robot, like how an octopus kills its prey.
Synergy is in 1905 splitting up Africa, regardless of historical patterns, from a Berlin Conference room. Synergy is how the Americans and the Russians fought ideological battles through ought the continent, battles that were less about the good of Africa, and more about abstract ideologies. Synergy is the SI folks in 1968 getting clues from the film Battle for Algiers, and the same movie dictating strategy for the Pentagon in 2006. It's a German theologian telling a billion Catholics that the south will have to re-evangelize the north, and it's having nothing on the television but starving infants and corrupt warlords, and nothing in the movies but savages and jungle drums, in this age of global media.
It is refusing the real geography of a place so large and diverse, that it is patronizing and exhausting to talk about it as one place.
But all of this is general. I kept thinking about were Edmonton fits in with all of this. It dawned on me, what we have in common with Africa is oil.
As a photographer, I am often concerned with beauty, with making things pretty, and then having the larger politics be hidden within. The picture I chose to share with Hands across Africa could be considered literally synergistic, but it is also symbolically so.
Like ancient monoliths, in a slick modernist white, these containers hold thousands of liters of petroleum products. They are a part of a large web that transports the liquid worldwide. They are then one part in a larger machine. How they work in that machine is synergy—how they hold oil that will go north or south or east or west.
But money flows faster then oil. The money that these machines make, will go back to Europe, like the money from Prince Rupert’s Land went back to England. It will join money from the Middle East, from South America, and Africa.
I consider this small, 5x7 photo, in a discount frame a way to remember the ebb and flow of global capital. To put a crude point on it all, this photo in its beauty and its silence, reminds that the Royal Dutch Shell that refines and pumps gas in this plant near Sherwood Park is the same Royal Dutch Shell that killed Ken Saro-Wiwa.
Another Note:
I alluded to this print being 5x7 earlier. I wanted to remind the viewer of prints taken by Malian photog Seydou Keita. Keita's work has been stolen, imported, imperialised, and broken of a very intimate context, part of that theft was formal. The orginals are small, intended for household use, and remind us of how snap shots build communities. Made much larger and much more glossy, they become exotics artifacts, for rich collectors, who reuse to believe in a modernist Africa. This has happened to a number of photographers, from Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, Mali and other countries. Keita is the most famous, and the best documented.
The New Yorker really drank the Kool-Aid in John Colapinto's wet-kiss to big-money fast-action art-heroes who sell art works to the highest bidder. How can someone conscientiously write an entire profile on Tobias Meyer, the chief auctioneer and worldwide head of contemporary art at Sotheby's, and not mention, even in passing, that contemporary art auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theater, and brothel? They are rarefied entertainments where speculation, spin, and trophy hunting merge as an insular caste enacts a highly structured ritual in which the codes of consumption and peerage are manipulated in plain sight. Auctions are altars to the disconnect between the inner life of art and the outer life of acquisition, places where artists are cut off from their art. At auctions desire is fetishized, buying and selling become a sort of sacrament, art plays the role of sacrificial lamb, and the Ponzi scheme that surrounds it all rolls on. For The New Yorker to publish an article like this and not raise one discouraging word about auctions is more than a little discouraging; it is a sickening.
Saltz
Letter to the New Yorker
Saltz
Letter to the New Yorker
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Free Form Outline for Papa Was a Rodeo…
Original:
1. 15 seconds starting
2. twisted point of view
3. who is mike, what gender is mike
4. the coyness, you’ve made it pretty clear what you like
5. the causal sexuality, the desire for bar room back room fuck
6. or is it something else
7. the kiss you puckered for me
8. plug it with a beer
a. first phallic signifaction
9. Papa was a rodeo
a. Not part of a rodeo, not a piece of the rodeo, but actually rodeo itself the personifiaciton of rodeo
b. The idea that identity was so infused
c. Ideas of transference, the power of parentage, et. al
d. Papa was a rodeo/mama was a rock and roll band wrt the Leonard cohen song
e. The brokeback scene, buckle bunnies, groupies, instability
10. mama was a rock and roll band
a. not a country band
b. away from the domestic
c. how common was the idea of mama, etc
d. the was questions again
e. can we make the argument that this was the second phallic signifaction
11. “play guitar and rope a steer/home was anywhere with diesal gas/love was a truckers stand
a. complications
b. he is in the middle of a gender non spec. seduction, he is talking about his parenting, explaining how he would like to stay, but cant—he has talked about who his parents are, how they affected him, but his role as a drifter becomes mythological, in that we don’t know anything of him before lets say 6
c. id/mirror stage/etc
d. the idea of truck stops as liminal places
e. the travellign trouboudour schtick
f. what is a truckers stand
i. literal defition
ii. last stand
iii. stand by your man
12. never stuck around long enough for a one night stand
a. does that mean that its all hand jobs at truck stops
b. truck stops as places for casual sex
c. or does that mean that there is a purity here,
i. asexuality and the cowboy
ii. celibacy and the cowboy
iii. cowboy as truckdriver
iv. Ie in the sense that I have too much to do, my tasks are too great, and my training as well, leads me to not have sex at all
v. Ie slut anthem or something else.
13. is he warning his paramour off, or his he seducing, what games are they playing .
14. semi-long sections o guitars, like lacunae, like pauses for reponses that do not come, like something stranger and less there.
15. the light refleting off the mirror ball/like a thousand seeking eyes/make me think that I should not be here at all…
a. a strange reference to the apropticon
b. what is he afraid of
c. where is here, why should he not be here
d. half ay thru the song and no specific geographic locator
i. and the mythic west
ii. na dhte lonliness contained therein
iii. and the implication that perhaps this is not a physical space, but an emotional one
iv. long tradtion of great traveling/trucker country that is v. atuned to geography, that knows where it is, and mentions names of cities, towns, highways (ie girl on the billboard, ive been everywhere, king of the road, find others)
16. everyminute someone dies/what are we doing in this dive bar/how can you live in a place like this/why don’t you get into my car/and ill take you away/ill take that kiss now/but…
a. unreliable narrative
b. unsure who is talking, whos car
c. why do I assume this to be a trucking song
d. it’s a great a/b/a/b call and response, vibe, but its merritt talking to himself, over thiese reptiive, turgid guitars
17. The shock of the last verse
18. 55 years later/and weve had the romance of the century/after years wrestling gators/ive still felt like crying…
a. the gender changes in the last chorus
b. its Claudia, and she sings, in a female voice, and we finally realize that there is a matched pair, and in all of the excesses of this, the lonlieness matches
c. jack and ennis moment
d. but also girl from the high country, and patsy montanna getting her own love
e. some interesting self relefexivity in the last little bit, in the last lines, (they sing together, songs entwine)
19. What A conincede Papa was a Rodeo.
Kelly Hogan
1. More Heteronormative, cause it’s a boy singing to a girl (is stepin playing a character, which gender is he speaking in, why do we assume its queer.
2. She emphasizes different parts of the text—she is more concise in her phrasing, of lines like I leave early in the morning, I wont be back till next year
3. When she says maybe, it seems less ambiguous, and beer bottle seems less like a replacement for cock
4. There is an elelment of biography, of Kelly being part of a rock and roll band
5. It’s a softer, less obnixous version, but its quicker, half a minute shorter .
6. The lacunae, the elements of musical intercession…
7. Everyminute someone dies, she deemphazies this, she doesn’t spend as much time lingering on it as she could.
8. Its truckers hand, not stand
9. She lengthens the vowels sometimes,
10. There, the first lacunae, the first instrumental break
11. What are the implications of her assuming this text, wrt gender?
12. Wrestling gators as metaphor
13. The dude comes in, and its shortened in, the third act marriage is not accompoined by some weird twisting in the second verse
14. I keep thinking, about this a roaming song, about a seeking out desire and sexuality, instead of watiting for it to come, in that way, it seems against the narrative flow of female country, with few exceptions, is a game of domesticity, her claiming this song, her claiming the raw desire, the strangeness of the road, the exhaustion and the sadness, is a different kind of raw desire et al then stand by yr man, coal miners daughter, I fall to pieces, I gave my wedding dress away, I want to a cowboy’s sweetheart, etc—even the fuck you Loretta songs (Rated X, Fist City ) is about protecting territory on yr own geographic space.
Original:
1. 15 seconds starting
2. twisted point of view
3. who is mike, what gender is mike
4. the coyness, you’ve made it pretty clear what you like
5. the causal sexuality, the desire for bar room back room fuck
6. or is it something else
7. the kiss you puckered for me
8. plug it with a beer
a. first phallic signifaction
9. Papa was a rodeo
a. Not part of a rodeo, not a piece of the rodeo, but actually rodeo itself the personifiaciton of rodeo
b. The idea that identity was so infused
c. Ideas of transference, the power of parentage, et. al
d. Papa was a rodeo/mama was a rock and roll band wrt the Leonard cohen song
e. The brokeback scene, buckle bunnies, groupies, instability
10. mama was a rock and roll band
a. not a country band
b. away from the domestic
c. how common was the idea of mama, etc
d. the was questions again
e. can we make the argument that this was the second phallic signifaction
11. “play guitar and rope a steer/home was anywhere with diesal gas/love was a truckers stand
a. complications
b. he is in the middle of a gender non spec. seduction, he is talking about his parenting, explaining how he would like to stay, but cant—he has talked about who his parents are, how they affected him, but his role as a drifter becomes mythological, in that we don’t know anything of him before lets say 6
c. id/mirror stage/etc
d. the idea of truck stops as liminal places
e. the travellign trouboudour schtick
f. what is a truckers stand
i. literal defition
ii. last stand
iii. stand by your man
12. never stuck around long enough for a one night stand
a. does that mean that its all hand jobs at truck stops
b. truck stops as places for casual sex
c. or does that mean that there is a purity here,
i. asexuality and the cowboy
ii. celibacy and the cowboy
iii. cowboy as truckdriver
iv. Ie in the sense that I have too much to do, my tasks are too great, and my training as well, leads me to not have sex at all
v. Ie slut anthem or something else.
13. is he warning his paramour off, or his he seducing, what games are they playing .
14. semi-long sections o guitars, like lacunae, like pauses for reponses that do not come, like something stranger and less there.
15. the light refleting off the mirror ball/like a thousand seeking eyes/make me think that I should not be here at all…
a. a strange reference to the apropticon
b. what is he afraid of
c. where is here, why should he not be here
d. half ay thru the song and no specific geographic locator
i. and the mythic west
ii. na dhte lonliness contained therein
iii. and the implication that perhaps this is not a physical space, but an emotional one
iv. long tradtion of great traveling/trucker country that is v. atuned to geography, that knows where it is, and mentions names of cities, towns, highways (ie girl on the billboard, ive been everywhere, king of the road, find others)
16. everyminute someone dies/what are we doing in this dive bar/how can you live in a place like this/why don’t you get into my car/and ill take you away/ill take that kiss now/but…
a. unreliable narrative
b. unsure who is talking, whos car
c. why do I assume this to be a trucking song
d. it’s a great a/b/a/b call and response, vibe, but its merritt talking to himself, over thiese reptiive, turgid guitars
17. The shock of the last verse
18. 55 years later/and weve had the romance of the century/after years wrestling gators/ive still felt like crying…
a. the gender changes in the last chorus
b. its Claudia, and she sings, in a female voice, and we finally realize that there is a matched pair, and in all of the excesses of this, the lonlieness matches
c. jack and ennis moment
d. but also girl from the high country, and patsy montanna getting her own love
e. some interesting self relefexivity in the last little bit, in the last lines, (they sing together, songs entwine)
19. What A conincede Papa was a Rodeo.
Kelly Hogan
1. More Heteronormative, cause it’s a boy singing to a girl (is stepin playing a character, which gender is he speaking in, why do we assume its queer.
2. She emphasizes different parts of the text—she is more concise in her phrasing, of lines like I leave early in the morning, I wont be back till next year
3. When she says maybe, it seems less ambiguous, and beer bottle seems less like a replacement for cock
4. There is an elelment of biography, of Kelly being part of a rock and roll band
5. It’s a softer, less obnixous version, but its quicker, half a minute shorter .
6. The lacunae, the elements of musical intercession…
7. Everyminute someone dies, she deemphazies this, she doesn’t spend as much time lingering on it as she could.
8. Its truckers hand, not stand
9. She lengthens the vowels sometimes,
10. There, the first lacunae, the first instrumental break
11. What are the implications of her assuming this text, wrt gender?
12. Wrestling gators as metaphor
13. The dude comes in, and its shortened in, the third act marriage is not accompoined by some weird twisting in the second verse
14. I keep thinking, about this a roaming song, about a seeking out desire and sexuality, instead of watiting for it to come, in that way, it seems against the narrative flow of female country, with few exceptions, is a game of domesticity, her claiming this song, her claiming the raw desire, the strangeness of the road, the exhaustion and the sadness, is a different kind of raw desire et al then stand by yr man, coal miners daughter, I fall to pieces, I gave my wedding dress away, I want to a cowboy’s sweetheart, etc—even the fuck you Loretta songs (Rated X, Fist City ) is about protecting territory on yr own geographic space.
at pompidou a show on la in art, from 1955 to 1985, review from the LATIMES:
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/knight/cl-et-pompidou15mar15,0,5708927.story?coll=cl-art-knight
(cut and paste, the link is too long)
admire, who have changed how i think about contemparary art, come from LA, and i think LA is more of a cultural capital then people think it is, and i think that we need to think about it as a capital for new art.
16 LA Artists from 55 to 85 for me.
1) Kienholz (for his horrors of the body, his fear of sex, his desire against accepted political boundries, etc)
2) Ruscha (i dont have to talk about this anymore)
3) Theibould (i dont like his recent landscapes, in fact my desire for him runs entirely from ca1963-1965, his most famous work, of candy, toys, cake, pastries, deli countersm etc, but his erotic tactility related to food, well it hits my belly)
4) Ramos (his pinups, his paintings of pathetic super heros, his awful kitsch remakes of high art, hes a bad painter, a limited one, but an interesting one, with good things to say)
5) Goldstein (his film work, and art movies, and making the mgm lion be about all lions in the world, and his sadness in the midst of all this glitz)
6) Deiborken (his colours, bonnard o the west coast)
7) Kim McDonnell and the rest of the painting and decoration school (the most underrated school of the 20th century, the one that gives birth decades after it was declared dead, and the school responsible for everyone from laura owens to carl fudge to
8) dennis hoppers photogs (he should have just quit acting)
9) judy chicago (esp. the mockery of slick minimalism she did before mensturation and quilts)
10) mike kelly
11) kenneth anger
12) john balderssai (he used to arange his 5x7 snap shots, up the walls of gallerys, in spirals, and arching curves)
13) nancy buchanan
14) martha rosler (rachel do you know her, esp her seires of photocollages called the body is beautfiul from 1969-1972, they might be a good place to look, because of how she works surfaces, beauty, commercem and industry, see if you can find one called cargo cult)
15) the work nauman did there, before he went to mexico, new york
16) paul mccarthy
and the vatican remixes the crusades, now with less islamic tolerance
here
http://www.calendarlive.com/galleriesandmuseums/knight/cl-et-pompidou15mar15,0,5708927.story?coll=cl-art-knight
(cut and paste, the link is too long)
admire, who have changed how i think about contemparary art, come from LA, and i think LA is more of a cultural capital then people think it is, and i think that we need to think about it as a capital for new art.
16 LA Artists from 55 to 85 for me.
1) Kienholz (for his horrors of the body, his fear of sex, his desire against accepted political boundries, etc)
2) Ruscha (i dont have to talk about this anymore)
3) Theibould (i dont like his recent landscapes, in fact my desire for him runs entirely from ca1963-1965, his most famous work, of candy, toys, cake, pastries, deli countersm etc, but his erotic tactility related to food, well it hits my belly)
4) Ramos (his pinups, his paintings of pathetic super heros, his awful kitsch remakes of high art, hes a bad painter, a limited one, but an interesting one, with good things to say)
5) Goldstein (his film work, and art movies, and making the mgm lion be about all lions in the world, and his sadness in the midst of all this glitz)
6) Deiborken (his colours, bonnard o the west coast)
7) Kim McDonnell and the rest of the painting and decoration school (the most underrated school of the 20th century, the one that gives birth decades after it was declared dead, and the school responsible for everyone from laura owens to carl fudge to
8) dennis hoppers photogs (he should have just quit acting)
9) judy chicago (esp. the mockery of slick minimalism she did before mensturation and quilts)
10) mike kelly
11) kenneth anger
12) john balderssai (he used to arange his 5x7 snap shots, up the walls of gallerys, in spirals, and arching curves)
13) nancy buchanan
14) martha rosler (rachel do you know her, esp her seires of photocollages called the body is beautfiul from 1969-1972, they might be a good place to look, because of how she works surfaces, beauty, commercem and industry, see if you can find one called cargo cult)
15) the work nauman did there, before he went to mexico, new york
16) paul mccarthy
and the vatican remixes the crusades, now with less islamic tolerance
here
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Sunday, March 19, 2006
10 stories for 10 photos
Taking photos out of moving vehicles:
(This is my attempt to move into another kind of artist statement, for a package of semi-unrelated photos, meant for the albertan bienal, its really bloggy, I don’t know if it works.)
1. Before I went away to school, when my grandparents were still alive, they used to take me to my great aunts cabin in the shushawp. I would have a drugstore 35 mm, and it would take blurry, awful photos. Because we couldn’t stop as often as I would have liked, I would point and shot from the Buick my granddad drove. They were often of similar things to what I take photos of now, trains, rocks, interesting buildings, factories, and various water features.
2. The two years I was away at school, I often did not have a camera, and so photos were taken for us. On parents’ day, a recent graduate would put up a table with lists of photos he took, and samples. Because they believed that nature was good for a boy, in the 19th century Canadian way of noble canoes and even nobler hiking, the photos would be a combination of the spectacular (pine trees, lakes, mountains, rock strewn moonscape like summits) and the snapshot (eating, walking, the big group show at the end.) The photos I wanted to take, were pictures of school bus wells, the hitch that held a dozen voyager style canoes, the pick ups that came to meet us on the shores, details that were missed, details that were less heroic. They wanted us to be like the boys in the novels we read for English (White Fang, She, Dog Runner, Mrs. Mike) I had enough danger, I wanted to avoid it, or be an arms length observer.
3. When I came back from going home to school, my dad took me to Vancouver for the first time. It was a place where he positioned himself as a bohemian, a place where he lived for a few years, and then left to go back to Alberta, to get married and eventually had me. It was the first time I ever fell in love with a city and I took photos everywhere, from another cheap camera. I lost or dropped things, and my family didn’t have a whole lot of cash, so need turned into a vernacular aesthetic. I remember most, the photos I took from the windows of the monorail, the sky train. Even the name seemed like something from Buck Rogers, and I liked being above everything else. Technically this was impossible, and I got rolls of interesting blurs. Bad photographs were as pretty as Good ones sometimes.
4. I took some photos during high school, with one use cameras. I wanted to be Warhol. They were cheap and disposable. I felt cheap and disposable. They ere high trash, like how high camp makes the aesthetic of unfulfilled desire into political theater, this made being broke into something similar. That, and they were easy to shoplift. Packs of 6, with a French name, just outside the photo department, in the Superstore in Claireview, it made me feel punker then Warhol. The interesting thing about this was that this was the first time I tried derive, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I wandered the city, on buses as far north as Castledowns, and as far south as Ellesry,to Millwoods, down stony plain road, I would spend weekends doing nothing but taking photos from the windows of buses, with these cameras I stole from the supermarket. Sometimes I developed them, I must have developed all of them, but I don’t remember that part of the process. It was shooting a roll of film, like shooting a load of cum, that relaxed me. The solipsism of adolescence, or something like that.
5. After High School, I went with a tour group to spend 3 weeks in London. I spent most of the time away from the group, in pubs, restaurants, galleries, and museums. I took loads of photos, snapshots and artshots, the two were less separated in my mind. My favorite was a picture of Scotland, from the air, just 45 minutes before landing in Heathrow. The ocean, and green land, white trees, an abstracted pastoral. I have failed to take anything as good from an airplane ever since—looking at Wolfgang Tillimans, much later, I realized that his were better then mine because they looked uglier.
6. I didn’t take pictures for a long time, after London, because of some failures, and general boredom, and other business. I met Raymond in a class, and after a while, he invited me to take his camera, and shoot at the railway yards. It was a nice machine, with lenses and a case, and he was much more of a tech junkie then I was. But I got the thrill, I remembered how much I loved trains, and how much it didn’t matter what other people shot. I learned about technical ability, and figured out that shooting a moving vehicle, from the outside, when you weren’t in it, had a thrill that was different then being encased in the vehicle. Ballard talks a lot about symbiosis with machines and bodies, in Crash and I re read it a few weeks after my encounter with Raymond and his camera.
7. About this time, I went to a conference for Canadian University Press, with an asshole of a photog, who shot for the Gateway. He wouldn’t take pictures of me, and played keep away with my camera, because I didn’t have an SLR. I managed photos of him, squished in the back of a Civic, and of things on the highway, sometimes when we went out for piss breaks, sometimes from the windows of the car. I figured out that it was the image that mattered and not the equipment, and that the linguistic similarities between equipment meaning dick and equipment being camera were not cocncidental.
8. A little while later, during my second or third year of university, Raymond and I lived together. We would often go shooting, trading shot for shot, then roll for roll, as our styles became closer and closer. I developed two kinds of language for talking about film, the visual language of composition and the verbal slang that devolped between he and I. We would travel, driving around the city, out to the coast, up to wainright, once. He drove a mid80s Firebird, and the thing would make noise—sometimes we would take pictures out of the window of this firebird, but the best thing was saying STOP and jumping out, suddenly, to take a photo of a sign, or a post, or a building, or something interesting/ ugly/ beautiful/sublime/pretty/etc. The movemovemovesSTOPmovemovemoveSTOP pull and tug of our shooting became a new way to think of bodies, vehicles and machines. I collected these in little blue books, showed people at parties, proud of the odd shot, but didn’t think of myself as a photographer. A writer writes and a photog takes pictures, though.
9. In the year after I flunked out of University, I spent two weeks in a monstary in Kentucky. I took some pictures there, with a digital camera my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. It was too dark to take photos on the trip there, and leaving early, I didn’t know how to be polite enough to ask the monk to stop, so I could take photos of certain things, it even seemed rude to take the camera out in the minivan and take photos of the highways. I still remember the list of things I wanted to take pictures of: Robbie the Worlds Largest Rooster; Various Baptist Churches, The Cathedral of Bardstown, proof that there was a Stephen Foster Avenue, The Jim Beam hand painted brewery sign, 30 foot signs on the interstate advertising truck stops, bait shops, waffle houses, and Girls Girls Girls; the signs for interstates themselves, and the minivan itself. The grammar of unspoken signals, of things not shot from vehicles, I think was stronger then if things were left in the open.
10. A few weeks ago, a friend and I went from my house in the suburbs to Millwoods, where he lived. We were going to toboggan. To get there we had to pass all sorts of industry, refineries, warehouses, and the supporting infastructure that happens on the edges of industrial towns. I took maybe 40 photos out of the window of his Honda, and he asked me if I wanted to stop. I didn’t, because the kid would be restless, because it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, because taking photos with someone is intimate for me, and I didn’t feel that way about Gerard, because I finally felt confident about my ability to take a good shot, with shitty equipment in less then ideal circumstances, because there is something transient that’s important about traveling down hiway 21 and having to be quick in order to take a photo.
Taking photos out of moving vehicles:
(This is my attempt to move into another kind of artist statement, for a package of semi-unrelated photos, meant for the albertan bienal, its really bloggy, I don’t know if it works.)
1. Before I went away to school, when my grandparents were still alive, they used to take me to my great aunts cabin in the shushawp. I would have a drugstore 35 mm, and it would take blurry, awful photos. Because we couldn’t stop as often as I would have liked, I would point and shot from the Buick my granddad drove. They were often of similar things to what I take photos of now, trains, rocks, interesting buildings, factories, and various water features.
2. The two years I was away at school, I often did not have a camera, and so photos were taken for us. On parents’ day, a recent graduate would put up a table with lists of photos he took, and samples. Because they believed that nature was good for a boy, in the 19th century Canadian way of noble canoes and even nobler hiking, the photos would be a combination of the spectacular (pine trees, lakes, mountains, rock strewn moonscape like summits) and the snapshot (eating, walking, the big group show at the end.) The photos I wanted to take, were pictures of school bus wells, the hitch that held a dozen voyager style canoes, the pick ups that came to meet us on the shores, details that were missed, details that were less heroic. They wanted us to be like the boys in the novels we read for English (White Fang, She, Dog Runner, Mrs. Mike) I had enough danger, I wanted to avoid it, or be an arms length observer.
3. When I came back from going home to school, my dad took me to Vancouver for the first time. It was a place where he positioned himself as a bohemian, a place where he lived for a few years, and then left to go back to Alberta, to get married and eventually had me. It was the first time I ever fell in love with a city and I took photos everywhere, from another cheap camera. I lost or dropped things, and my family didn’t have a whole lot of cash, so need turned into a vernacular aesthetic. I remember most, the photos I took from the windows of the monorail, the sky train. Even the name seemed like something from Buck Rogers, and I liked being above everything else. Technically this was impossible, and I got rolls of interesting blurs. Bad photographs were as pretty as Good ones sometimes.
4. I took some photos during high school, with one use cameras. I wanted to be Warhol. They were cheap and disposable. I felt cheap and disposable. They ere high trash, like how high camp makes the aesthetic of unfulfilled desire into political theater, this made being broke into something similar. That, and they were easy to shoplift. Packs of 6, with a French name, just outside the photo department, in the Superstore in Claireview, it made me feel punker then Warhol. The interesting thing about this was that this was the first time I tried derive, though I didn’t have the word for it then. I wandered the city, on buses as far north as Castledowns, and as far south as Ellesry,to Millwoods, down stony plain road, I would spend weekends doing nothing but taking photos from the windows of buses, with these cameras I stole from the supermarket. Sometimes I developed them, I must have developed all of them, but I don’t remember that part of the process. It was shooting a roll of film, like shooting a load of cum, that relaxed me. The solipsism of adolescence, or something like that.
5. After High School, I went with a tour group to spend 3 weeks in London. I spent most of the time away from the group, in pubs, restaurants, galleries, and museums. I took loads of photos, snapshots and artshots, the two were less separated in my mind. My favorite was a picture of Scotland, from the air, just 45 minutes before landing in Heathrow. The ocean, and green land, white trees, an abstracted pastoral. I have failed to take anything as good from an airplane ever since—looking at Wolfgang Tillimans, much later, I realized that his were better then mine because they looked uglier.
6. I didn’t take pictures for a long time, after London, because of some failures, and general boredom, and other business. I met Raymond in a class, and after a while, he invited me to take his camera, and shoot at the railway yards. It was a nice machine, with lenses and a case, and he was much more of a tech junkie then I was. But I got the thrill, I remembered how much I loved trains, and how much it didn’t matter what other people shot. I learned about technical ability, and figured out that shooting a moving vehicle, from the outside, when you weren’t in it, had a thrill that was different then being encased in the vehicle. Ballard talks a lot about symbiosis with machines and bodies, in Crash and I re read it a few weeks after my encounter with Raymond and his camera.
7. About this time, I went to a conference for Canadian University Press, with an asshole of a photog, who shot for the Gateway. He wouldn’t take pictures of me, and played keep away with my camera, because I didn’t have an SLR. I managed photos of him, squished in the back of a Civic, and of things on the highway, sometimes when we went out for piss breaks, sometimes from the windows of the car. I figured out that it was the image that mattered and not the equipment, and that the linguistic similarities between equipment meaning dick and equipment being camera were not cocncidental.
8. A little while later, during my second or third year of university, Raymond and I lived together. We would often go shooting, trading shot for shot, then roll for roll, as our styles became closer and closer. I developed two kinds of language for talking about film, the visual language of composition and the verbal slang that devolped between he and I. We would travel, driving around the city, out to the coast, up to wainright, once. He drove a mid80s Firebird, and the thing would make noise—sometimes we would take pictures out of the window of this firebird, but the best thing was saying STOP and jumping out, suddenly, to take a photo of a sign, or a post, or a building, or something interesting/ ugly/ beautiful/sublime/pretty/etc. The movemovemovesSTOPmovemovemoveSTOP pull and tug of our shooting became a new way to think of bodies, vehicles and machines. I collected these in little blue books, showed people at parties, proud of the odd shot, but didn’t think of myself as a photographer. A writer writes and a photog takes pictures, though.
9. In the year after I flunked out of University, I spent two weeks in a monstary in Kentucky. I took some pictures there, with a digital camera my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. It was too dark to take photos on the trip there, and leaving early, I didn’t know how to be polite enough to ask the monk to stop, so I could take photos of certain things, it even seemed rude to take the camera out in the minivan and take photos of the highways. I still remember the list of things I wanted to take pictures of: Robbie the Worlds Largest Rooster; Various Baptist Churches, The Cathedral of Bardstown, proof that there was a Stephen Foster Avenue, The Jim Beam hand painted brewery sign, 30 foot signs on the interstate advertising truck stops, bait shops, waffle houses, and Girls Girls Girls; the signs for interstates themselves, and the minivan itself. The grammar of unspoken signals, of things not shot from vehicles, I think was stronger then if things were left in the open.
10. A few weeks ago, a friend and I went from my house in the suburbs to Millwoods, where he lived. We were going to toboggan. To get there we had to pass all sorts of industry, refineries, warehouses, and the supporting infastructure that happens on the edges of industrial towns. I took maybe 40 photos out of the window of his Honda, and he asked me if I wanted to stop. I didn’t, because the kid would be restless, because it wasn’t the purpose of the trip, because taking photos with someone is intimate for me, and I didn’t feel that way about Gerard, because I finally felt confident about my ability to take a good shot, with shitty equipment in less then ideal circumstances, because there is something transient that’s important about traveling down hiway 21 and having to be quick in order to take a photo.
the boys had a house party, then v for, then frans...its not their fault, and its pretty constant contact, and its emails, phone calls, and we are as close as we can, and we are working my ass to get me out their, and yet, here, 2 feet of snow in the last few weeks, still snowing, cold and miserable, ive been really really depressed...
today is the lonliest, the most desperate ive been all winter, the closest ive gotten to the worst of the royal alex, toronto western days.
the perverse thing is that with sucidal ideation, it makes it easier, there is a way out, from isolaion, desperation, exhaustion, etc...there is a release to thinking about killing one self.
i havent engaged in sucidal ideation, its not an option, with mom being sick, etc, so it gets worse, there is less and less of a release, and i sort of fall into my own entropy/needieness/anger/depression.
i need to clean the house, i need to sweep, mop, pick up the laundry room and my bedroom, which are getting so bad that i cant move with out jumping, clean my sheets, all of that, and its just not happening, since the double funeral, and the next big snow dump, i do what i need to do, i keep working, keep skating, but i barely have it together, im crying right now, and gerard said he would give me a ride out tomorrow, to the city and i like gerard but i dont want to be a hassle, i never want to be a hassle,
i cancelled lettner 4 times this week, because of buses and also because i couldnt handle seeing new people, and gerard has gone out of his way to let himself in, which i need but yeah...
im depressed, not the low grade fever that usually moves thru, but a hard, cold, obilette kind of thing, a box w/o breath holes
today is the lonliest, the most desperate ive been all winter, the closest ive gotten to the worst of the royal alex, toronto western days.
the perverse thing is that with sucidal ideation, it makes it easier, there is a way out, from isolaion, desperation, exhaustion, etc...there is a release to thinking about killing one self.
i havent engaged in sucidal ideation, its not an option, with mom being sick, etc, so it gets worse, there is less and less of a release, and i sort of fall into my own entropy/needieness/anger/depression.
i need to clean the house, i need to sweep, mop, pick up the laundry room and my bedroom, which are getting so bad that i cant move with out jumping, clean my sheets, all of that, and its just not happening, since the double funeral, and the next big snow dump, i do what i need to do, i keep working, keep skating, but i barely have it together, im crying right now, and gerard said he would give me a ride out tomorrow, to the city and i like gerard but i dont want to be a hassle, i never want to be a hassle,
i cancelled lettner 4 times this week, because of buses and also because i couldnt handle seeing new people, and gerard has gone out of his way to let himself in, which i need but yeah...
im depressed, not the low grade fever that usually moves thru, but a hard, cold, obilette kind of thing, a box w/o breath holes
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Friday, March 17, 2006
Thursday, March 16, 2006
so im sitting in an internet cafe on jasper and 109th, handling some email, before my meeting with employabilities...and kitty corner to me, they are finally recladding an IS medium size office block, adn they do it with two people, one on the floor above and one on the floor below, with anchoring ropes to the ground, and some kind of mechaincal winch...the windows are huge, about 10x8 or so, and its windy/snow...so i cannot imagine the job pleasent in the least, but the corrdination, is breath taking--my inner 8 yr old wants tthem to drop the glass all over the sidewalk, but thats most likely why there is cladding on the ground floor, aside of course from security concerns, dont know how i could take a decent photo of this...
Proposal for a Book Chapter on the Magnetic Fields:
Cowboys, Cowgirls and Other Problems of Genre.
Gender and Rural Culture in Stephen Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo (and Kelly Hogan’s Cover)
Cover versions crossing gender lines become complicated creatures, and performers alterations of lyrics is often a disputed site of resistance. Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Field’s 3 volume 69 Love Songs, is even trickier, because Merritt works so hard on disrupting any possible gender or sexual clue. The version of Papa was a… in 69 Love Songs, on the surface, is a gay cowboy love song, unusual but not unheard of. The cover, on the surface, is a straight cowboy love song, casual in its banality. Merritt has claimed that Papa…was a straight country song and Hogan introduces the song live, plainly, as one of the loneliest songs she’s heard. It’s even lonely with a lover of the proper place and gender emerging in the third verse. A marriage in the third act is supposed to set everything right.
There is something confusing in the interplay between these two songs. Some of it deals with gender and personae mentioned, but there are also issues of geography. The song mentions no geographic place directly, unlike the Magnetic Albums country album Charm of the Highway Strip, so it discusses a Middle America, filmed, photographed, written about, and mythologized as archetypal and not “real”. Though this could be explained by Meritt being the archetypal, decadent New Yorker, how does it leave Kelly Hogan who’s record label Bloodshot was founded in Chicago, and knows a bit about all that space in the middle.
Starting with those intersections of aesthetics, sexuality and geography is to begin to slowly tangle and untangle sign and signifier, in these two songs, and in other country songs that Merritt may have sang. Using the theoretical tools as varied as Lacan on lacunae and phallic presentation; Judith Butler on the performance of gender; Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry’s concepts of urban and agrarian; the American travelogues of Baudillard and Bernard Levy, but also branch out from that.
I want to talk about how these two songs fit into film (Johnny Guitar; Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show; Brokeback Mountain); fine art photography (American Surfaces by Stephen Shore; Los Alamos by William Eggleston); and country music (Patsy Montana; Roy Acuff; Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie)
Like Wayne Kaustenbaum’s recent articles for art forum, and books like Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus and late Barthes, the article will be in numbered paragraphs. I am doing this for several reasons, including Merritt’s fondness for the list form, the spare minimalism of the plot, and to extend the songs loose web of referents. Think of it then, as a long highway, and the prose being the gas stations, hotels, honky tonks, truck stops, weigh stations and churches one sees on its highways.
Cowboys, Cowgirls and Other Problems of Genre.
Gender and Rural Culture in Stephen Merritt's Papa Was a Rodeo (and Kelly Hogan’s Cover)
Cover versions crossing gender lines become complicated creatures, and performers alterations of lyrics is often a disputed site of resistance. Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Field’s 3 volume 69 Love Songs, is even trickier, because Merritt works so hard on disrupting any possible gender or sexual clue. The version of Papa was a… in 69 Love Songs, on the surface, is a gay cowboy love song, unusual but not unheard of. The cover, on the surface, is a straight cowboy love song, casual in its banality. Merritt has claimed that Papa…was a straight country song and Hogan introduces the song live, plainly, as one of the loneliest songs she’s heard. It’s even lonely with a lover of the proper place and gender emerging in the third verse. A marriage in the third act is supposed to set everything right.
There is something confusing in the interplay between these two songs. Some of it deals with gender and personae mentioned, but there are also issues of geography. The song mentions no geographic place directly, unlike the Magnetic Albums country album Charm of the Highway Strip, so it discusses a Middle America, filmed, photographed, written about, and mythologized as archetypal and not “real”. Though this could be explained by Meritt being the archetypal, decadent New Yorker, how does it leave Kelly Hogan who’s record label Bloodshot was founded in Chicago, and knows a bit about all that space in the middle.
Starting with those intersections of aesthetics, sexuality and geography is to begin to slowly tangle and untangle sign and signifier, in these two songs, and in other country songs that Merritt may have sang. Using the theoretical tools as varied as Lacan on lacunae and phallic presentation; Judith Butler on the performance of gender; Howard Zinn and Wendell Berry’s concepts of urban and agrarian; the American travelogues of Baudillard and Bernard Levy, but also branch out from that.
I want to talk about how these two songs fit into film (Johnny Guitar; Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show; Brokeback Mountain); fine art photography (American Surfaces by Stephen Shore; Los Alamos by William Eggleston); and country music (Patsy Montana; Roy Acuff; Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie)
Like Wayne Kaustenbaum’s recent articles for art forum, and books like Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus and late Barthes, the article will be in numbered paragraphs. I am doing this for several reasons, including Merritt’s fondness for the list form, the spare minimalism of the plot, and to extend the songs loose web of referents. Think of it then, as a long highway, and the prose being the gas stations, hotels, honky tonks, truck stops, weigh stations and churches one sees on its highways.
A woman from nashville star last night yodelled and sang a bit of patsy montanna and was not evicted (she wont last of course, nashville is new country, and new country has no history)...but she was good. here here is a singer called elizabeth mcqueen, shes not bad at all, and i could imagine her yodelling (as did the singer on nashville
five soilders beat the shit out of some faggot in north carolina...the other side of the fort bragg gay porn story, and another reason why dont ask dont tell is untennable.
handmade masks worn by pretty boys, strange, erotic, with elements of childhood games, arts and crafts at summer camp, pink narcissus, and sunday morning boredom, because the masks tend towards nose peices, they attach themselves to a freudian tradtion v. loosely, and do not have the sinister, transformative, fetishistic, antropolgical terror that can be found in much mask work, they have a tender, careful, silliness, and i appreciate that. worth a click. (like the radical craft conference in pasedena this month, the work im doing for banff, allyson, etc)
this poor moose, shot near oslo, because he threatened to derail a passenger train. it makes me sad, though sentiment and anthropolgozation makes us forget danger.
five soilders beat the shit out of some faggot in north carolina...the other side of the fort bragg gay porn story, and another reason why dont ask dont tell is untennable.
handmade masks worn by pretty boys, strange, erotic, with elements of childhood games, arts and crafts at summer camp, pink narcissus, and sunday morning boredom, because the masks tend towards nose peices, they attach themselves to a freudian tradtion v. loosely, and do not have the sinister, transformative, fetishistic, antropolgical terror that can be found in much mask work, they have a tender, careful, silliness, and i appreciate that. worth a click. (like the radical craft conference in pasedena this month, the work im doing for banff, allyson, etc)
this poor moose, shot near oslo, because he threatened to derail a passenger train. it makes me sad, though sentiment and anthropolgozation makes us forget danger.
which reminds me
47) Atwood Penepoloid
it wasnt bad (she has never written anything bad, though blind assasian comes v. close) but its not very good, or not very funny. it seemed padded, the same points made over and over again, and she doesnt flesh out homers absences as much as she should have been. they should have given this one to carson
47) Atwood Penepoloid
it wasnt bad (she has never written anything bad, though blind assasian comes v. close) but its not very good, or not very funny. it seemed padded, the same points made over and over again, and she doesnt flesh out homers absences as much as she should have been. they should have given this one to carson
16 things that happened in the last 72 hours
1) hung out with gerard and jacob
2) there was sledding involved
2a) i am in horrible shape, and jacob is a quiet kid, but socialable in a way that i hve never been really able to be.
3) went over to gerads house
4) had dinner, saw some of claires art, talked to his mom, talked about god, borrowed books, ate dinner
4a) soup, salad, roast beef, vegetables, roasted potatos, apple crumble, ice cream.
4b) fuck was it good.
5) went to mass
6) saw lydia, graham, cam, jerry, amongst others.
6b) lydia is teaching, graham is UASU Pres, jerry is engaged.
7) Bittner gave an amazing speech, about power and love--i kept thinking about when bittner said, love is more impt then power in the works of paul, and i dont think thats true, reading derrida again about it, and about how power, mercy, strained and unstrained, i think that the rub is where infinte universal YHWH meets/interacts w. an eglitarian, humbled jesus, the mystery of something g. called it...must get back to him about it.
8) im nervous about meeting with graham, he likes me lots, and he appreciates my company, but i am never sure exacty how to talk to him, a bit of a politican, a bit gaurded, but shrug.
9) drove home and talked about being queer/catholic with gerard, and how isolating mass can be, and how erotic it can be as well (and not only b/c i want to fuck everyone in the room) and about how i dont trust my own body, and how god seems to come in and out in odd places and odd times, im in the midst of another god time...
10) marys funeral was on monday, mary is my grandmothers sister.
11) saw chip and barb, connected ray to chip but talking to him is a lot like talking to the mystics, different language, different power, and my inner marxist comes out screaming. talked to grandma a bit, she did the why are you doing that, keep doing t hat one two ninja psyop punch that makes me feel like shit. talked to scotts new wife, who was much too familar much too quickly, and sort of supportive, but frankly i dont need her support, and talked to scott. had several meltdowns, blisterbombed dad, grandma, the rest of the company, depression back.
12) big seizure (first seizure of any kind in weeks)
13) read and looked thru frielanders book sticks and stones, im settling into what it means, but one of the most impt books of photosgraphs ive looked at since maybe american surfaces or the new orleans fridge one. repositioned how i felt formally to my fotos, realised that my street photos are much more culturally/socially rigous.
14) got math books from rays mom, i have to set an hour a day to do that, cause if i dont they dont get done, methodically.
15) more money stuff with dad, but it comes down to his shit, his nerousis and mental illness and his inablity to get shit together, and finally settling into it not being my fault.
16) did some work for tcaf, and they really liked it, no money but excellent contacts.
friday will be a fone day.
1) hung out with gerard and jacob
2) there was sledding involved
2a) i am in horrible shape, and jacob is a quiet kid, but socialable in a way that i hve never been really able to be.
3) went over to gerads house
4) had dinner, saw some of claires art, talked to his mom, talked about god, borrowed books, ate dinner
4a) soup, salad, roast beef, vegetables, roasted potatos, apple crumble, ice cream.
4b) fuck was it good.
5) went to mass
6) saw lydia, graham, cam, jerry, amongst others.
6b) lydia is teaching, graham is UASU Pres, jerry is engaged.
7) Bittner gave an amazing speech, about power and love--i kept thinking about when bittner said, love is more impt then power in the works of paul, and i dont think thats true, reading derrida again about it, and about how power, mercy, strained and unstrained, i think that the rub is where infinte universal YHWH meets/interacts w. an eglitarian, humbled jesus, the mystery of something g. called it...must get back to him about it.
8) im nervous about meeting with graham, he likes me lots, and he appreciates my company, but i am never sure exacty how to talk to him, a bit of a politican, a bit gaurded, but shrug.
9) drove home and talked about being queer/catholic with gerard, and how isolating mass can be, and how erotic it can be as well (and not only b/c i want to fuck everyone in the room) and about how i dont trust my own body, and how god seems to come in and out in odd places and odd times, im in the midst of another god time...
10) marys funeral was on monday, mary is my grandmothers sister.
11) saw chip and barb, connected ray to chip but talking to him is a lot like talking to the mystics, different language, different power, and my inner marxist comes out screaming. talked to grandma a bit, she did the why are you doing that, keep doing t hat one two ninja psyop punch that makes me feel like shit. talked to scotts new wife, who was much too familar much too quickly, and sort of supportive, but frankly i dont need her support, and talked to scott. had several meltdowns, blisterbombed dad, grandma, the rest of the company, depression back.
12) big seizure (first seizure of any kind in weeks)
13) read and looked thru frielanders book sticks and stones, im settling into what it means, but one of the most impt books of photosgraphs ive looked at since maybe american surfaces or the new orleans fridge one. repositioned how i felt formally to my fotos, realised that my street photos are much more culturally/socially rigous.
14) got math books from rays mom, i have to set an hour a day to do that, cause if i dont they dont get done, methodically.
15) more money stuff with dad, but it comes down to his shit, his nerousis and mental illness and his inablity to get shit together, and finally settling into it not being my fault.
16) did some work for tcaf, and they really liked it, no money but excellent contacts.
friday will be a fone day.
Monday, March 13, 2006
From the Floor posted these, from the fielder gallery, of a german called Frank Bauer-unlike most new germans, the prints are tiny, up to a maxium of a meter,(which i think makes them more interesting, the juxtoposition, and i like that small prints are making a comeback)
from warehouses: (these are fantastic, cause they are so simple, its really hard to make things that big, that pure, things always get in the way, and this is the way the opposite of people like freidlander, maybe im just wondering about messiness, and concept and my photos)
from containers (compare the pure formalism, the shape and colour, and repetetion in these to judd like post minimlaism, and against seductive, imagist politics of people like burtynsky)
from telephone poles
(the smallest, b/w 30 and 50 cm) (and the latest, the messiest)
from warehouses: (these are fantastic, cause they are so simple, its really hard to make things that big, that pure, things always get in the way, and this is the way the opposite of people like freidlander, maybe im just wondering about messiness, and concept and my photos)
from containers (compare the pure formalism, the shape and colour, and repetetion in these to judd like post minimlaism, and against seductive, imagist politics of people like burtynsky)
from telephone poles
(the smallest, b/w 30 and 50 cm) (and the latest, the messiest)
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others. The same goes for the emergent logic of humanitarian or pacifist militarism. War is acceptable insofar as it seeks to bring about peace, or democracy, or the conditions for distributing humanitarian aid. And does the same not hold even more for democracy and human rights themselves? Human rights are ok if they are ‘rethought’ to include torture and a permanent emergency state. Democracy is ok if it is cleansed of its populist excesses and limited to those mature enough to practise it.
Zivek
Zivek
Saturday, March 11, 2006
I have been mildy obsessed with Ricky Nelson of late, because of how sweet/gentle/innocous his voice and reputation is (cf Ozzie and Harriet) . There is the strangely passive agressive Garden Party, one of the nastiest fuck you I used to be famous songs of course, but even better is a song called Last Kiss. Unlike most other teenage death/car crash songs, this one has much more detail. Fantastic and grisly detai. In a voice that sounds like milk and cookies--the best lines:we were out on a date in my daddys car/we hadnt driven very far/there in road, straight ahead/the car was stalled/so I swerved to the right/so i will never forget the sound that night/the grinding tires/the busting glass/that i heard last" There are also the lines about his babys warm blood, and how "shes gone to heaven, so ive got to be good/so I can see my baby/when I leave this world"--it actually is more melodramatic then that, almost more melodramatic then any of the girl groups.
it seems such a cliche, but has anyone written about the death impulse in these songs, the realtion between fucking and dying, in the cultural atmosphere before rock and roll, or in the safer edges of rock and roll?
(Sidenote: has anyone worked the dates b/w the golden age of the gore/exploitation dead teen in car song, and the golden age of the gore/exploitaiton dead teen in driver's ed film--are their any over lap?)
(sidenote ii: has warhol seen these?)
it seems such a cliche, but has anyone written about the death impulse in these songs, the realtion between fucking and dying, in the cultural atmosphere before rock and roll, or in the safer edges of rock and roll?
(Sidenote: has anyone worked the dates b/w the golden age of the gore/exploitation dead teen in car song, and the golden age of the gore/exploitaiton dead teen in driver's ed film--are their any over lap?)
(sidenote ii: has warhol seen these?)
some things i want to write, and their status:
1) Three essays on Thomas Kincaide (Fredrick Church, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol)
status: pitched the 2nd third to fillip and n+1
2) an essay on hiway photos, tracing the narrative from document to art and back again (not rest stops, or things on the sides or gas stations or anything like that--but actual, you know roads)
status:some research
3)that essay on horror remakes and the crisis of patriachal heterosexism
status:pitched to rue morgue, have to watch movies (amityville horror, the hills have eyes, texas chainsaw..., house of wax, dawn of the dead, the fog) can you tie this to korean/japan or is that overkill
4) solidify brokeback as a destablizing movie about rural duty and the punishment any of sexual desire
status: lots of research, writing some notes, waiting for the dvd on 3/4, ask geoff if he wants to co-write it, piggyback his academic connections, cause he thot about writing something like this on his lj
5) an essay on louise lawer and the implications of public/private space
status:some research, most likely will be a blog entry
6) two discussions of strauss
a) the difference b/w the close textual readings of derrida and strauss, irt issues of god, esp. the role of isaac
status: almost nothing
b) the problems with the obsession the kaballah, springboarding on this qoute fom anne nortons book: leo strauss and the poliitcs of american empire: Anyone who has spent time among the straussians knows their passion for puns, for partial qoutations, and allusions, made to carry an insult of simply as a form of amusement. You will have seen them count chaperts or the number of things in a list. Thgey are given, especially the lesser ones, to a facinaton with gamataria. Gamatria is a kabbalistic practive which assigns significance to numbers. The numbers may have reference to things in the natural world (one's two eyes or ten gingers, to convention (the twelve months in a year, the seven days in a week), to year, to verses in the bible, to special numbers like 3 or 9 or to the numbers of letters in the name of God (13x13 pr 139) When i first heard Struassians saying things like "there are three chapters and three parts, and three times three is nine." I felt rather as if i had heard them casting runes, or reading Tarot Cards. I asked my teacher whether people took this seiously. All too seriously it turned out. For half an hour or so he regaled me with stories of silly things people did with gamatria. He finsihed up by pulling out an article. Look at footnote 139, he told me."One hundred and thirty nine!" I said, "Why so many footnotes in a single article" HE always has at least that many" he told me"so that he can mention himself in 139..."(103-104)
serious, mystic, post literate view of the text, not being silly, comes from the obsession against anecdote and 2nd or 3rd Sources, spent so much time on words on the page...
(side note, i am a failure at my lenten promise)
a note on anne norton:
her personal narrative telescoped into larger issues of gender and race, plus telling tales out of school, and pointing out the elements of irrationality, etc would explain her dismissal by FF--i just wish that if she was going to gossip (which can be a good/nessc. thing cf Butler) she would actually do so--to much fucking respect, and not enough of the tin hat brigade (i keep thinking that Dick's total pyschotic breakdown is a more and more reasonable reaction to those in power---things ray said about setient machines, etc come to mind.
photo projects:
an edmonton alphabet, caging from evans, for the epl
a prarie home companion (domestic,still lives and landscapes richard billingham style, polaroids, 35 mm and digital prints) for foundation in la
industry (hi colour, poetic remakes of hilda belcher, digital, need to shot lots of it)
continuing the photos of light switches, tempature gages, etc (for whome?)
all of the various things that the NC Unesco residency needs
curratorial things
send 100 stags to moss street in victoria
best of flickr, amatuer night thing, for lat maybe
a show of small opulent paintings and drawings, about pure formal concerns, historically minded, outside irony or good bad painting (the anti dana shutz)
reviews
music:
josh logan(sp)
roy kaestens
that nifty swedish hurdy gurdy thing
art
that thing for fillip
something for flak
maybe that mask peice,
school
ref letters
ACT
call about disability issues
med stuff
masey
daphene
sanderman
other stuff
toronto (david)
parole
35/mo for rogers
reaply for aish
rewrite, perhaps the anarchy peice
bring back packages
talk to erik about film (shoot then edit)
the janet cardiff thing
tax info to ray
things im waiting for
prefix
spaced
the independent polaroid guild
fillip
banff
hoard magazine
edd
pitchfork
post road
snap:toronto
gallery 44
contract and cheque from robin
1) Three essays on Thomas Kincaide (Fredrick Church, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol)
status: pitched the 2nd third to fillip and n+1
2) an essay on hiway photos, tracing the narrative from document to art and back again (not rest stops, or things on the sides or gas stations or anything like that--but actual, you know roads)
status:some research
3)that essay on horror remakes and the crisis of patriachal heterosexism
status:pitched to rue morgue, have to watch movies (amityville horror, the hills have eyes, texas chainsaw..., house of wax, dawn of the dead, the fog) can you tie this to korean/japan or is that overkill
4) solidify brokeback as a destablizing movie about rural duty and the punishment any of sexual desire
status: lots of research, writing some notes, waiting for the dvd on 3/4, ask geoff if he wants to co-write it, piggyback his academic connections, cause he thot about writing something like this on his lj
5) an essay on louise lawer and the implications of public/private space
status:some research, most likely will be a blog entry
6) two discussions of strauss
a) the difference b/w the close textual readings of derrida and strauss, irt issues of god, esp. the role of isaac
status: almost nothing
b) the problems with the obsession the kaballah, springboarding on this qoute fom anne nortons book: leo strauss and the poliitcs of american empire: Anyone who has spent time among the straussians knows their passion for puns, for partial qoutations, and allusions, made to carry an insult of simply as a form of amusement. You will have seen them count chaperts or the number of things in a list. Thgey are given, especially the lesser ones, to a facinaton with gamataria. Gamatria is a kabbalistic practive which assigns significance to numbers. The numbers may have reference to things in the natural world (one's two eyes or ten gingers, to convention (the twelve months in a year, the seven days in a week), to year, to verses in the bible, to special numbers like 3 or 9 or to the numbers of letters in the name of God (13x13 pr 139) When i first heard Struassians saying things like "there are three chapters and three parts, and three times three is nine." I felt rather as if i had heard them casting runes, or reading Tarot Cards. I asked my teacher whether people took this seiously. All too seriously it turned out. For half an hour or so he regaled me with stories of silly things people did with gamatria. He finsihed up by pulling out an article. Look at footnote 139, he told me."One hundred and thirty nine!" I said, "Why so many footnotes in a single article" HE always has at least that many" he told me"so that he can mention himself in 139..."(103-104)
serious, mystic, post literate view of the text, not being silly, comes from the obsession against anecdote and 2nd or 3rd Sources, spent so much time on words on the page...
(side note, i am a failure at my lenten promise)
a note on anne norton:
her personal narrative telescoped into larger issues of gender and race, plus telling tales out of school, and pointing out the elements of irrationality, etc would explain her dismissal by FF--i just wish that if she was going to gossip (which can be a good/nessc. thing cf Butler) she would actually do so--to much fucking respect, and not enough of the tin hat brigade (i keep thinking that Dick's total pyschotic breakdown is a more and more reasonable reaction to those in power---things ray said about setient machines, etc come to mind.
photo projects:
an edmonton alphabet, caging from evans, for the epl
a prarie home companion (domestic,still lives and landscapes richard billingham style, polaroids, 35 mm and digital prints) for foundation in la
industry (hi colour, poetic remakes of hilda belcher, digital, need to shot lots of it)
continuing the photos of light switches, tempature gages, etc (for whome?)
all of the various things that the NC Unesco residency needs
curratorial things
send 100 stags to moss street in victoria
best of flickr, amatuer night thing, for lat maybe
a show of small opulent paintings and drawings, about pure formal concerns, historically minded, outside irony or good bad painting (the anti dana shutz)
reviews
music:
josh logan(sp)
roy kaestens
that nifty swedish hurdy gurdy thing
art
that thing for fillip
something for flak
maybe that mask peice,
school
ref letters
ACT
call about disability issues
med stuff
masey
daphene
sanderman
other stuff
toronto (david)
parole
35/mo for rogers
reaply for aish
rewrite, perhaps the anarchy peice
bring back packages
talk to erik about film (shoot then edit)
the janet cardiff thing
tax info to ray
things im waiting for
prefix
spaced
the independent polaroid guild
fillip
banff
hoard magazine
edd
pitchfork
post road
snap:toronto
gallery 44
contract and cheque from robin
Thursday, March 09, 2006
100 Stags
A curatorial proposal
There has been a ubiquity of the deer motif in recent culture. Not only the great taxidermied stags, but depictions of super cute fawns, or coquettish does as well. This does not connect to just one stream of ideological or aesthetic thought, but comes from all corners for all purposes, in most media and for a variety of politics and aesthetics.
They can be conservative indications of survivalist tendencies (hunting magazines and catalogs) or radical critiques of institutions (Amy Stein's C-Prints of natural history museums) or gender (Ann Craven paintings of does). They can be super butch (Paul Koepikin, taking photos in a Billings Montana Best Western) or hopelessly twee (the recent fawn toys made by Sanrio). They can be strange and new (the psychedelic floral intertwined with cut-outs) done by Hanna Wearing) or the end result of hundreds of years of traditions (the Irish Royal Elk emblazoned on t shirts by Squidfire) They can be lo-fi like recent rave posters done for Minnesota clubs and they can be the height of slick post-modern commerce (the video sequel to Bambi).
That's the best thing; they can be everything for anyone. In the last five years you saw men and women from dozens of countries making deeply personal or deeply whorish depictions of deer, meaning anything. It evades theory and it evades aesthetics. In my research I have found taxidermy, graphic design, stuffed animal, couture, suit jackets, t shirts, a dozen different kinds of photography, performance pieces, videos, paintings in every size imaginable, posters, flyers, prints, drawings, hand knitted, sewn, crocheted, and stuffed crafts, collage, wall paper, and various other materials (horn, silver, pewter, wood).
People like deer, and they see more and more of them when suburbs edge further into disappearing wilderness. I think the explosion of all kinds of deer motifs, in all sorts of places, in all sorts of politics, is a way of finding out what cities mean. They are amongst the best adaptors for invasion of cities, and they are cute or regal or beautiful or sublime enough that the real damage they are capable of isn't often known. I want us to start thinking about deer, what deer mean to the larger urban/suburban/rural dynamic.
I want to find 100 different examples of this deer motif, each of them symbolizing a different media, done by artists in cities, in suburbs and in rural areas. Items that have been hand made, made in small quantities, and mass-produced commercially. I want to combine high art, low art, tasteful design, and kitsch. I want to walk into that back room of Magic Pony, and be overwhelmed to the point of blunt silence, away from ironic kitsch, decorative skill, boredom or overkill. I want pictures of hunters as much as I want children's toys.
In actually getting together 100 fawn/stag/does on the walls, I hope to destabilize taste, decentralize people's patterns of cohesion and thought, and to perhaps foster new kinds of thoughts, away from the ghettos of clichéd represtentation.
A curatorial proposal
There has been a ubiquity of the deer motif in recent culture. Not only the great taxidermied stags, but depictions of super cute fawns, or coquettish does as well. This does not connect to just one stream of ideological or aesthetic thought, but comes from all corners for all purposes, in most media and for a variety of politics and aesthetics.
They can be conservative indications of survivalist tendencies (hunting magazines and catalogs) or radical critiques of institutions (Amy Stein's C-Prints of natural history museums) or gender (Ann Craven paintings of does). They can be super butch (Paul Koepikin, taking photos in a Billings Montana Best Western) or hopelessly twee (the recent fawn toys made by Sanrio). They can be strange and new (the psychedelic floral intertwined with cut-outs) done by Hanna Wearing) or the end result of hundreds of years of traditions (the Irish Royal Elk emblazoned on t shirts by Squidfire) They can be lo-fi like recent rave posters done for Minnesota clubs and they can be the height of slick post-modern commerce (the video sequel to Bambi).
That's the best thing; they can be everything for anyone. In the last five years you saw men and women from dozens of countries making deeply personal or deeply whorish depictions of deer, meaning anything. It evades theory and it evades aesthetics. In my research I have found taxidermy, graphic design, stuffed animal, couture, suit jackets, t shirts, a dozen different kinds of photography, performance pieces, videos, paintings in every size imaginable, posters, flyers, prints, drawings, hand knitted, sewn, crocheted, and stuffed crafts, collage, wall paper, and various other materials (horn, silver, pewter, wood).
People like deer, and they see more and more of them when suburbs edge further into disappearing wilderness. I think the explosion of all kinds of deer motifs, in all sorts of places, in all sorts of politics, is a way of finding out what cities mean. They are amongst the best adaptors for invasion of cities, and they are cute or regal or beautiful or sublime enough that the real damage they are capable of isn't often known. I want us to start thinking about deer, what deer mean to the larger urban/suburban/rural dynamic.
I want to find 100 different examples of this deer motif, each of them symbolizing a different media, done by artists in cities, in suburbs and in rural areas. Items that have been hand made, made in small quantities, and mass-produced commercially. I want to combine high art, low art, tasteful design, and kitsch. I want to walk into that back room of Magic Pony, and be overwhelmed to the point of blunt silence, away from ironic kitsch, decorative skill, boredom or overkill. I want pictures of hunters as much as I want children's toys.
In actually getting together 100 fawn/stag/does on the walls, I hope to destabilize taste, decentralize people's patterns of cohesion and thought, and to perhaps foster new kinds of thoughts, away from the ghettos of clichéd represtentation.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
here are some images of architechture in iqualit, nunavut
eatery
airport
cathedral
research station
from the anasuchus kirscher soc.
thinking about walk the line again, i realised that johnny cash was the one performer in america that i hadnt read anything negative about--about his treatment of vivian his first wife, his makkinig up shit in his autobiographies, his messianic tenencies, his religous strangeness, and even his voice or music. this struck me as odd, and so i was somewhat releived that ian somn finally wrote the essay to do all this, while still admitting he liked the bastard...
large portions of the world have finally achieved basic ZPG The interesting thing is, that the population bomb era folks who thought this wasa good idea faile to realise any of the larger issues that this might mean, including religous, political, social, family, and personal. The return of the patriachy may be one of these, according to the neo con foreign policy kournal, but i think a more organic merging of bio/non bio famiies may be more realistic. anyways read the link, its worthwhile context
long interview b/w Butler and DElany
historical essay on pysops and porn, in wwii/korea/veitnam, from both sides, with many pictures.
ny times is reporting that female prisoners in labour have one or both legs shackled to hospital beds, against medical advice.
eateryairportcathedralresearch station from the anasuchus kirscher soc.
thinking about walk the line again, i realised that johnny cash was the one performer in america that i hadnt read anything negative about--about his treatment of vivian his first wife, his makkinig up shit in his autobiographies, his messianic tenencies, his religous strangeness, and even his voice or music. this struck me as odd, and so i was somewhat releived that ian somn finally wrote the essay to do all this, while still admitting he liked the bastard...
large portions of the world have finally achieved basic ZPG The interesting thing is, that the population bomb era folks who thought this wasa good idea faile to realise any of the larger issues that this might mean, including religous, political, social, family, and personal. The return of the patriachy may be one of these, according to the neo con foreign policy kournal, but i think a more organic merging of bio/non bio famiies may be more realistic. anyways read the link, its worthwhile context
long interview b/w Butler and DElany
historical essay on pysops and porn, in wwii/korea/veitnam, from both sides, with many pictures.
ny times is reporting that female prisoners in labour have one or both legs shackled to hospital beds, against medical advice.
Monday, March 06, 2006
problems the academy might have with brokeback
a) the movie was set in the flyover
b) the presence of sexual content that is both same and opposite gendered, meant that it was difficult to process using tools that are already fairly common
c) the movie refused a standard vicitm naarratology
d )the rural folks were not enemies, the honest portyral w/o exoticism of the west,
e) i dont think that the left liberal elite understand themes like sacrifice for others, honour, the abjection of ego, and dereliction of duty.
a) the movie was set in the flyover
b) the presence of sexual content that is both same and opposite gendered, meant that it was difficult to process using tools that are already fairly common
c) the movie refused a standard vicitm naarratology
d )the rural folks were not enemies, the honest portyral w/o exoticism of the west,
e) i dont think that the left liberal elite understand themes like sacrifice for others, honour, the abjection of ego, and dereliction of duty.
Sunday, March 05, 2006
"real" becomes less so when filmed, deciding what to depict and what not to, is impt--and capote played into the sterotypes. i really did think that capote (the man, and how psh played the man) was a minstrel act and the whole line about him being pyschopathic because killing the boy he wanted to fuck made a better story, fit into that whole peter lorre noir genre, and was an easy role and him winning set things back
(a similar problem i had with his roles in flawless, and boogie nights amongst others)
(a similar problem i had with his roles in flawless, and boogie nights amongst others)
Thursday, March 02, 2006
i remember being in this thrift store in toronto, last time i was there, and johnny was playing, tiny place, 5 people in the store, 2 employees, every fucker in the room started to sing when ring of fire was playing...and i was just reading rednecks and bluenecks, the political book on country music that was out last year, and there was this line about how both neo stalinists and john birchers both thot he was on their side politically. and all that charisma, that bone deep leading by example, i could think of a thousand other examples, and none of it comes thru in walk the line
Tim Barber, From Tiny Vices:
Contributing Artists Include:
Lesley Arfin, Patryce Bak, Tim Barber, Jordon Bennett, Boogie, Ali Bosworth, Kenneth Cappello, Dan Colen, Scott Conarroe, Michelle Cortez, Mark Delong, Vincent Dermody, Chris Dorland, Anthony Easton, Shane Ehman, Louise Enhorning, James Erdeg, Diego Fernandez, Leo Fitzpatrick, Ryan Foerster, Alessandro Formenti, Jason Frank Rotherberg, William Galindo, Philippe Gerlach, Kava Gorna, Jeffro Halladay, Bala Heller, Eleonore Hendrix, Jerry Hsu, Gordon Hull, Sanya Kantarovsky, Ryan Kearney, Thatcher Keats, James Kendi, Richard Kern, Una Knox, Tuomas Korpijaakko, Jessie Kotler, Kim Krans, Gregory Krum, Gary LaChance, Jeff Ladouceur, Fabien Laurent Foureault, Leigh Ledare, Jason Lee, Scott Lenhardt, Gina Liberto, Jimmy Limit, Andrea Longacre White, Glynnis McDaris, Ryan McGinley, Jamie James Medina, Alex Morrison, Jason Nocito, Patrick O'Dell, OODA Group, Christian Patterson, Jaret Penner, Brad Phillips, Ben Pier, Brett Pittman, Caitlin Teal Price, Bobby Puleo, Max Ryazansky, Aurel Schmidt, Robin Schwartz, Jeremy Shaw, Asha Shechter, Dan Siney, Thomas Stavnes, Jane Stockdale, Peter Sutherland, Jamie Taete, Ah Kee Thiang, Jonathan Thiang, Lucas Thorpe, Kon Trubkovich, Yu Ukai, Brian Ulrich, David Uzzardi, Jaimie Warren, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Jason Wurm.
The show will also be featured in the Spencer Brownstone Gallery booth at the Armory Show: March 9th - 13th. Piers 90 & 92, New York, NY.
Emphasis Mine
Contributing Artists Include:
Lesley Arfin, Patryce Bak, Tim Barber, Jordon Bennett, Boogie, Ali Bosworth, Kenneth Cappello, Dan Colen, Scott Conarroe, Michelle Cortez, Mark Delong, Vincent Dermody, Chris Dorland, Anthony Easton, Shane Ehman, Louise Enhorning, James Erdeg, Diego Fernandez, Leo Fitzpatrick, Ryan Foerster, Alessandro Formenti, Jason Frank Rotherberg, William Galindo, Philippe Gerlach, Kava Gorna, Jeffro Halladay, Bala Heller, Eleonore Hendrix, Jerry Hsu, Gordon Hull, Sanya Kantarovsky, Ryan Kearney, Thatcher Keats, James Kendi, Richard Kern, Una Knox, Tuomas Korpijaakko, Jessie Kotler, Kim Krans, Gregory Krum, Gary LaChance, Jeff Ladouceur, Fabien Laurent Foureault, Leigh Ledare, Jason Lee, Scott Lenhardt, Gina Liberto, Jimmy Limit, Andrea Longacre White, Glynnis McDaris, Ryan McGinley, Jamie James Medina, Alex Morrison, Jason Nocito, Patrick O'Dell, OODA Group, Christian Patterson, Jaret Penner, Brad Phillips, Ben Pier, Brett Pittman, Caitlin Teal Price, Bobby Puleo, Max Ryazansky, Aurel Schmidt, Robin Schwartz, Jeremy Shaw, Asha Shechter, Dan Siney, Thomas Stavnes, Jane Stockdale, Peter Sutherland, Jamie Taete, Ah Kee Thiang, Jonathan Thiang, Lucas Thorpe, Kon Trubkovich, Yu Ukai, Brian Ulrich, David Uzzardi, Jaimie Warren, Martynka Wawrzyniak, Jason Wurm.
The show will also be featured in the Spencer Brownstone Gallery booth at the Armory Show: March 9th - 13th. Piers 90 & 92, New York, NY.
Emphasis Mine
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
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