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I created a slide show called the "New Jersey Wasteland Tour" that I hope you'll check out here. I took the pics with a digital camera (and later wrote accompanying blurbs) in a panic that the little "zone of rot" I frequently walk through was about to be fixed up by the city and/or state. The emphasis here is on Decrepitude and Folly, but I also find this area (between Jersey City and Liberty State Park) to be sort of beautiful. I've got shots of the Morris Canal at its toxic/fecal best, the Statue of Liberty from the viewpoint of a "Hazardous Materials Area," and some belated documentation of the parking lot that was hastily put in and removed in the patronage free-for-all that followed 9/11.
For my New Year's resolution, I promise this year to be nicer and more temperate politically in my posts.
NOT.
I mean, how about that twisted, Nixon-era relic Donald Rumsfeld, boasting that the U.S. can fight two wars simultaneously, neither of which has anything to do with bagging the Twin Towers murderers? We wouldn't be talking about any wars if the administration was halfway competent. The "axis of evil" rhetoric is what got us to this point with Korea, and Iraq is another fight we're picking.
One of the secretaries where I work said that when Rumsfeld was on TV during the Afghanistan bombing, a lot of women thought he was "hot." Sorry to be patronizing here, but c'mon, ladies! Is it that he's a confident Daddy figure, or is it the edge of violence that makes him so attractive? I mean, grow up.
Eric Heist has street cred to spare as a guiding force (with Laura Parnes) behind the Brooklyn nonprofit Momenta Art, consistently one of the best and smartest of the Williamsburg spaces. That rep climbed a few more notches last year when he collaborated with musician/poet/shaman/malevolent pixie Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV fame (as a TG fan from way back, I admit I was jealous). The pair did a 2-person show at Team Gallery in Manhattan, a kind of punk/psychedelic boutique entered through a womblike tunnel. It was a bit too DIY for my taste--more like a Happening set than a stand-alone exhibit, but then I missed the packed opening, so I really didn't get the full flavor of the event.
The new work in Heist's studio continues some of the themes of the Team show (and an earlier solo at Feed): an interest in crawlspaces and secret chambers, the street agitprop of band posters and handbills, and a Heist specialty, an obsession with the trimmings of multinational capitalism. When I visited, we looked at three installations, all incorporating fixtures from the modern office suite, heavy on the black formica. The first is a reception desk, of the type used by art galleries (including Momenta) to keep employees discreetly hidden from view. On the wall behind this structure framed prints depict business suited executives shaking hands and giving meetings--real annual report stuff, only done in garish black light colors with cheesy flocked surfaces. What's most noteworthy about the piece, though, is that down where the receptionist's legs would be, the formica has been replaced by a large cardboard box, with ratty blankets lining the bottom. Maybe you have a co-worker that likes to curl up under a desk and nap during "down time" ( I know I do), and this would be the perfect place, except it looks vaguely unsanitary.
The piece (and another one like it, resembling a corporate boardroom table, which may or may not end up including some porno in the box) is an oxymoron, a big exquisite corpse, grafting together sleek office fixtures with the repressed Other of makeshift homeless shelters. Somehow all this avoids being didactic, though. Perhaps because it appeals to the child in all of us who remembers playing in cardboard tunnels. William Gibson also exploits this nostalgic feeling in his last novel All Tomorrow's Parties, which has several characters living in boxes in a Japanese train station. There is a tension in both cases between bourgeois fantasies of escape into a "romantic" lower class world and the very real fear of it happening involuntarily in the Bush Economy.
Continuing the "invisible office" theme were some really nice muted pencil drawings depicting janitorial cleaning equipment in lonely corporate hallways, and a sculpture of a custodian's door, which opens incongruously onto a disco diorama. The latter piece also holds out some suggestion of escape, this time into a world of coked-up sensuality, but it's really only exchanging one kind of regulated, commodified activity for another. (But what lies beyond the disco?) Through his use of the boxes-within-boxes motif, Heist's work is ultimately about the impossibility of escape: even we gallerygoers, hoping to use art as a refuge from the micromanaged environments where most of us spend our time, aren't going anywhere--until we wake up one morning in that cardboard box.
Breakfast Room, ink on cut paper, product packaging, map pins, 95" X 45" X 16"
In November I visited Robert Boyd at Schroeder Romero gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to talk about his exhibition "The Virgin Collection" (as in "Like a..."), a high-concept conflation of Madonna, Gap kids, Spanish penitents, leftist agitprop, and fine crystal. The centerpiece of the show was a tall, freestanding effigy in bridal attire, holding a bouquet, with what looked like a KKK hood covering the head. The headgear is actually the official garb of the Nazarenos (the aforementioned penitents), originally meant to debase the wearer, like a dunce cap. During the opening, Boyd stood immobile inside this getup while people boozed & schmoozed (but still gave him a lot of space). In a true test of self-discipline, he held his pose even when a random drunk knocked over a delicate sculpture right in front of him. Sprinkled on plinths or hanging throughout the gallery were wedding trappings straight out of Modern Bride--stemware, cake-cutting knife, bridal portraits--emblazoned with Virgin Collection logos or otherwise tweaked, but all very elegantly presented. Boyd is taking a subtly askance, queer-theory look at both wedding mores and what Walter Benjamin calls the "aestheticization of power" with the show, but he also had some anecdotes suggesting an emotional undercurrent. We talked about the experience of certain gay couples being politely but perceptibly shunned at straight weddings, as if the whole rutting hetero thing caused even BoBos (bourgeois bohemians) to close ranks at Ritual Time. And if you think the Klan hood has lost any transgressive potential through pop culture repetition (in Cohn Brothers movies and the like), he related how the first lab he took the "bridal photos" to refused to print the pictures. Such symbols do still have power, as attested to by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's recent outburst during oral arguments in the cross burning case. (I had a couple of sentences here where I mimicked an offended Klansman threatening Boyd for his various transgressions against Southern honor and matrimonial rites, but I deleted them because people didn't know I was joking.)
This is an odds and ends post, where I talk about all the half-finished projects I'm working on. First, I direct your attention to my slightly juvenile defense of Jason Little, an amazing graphic novelist who got semi-slammed by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) in the New York Times. In his stuffy discourse on the immaturity of the graphic novel as an art form, Hornby sounds nervous, perhaps looking at the rise of a post-literate generation that doesn't have the time or patience to read his comedies of manners but has turned graphic novels into a burgeoning medium. Plus, it's possible he doesn't get Little's work, fretting that the cartoonist's material is potentially alienating when to many of us a "Nancy Drew mystery told in the style of Brian De Palma" is, um, good. Dissing Little's genre-bending suggests Hornby's own bias for the linear--or the old, like Louis Armstrong calling bebop "Chinese music."
I did a round of gallery & studio visits this past fall and wish I could write them up faster. An interesting range of work: Robert Boyd, Eric Heist, Carl d'Alvia, and Cory Arcangel. I've got notes and am hoping to get something readable posted soon.
I also have a review in progress of one of my current favorite musicians, Adrien Capozzi (aka Adrien75), whose work emerges from the late '90s ambient drum and bass scene but incorporates aspects of much earlier styles--'70s "jazz fission," RIO (rock in opposition), and Canterbury stylings. He released two superb, and very different discs this fall: 757, on Worm Interface, and Coastal Acces (sic), on Source. The first is kind of bouncy and melodic with warm analog synth melodies and nods to the early '80s, and the latter is a slow, tripped out series of impressions of the California coastline, with understated but intricately programmed rhythms and washes of industrial sounds. I first discovered Capozzi's work hearing "Smack Rabbit" on a NY radio show, a gorgeous instrumental that could have been a combination of the early Mothers, Milton Babbitt, and Bill Evans (if that makes any sense); subsequently I tracked down his amazing work with Doron Gura, under the names Unagi Patrol and Microstudio, among other aliases. He's an American Original who deserves a lot more attention.
I have a series of photographs I'm calling the New Jersey Wasteland Tour, in the tradition of Robert Smithson and Michael Ashkin but with no pretensions to being art. I took the pics with my digicam in a panic that the little "zone of rot" I frequently walk through was about to be beautified by the city or state. They include shots of the Morris Canal at its toxic/fecal best, the Statue of Liberty with a "No Trespassing Hazardous Materials Area" sign in the foreground, and some documentation of the parking lot that was hastily put in and removed by the Junior Soprano Paving Company in the patronage free-for-all that followed 9/11 (as described here). Eventually I'll have a slide show up. [Update: it's here.]
The Xtreme Houses book mentioned earlier was reviewed in the New York Times on December 19, 2002, in the house & home section. It's selling well, and has recently acquired a stroke-and-slap review from a reader on amazon.com. Slap because the writer feels the book needs to separate its artists-engaging-in-Marxist-agitprop from its shelter mag "livestyles of the cooler than you" spreads. I see the book's political and artistic non-hierarchical-ness as a strength. Also, the book is not "typographically cute" or Webby. It has text on the left, pictures on the right, and clear captions; Wired circa 1994 it's definitely not. The amazon writer's credibility is dicey, too, because in another review he says he has "nothing but respect" for MIT designer/programmer John Maeda, whose work, in the art field at least, still has a ways to go.
Anyway, Merry Christmas to all.
Quick addendum: Someone told me they saw my byline in the current issue of Flash Art. This is strange because I've never written for Flash Art. They do, however publish a lot of press releases that look like they might be articles, so maybe someone ripped some copy from a review, or this log, and stuck my name on it? I don't guess I care much. If anyone runs across the mag and can enlighten me further about this I'd greatly appreciate it.
A friend of mine was kidding me for saying I liked Dragonball Z, a much serialized, much butchered anime series that runs infinitely on the Cartoon Network on cable. I was trying to think what possible justification I had. Then I remembered King Kai. He's a sort of Yoda character that teaches battle tactics. He lives on a tiny planet in another dimension, which you get to by traversing Snake Way, which looks like the Great Wall of China on the back of a snake hundreds of miles long, twisting through the clouds. See the three people standing on the grass in the center of the planet? Each weighs 700 pounds in its enormous gravity. That's why it's such a good training place: if you can move at all you get stronger. Kai himself has blue skin, catfish whiskers, cockroach antennae, and dresses in priestly garb--with little hipster shades. He talks like a cross between Sylvester the Cat and Elmer Fudd, and constantly tells terrible jokes, like "You can tune a piano but you can't tune a fish." He's just the greatest!--and reason enough in my book to tune into the series. He's the type of "what the hell were they thinking?" character that pops up only in anime.
The apparent lethargy of the New York art world has less to do with 9/11, or even the Bush economy, than the shift of galleries from Soho to Chelsea, which, as I wrote in the New Art Examiner in 1997, was a calculated move to create an artist-free Brasilia for collectors (among other things, of course). The dealers are now reaping what they sowed in the form of an overall diminished sense of energy. Chelsea is a giant outlet mall, with huge spaces all apparently designed by the same person, providing festival-circuit artists with a place to strut their stuff in NY before moving to the next Biennale.
Increasingly I'm convinced that the action--yes, it's come down to this--is in artists' studios. You get to see a lot of work and hear the best explanation of it, before the ideas get turned to hash by a condescending or airheaded Manhattan gallerist. True, you don't get always get the nice white box, but c'mon, we're pros here! These, then, are notes from a few recent visits I did. Coming soon: the rest of this post, where I discuss recent visits to four NY studios. I'm still working on it, and I confess, the only reason I'm putting in this teaser is because I wanted some text between the images in the preceding and following posts, for layout reasons. That's the freedom I have, here in the blogosphere.