ah the cinema

films i've seen recently:
susperia (dario argento)
eraserhead (david lynch)
careful (guy maddin)
joe (a 70s movie about hippie killers)
the hunger (with david bowie)
liquid sky (cult)
trust (hal hartley)
switchblade sisters (jack hill)
nights of cabiria (fedrico fellini)
louisiana story
doom generation (greg araki)
journey into bliss
big business (with bette midler)
triplettes of belleville
tenebre (dario argento)
the living end (greg araki)
spider baby (jack hill)
napolean dynamite
battle royale
m.butterfly (cronenberg)
mystery train (jarmusch)
shivers (cronenberg)
the 400 blows (truffaut)
the happiness of the katakuris (takashi miike)
Night on Earth (jarmusch)

that's me

gone

tomorrow i will severe all ties with my former institution of learning. tomorrow is the final day. it will be over by noon. i am nervous thinking about it. i am worried that i am a failure. hopefully everything will be fine tomorrow.

a hair cut and a package in the mail

both two excellent things.
the prospect of meaningful projects.

i scared to write in this thing

pervs

are outside my apartment.

eeks

my story is very strange

tired

can't get up.

h views great art

when i went to school, there was fast change. when i went to school, no one wanted to go to school. i went to school with a flapper named olivia. we both detested school equally. i watched olivia everyday. i watched olivia frament and whidle. i watched until olivia became needy. olivia's was a life of speration.
olivia eventually became ambivalent.
"oh h., why is this such a bore?"
she cried into my large drooping ears and strong high shoulders.

i was a popular guinea pig. i did not have the fault of an intermixing of red or white hairs or a poor undercolor. i was spotless with no tingle of yellow.

nothing

nothing

write

writing.

i kept thinking i was going to run into someone i knew. what did you do today? i dunno. doesn't everyone do the same thing? this is the story of my best first friend. i don't remember it right now, but i thought about it all day. i think i knew about it last night for sure, but then i had that internal crying, the kind you can't really ever fix. there was something about four shadows, and the room was packed full. something happened that turned that internal crying into sobbing, but i can't remember it. the body always knows though and i think it was very bad. the room was full and there were voices all around. i wish i could remember the things that they said.

i hate it here

i hate it here. i keep think i will run into someone i know.
i decided to abandon the fspot forever.

bike thieves

i went down to unlock my bike which was chained to the inside of my gate. someone cut the chain and took my back wheel with all the gears and shimano gear changer. now it is useless. i bought bus tickets. it makes me paranoid about the world.

karen dalton

"All I can say is that she sure can sing
the shit out of the blues"

Fred Neil

Karen Dalton sang the blues and played the twelve string Gibson guitar and a long neck banjo. Her second album , In My Own Time, was recorded at Bearsville studios, produced by Bob Dylan's former bass player Harvey Brooks, with liner notes by Fred Neil, originally released on Michael Lang's (Woodstock promoter) label, Just Sunshine. The cover photos were taken by Elliot Landy, and The Band's current pianoplayer Richard Bell guested on the album. Less common is her first album for Capitol, It's Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best, re-released by Koch Records in 1996. Known as "the folksinger's answer to Billie Holiday" and "Sweet Mother K.D.", it is said that the song "Katie's Been Gone" by The Band from the Basement Tapes was written about her. In My Own Time includes a cover version of Richard Manuel's beautiful "In a Station" from Music from Big Pink.

cat + guinea pig

the sad story of h. the guinea pig.


soon enough anyway.

animal paradise

me, the cat, and the hamster.
acceptable activities:

meowing
rolling into balls
hiding under blankets/shavings

other acceptable activities (those that avoid reality)
drawing
book making
watching films
reading
writing
painting

all other activities are banned in animal paradise.

little things

why are little things so hard?

joanna newsom

tenebre

it wasn't as good as suspiria.

my guinea pig

i am going to get a guinea pig and hide with it. chou too. no humans please.

the story of john

chloreene lived on a small country road lined with pine trees. Around the age of 24, she gave birth to a baby. she named him john. chloreene, being a single mother, and being that she lived in a rural place where the attitude did not bend in her direction, developed a some protection and defense.
two years after the birth of john, she met ms. nettlebow, a young woman in her similar situation. as good fortune had it, chloreene's great uncle had died and left her a house. the great uncle was inclinded toward another level of reality and expressed this through the design of the house. the house was uneven, with 16 different levels. at the front of the house, the great uncle built a parlor store front. soon after meeting, ms. nettlebow moved in with cloreene and john and brought her own son tix.
once chloreene and ms. nettlebow settled into their new home, a community center was built down the road. since it was walking distance from the house, chloreene decided to open a deli in the store front to serve the newly populated area.
when john was five years old an exhibit came to the community center called "the rise of modernism in europe adn the united states". the day it opened john ran as fast as he could on his little legs to the big white building. chloreene and ms. nettlebow dressed identicaly in blue navy suits with lacy frills pushing tix in a stroller. john bought a postcard of his favorite piece, "three women" by fernand leger.
chloreene and ms. nettlebow lied to everyone when they came into the deli. chloreene said ms. nettlebow was the nanny.
when john was 14 he ran away with lori, his best friend. they went to a gay pron theatre. lori wasn't sure they would let her in because she was a girl.
later that week, john went to the catholic church. he figured he could find a homo there. he spotted a priest wearing pink converse. the priest stood in front of the fountain and john came to the priest and asked bluntly, "are you a fag?"
the roman collar said, "no my son. are you a catholic?"
"i went to catholic school for twelve years."
"well there is only one thing for you to do. i will get you a false identity and you must run away."
chloreene was watching the television she saw a picture of missing john on the tv. on tvs all over the country traled a 44 over the picture and filled it in with pencil.
john went to the bathhouse. eventually he got a job working in a viewing room with another boy. they worked in a bathtub. first they put in a little water, then the kept it hard for john to keep balanced.
eventually john went back to live with cloreene. he started working in the deli. cloreene ordered thin polyesterd polka dot work shirts with accompaning hats shaped like a triangle.
chloreene had become increasingly worried about the townsfolk gossiping about her relationship with ms. nettlebow. chloreene's face had aged with wrinkles and brown spots. she told everyone that ms. nettlebow was her maid.
it was hard to say what happened to chloreene in the time between john left and the time he returned.
as for john, he made sandwiches.

just so i don't forget

about sewer rats



don't let my rat go into the sewer

vermont

i'm back. i got a lite brite, a typewriter, two weird children's books, and peter jackson's bad taste out of the deal.

usa

i'm going to vermont today. i'm worried that they will give me a hassle at the border.
i've been hanging out the gc and i've been enjoying it.

i'm in hiding.

art 3

nam june paik

No artist has had a greater influence in imagining and realizing the artistic potential of video and television than Korean-born Nam June Paik. Through a vast array of installations, videotapes, global television productions, films, and performances, Paik has reshaped our perceptions of the temporal image in contemporary art.






Aloïse
"The world as recreated by Aloïse is cosmic and insubstantial, free of physical contingencies, in opposition to the old natural world she knew before her ‘death,’ that is before her illness. It is a supernatural world, theater of the Universe, thronged with immutable, hieratic actors whose deeds and feelings are expressed by the tiny hieroglyphic figures around them. Furthermore, their very essence is uncertain. They may be themselves and yet simultaneously represent something else. A woman may be herself and at the same time her icon … or a living lantern … or an allegory.



Jeanne Tripier
No wonder then that the domains of mediumistic revelation and psychotic paranoia overlap, or are sometimes indistinguishable, as in Jeanne Tripier's work. Each is, in its different way, an idiom deformed as a result of undergoing some form of excommunication. Each is also a dramatic instance of the person being possessed or inhabited ('squatted' in Michel Thevoz's words) by other voices whose provenance is uncertain. But although they come from a psychiatric context, Jeanne Tripier's smudged and blotched divinatory image-texts are no less 'prophetic' than the mediumistic scribbled words and figures from Victor Hugo's Guernsey seances.





Madge Gill
The tremendous creative outpourings of the mediumistic artist Madge Gill began after her only daughter died at birth in 1919 and a subsequent illness during which she lost the sight in one eye. Her early life had been no less traumatic. Born in london to an unmarried mother, at the age of nine she was placed in an orphanage and subsequently sent to Canada as a farm servant. Gill returned to london when she was nineteen and before her marriage lived with an aunt, who introduced her Spiritualism. Gill's discovery of drawing was a direct result of attempts to contact her daughter and one of her sons, who had died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, the other side. She maintained that she was guided by a spirit she called Myrninerest and often signed works in that name. Her oeuvre ranges from postcards, produced after another in all-night sittings, to drawings covering immense rolls of calico, which she finished incrementally, earlier parts of the drawing becoming hidden as the fabric was rolled to reveal a new blank surface. At times Gill exhibited work at amateur art exhibitions in the East End of london, but rarely sold her creations, insisting that the belonged to her spirit guide

art part deux

nan goldin


sonia ahlers


mark ryden


phoebe gloeckner


ian gamache www.jettison.org


keren richter


mark manders

art art art art art art art

julie doucet

Julie Doucet made her debut in an underground magazine. After working away at various magazines, including Weirdo, she was nominated and won the Harvey Award for the best new talent. During her time with Weirdo magazine, she became inspired by Robert Crumb.


ida applebroog


Ida Applebroog's art captures the cadences of the social and psychological deviations that dwell beneath the sanitized, orderly veneer of daily life. Seducing the viewer with its humorous edge and technical acuity at the same time that it confronts the painful violations in even the most nurturing relationships, her powerful work explores the frightening gulf between the real and the ideal through universal themes such as sexuality and power, the loss or corruption of innocence, guilt and penitence, and personal isolation in an intrusive world. Applebroog addresses these thorny issues essentially as a satirist, denouncing our lax, immoral society, revealing our base affectations, contradicting our stereotypes, and dashing our cherished icons with a sharp-edged, decidedly vitriolic, and often indignant point of view. Hers is a language of dislocation in which each work is constructed to be read image by image, like a succession of phrases. But while representationally forthright, her paintings give up their content only gradually; the nuanced subtexts of her pictures reveal a visual diction of rare precision, one that insists on telling a finely honed short story through elliptical liaisons and startling juxtapositions. Radical transformations ensue: myths and verities are stripped of certainty; innocence slips into experience; and safe havens become landscapes brimming with threat. In Applebroog's multifaceted worldview, humanity is a murky amalgam of positive and negative impulses, best observed through a cacophony of reflections and refractions that ultimately crystallize into a strongly personal vision.


dara birnbaum

The thing is, when you see it, because it's taken out of the narrative flow, you look and you think the speed is wrong. Or like in "Laverne and Shirley," which was called "(A)drift of Politics" - my first installation - there are two women. That was all about two-shots. They confront the world together; they face the world together. This was the end of the so-called nuclear family in America, meaning: Where is the father? Where is the mother? We are, as adolescent Americans, alone now. They're women, but girlish women. They go out; they work on an assembly line. When you see the original program, "Laverne and Shirley," they are working on a Coca-Cola bottle line. They finally take off their rubber gloves - this is around 1977 - and put the rubber gloves over the Coke bottles. Now with AIDS, unfortunately, there is a need for everything to have this rubber membrane. But here they cover the Coke bottles with these rubber gloves, and they leave the plant. They go out into the world. And they are their own nuclear family. I presented this work with another woman, Suzanne Kuffler. We were both doing our own work û but for me it was "Laverne and Shirley" - that we had to go out and face the world together, and at least I had another very bright woman to talk with. We wouldn't do collaborative work, but we would collaborate in getting the work out there. But I thought, it's really important not to change the speed and not to change the medium. "You don't speak from another voice. You speak from that voice." And with "Laverne and Shirley," for example, I took only the two shots and butt-edited them. Then I made subtitles, because I took the audio and I put it in a separate room. And I thought, "Let the audio be like a radio play when you go in there. And in this first room let this only be imagery - the "two shots." But you could read in the subtitles what they were saying in the frame. The subtitles went by so fast that you couldn't believe what they were saying.


sadie benning


If her format was obscure, her subjects weren't. The early films are in the classic diaristic mode of experimental film: shot in her bedroom, starring an array of objects both culture-constructed (Barbie, natch) and self-constructed (masks). Her main subject was herself, coming to terms with a pervasive 1980s culture of junk TV and mindless consumerism and finding some kind of comfort level there as a budding dyke-artiste. In the early films, she appears as a fragmented character, floating elusively in and out of the frame. But Jollies, made when she was 17, shows her as an increasingly bold presence in her own work. In overdub she reads some lines describing her sexual awakening: "It started in 1978 when I was in kindergarten. They were twins and I was a tomboy. I always thought of real clever things to say, like I love you." A brief visual counterpoint to these words is the famous Diane Arbus shot of twin little girls.

Benning's manipulations of her material show a surprising complexity. In spite of her youth she was increasingly regarded as an important video artist, with frequent showings at film festivals and museums and a Rockefeller grant at 19. During an interview with The Advocate in 1990, she showed a strong political bent too: "My dad said to me, 'You know, I'm really worried that all your work is just going to be on one subject.' And I was like, 'Yeah, my life.' He makes [experimental] films. What are his films about? They're about his life. It just so happens that his sexuality isn't something that people are going to label or talk about or say, 'He's the heterosexual artist.'"


henry darger

Central to Darger's work is his 15,000 page, 12 volume, single-spaced, typewritten epic entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Darger exhibit curator Stephen Prokopoff summarizes the story:

The story recounts the wars between nations on an enormous and unnamed planet, of which Earth is a moon. The confict is provoked by the Glandelinians, who practice child enslavement. After hundreds of ferocious battles, the good Christian nation of Abbiennia forces the 'haughty' Glandelinians to give up their barbarous ways. The heroines of Darger's history are the seven Vivian sisters, Abbiennian princesses. They are aided in their struggles by a panoply of heroes, who are sometimes the author's alter-egos. The battles are full of vivid incident: charging armies, ominous captures, alarms and explosions, the appearances of demons and dragons.

Hundreds of watercolor paintings illustrate the Realms of the Unreal. Some are huge double-sided murals, painted on scrolls four feet high and ten feet long. Darger often employed collage or traced figures from comic strips and children's books, but his keen sense of composition and use of vivid color allowed him to create landscapes, battle scenes, portraits, and even an odalisque, of incredible intensity and beauty.


vanessa beecroft

In inspiration her work is essentially classical. Nude and semi-nude females, shorn of any trappings that might express their individuality, contractually obliged to remain as silent and immobile as possible, posed vertically and arranged in a group composition on a horizontal plane — the sum effect is something like a painting by Poussin except for this one crucial difference: Beecroft’s subjects are not made of paint but of living flesh. To abstract from the life model in order to paint a timeless figure is one thing, but to abstract the life model herself is another. What appears as classicism in the first case becomes depersonalization and suppression of individuality in the second. The mathematical techniques of proportion utilized in the first case — the Golden Mean and the "rule of three" — become anorexia and girdles in the second. Fashion is used by Beecroft not to individuate but to homogenize, and even nudity is exploited not as an expression of sexuality but rather as a way of reducing the models to an appearance of sameness — nudity is, after all, the original uniform. An old art-historical distinction holds that romantic art is premised on the expression of the individual, whilst classic art suppresses the hand of the individual in favor of rationalism, formalism, and mathematical order.2 In the hands of Beecroft, however, classicism goes a step further: it is not only the individuality of the artist that is restrained, but the individuality of the subjects that is actively suppressed.


kojo griffin

the content of Griffin's work overwhelms. But it is not the content alone that creates the particular force in his images. It is what is thought to be told and untold. It is a feeling that there is something withheld in these images, like a fragment that stands in place of the whole-a fragment that instead becomes a world.

Griffin creates stories through images that seem strangely intimate yet distant, at once knowable and somehow inconceivable. Each work provides a fragmented narrative-featuring animal characters in scenarios of exacting violence and wrenching sadness. These images appear incongruent-Griffin's fuzzy creatures are portrayed in ways that force a suspension of collective sentimentality. Here one finds the intersections of childhood and mourning, hip-hop vitality and ghetto death - frightfully real and fantastic�. To engage with this work is to be complicit in its unfolding fictions. Situations of mourning , loss and violence that lack certain biographies, or more specifically genealogies, that can be traced, fleshed out and rationally dealt with. The whole is not known nor does the fragment by its nature stand-in for the whole. The story is taken from the story teller; in this case, as the viewer unpacks the images they are made secure by the fictions one hopes exist, as an explanation, as a meaningful anger, which are drawn upon its surface. These images are given a history by the viewer.


laylah ali

The delicate scale and enticing colors of Laylah Ali's works on paper invite close scrutiny . Ali's first solo museum exhibition presents twenty-four works from the Greenheads and Attack of the Blueheads series. With their hybrid bodies, contrasting uniforms, and various accessories, Ali's attenuated figures raise difficult questions about identity and power struggles in contemporary society. At first the viewer may see the figures engaged in sinister or aggressive activities, but the apparent violence is mitigated by those figures who seem to offer assistance or hurry to the rescue. The similarities between figures often make it difficult to discern who wields power and for what ultimate purpose. Ali's open-ended narratives prompt the viewer to attempt to make sense of the odd, often violent acts being committed in this brightly colored, cartoonish world.


valie export

Following World War II, a mood of near-despair brought process and performance to the forefront of the artworld. Art as contemplative object now seemed irrelevant: the Holocaust, the atom bomb, and the guilt associated with these disasters sparked a monumental shift in consciousness. In the United States, action painting heralded the transition from two-dimensional representation to an art that, in the succeeding fifty years, would embrace almost every medium and every form. Europe and Asia saw similar shifts. By the early 1960s, artists had begun to use their bodies as an extended medium creating actions that would shock the public into confronting the inescapable realities of sex, aggression, greed, and destruction.


trinh t. minh-ha

"identity...has long been a notion that relies on the concept of an essential, authentic core that remains hidden to one's consciousness and that requires the elimination of all that is considered foreign or not true to the self, that is to say, not-I, other." What makes you who you are is primarily that there is a "not-you" out there; each self is defined by having a not-self, an other, who enables one to occupy the "self" position. This way of thinking should be fairly familiar, by this point in the semester; it's drawing on the same logic as Saussure's negative relations of value and Derrida's binary oppositions.

Thus the concept "self" or "identity" is held in place, is stabilized, by being paired with its binary opposite, "other." Being a self requires establishing a boundary between self and other, and maintaining/enforcing that boundary at all costs. Thus an equation is set up, whereby Subject A is invested in having a stable identity, and achieves that (in part) by casting itself as not-B. Subject A then wants B to be not-A consistently and constantly. B then achieves a stable position (in relation to A, and in terms set by A), but usually doesn't have that position recognized as "self" or "subject" in the way A does. A then needs some form of power to keep B in the position A desires B to stay in. A uses that power to dictate the terms in which B can make claims to identity or selfhood.

The obvious problem, as Trinh and other theorists point out, is that B never gets to become a self, since B is always kept by A in the position of being other, so that A can be a self. B's place and social function is thus always relative to A's selfhood. But this is also a problem for A, who is just as structured by this binary opposition as B is


adrian piper

One of her most important works, a pencil drawing entitled, Self-Portrait Exaggerating My Negroid Features attempts to reconcile her experiences as a light-skinned black woman in a racist society. In addition, this comprehensive survey of Piper's 35-year career includes several remarkable works in video and audio from 1968 to 1991, outlining her early experimentation with new media in conjunction with her ongoing interests in Conceptualism, racism and identity.


cindy sherman

She began her career at a time when the art world was just beginning to focus on the relationship between the existence of a mass media society and how the implements of this society --television, film, and photography, among others-- could be used to further reinforce and redefine the icons and the rites of this rapidly expanding popular culture.

In this context, Sherman was able to achieve almost instantaneous success, though some critics doubted whether her work was the result of insight into the media mind, or simply, constant unquestioning exposure to the same forces and stereotypes that she sought to critique. As more and more artists turned to the media as the subject of their artistic expression, as as an unprecedented number of them did during the 1980s, Sherman expanded her work beyond her recreation of "film stills", and used her technique of photographic parody to comment on other vehicles of gender stereotype: the magazine centerfold, the fashion spread, advertising, children's literature, formal portraiture, historical records, and, most recently, mannequins.

liliput is cute

liliput

my art

suspiria