Month: April 2009

The Conceptualists and Flarfists
Agreed to have a battle!

And here’s what went down at the Whitney Museum on April 17, 2009:

Kenny Goldsmith’s intro (excerpt):

My sweet destruction, whenever tears become the indulgence of horseplay,
I shall laugh within four billion and forty years,
Just when the dawn expects me nothing but montage,
Through the shine of an extremely complicated montaged sun,
I shall rejoice within zealous breeze,
My spotted dog, You are collapsed to me,
Let me creep along the horizon of the damp. grey, meshes,
Let me steal the old masters as far as the fictional sun,
Please come back to me, my editor,
I will listen to a black harmony of conglomerates,
Crucified underneath the rebellion of your sound effects,
And among the self-referential bruise seekers, I am not 76 minutes of unvarying solid blue light.

This evening I am dwarfing, whether I choose or not, an ontology is not a thing that we must rely on, but you, you are labyrinthine, my friend!!

Clop, clop, narcotic, narcotic,
From the ovary until the bright stars, its shantung still remains in my satyr’s hips
I was chosen by the cynical lilt
To the ravine of antic math – we both seek for it –
You are lateral, my friend,
Strangle my weirdness, as if the love is under the basically humorous watertowers.
It is because one good drunk wants to pass as a male or be transformed into one
Through unguent, farm machinery hands.
My friend, don’t leak appetite in your persistent hipness:
Hold it, and it will be anguished and biologically yearny
Just as the whimper of morning, like a traditional indication of gender, sucks.

On this rancor, I am stunning to see a beautiful irruption,
Surrounded by murk which is glows in this hulk.
Fascinated by flaws of drooping wimples,
A loser writes the feelings into a thin line which is flat.
Lives of bread make harmony in morons.
Throughout the blood veil, it gives love.
I wish I can hear the locust flowers sing,
And they will not stop me to drip on everything.

My beard towards heaven, I feel my nape support / The back of my head, I grow the breast of a harpy / And my brush as it drips continually / Upon my face, makes it a gorgeous floor. (Michelangelo)

The simultaneity of the prophetic and the satiric distinguishes the greatest of Romantic art, and the failure of the classically oriented taste and criticism of our times has been not to credit the Romantics with a sense of humor and to ridicule their achievements with the same ridicule they practiced on themselves. The crucial difference, of course, is that Romantic satire measures the limitations of its heroes in their quest for absolute freedom while classical taste calls even the limited movement toward those ends grotesque.

(P. Adama Sitney, writing in Visionary Film on Kenneth Anger)

We’ll all be Yayoi Kusama soon.

Today was so variously interesting I have to make some quick notes about it before Duration swallows my memory:

at lunchtime went to a screening of three films by a Pratt colleague, Ethan Spigland,

the first called, I think “Luminosity/Porosity” with an old-fashioned (to me) Teiji Ito-ish soundtrack exploring the interactions of porous materials like stone and brick and cement with light;

the second actually a set of short films (I LOVED these) created in collaboration with Malcolm McClaren (!) to interact with McClaren’s mashup songs (for example, Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” + the Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”(!)). The images were very s-l-o-w, sometimes looped images from 60s & 70s porno films… but not the sex scenes; rather, what came before and after the sex scenes: a woman eating grapes, three women sitting on a sectional sofa, a cocktail party… Discussion afterwards focused on the expressiveness of these isolated moments, how they (in Ethan’s words) “revealed the unconscious” of the film.

Thinking as I listened to the discussion of what I mentioned to G. yesterday, that to get inside any art form you have to actually do it, never mind whether you do it well, and now that I have a little experience with moving images I knew precisely what Ethan meant. There is a moment in my newest opus where a very plump little girl dances in a monster costume at a carnival, and there is so much revealed in those few seconds… about little girls, about monsters, about plumpness, about carnivals, and how we feel beholding those things, and how SLOWED down the poignancy of her movement is even more penetrating.

But back to Ethan’s films… the third one he showed was of Miru Kim, whose project is to photograph herself nude in abandoned urban spaces. He said he was interested in how she moved through those spaces, and that the photos didn’t reveal that, so his film showed her padding about in factories full of rusty equipment, actually sitting on the giant gears (I thought of Chaplin, but naked), touching surfaces, peeling off paint, gingerly putting her bare foot down on piles of scrap material. I worried about whether she had had a tetanus shot, and whether she was warm enough, and I felt a little nervous for her as exposed Asian female, but not so much, I mostly thought she was brave and beautiful.

Ran from there to take my students to PS 1 where with another teacher they were asked to look at an installation by Florian Slotawa: “Most of the contents from his Berlin apartment, including his washing machine, dining table, wardrobe and kitchen sink, have been transported into the gallery, leaving the apartment absent of key appliances and furniture.” (from the PS 1 site) and while they were being guided by the teacher in thinking about this sort of stark and imposing structure (none of the objects were in any kind of usable position, and were balanced on top of each other), I went across the hall to watch Kenneth Anger movies, one of which I adored:

Eaux d’Artifice, in which a human (a dwarf, it turns out) clad in a Marie Antoinette-era gown, perruque, and mask, glides across what seems like palace grounds; it reminded me of the set of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete,… ah, Wikipedia tells me it is the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy. (and why am I not going THERE this summer?) Gorgeous arcs of spewing (ejaculating?) water, a fan that suddenly turns golden amongst the monochrome, all set to Vivaldi.

Browsed the bookshop there, noted many books by K. Goldsmith, C. Bok, and even Lisa Jarnot, made mental note that we must get Flarf anthology in such museums because of all the trendy elements: collectives, appropriation, etc.

And then, and then, as if that weren’t enough, got on the 7 train to meet G. because, as Rodney’s poem testifies, “there’s Szechuan in Flushing,” and we ate dan-dan noodles, basil chicken, etc., then got on the 7 again to Jackson Heights so I could re-buy a copy of the old Ramayana DV so that I can cop the scene where Ravenna unwraps Sita from endless colorful saris, and where in the DVD shop I had lovely interactions with two cherubs whose Muslim mother saw me with the DVD and told me to enjoy it with my head and not my heart because it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone (forgot to mention here how earlier in the day I kicked off Passover by having a BLT for lunch: sorry, ancestors, it was delicious, so crunchy and bacony). And then finally before coming home bought a little triangle of a paan leaf; if you have not tried one before know that it tastes like a cross between brown sugar syrup, bath salts, and a lawn, and it is delightful. It is probably on the trajectory of the stimulus of that weird treat that I have been able to write these notes about my terrific (but exhausting!) day.

whoa, good writing here