Goings on, a little more autobiographical

I am super excited about the collaborative projects being planned by Arnold Kemp for next years Time-Based Arts festival. He held a screening of Dario Argento's masterpiece Suspiria, and then invited artists in attendance to submit art inspired by their viewing. I have loved this movie ever since being introduced to it, though to this day I have yet to give it a proper viewing. It is absolutely lovely and terrifying, gorgeous visuals and masterful cinematography, suspense and abject gore. Shot with Anamorphic lenses, and using imbibition technicolor prints, the entire film is cast in a vivid, saturated palette. This creates a visual atmosphere of super-realness-come-fantasy, like an adolescent memory or a life-changing rock show. Not unlike the early video art of Sue De Beer. Actually, De Beer is a great bridge to this project. Her work, which reaches for The Teenage in a way that is both incredibly complex and heartwrenchingly earnest and beautiful, wears it's inflences on it's sleeves. Kristeva and Dennis Cooper, for instance, form the secret bones and guts, as well as the glittering froth of her work. High-concept meets fandom. Casting inspiration-via-fandom in lush, seductive rock-show colors, with all the requisite gothic tropes, has been huge lately. Whitney Biennial-2004 stuff, derided as hyped "glamed-up grungy teenage angst goth/disco aesthetic and faux shamanism, clumsily and cloyingly epitomized by so many Nth generation artists" in some blogs, of course. Actually I LOVE that description, and I LOVE the work of de beer, banks violette, terrence koh, christian holstad, david almejd, dario robleto, marc swanson, scott treleaven, anthony goicolea, and anyone else who that might be reaching at (is naming names breaking some sort of unspoken rule???). Besides being so much more than that, these artists all capture something so incredibly vital about the sociopolitical-social climate of the first few years of this century in New York City. These were really the first works of contemporary art to speak to me, the artistic practices of world-making that have never let go of my imagination. Pieces of art that took up familiar mythologies, but opened out into the strange and beautiful. Not escapism, though it might fool the casual observer, but rather fantasy so fabulous that they perform the same Butlerian function as drag: drawing attention to the utter lack of reality that they contest, reframing our desires to escape, forgrounding the mechanisms of nostalgia and utopian daydreams, and offering blueprints for world-building. Using strategies and tropes and imagery that are immediate and not buried in arcane art historical in-fighting, filled with enough references and jumping off points for the viewer to enter into a conversation-via-interpretation with the art, life, literature, music, and so on.

Anyway, obviously this is a snapshot of a partifular zeitgeist, and we have moved on in that avant-garde way of destructive progress (really?), but it is a point that won't be lost on me. The open call for "SuperNatural" sums it up well, quoting William Burroughs (gag): "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." Mr. Burroughs risks overstating it and missing the crux; fantasy, desire- in a word, dream-is indeed at the heart of lifestyle advertising, mass media distractions, and perhaps even ruling political frameworks. However, it is not by appealing to some gritty, restrained, authentic whatever that danger can be evoked, but by retracing those very mechanisms of the operation of power. Not to rehash that whole masters/tools/house stuff, of course.

I meant to post some reviews of the shows up at Tilt, Motel, PDX, Elizabeth Leach, and Quality Pictures, but I think it is time to get back in the studio and run with it.

Although the Glenn Ligon piece up at PNCA's "Habit Forming" is quite amazing and worth the trip alone. Ligon got a BA from my alma mater, and I was first introduced to his work by a curator ther who I worked with there. The piece at PNCA is huge canvas covered with coal dust, which obscures the newsprint image ostensibly underneath, and occasionally resolves into illegible text. The use of material, with its metaphorical and formal registers, is incredibly successful and I actually don't have much more to say about it right now. It is one of those pieces that grabs you, sticks with you, and continuously reveals itself to you. And for better or worse (better I think), it probably looks absolutely smashing on someones wall.