Welcome to Month 1: Volume 2, the first full collage/assemblage exclusively for paid subscribers! (In case you missed it, you can find Volume 1 here) Thank you again, I really appreciate your support!
Volume 2 contains seventeen contemporary visual artists, fourteen pieces of contemporary literature: poetry/fiction/theory/interviews, four artist videos, four fashion shows, four albums, two music videos, two short films, and more!
Don’t forget this newsletter will exceed most email limits, so you’ll need to click through to “view entire message” at the bottom of this email or click over to the website to enjoy the whole thing.
And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
Contemporary American artist Jamian Juliano-Villani
For the PASS Spring Speaker Series 2020, Jamian Juliano-Villani outlines her rise from Rutgers to gallery representation, tells us her top tips for aspiring artists, and gives us a sneak peek at her creative process:
Contemporary American artist Johnny Damm
You are afraid don’t be afraid be afraid don’t be afraid no one births you only my longing my angellonging
— excerpt from “The Angelgreen Sacrament” By Eva Kristina Olsson & translated by Johannes Göransson, via The Nation
Terror! (2007)
directed by Ben Rivers
We heard Hrafndis’s scream, and then the sounds of her struggling in the darkness. She would soon be dead, we were sure, though she cried out from time to time for us to help her. After a time we crept out from our own holes and stood listening. We even tested the stone that had fallen and determined that yes, two or three of us straining together might roll it away. We could roll it away and then perhaps she could escape.
— excerpt from “The Tower” by Brian Evenson, via Plinth
Contemporary British artist Polly Nor
Two recent fashion shows from Masayuki Ino for Doublet:
Fall/Winter 2021 (full collection)
Rakuten Fashion Week TOKYO 2021 Spring/Summer (full collection)
The house was connected to me—not the other way around, an important distinction—by a thick, pliable appendage growing from my abdomen. It was, and is, hot and wet, like the flesh of an inner cheek, but pocked and dimpled with white spots. The transition between what I thought of as my normal body and the connecting limb was smooth; at times I could not tell where it began.
— excerpt from “Cold Butter” by Maggie Siebert, via Urbanomic
Contemporary Israeli artist Liat Yossifor
Alice: Many people must ask you what emergent strategy is. What do you tell them?
adrienne: My answer has shifted over time. Right now, emergent strategy is how we can intentionally get into the right relationship with the planet and with each other. Emergent strategy is focused towards people who have a desire to change the world. They see that something is wrong. They see that there's injustice, imbalance, and that deep transformation is needed. The question is, how does one transform oneself in order to bring about that transformation?
— adrienne maree brown “on creating the future,” Interview with Alice Grandoit, via Deem Journal
Contemporary Italian artist Daniele Milvio
Contemporary American artist Jeanne Silverthorne
vox smooth crisp razorwoven i shed the stars the dead names obits for shitpaper halfpipe heresy then i'm with the boys again capless machetes to shear multitudes of spoiled silk gutted drag thru emperors dilapidated sloppy
— excerpt from “Trucker Milk gets the milk” by PJ Lombardo, via Dreginald
100 gecs - mememe (2021)
Shot by 100 gecs
Additional Shooting by Lewis Grant
Edited by Weston Allen
Cloaks and Hat designed by Elly
Looks from Jeremy Scott for Moschino PRE-FALL 2022 (full collection)
Diffraction is in stark contrast to the process of dialectics as proposed in Hegelian terms, in which opposing sides go through a linear battle to elucidate rational thought. Within the complexity of diffraction, the indeterminacy of space-time allows for these exhibitions to simultaneously affect one another —shifting both past and future discourses around them. Thus, the Newtonian and the Hegelian methods cease to be relevant. The past is ever present in shaping a future that has yet to come. All sides have become entangled as a means of survival.
— excerpt from “Dialectics of Entanglement” by Roxana Fabius and Patricia M. Hernandez, via the catalogue for Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States
Contemporary American artist Kate Bonner
— Part 1 of “Trap Poetics” by Ava Hofmann, via Action Books
Contemporary American artist Alexi Worth
M. NourbeSe Philip performs "Discourse on the Logic of Language" from She Tries Her Tongue at at the Words Aloud 7 Spoken Word Festival in Durham, Ontario, Canada, November 2010.
Contemporary French-Algerian artist Neil Beloufa
WHAT CAN YOU DO W A MAGMA -so attractive -likes to form crystals -sass -body lay in darkness producing its symptoms -in every error just hunting ways out -then the one way -stay in the error til then -slowly the question would vary its function -still looking
— excerpt from "TECHNOLOGY" by Kirsten Ihns, via Always Crashing
Contemporary German artist Kaspar Müller
There are three senses of extinction: the now widely discussed sixth great extinction event (which we have begun to imagine and witness, even if in anticipation); extinction by humans of other species (with the endangered species of the ‘red list’ evidencing our destructive power); and self-extinction, or the capacity for us to destroy what makes us human.
— excerpt from Claire Colbrook's Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction, Vol. 1 (available free via Open Humanities Press)
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, Sally Kindberg now lives and works in London
In 1964 Canadian film-maker Michael Snow invited a unique ensemble to his Chambers Street studio to record a soundtrack for a film he was then working on. The core of the group was comprised of Albert Ayler's trio of the time with Gary Peacock and Sunny Murray, abetted by Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai and Don Cherry (who would himself eventually join Ayler's band). Snow stipulated that he wanted a group improvisation with no solos and no pre-arranged lines.
– from an album review by Jeph Jerman via The Squid’s Ear
Here’s the album:
And here’s the film:
Contemporary Swiss artist Sonia Kacem
what I say contains no social script no postures carved on a-priori porcelain nor weight erected by extrinsic hexagrammatics through integer so there never exists within me self-destructive structure nor a privately hexed coronation
—excerpt from The Ganges by Will Alexander, via Posit Journal
Contemporary Dutch artist Jacqueline de Jong
there is a text in front of me; I am reading it; I am thinking about what I am reading, and I am thinking about reading it; I am writing some of that thinking, and reading some of that writing, and writing some of that reading of some of that writing; I am thinking about the writing as I am reading it; I am thinking about what I am thinking while I am thinking it; the second thinking is reading the first thinking; that reading is the mental source text; it occupies a mental space between the first thinking and the second thinking; I am writing a reading of that reading. This is what I am thinking about when I write about writing-against-itself as improvisational association in which the letter is the primary unit of composition.
— excerpt from “Writing Against Itself” By Jim Leftwich (2016) via his website
Contemporary Russian artist Dasha Pears
The epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations. Times of concatenation presuppose that our bodies have become repositories of different kinds of risks, including those kinds of risks that not so long ago (and in many cases still) were thought to be the peculiarity of certain classes of the population — or “races,” to use that infamous term. What used to only happen to some is now happening to more than just them. It seems to me that these new structures of destabilization have now expanded their reach and are provoking a whole set of displacements that we have to attend to sociologically, empirically and ethnographically.
— Achille Mbembe in an interview with Nils Gilman titled "How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness" (January 11, 2022) via Noema Magazine
Contemporary Congolese artist Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga
If the pandemic has been a portal to a portal, it has also been windows all the way down. My eyes are wobbly from the journey. I wasn’t sure I could even trust my vision when, sitting on my couch, mid-Instagram scroll, I thought I saw something on the screen that was surely a projection: a jalousie window. Perfectly executed to scale but confusingly placed on a wall—was I meant to look at it or through it?
—excerpt from Jeanne Vaccaro’s essay “Come to My Window: The Aesthetics and Erotics of Boundaries and Portals” via BOMB Magazine
Contemporary Brazilian artist Flora Rebollo
Looks from Thom Browne’s PRE-FALL 2022 collection
Lorn - Acid Rain (Official Music Video)
from the album The Maze to Nowhere Pt. 2
directed by Pavel Brenner, Julian Flores, Sherif Alabede
Jordan Ann Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area
“Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat”
Three part series via The Broad Museum
The first video segment of the series on jazz and bebop, produced by Quincy Jones Productions, features L.A. jazz musician Terrace Martin as well as input from Quincy Jones himself.
[The second video] The "Punk and No Wave" segment, hosted by James Spooner, who co-founded Afropunk Festival and ran an underground club on Canal Street in the early 90’s, features tunes by James Chance and The Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Basquiat’s band Gray, Liquid Liquid, DNA, and Mars.
The third and final segment of the series, delivered by Dr. Todd Boyd, a.k.a. "Notorious Ph.D.," examines the rich cultural era in which Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged and draws a line from bebop to hip hop.
I hope you found this volume worthwhile! If so, please let everybody you know hear about it. Spreading the word really helps.
Until next time….