Welcome to (Month 12: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 12: Volume 2) contains tons of contemporary art, music, fashion, videos, and more stuff that resists categorization!
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…
David Altmejd’s work “is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.”
I go to where the river meets the sea and I scour up three pounds of mouth from the people lying there, plus a little extra just in case. I add some tongues, lips, teeth and a little bit of leftover mouse. Because I am, if anything, a holistic baker I mix it all together with my bare hands and I sing the pattycake song, a song of how wonderful everything we can imagine actually is.
— from “As Fast As You Can” by Hugh Behm-Steinberg, via ergot.
Isobelle Ouzman is a contemporary artist currently based out of Bratislava, Slovakia
Nancy Haynes is an artist living and working in New York
Flip-Thru of The Complete Julie Doucet by @drawnquarterly66
Vivienne Joyce Binns OAM is an Australian artist known for her contribution to the Women's Art Movement in Australia, her engagement with feminism in her artwork, and her active advocacy within community arts.
IN THE FUTURE
In the future everyone will be famous for 15 dollars.
CAFÉ
One day I saw Joseph Brodsky at a café and asked if he had any advice for a young poet. He said, “Don’t use too many adjectives.”
— from “Tick Tock” by Mike Topp, via SLEEPINGFISH
Jeppe Ugelvig, writing for ARTFORUM, said, “Reina Sugihara’s solemn paintings emerge from a structured process of experimentation, guided by an instinct to trace the haptic memory of forms.”
1. It bejins in Berlin A Historical Case Study In Disappearance + Cultural Theft: Exhibit YZ: Brinj back to me Nefertiti
— from “Bring Back Our Girls” by Marwa Helal, via poets.org
“Martin Vaughn-James and the Early Graphic Novel” by Henry Chamberlain for New York Review Comics
Cezary Poniatowski “was born in 1987 in Olsztyn. From 2006 to 2012, he studied Graphic Design at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Warsaw.”
You find a monster hiding under your bed.
The monster is sick. It tells you so. The monster says it has a broken pulse.
You feel bad for the sick monster, so you give it antihistamines, expensive tissues coated with aloe. You check the monster’s forehead. The monster is running a fever. You run it a cool bath. In the bath, the monster whittles a bar of soap into a half moon. After the half moon, the monster keeps whittling and whittling until the soap is a crescent moon, until it is zero moons.
— from “MONSTER MONSTER MONSTER” by Leigh Chadwick, via X-R-A-Y
The Triadic Ballet and the Bauhaus dances of Oskar Schlemmer in reconstructions by Margarete Hasting and Gerhard Bohner (1970)
Mimosa Echard “is a French visual artist who lives and works in Paris.”
Anna Vogel “alters the reality of the natural landscape, creating surreal, abstracted photographs with digital and hand-manipulated elements.”
On November 22, the day that Bernadette Mayer died, I dreamt the moon had fallen from the sky. When I woke the moon was still there. Today, less than a month later, we sit on the dark side of the year, maybe late in the day and perhaps late in our lives. My mother has been gone since 2014.
When I wake today at 6:30 in the midwinter darkness, the Christmas lights continue their flickering, little flashing beads, a rosary for our eyes: light and dark, day and night, paper and ink. The sun’s a little mother who warms and feeds and allows us to see what is right in front of us.
In these December days we feel our scarcity. But that’s just what the myth of American individualism and the treadmill of capitalism wants us to feel.
— “Advent 2022, Dec 21, Susan Briante, Our Midwinter Days” via Essay Daily
Artist Duo Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl
If there’s chilly objectification on view here—in costume surveys and in the world of high fashion, perhaps there always is—it’s subsumed by a humanizing warmth and humor: in the face of AIDS-era homophobic moralism, rampant at the height of his career, the fun-loving Mugler was unapologetically, exuberantly queer.
— on Thierry Mugler by Johanna Fateman, via 4Columns
David Fesl (b. 1995, Czech Republic) is an artist living and working in Prague.
Ad Minoliti “is a contemporary Argentine artist known for colorful geometric paintings and installations.”
Remembering with Alexis Pauline Gumbs
In this episode, Prentis meets with Queer Black Troublemaker, Black Feminist Love Evangelist, and author of the upcoming book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs (she/her). Listen as Alexis moves us through time to relearn and remember the lessons of those who have brought us to now and the lineages from which we have come.
“In crafting speculative worlds on a shrunken scale, Naoki Sutter-Shudo dislocates us from the abstraction of the impending future, allowing a site for contemplation of reality”
Liv Schulman is a filmmaker, writer, and performance artist whose films and videos parody personal and political shortcomings in order to examine the larger structures that enable them.
I also began to study films. You know Jean-Luc Godard, particularly the film “Alphaville,” which at that time was shown on TV a lot. And I was able to borrow the screenplays; Ingmar Bergman movies began to creep in. And then I sort of crossed the bridge into independent cinema, to the movies of Bruce Bailey, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and got hip to all of these things through reading books. And later on, Jonas Mekas’ Film Journal. I was just sort of floating on things and moving through like on a river, and I didn’t know anything about anything, I was just just going with things. And I was feeling tingles, you know.
— William Parker :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Charbel Joseph H. Boutros “blends Romanticism with conceptual art in a body of work that encourages reflection on space, time, and the past’s formation of the present. Often monochromatic and melancholic, his works across installation, sculpture, and video are haunted by the political history of his native Lebanon, as well as the anxieties latent in contemporary society.”
The Three Romances for Oboe and Piano, Op. 94 is a composition by Robert Schumann. In this version of the 2d movement, the interpreters are Céline Moinet (oboe) and Florian Uhlig (piano). The video is directed by Joachim Thôme.
“In her expressionistic paintings, Melike Kara explores social relationships, fate, and notions of home as she combines sparsely detailed figures with spare or highly patterned backdrops.”
Sarah Zapata is a Peruvian-American fabric artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
The Nouveau Roman does not mean much to American readers now. But in the 1960s and 1970s, it signified and indeed epitomized French cultural sophistication. The symbolic capital fetched by French cultural imports — what Pascale Casanova calls "literary capital," in particular — had never been so high.1 For those who sought to solve the problem of "the death of the novel" with a newer, better novel, the Nouveau Roman — along with Barthes's Nouvelle Critique and Lévi-Strauss's Structuralism, its affiliated movements in criticism and anthropology — was a glowing opportunity.
— “Susan Sontag and the Americanization of the Nouveau Roman” by Ben Libman, via Post 45
Eva Löfdahl “was born in 1953 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and currently lives and works in Stockholm.”
MONIQUE MOUTON B. 1984, Fort Collins, Colorado Lives and works in New York, New York
Lisa Alvarado “is an American visual artist and harmonium player. Alvarado is known for her free-hanging abstract paintings. Her works operate as stage sets and artworks simultaneously, and engage with abstraction beyond the parameters of western art history.”
ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED - Official Trailer
Directed by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin told through her slideshows, intimate interviews, ground-breaking photography, and rare footage of her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the overdose crisis.
Susan Cianciolo (born 1969) is a fashion designer and artist.
“Both surreal and bizarrely familiar, Satoshi Kojima's transportive paintings are fantastic dreamscapes.”