Welcome to (Month 3: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 3: Volume 1) contains contemporary art from Iraq, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Germany, America, Finland, Spain, China, Vietnam, Brazil, Scotland, Mexico, and England — contemporary literature: poetry/fiction/theory/interviews, new music, and videos of artworks, fashion shows, interviews, documentaries, 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…
XVIII. Digital PTSD. The Practice of Art and Its Impact on Digital Trauma | Cally Spooner
In this presentation, Cally Spooner joins an assortment of notes on her current research with a new proposal: that “digital PTSD” is the result of an aggressive reality; “the performance principle”, identified in 1955 by Herbert Marcuse and found today in surveillance capitalist culture as well as chrono-normative regimes. The concept of temps mort (lit. “dead time”), after which Spooner’s ongoing work DEAD TIME is titled, provides a framework to test states of duration, undetectability, waiting, less controlled life and rehearsal as modes of resistance to our century’s demand for performance.
In high school I watched a silent film of a tsunami as it struck the shore of a Japanese town, the result of a seismic shift, plates moving underwater, the undulation as it hit the edge of the beach and kept going, picture flickering in the projector. Cars, dishes, buildings, garbage, someone’s pet cat, maybe bodies underwater all slowly moved together in a giant roar we couldn’t hear over the clickety click of the movie grinding to a halt. It didn’t look at all like that Japanese painting of the risen wave, blue and still in the pause before it crashes down.
— from Deborah Derrickson Kossmann's story "Churn" via The Nashville Review
Contemporary American artist Janiva Ellis
The History of Bottega Veneta
video by Threaducation
Bottega Veneta is one of the most exciting brands in fashion, but in light of some major changes, it’s future is uncertain. In this video we’ll look at how it grew into a prominent fashion, its recent explosion in popularity, and where it may be headed over the next few years.
Contemporary Finnish artist Kirsi Mikkola
To think politics in this multiscalar and constructive way necessitates that all social worlds be not only infinite in absolute size but inaccessibly so. If a world is inaccessibly infinite, it means that no sequence of reasoning within that world can fully capture its full size and scope—consequently, the possibilities for subjectivity are never depleted. The consequence of thinking of social worlds as infinite spaces, including both the material support and the configuration space of possible social forms within the world, is that the reasoning about these social forms can be done within the logic of the world itself.
— from ATLAS OF EXPERIMENTAL POLITICS, via Šum
Contemporary Spanish artist Ibon Aranberri
I settle back on the bedspread and let the story have its way with half my mind, trying only to save the other half for later. A talking chocolate bar career, a talking chocolate bar career I think, already unable to say which half I’m thinking this in. Some part of me again senses a third presence, but I know better than to go looking for it now.
— from David Leo Rice's "Tom & The Talking Chocolate Bar" via Ligeia
Contemporary Chinese artist Zang Kunkun
Kayla Weisdorf’s “Port(h)al(e)” (2011)
Operating on the romantic premise that there is a plane of existence to which only cinema might transport us, this installation imagined the rapturous filmic experience as a substance flowing through the world that could be concentrated into a fluid, energetic material. Composed of visual and aural elements clipped from high-grossing films.
Contemporary Vietnamese artist Quoctrung Kenny Nguyen
MANY OF Sylvia Snowden’s vivid canvases are so thick with impasto that they verge on being relief works. The acrylic medium retains the gestures of her fingers, the strokes of her palette knives, and the trace of her brushes. Her compositions are made of peaks and valleys, grooves and protrusions, tracks as well as marks. They are not just a representation in signs and figures, but the thick matter of extruded thought.
— from Johanna Drucker’s essay “Alive with Potent Energy: The Work of Sylvia Snowden” via LARB
Yasmin Williams: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
Yasmin Williams doesn't need much scenery to set your imagination in motion. For her Tiny Desk (home) concert, the Virginia-based guitarist keeps the background sparse (a rug, a folding table, curtains, a plank of wood) to foreground her inventive playing.
Maria Nepomuceno is a Brazilian artist known for her knitted sculptural works.
Inside its realm, no one could fathom us— we brazen through their shuttered doors, we huge inside their throats, we necessary storm, our newborn crowns smeared flat with blood, so hot against our little heads.
— from “Nap Unleashed” by Patricia Smith, via Poetry Magazine
Laetitia Ky is a feminist artist from Ivory Coast who creates sculptures from her hair.
Contemporary Scottish artist Morag Keil
![well as untitled: Teghan Burt, Richard Hawkins, Christopher LG Hill & Joshua Petherick, Morag Keil, Tim Webby "The Orchid and the Wasp" (curated by Dan Arps) ROBERT HEALD GALLERY Wellington 31.1.19 —](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!iWvC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fed2171d9-481b-4839-b64a-fed62070bd3e_1600x1066.jpeg "well as untitled: Teghan Burt, Richard Hawkins, Christopher LG Hill & Joshua Petherick, Morag Keil, Tim Webby "The Orchid and the Wasp" (curated by Dan Arps) ROBERT HEALD GALLERY Wellington 31.1.19 —")
Here is the first throw of our three-sided die: Surrealism is an accidental codex of invocations that pairs well with materialism. Second toss: Surrealism made sense of sleeping horror (dreams) after Dada made sense of waking horror (war). Last toss: Surrealism is the unconscious response (Freud) to material pressure (Marx). Let’s just say that there are no Surrealist cops and put away the dice. (I feel certain that there are Impressionist cops but cannot prove it.)
— from Sasha Frere-Jones "Convulsions: Surrealism past and present" via New Left Review
Composer Samuel Andreyev analyzes Karlheinz Stockhausen's seminal 1955-56 electronic piece, “Gesang der Jünglinge” (Song of the Youths).
Contemporary Mexican artist Rubén Ortiz-Torres
Dewey grants Kant that the eighteenth century was a century of “reason” rather than “passion,” and that shifts in art and theory are “connected with large rhythms in human history” (262). But the damage is done. We have an anemic conception of art. We have no way of talking about what is felt when art is encountered. We may feel the “reverberations” of the art that moves and shakes and even slices us open, but we can say almost nothing about it. Our hands are tied by Contemplation.
— from “YOUR LIFE IS YOUR WORK OF ART: On John Dewey’s Art as Experience” by Lindsay Lerman, via The Review of Uncontemporary Fiction
Zbigniew Rybczyński’s short film “Tango” (1981)
Contemporary Iraqi artist Sama Alshaibi
Contemporary Brazilian artist Ana Cláudia Almeida
Go on, hang the stars from the sky. This world is a pageant of your making. The hour of forgetting is a brown hour. The house of forgetting looks like any other. The trees are dark and full of language. The trees speak, but not to you.
— from Claire Schwartz's "Lecture on Loneliness" via Granta
Drag Superstars Violet Chachki and Gottmik do a “No Gorge: Runway Rewind” of the Alexander McQueen's Women's Fall/Winter 2009 Runway Show!
Contemporary American artist Karen Kilimnik
Contemporary American artist Jennifer Packer
For me, it’s like jumping in the void. An ellipsis is a space of time, or territory even, where something happens for the next scene. Even in the editing room sometimes, if there is no ellipsis in the way I shot, suddenly I feel, “No, no, no, no, let’s try this void.” The void, in a strange way, doesn’t contradict linear storytelling but makes a shock. And I know in my own life, I live every minute, every day, day by day, and sometimes something happens in another level of time.
— Claire Denis interviewed by Erika Balsom about her new film Fire, via Film Comment
The Craft & Ethics of Erasure
Jen Sperry Steinorth: On Creating and Claiming Space with Her Read by Amanda Newell, interview via Plume
Contemporary Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop
Balmain Fall Winter 2022 Show
Contemporary German artist Michaela Eichwald
So many conversations with people that I love seem to just approach the edge of the void. And you have nowhere else to go, and that’s where you crack the joke. And you don’t need to figure out “the where” anymore, you’re alive again. And, so I’ve always held onto that as a person and in my spirit. And also I like this kind of ironic trickery that humor can afford. You know, you’re smiling but you’re actually insulting the nation. I think of my poems as laced with arsenic. I think the humor is where things can be seen most clearly. That’s where the mask kind of breaks.
— Solmaz Sharif interviewed by Tarik Dobbs, “Reading An Experiment Into A Poem” via Mizna
Is Gaetano Pesce the Most Interesting Designer in the World?
"If I talk too much, I risk to repeat." Italian architect Gaetano Pesce's works of art fill the halls and walls of museums all over the world, but how has he remained so elusive, separating designer from the design? In 1968, he designed Foot "UP7" and began to carve out an artistic style uniquely his own. Now, at 82-years-old, Pesce speaks to his career, craft, and begs the question, is he the most interesting designer in the world?
Contemporary German-Croatian artist Genoveva Filipovic
I find it more valuable to write with an eye toward what I don’t know. To proceed from unknowing is unsettling and potentially destabilizing because it invariably leads to feelings of groundlessness and conceptual vertigo. But inhabiting an “I-don’t-know-mind” or “beginner’s mind,” as it is often described in Zen Buddhism, prepares me to recognize moments of self-discovery when they arise in my writing. What to do when you look to the sky and see something that violates your foundational understanding of who you are, of who others are—of what should be up there in the sky and what is literally alien? Write about it.
— Tony Trigilio’s essay “Writing What You Don’t Know: Poetry and the Arcane” via Big Other
Lecture | Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand
The Gertrude and David Fogelson Lecture
Hear writer and cultural critic Gary Indiana discuss the writings of Louise Bourgeois in relation to her sculpture, drawings, and other artistic works in conjunction with the exhibition "Louise Bourgeois, Freud’s Daughter." This talk also explores their affinity with the writing of Antonin Artaud, Unica Zurn, Anna Kavan, and other literary figures who produced some of their work as an adjunctive feature of their psychoanalysis.
Contemporary German artist Veit Laurent Kurz
Laurie Anderson — The Nerve Bible (1994-1995)
The Music Hall, Kansas City, Missouri (March 9th 1995)
Full transcript of The Nerve Bible
Much of American culture consistently confuses personal taste with right-mindedness. Liking or disliking a cultural object on social media often serves as a stand-in for a bald statement of your political affiliation, your educational background, or your place in the social hierarchy. Social media arguments where people take sides on which cultural product is superior to the other, like the Marvel vs. Scorsese discourse, endure for months and years because people can’t stop trying to use their faves to humblebrag about their political or moral rectitude.
— from Jessa Crispin's essay "Portals of Discovery" via The Baffler
Contemporary British artist David John Shrigley
Max Ernst | HOW TO SEE the artist with MoMA curator Anne Umland
Max Ernst is often described in textbooks as a key Dada or Surrealist artist, but throughout his long career, he worked across many mediums transforming everyday images into visionary dreamscapes. MoMA curator Anne Umland explores his life and works as a painter, sculptor, collage maker and poet in MoMA's new exhibition, “Max Ernst: Beyond Painting.”