Welcome to (Month 3: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 3: Volume 2) contains contemporary art from Russia, Ukraine, England, America, South Africa, Germany, China, Thailand, Korea, France, Venezuela, Japan, Jamaica, and Brazil — loads of 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…
Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was an artist who, as a gay, black man, aspired to live those roles to the fullest. He was not only a prominent member of New York's downtown scene as a composer, conductor, singer, pianist, and choreographer, but also performed at Lincoln Center with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic, and recorded experimental disco with producer Arthur Russell. 'Eastman is something of a cult figure among composers and singers', reads a 1980 press release.
The Lenbachhaus will host several concerts in February and March 2022 featuring works by the US composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990). Eastman was a representative of minimal music and composed primarily for smaller ensembles, including piano quartet. This rarely performed and challenging music is an impressive example of the international and cross-genre movement of Minimalism.
RA When is the best time for you to catch ideas?
HK Mostly while fishing or on the gun range.
RA Do you paint while fishing?
HK No, I can’t do both at once. But last year I caught a small teddy bear while fishing next to Fisher Island. I hooked its leg real good. That’s how I got the idea to paint it. It was so cute and it kept floating. You can’t kill those little bastards. They are eternal.
— Harmony Korine in conversation with Rita Ackermann via Gagosian Quarterly
Contemporary American artist Carolyn Drake
Stretch five canvases and lay them against the wall. Think, and when inspiration strikes, paint one and then turn it to face the wall and do another, even if you have to stay in bed all day. I stay in bed because there I’m not distracted. Stay in bed until inspiration arrives. You can tell right away, in the first minute, whether the painting is successful or not. None of this nonsense about one part working and another part not. Either it works or it doesn’t. Bad paintings can destroy the goodness of others. Don’t get into the destruction of them. Destroying paintings is a form of passion.
— “Agnes & Perfection” By Lizzie Borden, via Another Gaze
Contemporary Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti
Jezabelle Cormio’s debut runway show at Milan Fashion Week
Moor Mother - "Temporal Control Of Light Echoes"
Directed and animated by Ghazal Majidi
Contemporary German artist Alexandra Bircken
A hand stuck out from between the curtains and waved slowly at me for a long time, like someone was saying goodbye from a departing car window. At one point, it threw something into the road. When I ran to pick it up, huffing and puffing, it was a banknote in a currency I didn’t recognize.
— “Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing” by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda, via Granta
Contemporary British artist Javier Gallego Escutia
voicing murmurings several wallthicknesses away is unmistakably his, that is easily his silhouette (that stack of garbage beside a security floodlight), every cognition every corona of every everyday item is such a fluid entrance into reveries of him that I am sitting down with the firm intentions of thinking deeply on a subject so remote (knitting stitchcharts & yogurt beverage recipes & Parisian cityplanning) although the edgelines of a facet of knowledge are inescapably metamorphosing into the geometry of his pursing lips (although the animation of his lips moving are foreign, although I've the feeling I'm seeing him speaking, the vision of those lips is capable of parting in my imagination into a perfect toothless circle of blackness that in its approaching me is expandingly enveloping the entirety of my vision (the universe))
— from John Trefry's "Marienbad" via Neutral Spaces
Contemporary Russian artist Ellen Sheidlin
Contemporary British artist Helen Beard
A sentence is a sort of commitment the writer makes only so that they’re then able to carry out the remainder of whatever it is they find themselves thusly needing to write. You have to begin, and you have to begin in such a way that you’re not entirely holding on. Something else is guiding you, and in the process of enacting this something in language you’re then pushing yourself to a small problem, the only solution to which is to finish writing these sentences in the order your transcription would appear to dictate. Learning to hold onto these bits of language as they present themselves can often mean the writing of an entirely new project.
— Excerpt from Sentence-Making “Notes on the Act of Writing” by Grant Maierhofer, via Socrates on the Beach
Intersections: Sanford Biggers
Sanford Biggers’s Intersections project, Mosaic, presents a visual and conceptual interplay—a mosaic—of distinct histories, cultural narratives, and art styles. Drawing from works in the Phillips’s permanent collection, including the Gee’s Bend quilts that were recently acquired and a number of European modernist sculptures, Biggers produced a new body of work—Mosaic, a three-dimensional quilt; Fool’s Folly, a floor piece made with sand; and The Cantor, a marble sculpture—that bridges past art traditions with current multimedia practices.
Contemporary Jamaican artist Mekia Machine
Contemporary Japanese artist Haruhiko Kawaguchi
Bernie Krause – The Great Animal Orchestra (2019)
Over the course of nearly fifty years, Bernie Krause has collected more than 5,000 hours of recordings of natural habitats, including at least 15,000 terrestrial and marine species from all around the world. This trained musician quickly discovered the musical harmony and quasi-orchestral organization of animal vocalisations in the natural world. He is passionate about these natural musical compositions, or “soundscapes,” in which the sounds of the earth, including the sounds of the wind and the rain, also have their place.
Bernie Krause’s approach is unique. Contemplating the natural world as a poet, listening to animal vocalizations as a musician, Bernie Krause also studies it all scientifically. The analysis of the graphic representation of these soundscapes via spectrograms reveals that the sounds of the animal world, often perceived as nonsensical noises, are actually as carefully orchestrated as the most complex musical scores. The study of the acoustic organization of a particular ecosystem shows that at the heart of a soundscape each species spontaneously finds its own “acoustic niche.” Yet the observation of Bernie Krause’s soundscapes also reveals that the great animal orchestra, increasingly threatened by human activities, now risks being reduced to total and utter silence.
Contemporary American artist Carroll Dunham
In the beginning, “is,” with its long Z sound, is invested, infested.
— from Four Poems by Rae Armantrout, via Big Other
Contemporary Venezuelan artist Isabella Benshimol Toro
Loewe | Fall Winter 2022/2023 by Jonathan Anderson | Full Fashion Show
Alexandre Marain article about the show at French Vogue
Contemporary French artist and photographer Marc Sommer
Manchado - Mona Lisa (feat. Xhosa)
written, directed, and edited by Manchado
Contemporary French artist Georges Tony Stoll
in this ending, I am the pit, willing myself to fall, hoping to hit some fertile ground, where at least I’ll have one last shot to grow.
— from Aya Elizabeth Kusch’s “My First Autobiographical Fiction” via The Offing
Contemporary Korean artist Kim Byungkwan
Twombly tends to be attracted to writers, to texts. Thus, his interest in “the ancient world” as a metanarrative seems valid but not totally on point. To me, Twombly seems more interested in ancient aesthetics, ancient attempts, ancient artfulness in much the same way he is interested in Rilke and Mallarme and Keats and Lorca. He is interested in energy and articulation, the successful and the failed modes of communication. Thus, the real contribution of this catalog might be as a corrective. History is now. The past is present. We are all trying to write it.
— from “Poetry/painting/history/hermeneutics: On 'Cy Twombly: Making Past Present'“ by Dean Radar, via Jacket2
Contemporary Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija
Contemporary Chinese artist Xinyi Cheng
Balenciaga — Creative Director Demna Gvasalia
360° Show | Winter 22 Collection
Music by BFRND
(full collection)
Contemporary American artist Kate Gilmore
Kate Gilmore lectures about her work (2014)
Human symbionts—residents of the gut, the orifices, the skin—enable omnivorous dietary habits, regulate the immune system, protect against pathogenic bacteria, and produce a range of essential vitamins, to name just a few of their known functions. About half the cells in the human body are those of microbial symbionts. Margulis—now something of a cult figure among many bio artists—championed the theory of endosymbiotic evolution, which describes what was perhaps the biggest leap for life on Earth—the one from cells without nuclei (prokaryotic) to cells with nuclei (eukaryotic). This change led from a world populated solely by bacteria to one whose inhabitants included bacteria plus diverse other life-forms. Margulis spent her life proving that endosymbiosis was the secret to that leap. Put simply, she proposed that one single-celled creature engulfed another, but didn’t digest it; the engulfed organism continued to function inside the host, and eventually became what we now know as the nucleus. The most dramatic development in the evolutionary history of life, Margulis argued, came about not through competition between species, but through cooperation. Perhaps not surprisingly, she was at one time accused of being a communist.
— from “SYMBIOTIC ART” by Claire Pentecost, via Art in America
Contemporary German artist Mona Ardeleanu
Chantal Joffe is a contemporary American-born English artist based in London
South African artist John Baloyi
Although the Petrified Forest may be slightly more scenic now than it was over a hundred years ago, something of this characterization remains true: the petrified logs lie in glassy puddles, or are broken into smaller pieces and scattered along the trail. Volcanic ash embedded in the soil, as the map notes, resembles nothing so much as concrete.
— from “APOCALYPSE AND ANTICLIMAX: THE PETRIFIED FOREST, CALISTOGA, CA” by Abigail Struhl, via Public Books
Contemporary American artist Patty Carroll
Jack Whitten (1939-2018) was an American painter and sculptor:
Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter 2022 Show, Mycelium, held in Brooklyn, New York.
Contemporary London-based photographer Annie Collinge
Contemporary Russian-born Ukrainian artist Yuliya Golovina
Salvador Dalí and Marcel Duchamp at The Royal Academy
Two of the 20th Century's greatest artistic mavericks and showmen are paired together in a show which reconsiders the overlooked interests and connections between the two men. The Art Channel looks in detail at six key works exhibited in the show to learn more about their ideas and methods and why they have been so influential on younger generations of artists. The film includes a contribution from Professor Dawn Ades, co-curator of the exhibition.