Welcome to (Month 5: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 5: Volume 1) contains tons of contemporary art, music, fashion, literature, 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…
Our Painted Lives is an invitation to watch and paint along in daily painting exercises, Monday thru Friday:
Contemporary German artist Ruprecht von Kaufmann
Contemporary South African artist Blessing Ngobeni
Art’s toxicology is also the business of the pharmacist Keats’s Nightingale
Ode, in which to hear the exquisite (yet widely available) Nightingale’s
song is to take Art in through every sense-hole like poison and to undergo
poison’s symptomatic attack.
— from JOYELLE MCSWEENEY’s “NIGHTINGALE HYDRAULICS” via Lana Turner Journal
The Tell-Tale Heart (2008)
Directed by Robert Eggers
“I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
- Edgar Allan Poe
Only one Servant remains in the ruins of an old house. He is valet, butler, footman, cook and sick-nurse. The master of the house is a cadaverous invalid whose every function is aided by the earnest, young manservant. He meticulously repeats his duties within the silence of the moldering chambers - his only company is the vacant stare of the Old Man's blind eye. Time rots away. Tormented by constant silence and the banality of his duties, the Servant’s fears gradually turn to violent obsession.With tangibly detailed period design and hauntingly lifelike puppetry, THE TELL-TALE HEART unearths the decaying dreamworld of Poe. Director/ designer Robert Eggers centers the classic tale on the unnerving relationship between Servant and Master. With lyrical movement and a striking performance by Carrington Vilmont, the film quickly lures its viewer into its claustrophobic confines.
Contemporary Brazilian artist Lais Myrrha
As individuals, we exist socially, in relation to each other and the world we want to either maintain or build, which means we’re going to have to sort things out politically. We must grapple with our personal feelings when determining the policies we call for because policies impact everyone. Abolitionist worldmaking challenges us to hold whatever we feel––including, possibly, hatred and a thirst for revenge––while not promoting carceral systems.
— from “Understanding abolition through bell hooks” by Tamara K. Nopperapril, via The New Inquiry
Contemporary Indian artist Parul Gupta
Me ring fall from me finga a Stabroek.
Me husban’ go vex. He mudda’ wan’ eat
karaila chokha, he faddah suck rum steady.
Me na nut’in’ to dem. Me does clap a-roti
an’ chounke de daal. Me husban’ send
me a market fe buy mangro an’ fe get jeera.
Backra been tek me ‘way wid dem come,
me na been wan’ fe come ‘way. Me husban’
send me mus’ buy guinip an’ jamun.
Me na no one fe he mai-baap. Me does pise
de masala me does fry de barah. ‘E go sen’
complaint to me mumma an’ vex wid me faddah.
Me husban’ go vex wid me but nut’in’ me na do.
Me ring fall from me han’ a Stabroek.— from “Sita ke Jhumar” by Rajiv Mohabir, via South Asian Avant-Garde: A Dissident Literary Anthology
Contemporary Indian artist Aban Raza
Contemporary Russian artist Ilya Shkipin
When sorrow is endured, salt gets excreted from your body Your salty-salty expression Your animal gaze like a lonely island hammered by the sea
— from Three Poems by Kim Hyesoon, translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, via 128 Lit
Thom Browne Fall Winter 2022 2023 Full Menswear and Womenswear Runway Fashion Show (website for details)
Contemporary Indian artist Tarini Sethi
All the current forms of self-presentation have a personal success as a goal. They all are made for the public. But art should not necessarily have any public. People can do art simply because they like the process of doing it.
— “To Care or Not to Care: An Interview with Boris Groys” By JC Holburn, via Big Other
Toro y Moi 'MAHAL' Listening Party
WRITTEN & DIRECTED BY Joe Cappa
Contemporary Japanese artist Sacco Fujishima
The Tokyo Experimental Performance Archive is a project designed to promote the preservation and passing on of the legacy of progressive, experimental performance and to stimulate the creative cycle by building a creative archive platform. The project's mission is to reconstruct the historical context of the genre of experimental performance based on artistic expression through physical movement that began early in the 20th century and grew along with the visual arts and music, and to build an archive that will connect and contribute to the creative activities of the next generation of performance artists.
Contemporary American artist Amani Lewis
Conversations on Culture #25: Alex Jackson and Mark Gibson
Alex Jackson joins artist Mark Gibson as they discuss Jackson's exhibition "Chrysalis" at Jenkins Johnson Project as well as Jackson's overall practice.
Contemporary American artist James Marshall (Dalek)
Social media, metonymically represented by the selfie, is often characterized by its surface and its disposability. The selfie is not a narrative device, but what Paul Virilio describes as one in a series of constant arrivals without the "journey" of narrative. The selfie encourages users to forgo analysis in favor of the next arrival (another tweet, another update, another selfie). As stated, these fragments exist in the amplified present which undermines clear sequentiality, allowing multiple, perhaps infinite narratives to be expressed from one user's social media sphere. In the era of social media, the syntagm has become mutable as massive patterns of information — paradigms — take the foreground. Social media encourages users to represent themselves as data: lists of friends, favorite movies, preferred products.
— from “Autofiction and Selfie Aesthetics” by Joseph R. Worthen, via POST45
Contemporary Russian artist Ellen Sheidlin
Regarding content and narrative, Roussel was not an advocate of standard realism. He expended enormous energy generating formally rigorous textual environments, writings that seem to shout their status as artificial linguistic compositions through their very intricacy, even as the people described are generally one-dimensional and nothing that happens to them could occur anywhere but in Roussel’s imagination. Roussel was not interested in so-called great themes, either. Instead, he reveled in replacing Bildung with bizarre technologies, artworks, and environments (stages, gardens, aquariums, platforms, enclosed vehicles, and other built structures).
—via “NEW IMPRESSIONS OF THE HUMAN” by Lucy Ives, via Art in America
Contemporary American artist Rashaad Newsome
The novel is far from sanguine on the ecological fate of the planet. Here all animals have disappeared, some time before or after an unspecified tragedy in which one-third of the once-familiar world has been destroyed. (“A third of the whole. The remainder was still manageable, it was rumored; in fact things had to be managed more than ever. The two thirds left couldn’t be a whole, strangely enough.”) It is never made clear when the disaster occurred, nor what form it took. We know only that the state of emergency is ongoing and has been for some time, so long as to become itself the rule and its inaugurating occasion a matter of indifference.
—via “Final Judgment: The apocalyptic parables of Joy Williams” by Drew Dickerson, via The Point Magazine
Contemporary German artist Markus Linnenbrink
bite the bag to open it ride in the police car’s front seat for indoctrination swimming coach adiposity and cleft chin short lethal pedagogues puberty is criminal unexplained cyclone arriving in your body can a habitat become a ghost town if you desire the habitat too vocally— from “APOLOGY FOR DADAISM” by WAYNE KOESTENBAUM, via Prelude Magazine
Paweł Althamer is a contemporary Polish sculptor, performer, collaborative artist and creator of installations, and video art.
Olga Neuwirth: David Lynch’s Lost Highway Suite, for six soloists, ensemble and live-electronics (2008)
Annan Affotey is a figurative and portraiture painter from Ghana
Anthony Braxton (New Haven) July 17, 2016
In July 2016, a group of Tri-Centric collaborators convened in New Haven to spend some time together, which resulted in Sound American's Anthony Braxton issue. At that time, Anthony Braxton gave a talk about the role of Tri-Centric and the surrounding community in these turbulent times, the paths of the artist and how his musical systems relate to reality and universality beyond art.
Contemporary American artist John McAllister
For this reason, The Blood Oranges is Hawkes’s most intricate and perhaps most important novel. It “abandons” the conventional novel by offering a simulated version of it, inviting the reader to assist in the experiment that reveals it as a façade. It provokes the reader to demand of fiction a more vibrant reading experience in general, and to recognize that all the conventions supposedly involved in writing “quality” fiction are also just façades that could easily be, in some cases might need to be, dismantled.
—from “All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes” by Daniel Green, via The Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature & Culture
Contemporary American artist Judith Linhares
Contemporary American artist Anna Sew Hoy
Contemporary American artist Jean Lowe
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian visual artist currently living and working in New York City
Ayo Akínwándé is a Nigerian contemporary visual artist, curator, and writer.
The artist’s genius is in how she hints at the deep complexity of human relationships. In her unflinching depiction of motherhood, she represents the immensely powerful parent-child bond (something she has described as “monstrous” in her writings), but she also suggests the mother’s desire for freedom.
— from “The Monstrous Beauty of Louise Bourgeois’s Late Textiles: The Woven Child at London’s Hayward Gallery is a moving examination of Bourgeois’s fabric sculptures, drawing out themes of motherhood, gender, identity, and trauma” by Anna Souter, via Hyperallergic
A Brief Guide to Egyptian Surrealism
In 1938, a group of 37 artists, writers and thinkers in Cairo signed a manifesto titled ‘Long Live Degenerate Art’. This marked the start of the group known as ‘Art and Liberty’, and the birth of a distinctly Egyptian style of Surrealism.
Contemporary American artist Alicia Mccarthy
Part of living in consonance with the world, as Krause sees it, involves a practice of deep listening. To truly understand soundscape ecology as he has defined it, a person needs to be attuned to three foundational elements: geophony — sounds generated by naturally occurring nonbiological elements like weather and terrain; biophony — sounds generated by living organisms vocalizing their relationships to each other in their natural habitats; and anthropophony — sounds generated by human life forms. Together, these voices make up the “Great Animal Orchestra,” in which we are vital players.
— via “The Natural Symphony: Soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause teaches the world how to listen — and be quiet.” WORDS BY ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY VINCENT PERINI, via Departures Magazine