Welcome to (Month 5: Volume 2), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 5: Volume 2) 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…
Contemporary British artist Tessa Farmer
The artist Tessa Farmer creates magical worlds ruled by minuscule fairy skeletons, who are not just mischievous but downright evil. Her striking sculptures, which are made from insects, animal taxidermy, and plant roots, depict narratives that are no doubt dark and infused with maliciousness, yet their savagery is, for Farmer, an expression of a raw survival instinct inherent in us all. We met her in London while she was preparing an exhibit for Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art and spoke with her about her process, why she isn’t interested in beauty, and what materials she can find on eBay these days—or in a canal by her house for that matter.
A washing machine is the sole instrument on what, nonetheless, becomes a wildly vibrant canvas. From the opening crank of the dial and incoming glug of water, Schmidt and Daniel (alongside collaborators such as Dan Deacon and Horse Lords’s Max Eilbacher and Sam Haberman) coax increasingly alien moments from elephant-like trumpeting by rubbing metal to wild spectrums of electro-acoustic sound. “An object isn’t a concept. Some of our records are intensely conceptual, but some are just a commitment to an object,” Daniel says. Schmidt recalls how the washing machine—with its 40-minute cycle and distinct segments—had an album-like quality from the start. The resulting LP is one of the duo’s most exciting, and perhaps the perfect example of their ability to mine a seemingly infinite number of sounds and ideas from a single object.
— from “Washing Machines, Garden Snails, and Plastic Surgery: A Stroll Through the Matmos Catalog” by Miles Bowe · May 18, 2022, via Bandcamp
OUTGOING VESSEL (2021) by Ursula Andkjær Olsen | a Poem-Film by Paul Cunningham
OUTGOING VESSEL is based on the book-length poem of the same name translated by Katrine Øgaard Jensen and featuring artwork by Sophia Kalkau.
“this is a shape I cannot remain in” With its mutant orbs of grief and technoscientific phenomena, Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Outgoing Vessel is the electrifying sequel to Katrine Øgaard Jensen’s award-winning translation of THIRD-MILLENNIUM HEART. The book-length mirror poem titled Udgående Fartøj (Outgoing Vessel) received the Danish Critics Prize for Literature in 2015. Now, for the first time in English, a radically new and resilient voice emerges — an Outgoing Vessel — from an all-consuming darkness: “INSIDE ME THERE IS A NONDEGRADABLE ORB / MY OWN PLANET”
Contemporary Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong
All art is queer as it brings together dissimilarities. Some queer art is tolerated if it simply reproduces the unequally hinged relationships of things, peoples, body, that the powers that be put together in oppressive ways.
But the art that draws together dissimilarities to show relationships of forbidden solidarity and forbidden love—that art can be dismissed as corrupt pornography or dangerous propaganda.
Art moves out of these condemned categories only through a political struggle that redefines the boundaries of what can be lived publicly, out in the world. This political struggle is what makes it possible for creative work about forbidden lives to be called “art.”
— from “Imagination and the Mockingbird” by Minnie Bruce Pratt, via The Georgia Review
Marc Rebillet “CHILLING WITH ERYKAH AND REGGIE” (2022)
Contemporary British artist Lesley Grainger
The Gucci Cosmogonie Fashion Show
Streamed live on May 16, 2022
Just at sundown, against the backdrop of the historic Castel del Monte in Andria, Italy, Alessandro Michele debuted his latest collection for the House. A series of constellations illuminated the runway, progressing a narrative that traverses centuries, geographies, and languages.
Carolina Caycedo (b. 1978, London, UK, to Colombian parents; lives and works in Los Angeles)
This article focuses on Latin America’s extremely rich heritage of art practices that have taken form as resistance against past and present social, economic, and political oppression. Many artists, art activists and groups have developed and carried out extremely sophisticated artworks, art practices, and artistic interventions based on rigorous critical thinking and guided by principles of collectivity, which have led to highly effective symbolism. As a result of efforts to defy hegemonic discourse, they have been able to successfully oppose society’s mechanisms of control and oppression, creating spaces for resistance and alternative narratives that can eventually lead to social and political change.
— from “Opposing Epistemological Imperialism” by Eva Marxen, via Field Journal
Segue Reading Series: Will Alexander & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Segue Reading Series: Will Alexander & Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Reading Documentation. Saturday, April 10, 2021, 5pm. Artists Space, New York.
Contemporary American artist Sadie Barnette
Contemporary Lebanese filmmaker and photographer Ziad Antar
Dear Mr/Mrs (2011)
A short film by Freudenthal/Verhagen
for ArtEZ Fashion Masters
Master Fashion Design, Generation 12
Music: SOPHIE
Contemporary Saudi Arabian artist Maha Malluh
In college, I slept with a boy with a misspelled tattoo who studied poetry and wore things with the Carhartt logo positioned front and center. He was older in the way only boys in college can be, and thus I practically invited his pretension — I drank it right up. In fact, in my absolute devotion to configuring myself into the shape I imagined a “writer” might take, I was all the more open to his unsolicited criticism of my essays, and his insistence that I read Roberto Bolaño in bed before breakfast.
— from “Dear Men, Please Stop Assigning Reading To Me” by Eliza M Dumais, via Electric Literature
International Literature: László Krasznahorkai Reading
Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai reads from his recently translated novel, Sátántangó, and discusses the state of contemporary Hungarian literature.
Video Essay: "Orders of Time and Motion" | Béla Tarr's SÁTÁNTANGÓ
Read the introduction to this video essay on MUBI's Notebook
Video essay by Kevin B. Lee
Contemporary Brazilian artist Clarissa Tossin
Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.
— from “Decolonization is not a metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, via Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1, No. 1, 2012
Louis Vuitton Cruise 2023 Fashion Show
Nicolas Ghesquière presented his latest Louis Vuitton Cruise Collection at the Salk Institute in California on May 12th, 2022 at 6:45 pm (PT)
Music performed by Sparks
Contemporary Moroccan artist M'barek Bouhchichi
Camilia Kamoun explores how invisible black Moroccans can be made visible through the ideas and works of M’Barek Bouhchichi. Note: Camilia is not an expert on this subject but is sharing information in the hopes of spurring interest in the subject.
Contemporary Azerbaijan-based artist Fidan Zaman
Maroon Choreography: A poetry reading by fahima ife
fahima ife reads from their book "Maroon Choreography" (Duke University Press, August 2021). In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, ife speculates on the afterlives of Black fugitivity, unsettling the historic knowledge of it while moving inside the ongoing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery.
Contemporary English artist Jeremy Scott Miller
Surrealism is inherently resistant to the kind of formalist reading that anchored the previous exhibition: in the catalogue, he writes that under Breton’s leadership Surrealism springs from the ashes of Paris Dada after its 1922 demise, harnessing its predecessor’s anarchic anti-rationalism into a more systematic theoretical program, rooted in the exploration of the unconscious mind—but not in a corresponding aesthetic program. Surrealism was not a style, but a “mental attitude and a method of investigation,” as writer Georges Hugnet contends elsewhere in the show’s catalogue.
— from “WHAT WAS SURREALISM?” by Rachel Wetzler, via Art in America (2022)
Making Time - Irresolvable Questions about Art with Allan de Souza
Making Time: Art Across Gallery, Screen and Stage
Irresolvable Questions about Art with Allan de Souza
April 21, 2012
Participants:
Allan de Souza, New Genres, San Francisco Art Institute
in conversation with Julia Bryan-Wilson, History of Art, UC Berkeley
Contemporary German artist Matthias Weischer
You smell the wet linens, your acids. It is what’s left of you, a living thickness. You see the mirror with no quicksilver. It is only glass immersed in shadow and within it your face. Like this you are within yourself.
— from Antonio Gamoneda’s Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022)
translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, via Plume
Altın Gün - Yüce Dağ Başında
The second single of the album, "Yol" by ALTIN GÜN
Contemporary British artist Richard Llewelyn Wathen
A scapegoat escapes. You can learn a lot by looking at words. Not using etymology, something the theorist Maurice Blanchot warns us about in grave and clear terms, thank god: “Likewise, the radicalization whereby etymology’s linkages appear to promise us the security of a native habitat is the hiding place of the homelessness which the ultimate’s demand (the eschatological imperative: without finality and without logos) incites in us as uprooted creatures, deprived by language itself of language—of language understood as ground where the germinal root would plunge, and as the promise of a developing life.” Uprooted creatures, we cannot all be traced back to a source or be understood from the viewpoint of our origin.
— from Caren Beilin's novel Revenge of the Scapegoat, via Lit Hub
Balenciaga Cruise 2023 Full Menswear and Womenswear Runway Fashion Show Collection by Demna Gvasalia
Contemporary Romanian artist Szabolcs Veres
Contemporary Canadian artist Kathryn MacNaughton
I dreamed a way through and then found it. Once, you said I would never return, disappear. Even then I knew I could not—not not return, not disappear. Instead, I hold onto and out the hand that extends, the water. It isn’t what it was
— from Emily Barton Altman’s “To Think about the Mileage” via La Vague
Aron Barath (b. 1980, Novi Sad, former Yugoslavia) resides and works in Budapest, Hungary
Latcho Drom ("safe journey") is a 1993 French film directed and written by Tony Gatlif. The movie is about the Romani people's journey from north-west India to Spain, consisting primarily of music. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.
Contemporary American artist Cynthia Daignault
Tropicália (2012)
An exploration of the 1960s Brazilian artistic movement known as tropicália, which combined theatre, poetry and music, and which was also used a form of critical expression against the military government of the era.
Director: Marcelo Machado
Jules de Balincourt is a French-born American contemporary artist, based in Brooklyn, New York
Contemporary Spanish artist Jaime Pitarch
Michael Finnissy on the Samuel Andreyev Podcast
Michael Finnissy is a British composer and pianist. This conversation was recorded via Zoom on 27 April 2022.
Contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang
It is undeniable to me that realism was a mechanism of capitalist ideology: its elaboration of a bourgeois regime of ethical concerns, its validation of the individual experience of collective life, and its reification of the political present all work together to suppress radical visualizations of the future. At the same time, it is undeniable that the realist novel takes up the “imaginative task” of sustaining and reinventing collective life. This contradictory dialectic reminds me of Fredric Jameson’s description of Wal-Mart as utopia: “what is currently negative can also be imagined as positive in that immense changing of valences which is that Utopian future.” As Lesjak writes, realism “allows us to see that any possible common future must be grounded in the nitty-gritty details of material life.”
— from Zach Fruit’s “Realism as Walmart” via Mediations
Full live concert from Nils Frahm, July 7th 2015 at the 49th Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.