Welcome to (Month 6: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
(Month 6: 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…
Contemporary Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal
I don’t mind it when people put on an act. Was it an act when I claimed that I liked knowing the names of things? I bought visual dictionaries and books with titles like What’s What, but they almost never gave me the words I most needed, so I had to resort to making things up, and that must have been an act, too.
— from “Backwardness” by Garielle Lutz, via Socrates on the Beach
Contemporary American artist Mickalene Thomas
Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, NYC 2022
Contemporary American artist Patrick Nelson
Writers are indeed an incestuous little bunch eternally doomed to borrow, copy, steal, plagiarize, allude to, accidentally repeat, consciously imitate, alternately praise and denigrate each other’s work. Originality held aloft by its own purity in some Platonic realm . . . no, it doesn’t exist.
— “theft from the author: Literary pilfering through the ages, from Shakespeare to Cormac McCarthy” by Vincent Czyz, via The Smart Set
Contemporary Korean artist Hyegyeong Choi
We must be able to imagine our own end to find our way to the light. We must be able to articulate the fragile joys of this age as well as the tragedies. We must hold onto what is important to preserve even as part of that will fall away, as inevitably as ice sheets crashing into the sea in the Arctic.
— from Landscape, Change, and the Long Road Ahead” by Jeff Vandermeer, via Orion
Dominique, Dylan Marx - Love-Ability (Official Video) 2022
Contemporary German artist Stephanie Luening
Alexander McQueen Fall Winter 2022 2023 Full Womenswear Runway Fashion Show Collection by Sarah Burton
Contemporary Italian artist Michele Gabriele
Susan Howe reading from ENVELOPE POEMS by Emily Dickinson, edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin, and copublished by New Directions and Christine Burgin, at McNally Jackson Picture Room, 2016.
Contemporary American artist Rose Salane
Contemporary American artist Mariella Bisson
Rodarte Spring Summer 2022 Full Womenswear Runway Fashion Show Collection by Kate and Laura Mulleavy
Contemporary American artist Clint Fulkerson
Contemporary Ethiopian-American artist Awol Erizku
If I were teaching how to write about film, this is probably an exercise I would do for my students, and one I would ask them to do. It is an excellent way to understand what writing and reading are all about.
— from Cristina Álvarez López’s “Notes on Film Criticism (V)”, via Laugh Motel
Contemporary American artist Elise Rugolo
inside averted truncated selected among several angling invading with parts naturalized attaches seldom proposing
— from Joe Milazzo’s “From Being Things, To Equalities In All”, via The Operating System
Contemporary British artist Zoë Buckman
Olivia Rodrigo: Tiny Desk (Home) Concert
Contemporary French/Danish artist Cécile Smetana Baudier
“King Tubby, Dub You Can Feel” radio show: Explorers Room with Flash Strap: Playlist from June 2, 2022, via WFMU
Contemporary Dutch artist Peggy Kuiper
In Lynch’s films, song acts the way it acts on people in advanced stages of dementia: it tugs on a cord that is still there, somehow, even if the bell it was once connected to has gone silent. It allows for momentary lucidity in an otherwise clouded and chaotic realm. It bleeds through the barrier between transcendent meaning and restrictively painful reality.
— from “There’s No Need To Make Life Tougher Than It Has To Be: Wild at Heart (1990)” by Elizabeth Cantwell, via Bright Wall / Dark Room
Contemporary American artist McArthur Binion
Anderson Ranch Arts Center's 2015 Summer Series featured artist McArthur Binion in conversation with collector Dennis Scholl on August 13, 2015.
To understand Warhol’s approach, we must begin with his initial infatuation with Chairman Mao, which stemmed not from support but amusement. “I have been reading so much about China,” he wrote in a diary entry from 1971. “They’re so nutty. They don’t believe in creativity. The only picture they ever have is of Mao Zedong.” Here, Warhol referred to the CCP’s mass propaganda campaign during the Cultural Revolution, which presented Mao as the embodiment of China’s highest post-revolutionary ideals. This far-reaching initiative saturated the Chinese media sphere—according to the Peking Review, revolutionary workers printed more than 840 million portraits just from July 1966 to May 1967—and made news beyond, giving inspiration to the Black Panthers as well as anti-imperialist movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
— from “WARHOL’S MAO TURNS FIFTY” by Billy Anania (2022), via Art in America
Contemporary Brazilian artist Sandra Mazzini
A Pretty Normal Day with Collage Artist Luis Martin
directed by XAVE
Contemporary Japanese-Swiss artist Leiko Ikemura
To me, this is a subversion of reality that I feel aligned with. Not to get too far out, though I love getting far out, reality has always been a bit suspect to me. Slippery. We think we have a handle on things, but how can we when everything is translated through this imperfect body, this fallible memory, these careening feelings? Talk about denial. I know is probably the most comical thing one can say.
— from “Being Born is Just Plagiarizing Your Parents”: An Interview with Good Actors Author Sommer Browning, via Southwest Contemporary
This video is part of our new series Paper Cuts, in which you get to be hypnotized by artists doing incredible things with paper, scissors, glue sticks and X-Acto knives.
A while back, we brought you the story of Pauline Loctin, a.k.a. Miss Cloudy. She was getting a ton of attention for her origami costumes that blended the Japanese paper-folding art with couture costumes in photographs featuring renowned dancers.
We decided to return to Loctin's studio to find out exactly how she makes the paper sculptures that are optically spellbinding and seem almost impossible to make happen...and it turns out that it's as complicated as it seems. Using a variety of tools, Loctin draws, cuts, folds and bends until paper becomes a limitless and otherworldly material.
In this video by filmmaker Nicholas Castel, you'll watch as Loctin creates paper elements for new works, using basic mountain and valley folds. The results, though, are anything but basic.
Contemporary American artist Tom Bartel
February 6
At moments when things seem to crystallize for me, when life comes together for a minute, when what I am sensing, thinking, reading, ties together for a magic moment of unity, along with the instant desire I have to tell Chris [Murphy], or Marge [Kepler], or the beautiful girl I met yesterday somewhere, comes the simultaneous thought that I am the only one who can know what I mean. My girls must be real—not symbols.
— from “The Sixties Diaries” by Ted Berrigan, via The Paris Review
Contemporary American artist Vanessa German
Sonsonate, the magic of the never-ending Even its name, resonant like the cenzontle’s song, in harmony with the natural springs sheltered in its depths, has the vibration of wheat, of pastures, and paddocks.
— from “A Sonsonate” by Mayamerica Cortez, via BOMB
The difference between hearing and listening | Pauline Oliveros | TEDxIndianapolis
Sounds carry intelligence. If you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment. Ears do not listen to sounds; the brain does. Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound; it can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Octogenarian composer and sound art pioneer Pauline Oliveros describes the sound experiment that led her to found an institute related to Deep Listening, and develop it as a theory relevant to music, psychology, and our collective quality of life.
Pauline is a composer and accordionist who significantly contributed to the development of electronic music. The culmination of her life-long fascination with music and sound is what inspired the practice of Deep Listening, the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions. As a Professor of Practice in the Arts Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she produced highly regarded work as a composer and improviser. Pauline’s 1989 recording, Deep Listening, is considered a classic in her field.