Proof of Concept

like a drug dealer does, you get the first one for free

Welcome, welcome, welcome to my new project, BEAUCOUP: a twice-monthly trove of marvelous artworks!

Much like my past curatorial project, bright stupid confetti, this newsletter aims to bring you a gob of contemporary art, literature, music, fashion, philosophy, and film…especially strange, thought provoking, wild, experimental, avant-garde weirdness!

For more information about this project, check out my ABOUT page.

This first entry serves as an example of what you can expect: a whole gob of marvelous artworks! Hopefully this entry convinces you it’s worth subscribing!

Please keep in mind, 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 each one further.

Now then, without further ado…

Contemporary Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury

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when i am gone

                         & these fiber optics still ignite

as an ad for Nike
                                                  what then?

my gamma-tendrils spreading

                                over the hills like a klepto—

i wasn’t looking to be saved

— excerpt from Madison McCartha’s Freakophone World (Inside the Castle, 2021) via Tarpaulin Sky Magazine

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Guo Pei’s Haute Couture Spring Summer 2018 (full collection)

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I awake in the sand near a body of water. I ask a man wearing a mask, what is this place? The man says, a place near the dark forest.

—excerpt from Mike Kleine's short prose piece "Angband" via Occulum

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Contemporary American artist Joanne Greenbaum

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I attend to the artwork as a poethical piece, as a composition which is always already a recomposition and a decomposition of prior and posterior compositions. By doing so, then, I propose that the artwork does not have to come before the appreciator as an “object,” with all the presuppositions and implications this entails. For the object (of science, of discourse, or of art) is nothing more than a concoction of the onto-epistemological pillars of universal reason that support the modes of operation of the subject, in the moments of appreciation, production, and actualization. Extricated from the subject, reflection on the artwork releases the imagination from the grid of signification sustained by separability, determinacy, sequentiality—a crucial step in the dissolution of the mode of knowing that supports state-capital, that is, that grounds an image of the world as that which needs to be conquered (occupied, dominated, seized).

— excerpt from Denise Ferreira da Silva's "In the Raw " via e-flux journal

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Larytta's "Souvenir de Chine"

from the album Difficult Fun (2008)

video directed by Körner Union

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Contemporary Nicaraguan artist Farley Aguilar

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This essay is an experiment in speculative fabulation, in reframes and the telling of wild facts. Think of that as journalism into the feral conditions and magnificent terrains that make facts, as we have come to understand them, possible. Like most offerings in this genre of posthumanist literature, the aim is to shock you, the reader-author, into noticing the world differently. Into touching the scandalous fugitivity and plausibility of the impossible. Noticing the world differently can have material consequences that could be the difference between taking care and perpetuating paradigms of oppression and needless suffering.

— excerpt from Bayo Akomolafe's "I, Coronavirus. Mother. Monster. Activist" via his website

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Mykki Blanco’s “Join My Militia”

produced by Arca

from the album Mykki Blanco & The Mutant Angels

video directed by Mitch Moore

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Contemporary French artist Marc Desgrandchamps

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To remain filled is
      to remain heavy

to resist your capacity to hold
invisible things
                          to grow lucent
lose everything
even your darkness

—excerpt from “Chihuly’s Baskets” by Jenna K Funkhouser, via As It Ought To Be Magazine

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Contemporary American artist Mildred Howard

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Contemporary American artist Jacob Hashimoto

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Matias Viegner & McKenzie Wark discuss Wark's new book Philosophy for Spiders: On Kathy Acker (Streamed live on Jan 20, 2021)

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Contemporary German artist Raphaela Simon

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Having built many a flimsy worlds, father creates the right one on his head, puts away the comb and rests. Later he moves on to stroke his belly but his hands are too small to iron out all that skin. They look like a doll’s hands attached with a rubber band to the buttons on his shirt’s sleeves.

—excerpt from “Four Poems” by Bronka Nowicka from To Feed the Stone (Dalkey Archive, 2021, translated from the Polish by Katarzyna Szuster) via LIT Magazine

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Contemporary American artist Lorna Simpson

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For a long time, though, when we talked about space moving, it was purely description; we were establishing a geography or perpetuating one that had been designed for us in the previous century; we were still getting used to the names they gave us for what parceled space, for what ran between, for what lay horizontally everywhere, for how we divided the above from the below, the luminous from the nearby rough formations.

— excerpt from “People in the Grasses” by Renee Gladman, via The Yale Review

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Pyer Moss Spring Summer 2020 by Kerby Jean-Raymond (full collection)

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Contemporary British artist Boo Saville

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A Map to the Door of No Return at 20: A Gathering, [was] a 4-day virtual webinar and participatory workshop [that took] place from November 3-6, 2021. This gathering of artists, writers, and scholars [took] stock of, reflect[ed] on, and extend[ed] the important work that Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging has done in the world.

Here is the welcome & opening conversation with: Shivanee Ramlochan, Kevin Quashie, Emily Greenwood, and Rinaldo Walcott. Moderated by Deborah E. McDowell. With welcome remarks by Christina Sharpe and Andrea A. Davis.

Here is the official conference website with complete information about the speakers and schedule.

Here are the complete conference videos.

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Contemporary Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer

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Begin with I. I write the first sentence.

Each typed letter initiates a site-specific temporality, a here and a now. To begin to think about Gertrude Stein, we begin with beginnings. Begin with a new relationship to order, one which moves to dismantle semantic codes and complicates syntax. To engage with Stein’s language experiments is to move against hegemonic systems of discourse and interrogate subsumed forms, to engender a more diverse compositional sensibility.

— excerpt from Emma Gomis’s “There is Almost Not an Interval: Composing in Steinian Time,” via Full Stop

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Portland-based tattoo artist Winston The Whale

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Contemporary Brazilian artist Thiago Barbalho

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Light Is Waiting (directed by Michael Robinson, 2007)

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It is no longer a revolutionary act to scratch on film or use asynchronous sound. Great films can be made in established genres, but only if one realizes that one has to face the question of working within a tradition, rather than assuming that the genre itself is its own justification.

To say a film is avant-garde or experimental, according to current usage, no longer has any meaning according to the definitions of the words. In our current Newspeak, an experimental film is a work with certain defining stylistic characteristics, just as a Hollywood film can be similarly defined. Forty years after the movement's inception, its “avant-garde” period has itself ended.

—excerpt from “THE END OF AVANT-GARDE FILM” written By Fred Camper (Nov. 4, 2021) via Caesura Magazine

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Contemporary Australian artist Harriet Moutsopoulos

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On April 17, 2021, a brisk early spring evening, half an hour after closing time, [James Kalm and] Canada [Gallery]’s Phil Grauer accommodated an “un-masked” walkthrough of Katherine Bradford’s latest show “Mother Paintings”. On this gracious stroll, Bradford chats about her artistic musings, the role of mothers during the pandemic, and paint-head trivia. This latest selection of paintings has been called “masterful” and the artist’s close descriptions and explanations of both technical and aesthetical decisions are insightful. A musical intro is provided by Kid Krill, and was recorded on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg Brooklyn.

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