Welcome to (Year 2: Month 5: Volume 1), the new exclusive collection for paid subscribers! Thank you again for supporting this project, I really appreciate it!
As always it’s absolutely bursting with contemporary art, fashion, music, literature, videos, and other uncategorizable materials…
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Now then, without further ado…
On the occasion of Lauren Halsey: Douglas Kearney at MOCA (2018)
Los Angeles–based poet Douglas Kearney is also a performer and librettist, collaborating with artists in the context of experimental and traditional theater and opera. Drawing from music, Black culture, and personal experience, his works, when published on the page, resemble visual poems that he calls “performative typography.” On the occasion of Lauren Halsey: we still here, there, Kearney reads some of his work in parallel to the exhibition on view and highlighting the artists’ shared interest in Afrofuturism and funk.
KENNETH BARLIS Art Hearts Fashion 2023 Los Angeles - Fashion Channel
Veronika Spierenburg (b. 1981, Switzerland) is a multimedia artist.
Vincent Como is an artist living in Brooklyn, NY
SLOTHRUST - "Sleep Eater" [Official Music Video, 2017]
She sees writing as a cumulative process, one in which “characters” appear and reappear, situations recur and take on new realities, while at the centre of it all is the being, the writing being, who is “giving them a certain response.” As such, perspectives shift, moving in and out of a first person voice that may or may not identify itself in a fragmented narrative that often drops off mid-sentence or rearranges itself on the page into narrow columns. Yet although it may sound unlikely, Llansol’s work is enveloping, atmospheric and not difficult to read if one respects the fact that it is not prescriptive in nature, but rather inquisitive and exploratory.
— from “A book is vegetal: The Geography of Rebels Trilogy by Maria Gabriela Llansol” by Joseph Schreiber, via Rough Ghosts
Nives Widauer was born in 1965 in Basel, Switzerland, and now lives and works in Vienna.
Alejandro Almanza Pereda was born in 1977 in Mexico City.
Rosemarie Trockel “is a German conceptual artist. She has made drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations, and has worked in mixed media. From 1985, she made pictures using knitting-machines. She is a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, in Düsseldorf in Nordrhein-Westfalen.”
Daniel Spoerri “(born 27 March 1930) is a Swiss artist and writer born in Romania. Spoerri is best known for his "snare-pictures," a type of assemblage or object art, in which he captures a group of objects, such as the remains of meals eaten by individuals, including the plates, silverware and glasses, all of which are fixed to the table or board, which is then displayed on a wall.”
More recently, the Beckett-Stein connection has begun to receive renewed attention and this Element builds on this emergent and increasingly dynamic field of interest within Beckett studies by exploring Stein’s role in Beckett’s evolving aesthetic praxis throughout the 1930s and the emergence of his bilingual oeuvre. It posits Stein as a figure both suitable for and deserving of consideration as one of Beckett’s most prominently discernible contemporaneous literary influences, and situates Stein as a key figure not only in the evolution of Beckett’s aesthetics as articulated in the Kaun letter of 1937 but also in his transition from a ‘monolingual polyglot’ whose work showed definite stylistic assonances with that of Joyce to a ‘bilingual Anglophone’ writer, a transition that ultimately facilitated his evolution into a ‘bilingual Francophone’ author and self-translator.
— from the “Introduction: ‘Grammar Is in Our Power” of Georgina Nugent's Beckett and Stein
Raphaël Zarka “was born in 1977 in Montpellier, France. He lives and works in Paris, France.”
Drawings, like buildings, are surfaces bearing marks (some drawings imply depth using Western linear perspective, though those like Gladman's that don't are, in my opinion, more honest). The experience of seeing Gladman's drawings, framed, evenly spaced on the walls, and perfectly lit, brought about a sensation similar to Jakobi's nighttime encounter with the "strange building" in Ravicka. The drawings, which were once pressed together on facing pages, had now become vertical surfaces, bearing inscrutable missives. They meet the viewer’s body at eye-level, both declaring their two-dimensionality and pulling the viewer toward the tension of their surfaces. In a sense, Gladman’s drawings are not just for the eyes; to quote the mysterious inhabitant of Ravicka’s House no. 32 (since even a missing house no doubt has an inhabitant), “You have to let go of the notion that sights enter the eyes, or merely the eyes.”
— from “The Critic-Comptroller: On Renee Gladman’s Solo Show at Artists Space” by Jenny Wu, via CRoB
Riikka Tauriainen was born in Oulu, Northern Finland (FI), lives and works in Zurich.
Although I have yet to explore any of these more fully, it strikes me that the following might also be considered as instances of post-continuity:
The casual, throwaway style of “mumblecore” slice-of-life films.
The widespread integration of graphics, sound effects, and mixtures of footage emulating video games, that we find in a film like Scott Pilgrim.
The promiscuous mixtures of different styles of footage that we find in such films as Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers and Brian De Palma’s Redacted.
— from “1.2 Post-Continuity: An Introduction” by Steven Shaviro, via Post Cinema
Dutch sculptor Frode Bolhuis
Punctuation can be the letting go, the deferring to a handy authority. I think as readily of punctuation as the spin and stall, the carburetor icing, the ape in the trees. It is a bore if you use it too lightly, a hazard if you use it too hard.
— from “Punctuation Is when You Feel It” by Noy Holland, via Glimmertrain Bulletin
Swiss artist Christoph Hänsli
Cinephiles are known to obsess over the question of what film can do that no other medium can. But in the case of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, one of the most influential filmmakers to emerge in the past quarter-century, much of the allure of his work lies in how it evokes other vocations, including two that loomed large in his early life. Both of Weerasethakul’s parents were physicians, and not only do his films spend a lot of time in and around clinics and hospitals, with characters who endure all manner of mysterious ailments, but they also have a recuperative effect that belies their subtly unnerving insights into human suffering.
— from Apichatpong Weerasethakul by Andrew Chan, via 4Columns
"Wishbone" by Shaelin Bishop is published in PRISM International's SPRAWN issue (58.3)
Pascal Sidler lives and works in Zürich / Switzerland
Mamali Shafahi was born in 1982 in Tehran, Iran. He lives and works in Tehran and Paris.
Rob Wynne “tests the boundaries of genres in his delicately crafted mixed-media works, installations, drawings, and canvases.”
“After their studies at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, Anne and Patrick Poirier spent four years at the Villa Médicis in Rome.”
Allan McCollum “is one of the most original and influential post-Conceptual American artists alive today.”
Władysław Komendarek - Władysław Komendarek [1985]
The Franco-Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez has lived and worked in Paris from 1960.
It’s important, I feel, to at least partially disassociate when at the zoo, and to avoid thinking of the lives of animals who have lived their entire lives in captivity. One sees the animals through the curious faces of one’s children. We lingered like that, in front of the sea lion pool, with our friends, and decided to walk together as a group, along the path, as it grew darker out, the older children running ahead, the toddler toddling after them. That afternoon, as on our previous visit, the peacocks, usually the only animals running about freely, albeit with their legs tagged, were nowhere to be seen.
— from “The Winter Zoo: Visiting animals when most humans stay away” by Kate Zambreno, via The Yale Review
Born in 1990 in Bourg-la-Reine, France, My-Lan Hoang-Thuy works and lives in Paris, France.
The Link Between Personal Style and Identity | Molly Bingaman | TEDxUMKC
“As an important figure of the Balkan arts scene, the work of Edi Hila has for the last 20 years bared witness to the profound changes experienced by societies in post communist Europe. Having refused to emigrate to a more economically prosperous country, Hila remains living in Tirana where he has developed a practice which reflects on the transitory nature of Albanian history (its geography between east and west) and on the position of Albanian painting in Mediterranean art history.”
Artist Talk | Body Work: Performance and Practice
Victoria Sin, Artist, London; Juliana Huxtable, Artist, New York; Melati Suryodarmo, Artist, Surakarta; Sonia Khurana, Artist, New Delhi
“After completing studies at the Atelier de Sèvres in Paris, Marie Hazard went to London to pursue textile design at Central Saint-Martins.”
Venue: University College Falmouth/Dartington College of Arts.
"Exploited, plundered, assaulted and unknown, this anonymous mass is called... O'Povo (The people)"
This is a piece of devised theatre about the sugar plantation slave trade which combines a modern sugar trade office with the life of slaves in the plantations. We use alot of symbolism and intense imagery. The paper trail at the end was inspired by a slave called Priscilla who left a paper trail wherever she went so she could be traced through history. The laptop at the beginning is displaying footage of the company digging to gather the soil that was then used in the piece.
Capoeira:
Afro-Brazilian art form which combines martial arts, music, and dance created in Brazil by slaves from Africa. Some were forced to work on sugar and tobacco plantations. The slave trade has not gone it has just changed tactic.