Welcome to (Year 2: Month 6: 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…
Berlin, 29. April 2023, 18 Uhr: Floating Poetry, Meandering Mindscape: Yahon Chang - Isang Yun
Margeaux Walter uses photography, video, and lenticulars to create meticulously staged social satires.
Well, I like Agnes Martin’s work as much as the next one, but in her writings she has this one idea I really just can’t stand. (An almost I-take-it-personally kind of I-can’t-stand.) It’s in the piece “What We Do Not See If We Do Not See,” and goes like this: “I suggest to artists that you take every opportunity of being alone, that you give up having pets and unnecessary companions.” Yes, you read that right: no animals for the artists. Not good for the work—sorry. Artists, why not let your plants die too, since they intrude on your solitude by requiring you to water them?
— from Kit Schluter on Joe Brainard, via Brooklyn Rail
Skinshape - I Didn't Know (Official Video, 2019)
Video directed by Kendra Morris
Odd Nerdrum is a Norwegian figurative painter, born in Sweden.
Dualities are interesting because they frequently answer questions that are otherwise out of reach. For example, you might have spent years pondering a quantum theory and you understand what happens when the quantum effects are small, but textbooks don’t tell you what you do if the quantum effects are big; you’re generally in trouble if you want to know that. Frequently dualities answer such questions.
— from “A Physicist’s Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality” by Natalie Wolchover, via Quanta Magazine
“Born in Chile, Guillermo Muñoz Vera (B. 1956) is best well-known as a Realist artist that actively combines his artistic expertise with theoretical studies.”
Angelo De Augustine - The Ballad of Betty and Barney Hill (2023)
Directed & Created by Clara Murray
There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reality in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put forward half a century after Foucault examined the constructedness of all social contexts and knowledge categories; or, indeed, a century and a half after Nietzsche unmasked truth itself as no more than ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms ... a sum of human relations ... poetically and rhetorically intensified ... illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions’ (and that’s not to mention Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze-Guattari, Derrida etc). It seems to me meaningless, or at least unproductive, to discuss such things unless, to borrow a formulation from the ‘realist’ writer Raymond Carver, we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real.
— from “Writing Machines: On Realism and the Real” by Tom McCarthy, via LRB
Steven Assael is an American painter.
Many of Anger’s films are readily available now online and still screened at independent cinemas, defying his censors and critics, so you can judge for yourself, and it’s well worth the time. For all that his formal techniques have been imitated, from the avant-garde to advertising, there is still nothing else quite like them.
— from “The Brilliant, Contradictory Vision of Kenneth Anger” by Juliet Jacques, via Art Review
G. Daniel Massad lives and works in Annville, Pennsylvania, where he is artist in residence at Lebanon Valley College.
Blood Cultures - Set it on Fire (Official Music Video, 2021)
Directed by Charlie Denis
Michèle Fenniak is a Canadian Postwar & Contemporary artist.
Roden Crater, Turrell’s monumental, naked-eye observatory, is a mostly subterranean network of chambers and tunnels built into the extinct cone and calibrated to celestial events. Through a keyhole aperture called the East Portal, light enters the Crater’s 854-foot-long Alpha (East) Tunnel, likely the world’s longest refractor telescope, and gathers in the Sun | Moon Chamber. Every 18.61 years a white marble stone in the middle of the chamber will display an image of the moon during the Major Lunar Standstill. The stone is eight feet across and set in a black basalt triangle. Turrell calls it the image stone.
— from “Roden Crater” by Alexa Hazel, via The Point
Xenia Hausner is an Austrian painter and stage designer.
The numbers hang before my eyes like faces from the greyscale pages of those old books. Maybe love ruins the empty field, removes the fertile void, makes the institutional beige wall bloom like cheap wallpaper.
— from “GOD WHAT I WOULDN'T GIVE TO FEEL BORED AGAIN” by LETITIA TRENT, via Biscuit Hill
Alan Feltus is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1943.
RUPAUL: I know that inside of every human being there’s a child that loves colors and sparkly things and things that are exciting. What’s brilliant about drag is that it is actually the truth of who we all are. We are all shape shifters. We change.
— from “37 Drag Race Contestants (and RuPaul) on Drag as an Art Form and the Show’s" Legacy” by Maria Elena Fernandez, via Lit Hub
Dope Lemon - Hey You
Directed and Filmed by Stefan José
Rance Jones is photo realistic watercolors painter.
yeule - Don't Be So Hard On Your Own Beauty (Official Music Video, 2021)
Director - Joy Song
Linden Frederick is an American painter long a resident in Belfast, Maine.
INTERVIEWER Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful? Either in general, or specifically about your own books? Is it ever instructive? NABOKOV The purpose of a critique is to say something about a book the critic has or has not read. Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic's intelligence, or honesty, or both. INTERVIEWER And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer? NABOKOV By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”
— Vladimir Nabokov Interviewed by Herbert Gold, via The Paris Review No. 41
Ethel Cain - Crush (Official Video, 2021)
Directed and edited by Hayden Anhedönia.
Shot by Delilah Dolimiere.
David Mach is a Scottish sculptor and installation artist.
the lagoon’s dark belt of sky the collector recites bird names into my feathers pūkeko shag paradise duck in the raupō fringe
— from “from under” by Hinemoana Baker, via Berlin Lit
Jane Lund is an established contemporary visual artist, who originates from the United States.
Crumb - Locket [Official Video, 2018]
Directed & Edited by Haoyan of America
Alyssa Monks is an American figurative painter, blurring the line between abstraction and realism.
descension (Out of Our Constrictions) I · Natural Information Society (2021)
Outside of the history world, the word “Zong” and the event to which it refers is virtually unknown. The tragic lost of life of over one hundred and forty slaves thrown overboard during its journey to the New World is an atrocity that has escaped mention in the largely US-centered perspective of textbooks one frequently encounters in high school and even university classrooms. Its horror, its warning, its echo is left unheard to many of those outside the realm of Caribbean Studies.
— from “M. NOURBESE PHILIP’S ZONG!” by SAVANNAH WINDHAM, via Duke
Michael C. Thorpe (born NY, 1993) is a visual artist living and working out of New York, New York, with a primary focus in textiles.
Joshua Abrams, Lisa Alvarado and Frank Rosaly take us on a hypnotic travel in psychedelic improv music. Based on Abrams’ guimbri, a three-stringed North African ceremonial instrument, their music reveals a story of traditional sounds being kneaded with the deepest of concentration into a contemporary instrumental chant. As Abram’s tells at the end of the video, their songs are more than just songs, they are environments for concentration and that is exactly spot on.
Cybèle Young creates unique sculptural works inspired by the fleeting day-to-day minutiae that comprise everyday life.
NATURAL INFORMATION SOCIETY - IS
Music Composed by Joshua Abrams
Filmed & Directed by Mikel Patrick Avery
Edward Kinsella III is an award-winning illustrator from St. Louis, Missouri.
Pol Kurucz was born in Budapest and spent his childhood in Paris.
Robert Bartholot is a photographer based in Berlin, Germany, composing sharp surreal statements of fashion.
Magdalena Kaczi Kaczanowska is an independent illustrator from Warsaw, Poland.
Yun House Berlin, 21 May 2023, 5 p.m. Live-Stream XIII - Isang Yun, His Friends and Companions
Gertrude Stein's use of language has caused much merriment among reviewers and critics, but has achieved its intended purpose, as she notices in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: "My sentences do get under their skin. . ." (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas 70). This is, I suppose, one of the aims of every writer, but Stein has a rather special reason for wishing her readers to be conscious of the verbal level of her writing.
— from Lew Welch’s “Words as Objects,” via Penn Sound
Nan Goldin in Conversation with MOCA Assistant Curator Lanka Tattersall