Year 2: Month 7: Volume 2
as if locked in their cages with hot wires
Welcome to (Year 2: Month 7: Volume 2), 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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And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
Threeasfour
FALL 2023 COUTURE
Michael Reeder is an Urban Contemporary artist from Dallas, TX.
CPP Sheffield Poetry Reading: Maria Sledmere, Carol Watts, Katharine Kilalea, hosted Agnes Lehoczky
Joel Dean (b. 1986, Atlanta, GA) lives and works in New York.
Sam Lipp (b. 1989, London) is an artist based in New York, where he also directs the gallery Queer Thoughts.
otomo yoshihide Tokyo Experimental Performance Archive
Oscar Delmar is a Graphic Designer and Illustrator of the Canary Islands and based in Barcelona.
Kundera may have been correct that Western culture is bowing out of its commitment to its literary heritage. It would seem inevitable that in a culture that no longer takes its literature seriously, the writer is doomed to invisibility, though not in the way Kundera might have hoped. The novelist may seek to disappear behind their work, à la Flaubert, but what happens when the novel disappears? If the West is indeed forgetting the novel, then it is also forgetting its novelists. Kundera himself understood this only too well, and his work remains a testament to the writer’s stubborn struggle to survive.
— from “Milan Kundera’s Stubborn Struggle for the Survival of Literature” by Jared Marcel Pollen, via New Republic
Covey Gong “creates sculpture and dimensional wall pieces from reclaimed material, investing in the narratives and history that items accrue through time and use.”
Anthony Braxton 4tet - Live in Châteauvallon 1973
Lauren Satlowski (b. 1984, Detroit, MI) lives and works in Los Angeles.
Ethel Cain performing live in the KEXP studio. Recorded August 19, 2022.
Anne Yafi is an American Postwar & Contemporary artist who was born in 1961.
Joan of Arc closed Balenciaga’s couture presentation in Paris this July. Artist Eliza Douglas appeared as the saint in a 3D-printed, 36kg armoured dress made from galvanised resin and finished in polished chrome. The mood of the show was sombre, with models walking at a glacial pace, but Douglas moved with deliberate stiffness. Her rigid skirt tilted back and forth, shiny as a silver saltshaker. ‘I thought maybe if Joan of Arc had worn this kind of armour,’ creative director Demna Gvasalia (known mononymously as Demna) said after the presentation, ‘they would’ve not burned her at the stake.’
— from “Joan of Arc, the Patron Saint of High Fashion” by Rosalind Jana, via Art Review
Claudia Hart is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.
Anthony Braxton: Composition No. 19, SoundSpace at the Blanton Museum
Bakhtiozina Uldus Vildanovna is a Russian artist, film director, and photographer.
It’s commonplace to note that sociopolitical upheaval and artistic experimentation often flourish side by side. But today — despite an alleged “polycrisis” — new modes of cultural production don’t seem to be emerging. Three years after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the subsequent George Floyd rebellion, the arts seem stagnant and stubbornly centralized: franchise fare dominates at the box office; literary output is hampered by monopolized publishers; even the obsession with so-called nepo babies suggests a cultural bloodline without disruption. The internet, meanwhile, tends to both homogenize art and silo audiences by algorithm. We’ve begun to wonder if we’re overlooking experimental movements, or if they’re going extinct.
— from “Publicists, Manifesto Pushers, Propagandists | What Happened to the Avant-Garde?” via The Drift
Jill Mulleady is an artist. She was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I NO LONGER WRITE NOVELS OR STORIES with complex structures because, between my retirement in the spring of 2015 and today, I have observed the deterioration in my own mental processes, which makes it all but impossible for me to read or write complex works of fiction and nonfiction, other than very short essays the length of a Facebook post. Even these require a great deal of editorial revision, sometimes with the help of an outside reader. This also explains the form of these notes. It is not necessarily unpleasant or pleasant; it is simply a fact (age-appropriate hydrocephalus), but it is part of the transition I am trying to make between someone who writes and someone who has written.
— from “Why I Write: Getting ready not to be” by Samuel R. Delany, via Yale Review
Orion Martin is an American artist who was born in 1988.
On Thursday, January 23, 1975, Roland Barthes lectured in Paris at the École pratique des hautes études on the theme of love, focusing on the phrase “I love you.” Barthes was then at the summit of his career. From his beginnings as a literary and cultural critic of the “mythologies” of mass media in the years after World War II, he had become both a famous writer and (despite never finishing any of his three attempts at graduate study) one of the more influential figures in French academia. Known best for his pioneering application of structural linguistics to the analysis of texts ranging from the classics of literature to detergent packaging, Barthes seemed in the 1960s and early ’70s to have laid the basis for a new science, or semiotics, of culture.
— from “I Love You” (in Theory)": In which Roland Barthes asks “Alors, l’amour?” by Blake Smith, via The Hedgehog Review
Zoe Barcza (born 1984, Toronto) lives and works between Stockholm and Los Angeles
What is essential is to understand the necessary relationship that unites the state of exception and the political machine. If the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception, the state of exception has always constituted the secret center of the bipolar machine. Between kingdom and government, between legitimacy and legality, and between constitution and administration, there can be no substantive articulation. Insofar as it marks their point of coincidence, the hinge that connects them can belong neither to one pole nor to the other and can be in itself neither legitimate nor legal. As such, it can only be the subject of a sovereign decision, which articulates them punctually through their suspension.
— from “The Two Faces of Power” by Giorgio Agamben, via Ill Will
Gene Beery “is an American painter and photographer, who has been described as an expressionist, Pop artist, Minimalist, and Conceptualist over his career of fifty-plus years.”
The most philosophical (and perhaps unintentional) dimension of Shipley’s reconstruction of Schneider’s house—and not a gloomy one given the note of despair in the other existential dimensions that repetition unfolds in the text —is a tension between the Platonic disdain for representation of representation, idea of an idea, and copy of a copy on the one hand, and the Aristotelian counter to the Platonic idea in the form of mimesis or imitation as taking one closer to the idea.
— Soni Wadhwa’s review of Gary J. Shipley’s The House Inside the House of Gregor Schneider, via Full Stop
Jason Benson (b. 1987) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.
James McNew, Bill Frisell, and Jim Woodring
Offhand Gestures: An Evening of Spontaneous Creation
Town Hall, Seattle WA
2014-10-05
Whitney Claflin. b. 1983 Providence, RI. Lives and works in New York, NY.
Really, I was just trying to re-learn how to write. The editing and polishing process for Negative Space was so long and intensive, by the time I was finished I’d largely forgotten what it was like to start from scratch. I’m not someone who is able to write something and have it come out immediately beautiful. It’s really the editing process that turns it into something decent, so until I have enough material to edit I’m just tapping out these ugly sentences into an ugly structure and I have to trick myself into believing I’ll someday be able to turn it all into something worth reading.
— from “OUR MONSTROUSNESS AS A TEMPLATE: An Interview with B.R. Yeager” by Daisuke Shen, via XRAY
Julie VonDerVellen is a paper artist and design professor based in Wisconsin.
Dorris Vooijs is a Dutch artist living and working in Groningen, the Netherlands
Zach Davidson
Can you tell us about what inspired these new works of art?
Salomón Huerta
Seven months ago, I was diagnosed with PTSD based on my childhood experiences in East Los Angeles’s public housing projects. I decided to do paintings of gang members to move forward. All the paintings that I’m working on are of gang members whom I had positive moments with. In terms of negative experiences, when I paint about something that is bothering me, I’m able to let it go very fast and move on to what I really want to do.
— Salomón Huerta Interviewed by Zach Davidson via BOMB
Maren Klemp, born in 1984, is an award winning fine art photographer residing in Oslo, Norway.
Daniel Arfib, "Musique Numérique" [CP-088]
Nicki Crock is a conceptual artist currently working in Columbus Ohio.
Miles Davis live in Stockholm 1973
Tyler Spangler is a freelance graphic designer from Southern California that explores the connotations of form and color through digital collage.
