Year 2: Month 8: Volume 2
mamba day
Welcome to (Year 2: Month 8: 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…
If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, now is the perfect time to start! Only $5 a month or $55 a year! That gets you two issues a month plus access to the entire back catalog.
ICYMI: The second mixtape is now available for free!!
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And remember, every entry comes with a link so you can explore more and more.
Now then, without further ado…
Vivian Suter is a Swiss-Argentinian painter.
John Smith - The Black Tower (1987)
In The Black Tower we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes, is following him around London. While the character of the central protagonist is indicated only by a narrative voice-over which takes us from unease to breakdown to mysterious death, the images, meticulously controlled and articulated, deliver a series of colour coded puzzles, jokes and puns which pull the viewer into a mind-teasing engagement.
Banks Violette is an artist based in Ithaca, New York.
Bo didn’t know how long he’d been sitting on the cold tiled bathroom floor. Maybe five or ten or thirty minutes. He’d listened to the recordings over and over. His grandmother had been right, and he knew better now why they needed to keep their gift a secret. He wished he could stay here and not face out there. The intruders had just turned his world upside down. A choking guilt swelled inside of him; hot tears poured onto his white shirt.
— from “Neurotech Nightmare” by Fiona Bewley, via Pub Lab
Richard Aldrich is a Brooklyn-based painter who exhibited in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.
Venera "Hologram (ft. VOWWS)"
Kai Althoff is a German visual artist and musician.
"Shimmer" by Vivian Fung
“Sparkle” by Vivian Fung
Ed Atkins is a British contemporary artist best known for his video art and poetry.
To someone raised on a diet of 19th and 20th-century fiction, Miquel de Palol’s The Garden of Seven Twilights reads like a very strange novel. In many ways, it does not read like a novel at all. A huge part of this has to do with its structure. Whereas most contemporary novels move like trains, travelling from a predictable point A to a prearranged, if hopefully satisfying point B, de Palol’s book seems to expand in all directions at once, like a fleet of getaway cars. The experience of following its zigzag can be draining but also rewarding; for by forgoing the psychological realism that became the ascendant form of the novel in the 19th century, de Palol regains some of the storytelling virtues that preceded this form. His book is immediate and, in certain points, very uncertain-feeling; and in this way, the tradition that The Garden of Seven Twilights resembles is really not ‘the novel’ at all, but the older tradition of story cycles exemplified by Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio’s Decameron.
— from “What are we supposed to do with that? Miquel de Palol, trans. Adrian Nathan West, The Garden of Seven Twilights” reviewed by Josh Billings, via Review 31
Thomas Bayrle is a German sculptor, painter, graphic artist and video artist.
“Working in Brussels and Amsterdam, Kasper Bosman's art utilizes and dissects imagery from different periods, weaving it together in new ways.”
Kerstin Brätsch is a German contemporary visual artist.
Every morning — a different arrangement of pillows and books. One face down over another. The sky and ground and me, all white. The deepest place is not all good. The outer world, the same. No comfort either. So what time is your surgery?
— from “Surreal-Absurd” by Marcus Silcock, via Mercurius
Gillian Carnegie is an English artist.
Jun Togawa - Suki Suki Daisuki
Anne Collier is an American visual artist working with appropriated photographic images.
Alvin Curran, Songs and Views of the Magnetic Garden
Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change.
Yet am I to my pen again; for of late a wondrous hope has grown in me, in that I have, at night in my sleep, waked into the future of this world, and seen strange things and utter marvels, and known once more the gladness of life; for I have learned the promise of the future, and have visited in my dreams those places where in the womb of Time, she and I shall come together, and part, and again come together — breaking asunder most drearily in pain, and again reuniting after strange ages, in a glad and mighty wonder.
— from William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land
Claudia Comte is a Swiss artist.
Cheyenne · Caspar Brotzmann
Cyprien Gaillard (*1980) works across a range of media including film, video, photography, collage, installation and live performance.
While watching the show through a second time, I found out that this strange twelfth season has come to not be considered canon and as such is often not included in the home-video or streaming releases of the complete series and that the boxed-set I had managed to purchase was a rare item indeed, selling for a surprisingly large amount of money, even though the disavowed season still exists on the web, episodes have been uploaded to different social-media platforms. However, these pirated episodes versions are often reduced to small boxes surrounded by solid colors or clip art, or in full screen versions that are oddly close-cropped as if that rather than reducing the picture by seventy percent, they have expanded it by as a much, so that a roaming eye seemed to bob and wander around the scene alighting on the fabric of the close cropped and greying hair, or sometimes just a blade of grass or stone; still other uploaded versions seemed to clip the frame rate and loop it so that the twenty-four minute episode became a two hour long feature, and in that way escape the bots searching ceaselessly for copyright infringements.
— from “Don’t Move Gertrude” by Rowland Saifi, via Annulet
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist and professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Holidays In The Sun · Mykki Blanco
Maureen Gallace is an American painter based in New York City.
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte
Mark Leckey is a British contemporary artist.
Why You Should Read Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Sarah Lucas is an English artist.
Victor Man is a Romanian-born artist and painter with Hungarian ancestry.
I don’t need him or the president with his urgent vanity You need a structure but I don’t not in our cities of cowards The problem is everyone’s needs dish it out to yourself and tell Waltons Buffet and Gates you’d just as soon kill them as buy their stuff I would though I know you want to buy everything slop
— from Alice Notley’s Speak Angel Series
Paloma Varga Weisz is a contemporary artist living in Germany, best known for her sculptures and drawings.
WHEN A MOVIE becomes a mass culture phenomenon, like Barbie, any negative criticism of it runs the risk of coming off hysterical. Any meanness toward it becomes the mirror version of the reactions of fans who see the movie in the theater again and again, who cry during certain scenes each time, and who tell the world about it on social media with a great sense of pride and purpose, or even with a certain amount of shock about its power over them.
— from the N+1 forum on Barbie
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand.
In a dream the young poet asked me if I had any advice for him. “Yes” I said “but you wouldn’t listen to it anyway.” Now I’d tell him whether I was awake or asleep, “Read Clark Coolidge’s POET. Then rethink yourself. Or maybe don’t think at all.” Do yourself a favor, pick up this “flexible poetry fork in the road” and decide for yourself: are these poems or “no poem at all”?
— from POET by Clark Coolidge, reviewed by Steve Dalachinsky, via Empty Mirror
Walter Swennen is a Belgian artist who lives and works in Brussels.
