ART OBSERVATIONS WITH JERRY MAGOO

2012-01-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

is this shit?

This year the best and most underrated exhibition in the world this year was The Confidence Man, curated by Gianni Jetzer at Tany Leighton. Gianni Jetzer is the best curator in this bracket of the market because he applies the principles of raw veganism (with improvements) to the digestive tract of both the gallery and the internet. There is no difference between contemporary art daily and The Confidence Man, and in this union we can also celebrate a truly post-gender moment where identitarian conscription to the far-gay (CAD) and the ultra-hetero (Gianni) and everything vagary in between is one and the same vector of sanitation best viewed on an iPad, drunk or on xanax at some schleimy afternoon tea opening or next year, on art.sy. An endless group show double-penetrating collaborationist screens and galleries on a daily basis.

"The Confidence Man portrays a group of zany abstract artworks whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the slump of an endless recession"

life, like networking, is a group show. how would these works network if they could talk? In the financialized space of the postgender, group shows offer the surrogate pleasures of the orgy experience in its most socially acceptable form: art as the residue of networked experience. Or art as a performative chessboard optimized to facilitate social relations. Lubricated by feedback, jpgs arouse an absolute master that returns the favor by misrecognition alone.

***

Giani Jetzer/Forrest Nash is the most significant and best artist/curator/human being/machine this year.

***

******

The most significant and memorable exhibition is The Confidence Man and/or Contemporary Art Daily. A fine balance between the optical effect of shit smears and a clean fresh-bleached anus.

The best exhibition in New York by far was Peter Nadin at Gavin Brown’s.

This civilization is in steep decline and you are a mourning slave. Your are white. Peter Nadin is giving you the life of your ancestors as art one last time. You cannot afford the life of your ancestors. Better than rectangular frame-obsessed CAD, he is back from the mountain to announce the vegetable-drive of the West to the art world with resounding glory and genius. The presence of humans is important to support the technical project of eco austerity. Pigs. The new Houellebecq ends when “vegetation had triumphed completely.”

Great exhibition. cad, you missed out.

work speaks for itself

work is concrete like your sub-human mass of networked flesh

work has personality and is tactile like an iphone skin

work make$ free, doily

work is textures and abstract pttrns your blog/italian dealer can digg

work is a language of its own

in the united states, there is a debate in academia about work

Jerry Magoo's top 10 for 2011:

1-Gianni Jetzer

2-Peter Nadin

3-Gianni Jetzer

4-Gianni Jetzer

5-Gianni Jetzer

6-Gianni Jetzer

7-Gianni Jetzer

8-Gianni Jetzer

9-Gianni Jetzer

10-jerry magoo

How do you feel abt this list?

Who got 'shafted'?

Are you sad there were no 10.0's in 2k11?

Who got 'overhated'?

Is it a 'joke'?

Do you think poor people have less networking opportunities?

Do you think CAD is changing that by allowing them to see good art everyday from the comfort of their poverty?

Are indie art markets changing via the leaking of all available Heimo Zobernig jpgs on the internet?

Would you buy 'more critical/smart “art” if you had $$$?

Are you white and str8?

Is jerry magoo officially 'over'?

Is David Lieske cracking open a bottle of champagne?

Have you heard of “adamlindemann.com”?

Have you heard of “May”?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z8ppcFGPlY&feature=autoplay&list=PL9FD3B75D4BF377CB&lf=results_video&playnext=5

Is there a difference?

Are there 2 many artists/exhibitions?

Is this 'shocking'?

Are blogs 'dying'?

has 'hackwork' putrefied on a grand scale?

If you listen to a press release on textedit [via speech function and 'Contemporary Art Daily'], is it really an authentic experience?

Is CAD the “Pitchfork media” of young/decadent/uneducated dumb white people art {via Chicago, the School of Chicago, isolation, wanting to be socially successful}?

How do you feel now that the internet is our church?

Should we all just 'quit' art / networking?

How can you make critical art that “looks cute/sexy on CAD”?

{tobias k pic}

***

CANVAS=Jerry Magoo=a $75.000 Michael Krebber painting=Contemporary Art Daily=Gianni Jetzer

CANVAS=Gianni Jetzer

we all work together

Academia offering its custodial services to contemporary art in exchange for a little bit of money—press releases, articles, dinner attendence, protesting, painting/discreet public nudity. As scenic features of a massive biopolitical strata, they achieve where others fail in their laboratories of joyous Bloom. Their recombinant motility is only special when it feeds back—a return that resonates like a whip cracking. In the larval reproductions of their intellectual labor, Creation never felt so forbidding when faced with work that eats up itself, accomplishes its own end, self-nourishes, leaves no seed, is perfect in itself. sounding from their disciplined innards is the plea to leave poverty to the poor.

Do u vibe 2 abstraction?

What is your favorite kind of abstraction?

Would you say you are one {via Cheney and Hates and Labors and working on interesting projects}?

Speculative realism: cool meme.

the tek-tonic constitution of the operable world about the abyssal defiles of posthistorical conquest is too smooth to rupture hermes' sac.

The dredges of fukushima reek of locavore dining.

A hard-scrabble dog surfing the tsunami on a board of wreckage.

Do u ever wish u could 'meet for coffee' with someone who goes to the Staedelschule?

Do you feel this post is trying to be 2 cool for school or do you think criticality/haters is a vital leak in today's culture {via DIS MAGAZINE}?

Does Sigmar Polke make u feel like ur cuddling with someone because it makes ur insides warm and fuzzy?

Are you revisiting the Capitalist Realist-style?

Do you think the following abstraction does?

One, and perhaps more, have taken commissioned assignments from art journals to polemically indict the political agency of painting in the wake of activism’s resurrection as a daily routine of metropolitan life. sure, paintings deserve confrontation, a stone bundled in agit-prop invective hurled at their individuated surfaces. Words and paintings, both seek homes like artists find turgid collections and conniving public programs. praise be—the biopolitical noise of an art work in the enforced age of the network is grounds for critique. Hide in your bunker hoping the civil war doesn’t drive you to suicide thanks to your wi-fi connection?

magoo had quite a fall. several of my online tantrums found themselves as hand-crafted lines of paint elegantly dashed across the surfaced of belgian linen. now fugitive from the virtual, special attention was paid to the legibility of my words’ passage onto a primed surface. nature knows that it had to be someone else to press the print button. the aggregator is an elder no less. my mojo is subject to the youth from which it emanates. Elsewhere compared to Saturn eating his own helpless children, it may be more interesting to compare these work’s recycling of negative socio-pedagogical feedback to Oedipus’ exile from Thebes, when as a blind old fallen king, he wandered along country roads led by his daughter Antigone in search of the site promised to him by Appollo—a dignified place to die and be buried. World without end. Critique without friends.

a gaunt gentlemen from overseas draped a towel in the bathroom of a corporately sponsored exhibition venue in the east village. it came with a text that lucidly details the exploitative labor practices maintained by the venue sponsor BMW and conclusively implores “Now wash your hands.” the clever implication that this venue, and the culture that it contains, is a technique to produce a public conducive to the belligerent corporate imperatives of its sponsor is hard to miss and not worthy of critique. Nailed to gold, let us offer a wow to the reversal of command so that it issues from the artistic subject itself. and another to the clean emergence of a critical exercise from this toilet bowl of an exhibition. all thanks to an interpellative reminder to mind one's hygiene. With Nowadays sovereignty impeached by critical sanitation, we may now kiss a nobler ring—

elsewhere a critic reviewed the occupy movement. the opening of space was a touchstone of 2011. moma was grandly opened this summer for what one critic drunkenly extolled their performative practice as a “latently perverse circulation of human capital.” the increasingly famous georgia sagri performed, moved people about a skype session with her older brother. later in the fall she loudly interrupted a dormant 5$ suggested donation lecture on situationist politics to commence an occupation. chris d’arcangelo had just closed. opening space with the reek of a corpse, its closure with the hint of B.O.

grand openings & the artists space occupation, as if they were related? the projects this year that really "opened up space", for whatever..? i guess the greenspon d'arcangelo show sort of did that too

only if it leads to how opening space is another means of transparence and that it’s fast turning to a form of pr kitsch that’s not emancipated from self-promotion and social networking. but I don’t like the whole “what was hot in 2011 rethoric for this because it MAKES SENSE. like, it’s reasonable enough to be in AF. ok. cinemarx, blogcupation, whatever, dumb ass graffiti godard’s wife makes in sympathy for the devil..

open/occupy/lubrik8

no it has to be a pun. like “cinemarx” is “cinema” and “marx”.

je suis la 'chez

deep fried flowers. donuts foie gras. the futurist cookbook retooled as a tactic to navigate the frontlines of gentrification, sliding through its profitable gaps like a prisoner ducking past a crushing wall. diabolical roses indeed. of course, the supplementary noise of publicity materials register sympathetically to this text, ‘diet human beings’ and what not. the ouroboric tail to nadin’s head. today faces an art that revels in the hermeneutics of the palliative shit shoveled down the serfs’ throats. bodies soaked in oil, crossing connections, splitting hairs over the phantasy of consciousness.

Ghirardelli Specialty Store...

Do u want a peppermint latte instead?

Maybe some sort of frappychinos

I want 2 drink cocoa with u...

Maybe we can just go to AZ/butterfield/the Met

and buy some Hot drawings

I promise 2 buy

Whatever % you prefer

So we don't have to be like 'poor ppl'

who have to make hot galleries with no $

Maybe we should get some hot choc 'in the bulk'

if this is going to become a 'regular meme'...

I noticed that you like georg herold, or lilly van der stokker

:-D

I will get a big bag of mallows

I'm more into whip cream [via can]

: - )

Not the Cool Whip vibes

I want to drink hot chocolate with u...

In our waspy {via the old testament} christmas interior

Do u think drawings are a good idea for the holidays because they are cheaper and “giftable”?

Is Kerstin Braetsch still “relevant to hate”?

Who is?

Is "hating" not also just "caring"?

Do you "DGAF" about haters because they are just making you famous?

free will

free william wheaton

2011-12-24T01:03:00.000-08:00

Pig (The Final Testament of Rozz Williams)

2011-12-19T09:25:00.000-08:00

This film is something else, a true cinematic oddity. Rozz Williams, the leader of the early goth band Christian Death committed suicide in 1998. The last project he completed before hanging himself was a film short he made as a collaboration with a filmmaker named Nico B. (no relation to Nico of the Velvet Underground). Rozz Williams wrote the film, acted in it, and of course created the soundtrack It features Williams as a serial killer in the desert. It makes references to the Manson killings (the serial killer Williams plays cuts the word 'pig' in his the stomach of his victims, as Manson's followers did) and involves a lot of homosexual bondage. The film could in part be dismissed as sadistic fantasy, a sort of "torture porn" but he film is cryptic to say the least.. It's curious,in the film Rozz plays a murderer, but it was suicide, not homicide, that he committed-so far as we know, at least. There are of course heavy religious allusions throughout. That was always the pattern with Christian Death lyrics. Rozz was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, the strong influence of which appears to have followed Rozz to the very end. There is something remotely resembling pattern to this film. You can't be too optimistic though. This is Rozz Williams at the end of his rope here, soon to be literally at the end of his rope. You could pull out the film theory or some psycho-analysis to play armchair psychiatrist, but Rozz was likely beyond the point of no return when he made this film. It's deranged. He wasn't faking it either. I highly recommend this film for first dates, family holiday gatherings, and of course, company picnics.

2011-12-16T14:56:00.001-08:00

funky times

2011-12-12T15:37:00.000-08:00

:-D

;-)

;-D

Response to the 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions

2011-12-10T11:50:00.001-08:00

I have to stay, I had an increasing interest in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in that in recent years. That's because they pulled in Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, Iggy and the Stooges, Metallica- a few very decent artists. They try to juggle substance with record sales, but they end up coming up with questionable results. This year, they did exactly what I did not want them to do. They are set to induct the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Beastie Boys, and Guns N'Roses, Laura Nyro, Donovan, and The Small Faces/Faces. Those acts were finalists chosen over nominees The Cure, Heart and a few others. The Cure I think were very good, if not the equal of other early goth bands like Bauhaus or Joy Division. Heart were sexy women that arose out of the male dominated 70's music now called "classic rock", that I can respect. Laura Nyro , Donavan and The Small Faces are the dregs of 60's hippy garbage. I can count the number of times I've heard Laura Nyro on the radio on one finger. I don't need to hear some sixties band that Rod Stewart ended up joining that's exactly what The Small Faces are. I am neither a leftist nor a user of illegal drugs, so I do not deify these people. The bands that weren't fecal matter fossilized from the 60's that they picked are bands that were overplayed on 80's to early 90's MTV. I recall it all well, but I feel no need to revisit Mother's Milk or Check Your Head. Guns N'Roses I suppose are alright. The Beastie Boys had their moments in a way. The Red Hot Chili Peppers annoy me at the mall. People bitch about this Lou Reed and Metallica album that was sparked by a performance at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame event, but if the members of the bands listed above start jamming at the induction ceremony that will be the worst music ever made. You want to hear Axel and Slash join on "Fight for Your Right to Party" with Flea slapping the bass? It could happen at the induction ceremony. Two bands that emerged in the same time era that annihilate the ones in the rock and roll hall of fame this year- one is the Cult and the other is Voivod. Guns N' Roses actually opened for the Cult at one point. . Voivod and the Cult in slightly different ways captured the correct way to go about creating rock, which is not so much to adhere too rigidly to a genre, but to synthesize a sound using something here from metal,here from punk, here from 60's bands, whatever works. That's where we get nice little genres like gothic metal from. The explication I've read of the Cult's sound is that they started as a goth band and then made the risky, then unfashionable move of looking back into late 60's/early 70's bands like Led Zeppelin and Free that we today hear on classic rock radio. Voivod integrated influences from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Venom and Motorhead with bits of things that were going on in punk, but their big hit was actually a cover of an early Pink Floyd song written by Syd Barrett. I'm thankful to say, I've recently run into early Cult and early Voivod that has been re-released or released in the last few years. I didn't know about it at the time, but in 2009 the Cult issued a box set edition of their album Love with three disks of demos, b-sides and live takes. This fall, Voivod released their original demo from their early days in Quebec, To The Death 84. The Cult's Love Omnibus Edition from 2009 is a must have. That has been one of my favorite albums since I was a child but listening to the collected b-sides and such, the better material they were working on may not have even been what made it onto the original LP. Lead vocalist Ian Astbury was obsessed both with the 60's counter-culture generation and with Native American culture, neither of which he belonged to, they had the strange ability to get away with it. I much prefer Cult to any of the hippy era bands like Led Zeppelin that they drew inspiration from. The Love Omnibus Edition has a little booklet that it comes with that has some details that I didn't know before. I wasn't aware that the Cult's drummer from their first album, Nigel Preston, was thrown out of the band because of mental illness or that the working title for "Phoenix" was "Stooges" because it sounded like a Stooges track. The track that really gets me is "Hollow Man". In the lyrics, the man who follows him each and every day with a gun in hand- is that himself? Is it the grim reaper? After Love they went into the studio working on a lengthy psychedelic album that was taking too long to make, the band being very into drugs at this point. The Cult used Rick Rubin as a producer immediately after he did the Beastie Boys' License to Ill album, and went for the very straight sounding electric guitar sound Rubin was using at the time. Their next album Electric I think only uses any guitar effect whatsoever on one track. I'd still listen to Electric, it doesn't have the nice lairs of sound that Love has. They started turning into hair metal, essentially. Love is really the album to get. To the Death 84 is a little bit of a different organism. This material is a very early demo material by Voivod, the science-fiction the meed speed-metal band from Quebec. It is recording of an early live performance, and includes many of the tracks that ended up on Voivod's first album, War and Pain as well as a few covers, two of them Venom songs. The recording quality is very lo-fi. You get a sense from this track what an aggressive beast early Voivod really was live. At this point the drummer wore a gas mask on stage, in keeping with the band's pre-occupation with life after a nuclear war. They moved way from there very early wall-of-noise approach in pursuit of something more technically sophisticated and futuristic. If someone come across a young band that know the Cult, Voivod and some of the other music I've referenced here well,I'd be sort of curious to know about it. I started being sick of people and their stupid bands when I was in my late 20's. That's when I would cross paths with a lot of utterly failed and pointless bands and musicians, especially in New York. The hipster music press is full of it, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction committee is full of it. There are a couple good goth albums, a couple good metal albums, that's about it. Even that I get sick of periodically.

Guest post by Mark Weikel: How to Flirt at Holiday Parties

2011-12-08T19:06:00.000-08:00

The holidays are upon us and along with merry activities such as decking the halls, singing carols, and emailing your extensive wish-list to Santa (after all, you’ve been extra good this year) comes the slew of events that have filled up your December calendar.

So if you’re single, RSVP-ed, and plan on doing a little festive flirting at a holiday art opening or lavish Christmas gala, it’s crucial that you know how it’s done. To have a blast at your holiday event and ensure that you aren’t left under the mistletoe knocking back eggnog all by yourself, check out the following tips for how to flirt:

Tip #1: Be realistic. If you embark upon your flirting adventures with the expectation that you are going to get a relationship out it, you could be setting yourself up for failure. Look at flirting as a way to have fun and meet new people…and who knows, maybe a flirtatious spark could lead to something more.

Tip #2: Be approachable. When it comes to flirting, we all get nervous putting ourselves out there. Even with butterflies, however, it is important to try your best to relax so that you come across as welcoming to prospects at the party. Think about it like this: Who would you rather approach? Someone who is smiling, laughing and having a good time? Or someone giving off unfriendly vibes and not socializing with anyone? Most likely you’d choose the former.

Tip #3: Keep your eye on the prize. As simple as it seems, making eyes at someone with whom you wouldn’t mind getting to know better can be a great way to lure them in. Studies indicate that you have to look at a person three times before they will approach you. Now, be careful not to be creepy when doing this…to let them know you are interested, try to lock eyes for just a few seconds then look away. If you look again and they are gazing your way, it’s a good sign.

Tip #4: Strike up conversation. Should you be scanning the room at the holiday event and notice a beautiful stranger admiring a beautiful piece of art, use it as an opportunity to swoop in and make your introduction. When you break the ice with harmless topics and common ground such as a painting or a sculpture at the party (your approach will depend on where you are), it can ease you into a dialogue so that you can possibly build a deeper conversation from there.

Tip #5: Read body language. Don’t let the hot toddies get the best of you—be alert and stay aware of your surroundings so that you can pick up on body language cues from eligible singles at your holiday event. Is someone exchanging looks with you? Are they flirting back with their eyes? Is their body or feet turned in your direction?

Tip #6: Listen up! As important as it is to talk to your new holiday friend, in order for the two of you to really hit it off, it is equally as important for you to actively listen. With whoever you’re flirting, let them know you’re interested by giving them your full attention and not getting distracted by what’s going on around you.

Tip #7: Go for the gold. If you find that the person you’ve been flirting with at your holiday event is someone you’d like to explore a flirtatious bond with further, don’t be afraid to let them know! Seal the deal by asking for their number or email address and if possible, see about arranging a date.

Mark Weikel is a guest post author who enjoys writing on topics surrounding dating and relationships. In addition, Mark also contributes his work to a gay dating site where he offers advice for safe online connections in the gay community.

Paintings by Human Centipede 2 Director Tom Six

2011-12-06T09:00:00.001-08:00

Just in time for Christmas! It was, I suppose, only a matter of time before this development came along. Some months ago, I discussed on here issues of censorship and the film Human Centipede 2. It would so happen to be the case that Human Centipede 2 director Tom Six is a painter, and his paintings have now surfaced on-line. Just as conservative radio host Michael Savage turned out to be a surprisingly good fiction writer this fall with his book Abuse of Power, Tom Six has proved himself to be a man of many talents with his paintings. If you've seen Six's films, the subject matter will not surprise you at all- fecal matter, venereal disease, Nazi Germany, and of course, people sewn together mouth to anus. One painting alludes to the "barbed wire" scene cut from the version of Human Centipede 2 released by IFC. The obvious response is that Tom Six does what he does merely to shock and offend. I don't know, he looks pretty fixated on this fecal matter to me…find more: www.paintfartsbytomsix.com

2011-12-04T14:13:00.000-08:00

I Eat Your Skin

2011-11-22T10:15:00.001-08:00

I saw this gem of a film screen at the Sc-Fi Center in Las Vegas this weekend. Back in 1970 I Eat Your Skin (which was made years earlier but not released until 1970) screened as a drive-in double bill with I Drink Your Blood. William Powell at the Sci-Fi Center screened the two films together in the original double package they were shown together as. The role of the arts here in Vegas where I now live again is sort of interesting. It is only within the year that an "art" oriented coffee shop has existed at all successfully downtown. Any kind of an indigenous art world in Vegas is ver young. That being said, the Las Vegas premier of Human Centipede 2 around (also at the Sci-Fi Center) was pretty much a weekend long festival. I Drink Your blood I've written about elsewhere, so I won't go into detail about it here. I Eat Your Skin is much older, dating back to 1964 and filmed in black and white. I Drink Your Blood was quite clearly made in response to the Manson killings. I Eat Your Skin has nothing to do with anything. It also doesn't make a lot of sense. I am particularly a fan of the scene where a zombie holding a carton of explosives labeled "explosives" blows up a plane. The "plot" of the film revolves around a romance writer, his agent, and the agent's wife, who make a trip to an Island called Voodoo Island where a plantation owner and scientist are making zombies. The daughter of the scientist is a love interest for the romance writer. That makes the film sound like it makes a lot more sense then it does. There's a whole plot thread that has to do with the island natives wanting the daughter for a human sacrifice which goes exactly nowhere, because it turns out that it's her father and the plantation owner turning the locals into zombies. It doesn't all fit together at any point. It does feature a lot of Voodoo Island zombies running around with machetes. I am particularly fond of the scene where the hero points out - and this is well into the film- that the symbols on the altar are symbols used in Voodoo rituals involving human sacrifice. If you are about my age and remember Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the late 90's you are likely to recall a time when Les Baxter's "exotica" music and lounge music came back into style in a big way. There was the whole reissue of the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack at that point, in the late 90's. This was about the time that bands like Stereolab and Air had resuscitated the Moog and DJ Spooky was a big deal. The soundtrack to I Eat Your Blood is full of campy lounge music like that. In general, I strongly approve of that general aesthetic of resurrecting cinematic and musical absurdism of the past. I Eat Your Skin must be seen to be believed. The whole film is so absurd I could hardly believe it was real. I think that there is a kind of merit to the approach of reviving things like I Eat Your Skin purely for their sheer absurdity. The zombie holding the carton of explosives labeled "explosives" is worth the price of admission itself. As with extreme metal sub-genres like death metal and black metal, it's become clear to me from blogging that the audience for films like I Eat Your Skin is actually gigantic. There's something there...

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

2011-11-21T10:23:00.000-08:00

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali (Contemporary Art Daily)

Review: Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann

2011-11-02T10:26:00.000-07:00

At one point I was obsessed with William T. Vollmann, but I hadn't read him in years until this week. I hadn't been following him closely for a long time. For one thing he's really into writing books that are hundreds of pages long or longer. His big thing about 20-25 years ago was having sex with crack addict prostitutes. He does have the distinction of writing the only novel I've ever read that made me vomit, which was The Royal Family. The Royal Family is a novel about crack whores that goes on for nearly a thousand pages, with a child molester as one of the main characters for good measure, such that a good portion of the book are scenes involving child molestation or kiddie porn. I think Vollmann likes crack whores way too much. If there's a new Vollmann book the sense I had was that it was either going to be a thousand pages long or or heavily involve this intense fascination he has with disease. That's a lot to ask of an audience. The statical information is very clear in showing that blogs that I've done that have attracted the most public interest are texts involving horror films and texts involving metal bands, in particular black metal bands. I'm more then willing to bend to my audiences needs in this regard, if that's . Personally, I am too fixated on the Human Centipede films and Michael Savage at this point to be datable. That is actually a very different inner insanity. For a long time I had more or less written Vollmann off, figuring he was partying with Genesis P. Orridge at Club Pervert Has-been over in the Magical Land of No One Cares. Incidentally, the reason that I always insult Genesis P. Orridge is that I figured out that posts get more hits because I do that. Vollmann's latest release isn't quite as bad as all that. Don't get me wrong, my appreciation for his work is still very much diminished, it just wasn't as bad as I thought. Into the Forbidden Zone was only released as an e-book and it's only 77 pages long. If he had put out another several hundred to a thousand page books, I wouldn't have read it. It's put out by a company named Byliner in the bay area that puts out shorter journalistic narrative in e-book format that only cost a few dollars. This is a good format for Vollmann to work in, as he has a tendency to get lost in the process of writing epics. I much prefer the stripped down Vollmann. In general, my view on wiring is that If you can't do it in 20 pages you probably can't do it in 200 pages Into the Forbidden Zone is basically an account of traveling through areas of Japan affected by the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed. It is free of detailed descriptions of kiddie porn and AIDS symptoms. The threat this time around is radiation sickness and cancer, but Vollmann didn't come across people that were visibly sick and dying. What he describes is walking around disaster ravaged areas in Japan. The book does try to establish is that the Japanese government lied to the populace about the seriousness of the nuclear problem at first. Vollmann actually went into high risk areas with a radiation detector. Vollmann always seemed to have a death wish. He's always been sort of an extreme individual in that way, he's till somewhat of a fascinating enigma because of it. He's not fascinating for a thousand pages because of it, but he's still kind of a relevant figure. -W. Wheaton

blog paintings

2011-11-02T09:54:00.001-07:00

this is stupid but one can see a bit more of the exhibition

Greene Napthali offering - YouTube

Gothic Daydreams (Various Artists, Free MP3 album)

2011-10-31T07:20:00.000-07:00

(Review By William Wheaton) The biggest and best surprise in music for me of late 2010-early 2011 was the Metalhit Free Download series from the on-line metal label Metalhit, which I've written about on here. That was six hours of definitive underground metal released for free on-line. This fall the biggest and best musical surprise comes thanks to the same individual. Mike Riddick owns both Metalhit and The Fossil Dungeon, which is not a metal label but rather a gothic label that's been around about ten years, and we have a free mp3 album of material from the Fossil Dungeon catalogue. For awhile I would have told you the best gothic playlist around was to be found by tuning into the Doomed.fm station on Soma.fm. Riddick here has put together a much shorter playlist of material, but it probably competes with what you would hear if you listened to an hour of the Doomed station. Doomed has a few problems, one being that they play the same sound clips from the original Halloween film over and over. Mike Riddick really has quite an ear, as evidenced by the bands he's found for his labels and by his own band, The Soil Bleeds Black. It could very well be that he owns the one of the best gothic label around these days and one of the best metal label around these days, which is an accomplishment. The only band on here I'd heard before is Mephisto Waltz who recall well from the 90's, their track on here is quite similar in sound to the track "Heaven or Las Vegas" by Cocteau Twins. Other bands on the compilation have more of a neo-classical or pseudo-medieval feel. Riddick's own band Soil Bleeds Black is like that. Caelum Bliss have almost a little bit of a metal element to their sound. A few of the songs sound more like that dance-oriented gothic music played at fetish clubs. "It's Time" by Butterfly Messiah is like that. Across the board,the compilation tends to focus on bands with female vocals, in particular bands that use female vocal harmonies. As you may have guessed, this is not musically revolutionary material. I won't pretend that is. If you go back to the In Goth Daze compilation put out by Cleopatra Records in 1994, and closed your eyes while it played, you might have difficulty determining which bands were 80's bands or 90's bands. It would be hard to place any of the bands on Gothic Daydreams as not being from the 90's or even the 80's without knowing otherwise. "I Don't Want You To Go" by Gifts in Secret on Gothic Daydreams sounds like something that might have played on college radio in 1984. This comes up again and again, but it seems veritably impossible for current gothic/industrial bands to surpass the kind of musical innovation that was taking place within gothic/industrial the 80's. I'm still uncovering obscure gothic/industrial bands of quality from the 80's. I hadn't even heard Brighter Death Now until this year. However, the music on this compilation sounds a lot better then some of the music being made now by gothic/industrial artists left over from the 80's. Psychic TV, a band from 30 years ago, has a new single for sale, which is a cover of a track by Can, a band from over 40 years ago. Some of this music is from ten years ago or more, and Mephisto Waltz has been around forever, but this music isn't as bad as dredging up Boyd Rice,Genesis P.Orridge or Sleep Chamber once again. That I can do without.

Gerhard Richter Painting

2011-10-30T16:27:00.001-07:00

http://www.gerhard-richter-painting.de/

photostream jerry magoo twitter the human centipede 2

2011-10-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

http://yfrog.com/hsm0fiaj

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) – IFC Center

http://www.southpark.de/search/?searchterm=the+human+centipede

arboga teenage riot

2011-10-28T08:31:00.000-07:00

going thru some cd-r's the other day and came across this gem from '04. Music made by people i don't know but it might as well have been made by friends—like this one. 10 untitled tracks of electronic disgust—skip track 5 & 10, novelty throwaways. Surprised that someone else uploaded this to mediafire, but then again it made the vaunted aquarius list——in fact the cd-r is still available online from the store if that offers any indication of its listenability. i believe from sweden, the name is a touch misleading in terms of sound. more on point are chicks on speed unraveled by amateur gabber and poser black metal vocals, so basically riot grrl techno stripped of fun.

wild that between the recent ying of suburban bands like blood on the dance floor and brokencyde and the metropolitan yang of ghe2o gothik, euro dreck like this still musters some relevance, if only for its bathetic refusal of electronically mediated joy and the marketable memory of its recent histories. Perhaps a good soundtrack to the recent occupy artist space initiative? In fact that questionable honor would better rest with the young, recently disbanded, realicide. in their squatter-y hands electronic music becomes a means to traverse the discomforting netherregions of lumpen hipster consciousness and anarchopunk agency, a movement accomplished wholly through a spine-tinglingly complete disavowal of good taste; a foreclosure of a memorialized past for the naive intensities of the immediate present. see also this for maximum relevance.

preview:

DL

weltschmertz demo

2011-10-26T09:30:00.001-07:00

socially networked grimness. recorded between tape and a blackberry (maybe for an art show in malmo? i forget) this one-man bedroom bm lives up to all the cliches of that tag, perhaps one day aquarius records will praise its burzumic buzz? yet despite its sub-Aske fidelity, the riffs and synth atmosphere suggest deep beherit worship, especially if the band had recorded electric doom synthesis shrouded in the infernal tape hiss of their demo era. actually that might not be all the way true, this record has all the BM essentials covered, the norse kampf of track 2, the bestial throb of track 3, martial triumph of track 4, an approximation of abruptum on track 5 that fugues into what sounds like a mournful early sarcofago—bookended by fat synth'd intros and outros. what else would you expect from an act whose name implies the sorrow that results from knowledge's irreconcilability with the world?

its a fucking trap - s/t

2011-10-26T09:02:00.000-07:00

Hailing once upon a time from the punkier mores of olneyville, this ensemble of nine (i think?) unleashed a heap of life-loving, early-00s grinding metallic hardcore with art school flourishes —a barely audible saxophone being one tell-tale sign. for better or worse nary a note of anything from pageninetynine to integrity graced these ears through the agony of my teen years, so i can thank this punk frat for a proper introduction to music that no freshman really needs but seizes regardless. more brutal than local white belt superstars as the sun sets/daughters, this clown car of musicians only ever croaked out one cd-r in early 2003 after many a show played in utter darkness. notable not only for the considerable attention the band has paid t the craft of their riffs, but also for the the band's treatment of the punk convention of call and response vocals. with two vocalists given no other task but to scream, they offer this tried and true convention a novel, glass gargling texture—one that can be spotted even in this album's first few seconds.

given the recent shape of the metal and hardcore media and its entrenchment as an alternative to the softer sounds of gentrification (i suppose one could generalize metal, punk and all their possible combinations as the self-critical sound of gentrification hating itself), had these guys kept up the heat they pressed onto this first album they very well could have played the new museum last week. shucks. perhaps you know some of these guys nowadays? sorry forgot to scan the album art.

myspace: http://www.myspace.com/itsafuckingtrap

2011-10-24T14:18:00.000-07:00

GROUNDBREAKING!

2011-10-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

congratulations Artists Space and Georgia Sagri, your critical efforts have finally been recognized by the public.

After 29 hours of symbiotic occupation, you are both significantly more radical New Yorkers.. Perhaps the best addition to the programming in a long time for your self-critical organization who since 40 years, has stayed at the forefront of critical discourse and socio-economic conditions artists live in. A friendly nod to the right-wing tax-evading constituency of the non-profit industrial complex, the "agendaless" occupiers are once again described as not knowing what they want. Perhaps forcing this out of AS's scribes is their 2nd greatest achievement, after boosting their personal brand in front of curators and staedel students falling asleep at a 3-hour lecture on self-reflexivity and situationism? Everybody wins!

http://www.galleristny.com/2011/10/group-occupies-artists-space-in-soho/

http://www.artistsspace.org/exhibitions/artists-space-occupation/

PROBLEM?

2011-10-21T15:26:00.000-07:00

coming soon to chelsea AND brooklyn

2011-10-14T20:29:00.000-07:00

ANARCHY IN THE U.K.?

2011-10-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

TOM SIX'S HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 and MICHAEL SAVAGE'S ABUSE OF POWER
(review by William Wheaton)

My friend the painter Paul Richard made the joke which I've stolen and referenced a few times is that since Human Centipede 2 was initially banned in the U.K. and the right wing radio host Michael Savage was banned from entering the U.K., that listening to the Michael Savage show and then going to see Human Centipede 2 would go really well on a first date. I don't know for sure that wouldn't get you laid, because in a certain it way it would put you at a cultural forefront. "Torture porn", extreme right wing "hate" radio- go straight for the meaty subject matter, right? Actually, to be totally honest I think the problem with that is that those are actually both cases of overzealousness on the part of the British officials. I don't find either Human Centipede 2 or Michael Savage's new book Abuse of Power all that shocking. I wrote about the British ban on Human Centipede 2 on here when it happened, but having seen the film now I think it's absolutely insane that they took that film seriously enough to ban it. I wouldn't cry for either Tom Six or Michael Savage. Whatever Tom Six is doing he's got something figured out because I saw the premier at a theater in Philadelphia, and I bought the ticket several hours before the film was supposed to screen, and was told to come at least half an hour early to get seats and Michael Savage's new book, which is his first novel, is on the New York Times bestseller list.
The version of Human Centipede 2 IFC has released for U.S. markets is substantially cut, but the nature of violence in that film is so completely fake and the scatological and sexual material in that film is so over the top I just considered the film a joke. The audience was laughing the entire time. The first Human Centipede film a mad scientist captures three people and stitches them together anus to mouth. The plot of the sequel is a mentally retarded security guard in a bad part of London is sexually infatuated with the first film, so he recreates the first film by stitching twelve people together anus to mouth. The retarded security guard Martin is almost kind of cute, and a few of the people he kills and tortures during the film probably deserve it. The original Human Centipede film was less violent, but this film's violence lacks any kind of realism. It's not family entertainment but I just couldn't believe I was watching Human Centipede 2 when I was watching it because it cracked me up more then disturbed me.

The extreme irony of Human Centipede 2 is that the same week it was released the number 1 iTunes app has been the live stream of the trial of Conrad Murray for the involuntary manslaughter of Michael Jackson. It's every bit as grotesque as a scene from Human Centipede 2 with the catch being that it is absolutely real. The live feed of Conrad Murray has gone into minutia regarding issues such as when Michael Jackson's body turned the color blue exactly. If that's the number one iTunes app and Human Centipede 2 is a cult film, then the mainstream is far more hardcore then the underground.
Michael Savage's Abuse of Power is effectively a spy thriller perfect for an airport bookstore, although very clearly written by someone of the political right. Film critics are going on and on about the "meta" element of Human Centipede 2, but Abuse of Power actually has perhaps even more intriguing "meta" elements. Michael Savage made his main character a right-wing journalist whose been banned from entering the U.K for statements he made about Islam in a blatant autobiographical reference. Jack Hatfield, a kind of self-aggrandized version of Michael Savage as a James Bond type uncovers a Muslim terrorist plot. A car bomb terrorist plot is botched when a young black thug carjacks the car, and Jack Hatfield's best friend, a bomb squad expert, is killed in the debacle. The government tries to cover-up Muslim involvement in the attack, but Jack Hatfield is determined to uncover the truth, even if he has to sneak inside England to do it. It turns out to be a conspiracy involving Islamic terrorists and leftists.
It's actually a fairly readable book, a nice little piece of war on terror-era paranoia that plays on fears of Islamic terrorism and WMDs. Michael Savage has flipped out on air about gays and Muslims a few times, at one point losing his MSNBC show for homophobia, and that's about the short and long of his "hate speech" .He apologized for the homophobic statements that got him fired from MSNBC. Michael Savage was careful to incorporate "good guy" Muslim characters into Abuse of Power as if in penance for his accused bigotry. The subject of homosexuality is not explored at length in Abuse of Power either way.

'du bist schwul denn du saugst von einem typen den schwanz bitch'

2011-10-09T23:47:00.000-07:00

JORDAN WOLFSON @ T293: AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE

2011-10-03T14:54:00.000-07:00

After years of crafting a unique formal vocabulary out of ambiguously auto-biographical references, an often tongue-in-cheek conceptual approach and presentation strategies borrowed from various dematerialized forms of art-making, Jordan Wolfson has managed an impressive "return" to a more standard exhibition format that feels effortlessly adapted to contemporary image distribution requirements for his last solo presentation at T293's new gallery space in Rome. Evoking the playful digital/analog experiments in which digital techniques are used in combination with a painterly sensibility the way peers like DAS INSTITUT, David Lieske, Michael Krebber, and Tobias Madison have been using them to general acclaim, Wolfson re-introduces a cycle of references familiar to close observers of his work (Hassidic Shyloh figures, cartoon characters, infantile nudity, politically incorrect material found on the internet...), cooked up in a set of 14 loosely hung digital prints on canvas and two single-channel videos.
Often described as moving freely across media or even, "post-studio", Wolfson's practice here innovates by delivering its accumulated subject-matter in a subtly presented on-demand response to the requirements of his role and vocation as an artist. Feeding back most of the presentation strategies routinely encountered in the art circuit most visible on blogs such as Contemporary Art Daily to the a gallery prominently present within that circuit, Wolfson's solo show and adoption of a distribution-friendly presentation format casts the ever-changing nature of his formal vocabulary (the artist often produces using skilled outsourced labor like animators, actors and mimes that leave a strong imprint on the technical signature of the work) in a self-deprecating, humoristic light that confers T293's new space a playfulness that will no doubt be repeated by other artists in the roster. In many ways reminiscent of a contemporary hockey rink (banners commemorative of the players' history circling the main play area and providing an inspiring decor for the spectators, two flat screen televisions sets facing each other from either sides of the room like nets..), this exhibition is a one-player, one team championship: Jordan Wolfson, for Jordan Wolfson, scoring a never-ending series of highly de territorializing goals in both nets.

Lou Reed and Metallica Single Released

2011-09-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

(review by William Wheaton)

Lou Reed and Metallica have released their first single. They sound a lot better then Genesis P. Orridge does these days, I’ll give them that much
There are two extreme takes on the whole Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration. On the one side there are rock critic types that are saying that this is the best album in years. The other extreme is that you see blog comments in particular written by die-hard Metallica fans that this album is a complete train wreck. As material from the album has begun to be released, I’ve become of the opinion that these extremes are both really silly. I think devote Metallica fans are angry and have been angry for a long time that Metallica don’t sound exactly like they did in 1985. The web phenomenon of Metallica fans complaining about Metallica working with Lou Reed is quickly becoming the most obnoxious web phenomenon of all time. There’s also been minor controversy about the London Underground authorities banning the album artwork from trains and train stations because it supposedly looks “too much like graffiti” and a British columnist named Lucy Jones attacked the poster as misogynistic.
The single sounds about like the metal subgenre doom metal or somewhat like Black Sabbath. The collaboration between Metallica and Lou Reed doesn’t sound awkward because music that exists in a happy medium between Metallica and the Velvet Underground already exists. If you played a Metallica riff at the tempo of ”Venus in Furs” by the Velvet Underground it would sound about like doom metal. I’ve got bands like Evoken and the Howling Void going all the time. I think the big threat was going to be that this album wasn’t going to be heavy. What’s been released so far is.
Lou Reed wrote all the lyrics for the project. There are going to be no serious surprises on there for people who know Lou Reed’s music well. It seems like Lou Reed has been writing one tribute to a friend that passed way after another for 25-30 years. The lyrics on this one are some such madness about sadism and violence, such as was heard on his Velvet Underground albums and his solo albums Berlin and The Blue Mask. Lou Reed was kind of always that way. I saw some old footage of the Velvet Underground playing recently where they were doing their whole multimedia thing from the 60’s. The footage shows some young man pretty clearly on drugs and his face at first appears to show a state of euphoria but then on closer examination it appears to reveal a state of psychic agony. As I’m thinking of it, a lot Velvet Underground footage is pretty much like that. That’s pretty typical Lou Reed territory. However to put it into perspective in terms of time, Ian Curtis of Joy Division was influenced by Lou Reed in that regard and Ian Curtis hung himself over thirty years ago. So Lou Reed is using tricks he’s used for a long, long time.
This is not revolutionary music. It is very good music. There’s a kind of psychosis to it all. Metallica switches over to a doom metal thing, Lou Reed rants about killing a whore or whatever, sounds fine to me. Best album in years? You go through those Metalhit Free Download albums or tune into the Doomed station on Soma.fm (which is their gothic/industrial station) you’ll find a fair few excellent bands. There’s a general direction of music that Lou Reed and Metallica is an example of, albeit a very interesting example of, more so then it is a solitary work of genius.
.

is 47 orchard like 47 essex?

2011-09-05T18:06:00.000-07:00

Sarah Greenberger-Rafferty is preparing a new show at Rachel Uffner gallery, where as our readers know cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side Orchard 47 used to be. Greenberger-Rafferty's exhibition will feature her "waterlogging" technique with which she works liquid into inket just printed extant images, then rephotographs and digitally manipulates the mottled, apparently damaged results.

How will it go down? One can only speculate..

http://racheluffnergallery.com/

but in a recent interview with the Observer

http://www.observer.com/2011/09/dealer-maxwell-graham-readies-essex-street-gallery/

Maxwell G Graham says:

"It (the new gallery he is starting) relates to Orchard, which was at 47 Orchard Street,” he said, referring to the Orchard gallery, which was run from 2005 to 2008 by 12 backers, including artists Moyra Davey, Andrea Fraser and R.H. Quaytman."

Ha. But is that really true? It has been reported that he commented "Idontknow" under the article posted on his facebook feed. Can this new 47 Essex gallery, a commercial gallery subject to the neo-liberal demands of the market (that very medium of contingency) really relate to a limited-profit space associated variously with New York experimental film and video scenes, institutional critique, 90s non-yBa practices in Britain, and political conceptualist traditions in North and South America?

one can only speculate...

ASR: Magoo Rates

2011-08-31T14:15:00.000-07:00

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August-September Review 2011

2011-08-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Beginning now, Jerry Magoo will begin our annual August Review. Throughout these months, when the art world grinds to a halt and few new shows are opened, we will take the opportunity to reflect on the most memorable posts. These items will be labeled with “ASR:” in the title, which will help distinguish them from new posts by William Wheaton. A trickle of new posts will continue to be published as well, but at an aptly lower frequency.

Midnight: Satanic Royalty

2011-08-25T13:42:00.001-07:00

Review: William Wheaton

This is the new single Satanic Royalty by Midnight. Midnight is a metal band from Ohio that sound very much like 80’s metal, specifically the very beginnings of black metal as it grew out of N.W.O.B.H.M. (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) sound. Metal fans will have guessed it immediately, they sound a lot like the band Venom. Hey that’s not too bad- to sound like Venom. They’ve been putting out music since 2003 but only this November will they have their first full-length album released.
Goth and metal are starting to be at very much the same impasse these days. A good band is able to pass off as an eighties band. My friend Sean McBride’s band Xeno & Oaklander is a goth band that has that problem- they can re-create 80’s art student type music from Europe but they can’t seem to create the new moment. Another band I saw this week hanging out with my friend Kevin Shea called Le Sphinxx is a New York goth band that sounds a little more distinctive. And then for metal I’ve already written about the band Children of Technology who have picked the excellent Voivod to sound like, but they haven’t seem to be able to create something truly new yet. We’ll see with all those bands what happens. I don’t know, maybe Le Sphinxx, Xeno & Oaklander, Midnight, and Children of Technology should all get together and switch up members or something like that. I don’t know. Maybe that would be the new moment. I doubt it will ever happen though. I think the impasse may unfortunately be permanent.
All is relative, though, considering there is a new Strokes album. That to me is a deeper impasse, an impasse deep within the functions of the human organism. It’s hard to create something truly new.
Well, if you don’t care about that so much, you’re fine with a newer band that sounds much like Venom, crank it up!

the medium of contingency

2011-08-16T09:34:00.000-07:00

Children of Technology: It’s Time to Face the Doomsday

2011-08-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Review by William Wheaton

This album actually came out last year, but Children of Technology are currently on- tour in Europe still promoting it, so it is still a viably current topic. When I was living in Las Vegas last fall, this guy was hanging out with my neighbors had on a t-shirt I misidentified as a Voivod t-shirt and was corrected that it was actually a t-shirt for the more recent but strongly Voivod-influenced Children of Technology from Italy. Indeed, Children of Technology are very similar to the early years of Voivod, except that they incorporate female vocals. That’s something the original Voivod line up never did. Then again, a very similar band of the same era, Celtic Frost, did incorporate female vocals.

In general I like the early years of extreme metal in the 80’s, the beginnings of black metal/thrash metal/death metal whatever you want to call it back then. Children of Technology’s lyrical fixation with life after nuclear war is straight out of early Voivod. Children of Technology even have a song called “Nuclear Armed Dogs”. Children of Technology The 80’s was a glorious time when metal bands were grabbing aspects of punk and in the case of Celtic Frost from goth and re-incorporating into structures as intricate as they were aggressive. It’s not that bands of this period were flawless Voivod ended up breaking their streak by putting out the Angel Rat album that out of nowhere sounded somewhat like Rush which alienated their hard metal fan base. Celtic Frost did almost the same thing with an album called Cold Lake when they seemingly tried to adapt themselves to LA hair metal. However, in looking back to the early years of bands like Voivod and Celtic Frost, Children of Technology really picked the right albums to be into. Reading any of the interviews with Children of Technology is a pleasure because they have an encyclopedic knowledge of 80’s metal and punk bands.
The question that all that leaves is “what can Children of Technology do to take that music forward?” They’ve only existed for three years, so they might be able to come up with something. If they don’t, they can remain purists to the early extreme metal of Celtic Frost, Voivod and so on from the 1980’s. If that ends up being how it plays out that would still be better then a whole lot of bands.
I guess it’s worth noting that Children of Technology’s music is released by the on-line metal store www.metalhit.com that put out the absolutely essential Metalhit Free Download Series in late 2010-early 2011. Those little free Mp3 collections are the best musical release I’ve heard in the last few years, unless you count the unofficial release of Phillip Garrido’s music on YouTube. Children of Technology didn’t make the cut for the Metalhit Free Download Series, but they make it onto the Metalhit store. That band Goatpenis they just had me review on here is also on Metalhit. I don ‘t know if they did or ever will, but those little free sampler Mp3 albums that Metalhit put out should have changed music forever. However, from what I’ve heard, Metalhit seems to have really put their best foot forward with those. That’s a very good gauge of how good of a band Children of Technology are- they’re good enough to be carried by the Metalhit store, but didn’t make the cut for the best of type collection-about the same quality as Goatpenis.
As I’m thinking of it, if I had to put together a list of best albums ever made I think that Voivod album War and Pain probably would be right up damn close to number one. A couple of the Metalhit Free Download Series albums would probably up pretty high.

The Boys from Brazil: The Neo-Nazi Black Metal Sounds of Goatpenis

2011-07-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

(Review by William Wheaton)

I’ve been asked to give my opinion of Goatpenis. Well, I will give my opinion of Goatpenis right here and now so that you will be able to answer the question “do I need a little Goatpenis in my life?”
Apparently, all the Nazis in Brazil haven’t died of old age yet, because the band Goatpenis from Brazil are signed to a label appropriately enough named Satanic Skinhead Propaganda and have a song entitled “Zyklon-B.” You know how the whole black metal thing overlaps in places with the whole Nazi Skinhead thing? That’s pretty much what Goatpenis is. It’s a bunch of white Brazilian Nazi Skinhead types playing black metal. The original suggestion was that I should review their new album Depleted Ammunition but this band has existed for over twenty years. There was no reason for Goatpenis to go on that long. Their work is extremely repetitive. They have a best of compilation (Trotz Verbot, Nich Tot) that’s what I’m going to base my judgment on. After all, one really should only be concerned with the very best in Goatpenis. Boy those guys have been doing Goatpenis for over twenty years. I guess they just can’t get enough.
Well, Goatpenis are a very rough, raw sounding black metal and death metal band. Like many black metal bands they used the worst possible sound quality they could achieve. A lot of the Goatpenis tracks are so much so that way that they could almost be mistaken for radio static. The track “Blessed by War” by them is like that. Actually a lot of their music is that way. Many Goatpenis tracks are likely to make you think your speakers are damaged.
There’s a lot pictures of them standing around with guns on-line and they are on a record label that very clearly makes no qualms about being a neo-Nazi label, plus, and there’s the whole thing with their name. I think if you heard their actual music, without knowing anything about them what would come across more so is this unreal impulse that they have towards creating an absolute sludge of lo-fi sound.
You know what it would be great for? It would be a great for a first date. You want get romantic on that first date, slip in a little Goatpenis.

If I Had A Hammer

2011-07-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

Simon de Pury let's his Rebecca Black hang out.

2011-07-04T23:23:00.001-07:00

Munchie

2011-06-28T08:26:00.001-07:00

Munchie (1990)/ Munchie Strikes Back(1992) Jim Wynorski director

Review by William Wheaton

What do you get when you use a producer best known for horror (Roger Corman) a director best known for soft-core pornography and horror (Jim Wynerski) and an actor best known in recent years for being caught in the whole Pellicano wiretapping scandal (Andrew Stevens), and have them do a family film?
Munchie and its sequel Munchie Strikes Back Are these two of the worst films of all time? It could be someone’s opinion, but they have a definite curiosity value. The 80’s saw an incredible wave of monster movies featuring small monsters- Critters, Ghoulies, Gremlins, and even Hobgoblins. I am a huge fan of this genre, but I have never made it through legendary b-film producer Roger Corman's Munchies form this period. In the early 90’s, soft core and horror super director was tapped to put together Munchie and Munchie Strikes Back, which are only in some vague sense sequels to Munchies. Munchie is more about a single creature with magical powers and more so a good guy. That puppet sucks. The crappiness of the puppet used in Munchie and Munchie Strikes Back makes these films. The original Munchie has Don DeLouise, a terrible actor you’ve at least heard of. Munchie Strikes Back not even. Actor Andrew Stevens, who later became a producer, is near and dear to my heart, as I saw him testify at Pellicano where he admitted to using Pellicano to tap his business enemies phones. In Munchie Strikes Back he plays an evil business man, oddly enough. He plays unrelated villain characters in these two films.
That wacky Munchie, magical powers, and he loves pizza. He started all the great civilizations in human history, but he’s more then happy to help a growing boy in need, which is the basic plotline of both Munchie films. Pre-adoloscent male, learning about girls, family problems, little league in the second one, and Munchie is on the case of helping the boy with his problems. Munchie is wish fulfillment. That wacky Munchie just waves his hand, and magically makes the pizza fly. Trouble with girls? Family problems? Munchie to the rescue! On the topic of wish fulfillment, director Jim Wynorski is famous for his unbelievable fetish for large breasts, which is even evident with the actresses in the Munchie films he did. But what really stands out to me about these films is the shitty puppet. When they try and make that thing dance or move it just looks wrong. No budget special effects on these. Then of course like many family films there are over sentimental heart-to-heart sequences with Munchie offering advice on the problems of growing up to the young boy. This is car wreck cinema- you won’t be able to take your eyes of the mutilation. But my faithful readers may ask, why Munchie now? Is Munchie the allegorical figure of the desperate idealism of Williamsburg hipsters fueled on brown Puerto Rican cocaine, electro clash and expensive MFAs from Cologne and lower east side douchebag artists, writers and curators? Isn't that what you all pay for? Well, I myself am a libertarian conservative connected more strongly with the Libertarian Party or Ron Paul then to the Constitution Party or the Evangelical end of the Republican party., but I did find this intriguing interpretation of Munchie on a Christian website, which argues surprisingly well that Munchie is satanic:

http://www.movieguide.org/reviews/movie/munchie.html

Munchie Strikes Back has become hard to find and expensive when you do. There is a version on YouTube with Russian cheaply dubbed over it but if you turn up the speakers you can still hear the original English. The alternative would be to spend a lot of money in order to see Munchie Strikes Back, something I can’t be held accountable for encouraging. If you get a kick at all out of watching bad movies and laughing at them, then Munchie is not to be missed. Munchie Strikes Back is very similar. In that inverse way Munchie and Munchie Strikes Back are good movies.

h8ball mrlam(e)

2011-06-23T13:23:00.000-07:00

Let's consider the prevailing barbarity of much contemporary art production, the primitive accumulation accomplished through crude manners and Richard Prince worship that marks the current exhibition of Nate Lowman.

The primary lesson of John Milius’ libertarian cinematic tract, Conan the Barbarian, was its paranoid misunderstanding of the will-to-power as the conquering vengeance of the oedipal slave, that is the will-to-power recast as the master-slave dialectic… The unshackling will to self that consolidates its lordly power through the shackling of others via the secret of steel, i.e. the patrilineal sword, the phallic signifier 'willfuly' manifested as steel. As so often is quoted in a drunken night among fraternal buds, Conan’s self-effectuating answer to the question ‘what is best in life’, he replies with a Serra-esque list of verbs—“To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women. “

After years spent questing the shallowest forays of trash culture, the Lowman returns with his bounty in tow. A procession of alienated labor (those college grads paying off debt…) and defeated celebrities--from Joan Rivers to de Kooning's Marilyn--like the slaves from conquests abroad brought whipped and shackled into the glorious metropolitan salons of the 21st century further embellishes the signalling of a new lord returned to rule us all. The human spoils of Lowman's bounty fills not one but two of Manhattan’s largest galleries in its self-proclaimed ‘trash landing’. Sure, thanks to the reifying power of contemporary artworks, the lamentations are put on mute—perhaps for Gavin's sake as I'm certain Maccarone wouldn't care…

Yet, given the aesthetic power of synaesthesia, their howls of bondage re-emerge as the noisy drips marking each and every painting. These works' messy formal 'surplus', that authored seepage whose distinctive facture removes the idea that they are mere mechanical facsimiles, marks Lowman's appropriated property in the same way that an iron brand marks livestock. This is appropriation art as primitive accumulation, the quaking of the earth with the war drums of one’s hubris, spitting or jizzing in someone’s soup to inform them who really owns them.

Crucial to understanding the cultural value of Conan’s deeply conservative art was that screenwriter Oliver Stone intended for the film adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy novels to be set in a post-apocalyptic future—a wholly normative coke-fueled epiphany akin to all the other return to order fantasies of mainstream cinema during the Reagan years. This fact only further embellishes this return of the barbaric as sovereign operator in a posthistorical time that delineates its public sense by coming home everyday to family values. Might Nate, in a fit of patrilineal anxiety, throw celebrity women under the bus because he can only impregnate their mediated image with meaning and not their factual bodies with his conquering seed? Even a painting of a notorious hurricane is understood through this patriarchal angst, a swirling vortex of trauma complete with a woman's name—a name that might as well be 'Mary-Kate'.

Like the raising of the sun to extinguish the mongrel night, this overflowing exhibition salutes this tumescent prince with the fulfilment of his kingship, the coronation of his self—Nate, The Lowman—into the sovereign figure through which a contemporary public is able to circulate their being and its 'whatever' understandings. A quick google search of ‘nate lowman’ reveals his indissoluble lordship, nowhere do the artistic by-products of his kingly autopoeisis figure in the results, only the man himself appears. Nate caught by a papparrazzo as he passes through the 'public' interstices between his studio and home and all as he hangs on the arm of his now lost queen.

Metallica with Lou Reed: Full Album Recorded

2011-06-16T16:31:00.001-07:00

William Wheaton

It was fairly intriguing if nothing else in 2009 when Lou Reed and Metallica jammed on two old Velvet Underground songs at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th anniversary show at Madison Square Garden. It was revealed by Rolling Stone magazine last night that Lou Reed and Metallica went into the studio in May and cut an entire album. Lou Reed wrote the songs and then Metallica helped build arrangements.
So what is this going to be an album that hipsters buy or is this going to become a joke or what is this going to be? It may be the best move either side could make at this point. Lou Reed’s solo career had some unlistenable bad depths and Metallica are probably never fully going to get over that stupid documentary were they go into group therapy together. It might have made more so sense for them to make this seemingly arbitrary move back in the early to mid 90’s, when I was a teenager because the air waves at that point were filled with people like Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails who were probably influenced by both Metallica and Lou Reed. Lou Reed hasn’t played with a band that produced that much noise since the original Velvet Underground. If nothing else the version of “White Light/White Heat” from the Madison Square Garden show is very loud. Metallica’s contemporary metal bands and in my opinion musical superiors Voivod and Celtic Frost took wild musical risks like that and had open ears to things going in punk or gothic/industrial music.
I think those people are likely to get very bored doing what they do year after year. They must. Metallica are getting kind of old Lou Reed is obviously older. They have to take risks like this or their existence becomes irrelevant even to themselves, likely.
I’ll give the new album a listen when it comes out. I’ve said here earlier I feel less and less interested in “bands” for the most part, it has to do with my moving politically to the right over recent years and a few other things, although it has been a long process of growing disdain. I have felt that Lou Reed with Metallica doing “White Light/White Heat” had a certain vitality to it. There are some interesting musical textures coming out of that collaboration-more so then some jack-ass indie rocker’s local band in Williamsburg.
We’ll hear it when it comes out, which is not clear when.

The Pure Essence of Garbage

2011-06-16T00:33:00.000-07:00

The new Peste Noire album is going miles to alienate their fanbase for the win!

Famine, who now goes by DJ Famine, said in a 2009 interview with diabolical conquest that the next album would be all reggae, "pure 'fucking' reggae' to be specific. And although he failed to deliver on that promise, ska-punk is present, and so are electronic beats, polka, sex and machine gun samples, funky bass solos, orchestral instrumentation, chicken imitations and those romantic guitar leads that brought fans to this band in the first place. Piling all this genre-fucking onto tracks so expansive and theatrical they can hardly be called 'songs', DJ Famine projects his nationalist agony with a rarefied air and utter disgust for humanity.

Mourning their disdain at having sexual intercourse with the beloved French soil in its current state of decadent putrefaction (gasp, foreigners are walking on it!), the music manages to be all at once extremely melancholic, conservative and fratty—which no doubt will make it a big hit among North-American audiences...

Forget the hipster recuperated Les Legions Noires and their countless children. One no longer needs to suffer the sight of a short-haired, post-collegiate bro moshing in a Mutiilation t-shirt at the reunion show of Ted Leo's old hardcore band (great band tho, Citizen's Arrest). Seize this here metal as one that not only sets its aim on the moral agenda of the cultural mainstream but also one that ecstatically soils the dignity to which this subculture endows its alternative forms. Cultness bedamned, this music is contemporary in the gauchest sense possible. With black metal's trite intimation of 'trueness', the obscure reaches of this pathopuritanical subgenre are increasingly subject to libidinal circulation by urban professionals who, with their media apparatuses, then weave its identifications into a yet another marketable, compensatory veil to enrich their suburbanized lives. 'L'Ordure D'État Pure' corrects this instrumentalization, the hipster minstrel show of corpse paint and bullet belts loses itself in the mocking sociality of a Rabelesian carnival or within Baudelaire's criminal flaneur. In the advent of hipster metal columns and blogs—even a 'cvlt nation' has recently been founded, mockery has a new cross to which it must howl.

Put this on for a 'poseur test.' If they love it, they're a poseur; if they hate it, they're a poseur. Alienation all around, just like the one ms. DJ Famine, a dual citizen of hell and the kingdom of France, feels. This album finds exile at l'Auberge Espagnole… the Erasmus-sanctioned putrefaction of the mourning corpse of Old Europe impgrenates every second of this highly toxic magister opus of a gargoyle turd.

Like the stylistically miscengenating Lugubrum before them (see their excellent 2008 record, 'Albino de Congo', an album claimed to have been recorded in the former Belgian colony)—a band whose self-described 'brown metal' revels not in the absence of light but rather the matter of our human 'sub-continent'—Peste Noire uncomfortably appends 'shit' to this sub-cultural genre's long-guiding criteria of "only death is real;" confounding the social apprehension of hate one garish fold at a time…

Half a decade ago, at an American Museum a hipster defended the performance of African blues music redone as Cajun chansons by stating that it is "about the moment of miscegenation… that 'mon negre' is a term of endearment." If one only turns this defensive caveat inside out, if one were to locate the belligerent tail to its considerate head, one may find DJ Famine and his art hatefully seething like a Thelemite monk in bestial stupor to the throb of his globally integrated nation-state.

"what infamy! where have nature and the forests gone? everything is ugly. there isn't a natural habitat to hunt in..."

Diapsiquir, keep your guard up…

available now for pre-order on these shores from the band's Mesnie Amerique and on yours thru La Mesnie Herlequin

Human Centipede 2 BANNED IN THE UK!

2011-06-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

by

William Wheaton

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/BVV278459/

Here is it is kids, you may never see this again in your life. A fictional narrative film banned in a Western country.
The film Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence has now been rejected by the British Board of Film Classification. It is effectively banned in the United Kingdom. Wow, that really is going some. For a fictional film to be banned in a western country at this point is really saying something. Apparently, the main character of the film becomes aroused at watching a DVD of the first Human Centipede movie. He attaches twelve people together. There’s a whole lot of sexual violence in the second film, rape for example, which there wasn’t really in the first film. The new film is apparently much closer to being torture pornography. The first film it wasn’t even completely clear how much of a sexual thing it was for the mad scientist to sow the three people together anus-to-mouth or why he did it exactly. The new one it is clearly the main character’s jerk-off fantasy. He had somewhat hit a nerve with the first film, but with the second one the issue of sexual arousal becomes more central, and apparently the victims are shown naked in the second film, the first film they had those weird diapers and bandages on. The BBFC also said the film could not be cut in such a way as to be anything less then totally rejected. Meaning, the film is more or less merely a sexual fantasy of unimaginable torture from front to end.
You may except that I, a good gun-loving American libertarian, will go on a political rant about the violation of free speech that has taken place here. I would but I sort of feel that this is the best thing that could have ever have happened to the film. I have a feeling that if the film does not get an official release bootlegs will turn up eventually. This incredible free and sensational publicity to a lower budget horror sequel that might have ended up otherwise in obscurity, as horror sequels often do. That’s a real historical event right there. The right wing radio host Michael Savage is banned from entering the U.K for reasons I don’t quite follow or accept which is very impressive considering he has never used foul language on air. Here in the United States occasionally a pornographer like Max Hardcore does a little prison time if they get into material that is a little bit left of legal. If the Human Centipede 2:Full Sequence gets banned, if a horror film is taken that seriously in this day and age, that’s got to be one horrific little horror film. The little BBFC release suggests that the film might even be potentially illegal under British obscenity laws, so Dutch director Tom Six could potentially face legal trouble on this whole deal. That I would say is fairly historic.
People talk about this graffiti artist guy Banksy as if he is a historic controversy. Relatively speaking, he is not. Probably a lot of the art world, people like Joao Ribas, are likely to end up footnotes to Banksy. Banksy has succeeded in making a lot of money. He’s not especially shocking or controversial. Let’s examine the evidence. Between 1992 and 1994, 50 churches were burned in Norway in connection to the black metal movement, Michael Savage was banned from entering the United Kingdom despite never having used a swear word on the radio, and now Human Centipede 2 is banned from ever being shown in the United Kingdom. Art critics should consider these things when they describe something as “transgression”.
Well, you know it means that Tom Six has really hit on some very delicate nerves. Acts of rape and sexual torture fill the pages of the local news sections of local papers. There appears to be a serial killer currently loose on Long Island. In attempting to run and orderly and safe society we don’t like that much that people take sexual pleasure in torturous acts against others, unfortunately it is a fairly standard pathology that comes up every once and again. If people are forced to eat feces, the main character has an erection, then that is going to bother people. If he wraps some barbed wire around his penis and rapes the woman at the end of the human centipede, (apparently what happens in the film) then that is really not going to go over well in mixed company.

Voices are Real

2011-06-10T12:29:00.001-07:00

The Lost Musical Genius of Phillip Garrido:

By William Wheaton

It came to be a week ago at time of writing that Phillip Garrido was sentenced to 431 years in prison in connection to his 18 year kidnapping of Jaycee Lee Dugard from 1991-2009. What few release about the case is that Phillip Garrido was not just a child rapist and kidnapper, but also a musician. There is, perhaps an alternate reality somewhere where it is Phillip Garrido in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame instead of Lou Reed or Neil Young. He performed starting in California in the 70’s, but was given to trouble with drugs (he is said to have taken LSD everyday for four years) and was arrested for raping a woman for hours upon hours, the beginning of a sad tale that ends now within the rest of his life behind bars for committing the unspeakable act of holding a girl captive, raping her constantly, fathering two children by her. This underscores another tragedy, the loss of what could be one of rock’s great, lost geniuses. Based on the one demo of his music that made it on-line, Voices are Real, I would say that is the case. Apparently, there are recordings of the young Phillip Garrido from the 70’s that exist, whether or not we will ever hear them or not is unclear. I would like to lead the call for them to be released.
I’m a very tough crowd for rock and roll. That I have been losing interest over the years would be a substantial understatement. I’m much more excited by conversations about firearms, at this point. I was not homesick for Williamsburg and East Village hipster culture while I lived in Las Vegas. Joy Division is a good enough band, my favorite for years and years. Thirty years after Joy Division, forty after the Velvet Underground, Williamsburg is still full of people wearing Velvet Underground and Joy Division t-shirts, which is very ironic because Ian Curtis of Joy Division was not a liberal but rather a member of the British Conservative Party, unlike the hipsters with the Unknown Pleasure t-shirts, and not too long ago Mo Tucker of the Velvet Underground was identified correctly in footage of a Tea Party rally to the surprise of many. Scandinavian black metal stands up well. Somewhat a black metal band but from Switzerland rather then Scandinavia, Celtic Frost is an excellent band, I recently gave them a good review. The band I really like a lot though right now is Goblin. The thing with Goblin is they may have shoot right up to being my favorite band right now, as there is a lot of Goblin I haven’t heard yet. Goblin for those who might not know is the progressive rock band that was hired out to do soundtrack work for the films of Italian horror director Dario Argento. Goblin’s work stands on its own too, I feel. But Garrido, there was a real genius of rock and roll.
The music on Voices are Real is somewhat like progressive rock, like Rush, Yes, or King Crimson, except that progressive rock is generally associated with very long songs and Garrido’s songs lasted only for a short time and stopped in the middle of things without warning. He liked synth a lot, especially very cheesy synth. He also recorded on 4- tracks, so the sound quality is extremely low-fi. His voice is spot and his guitar playing is also right on spot. Oh the lyrics? They’re all about little girls, very pedophilic. When he sang about his baby girl, he really meant it.

Which art is the worst out of all the trash Michael Krebber has knowingly / unknowingly breeded? pt. I

2011-06-10T12:13:00.001-07:00

The art of Lisa Tan

The art of Nathan Hylden

The art of Per-Oskar Leu

The art of Tobias Kaspar

The art of Anna Ostoya

The art of David Hominal

the art of Alistain Frost

the art of Paul Cowan

The Films of Anna Nicole Smith

2011-06-08T06:34:00.000-07:00

The Straight To Video Films of Anna Nicole Smith

Skyscraper(1996)/To the Limit(1995) (Director Raymond Martino)

To the Limit(1995) is in its own way a kind of classic. A straight-to-VHS movie staring the late great Anna Nicole Smith, this film qualifies as a gold in the aesthetics of some weird terrible movie that you would see in a hotel room in the wee hours of morning on cable that you might watch half falling asleep, an aesthetic I hold in great reverence as one of the only cinematic aesthetics that still genuinely captivates me. Almost all the movies I’ve reviewed on here either belonged to the ghetto of the grindhouse film or the ghetto of the straight-to-VHS ghetto, so there you go.
Anna Nicole Smith is a legend beyond legend more so for her ultra-strange personal life and death the anything else. For a while her manager and sometimes boyfriend Howard K. Stern was facing charges in relation to her prescription drug use and death. For a lot of very detailed information about this, check out the blog of an acquaintance of mine,PI John J. Nazarian, at www.desperateexes.com. John J. Nazarian was Howard K. Stern’s investigator for a while, and if you had any question of the sophistication of the legal intrigue around her death, his blog will set that at ease. I know John Nazarian a little bit from working on the Pellicano trial. He’s usually pretty sharp although he made some substantial mistakes in writing about Pellicano co-defendants the Nicherie brothers Daniel and Abner (friends of a friend I may write about on here later). The extent of Anna Nicole Smith’s mental instability before her death can be surmised from the account of the generally perceptive John Nazarian on details concerning Anna Nicole Smith’s nanny and infant daughter- as Nazarian writes-
“One of Nadine’s recollections was the feeding of the baby, the issue was not too much formula, 2.5 v 3.0. The reason that was stated in court was that Anna wanted her baby ‘to be sexy.’ You could see the look of disgust on some of the jurors…it was an uncomfortable feeling and an even more uncomfortable thought.”

There’s a good chance you may find Nazarian’s writings on the case difficult to understand unless you are either a lawyer or private investigator who followed that case carefully. Be that as it may, his writing is actually more relevant to her understanding her film work then you might on the surface suppose. To call Anna Nicole Smith the worst actress I’ve ever seen in a film would be a gross understatement. This is a baffling plasticity, beyond anything one could expect. It would be hard to imagine anyone intentionally acting poorly being able to be a worse actress. She was, at the time of filming To the Limit, hotter then the blazes of hell physically, but that is seriously underscored by the fact that for a while she was way, way overweight. Then towards the end of her life she was incoherent from prescription drug use.
The “plotline” of the film involves a renegade CIA head versus the mafia as the good guys over something or other about the Vietnam War. When Anna Nicole Smith’s husband is killed by a car bomb. The bride and a number of guests at the wedding are slaughtered. Then it’s a war between the mob and this one renegade evil C.I.A agent. Anna Nicole Smith must race time to stop the evil renegade C.I.A agent, except when she has to stop to masturbate in the bath. That’s pretty much what it is, although I have to say, it has a real perverted little edge to it. When the villain, the evil C.I.A operative, stresses out, he tokes some opium and has a dominatrix whip him to get his good old opium and S&M kick. That’s an unforgettable sequence. Paradoxically that scene is both hilariously over the top and genuinely sick. I cracked up. It shows exactly what a bent, fetishistic area of the human psyche this film comes out of.
A lot of the film was shot in Las Vegas, of course which adds to the general vibe -brow thrills centered around large breasts which the film delivers in typical 90’s So-Cal straight-to-VHS style. There are a number of highly random soft-core sequences of Anna Nicole Smith in it that have exactly nothing to do with the plot whatsoever, including one with Anna Nicole Smith masturbating with a shower nozzle. Another scene that really grabbed my attention is when Ana Nicole Smith rams a helicopter with her car and lives through the explosion, a moment of utterly unrealistic violence surpassing any other in any action film I can think of off handedly.
The real winner though is the villain smoking the opium pipe and then having his dominatrix whip him to relive his stress at his criminal operation not going his way. That scene is depraved. It really shows the level of class of the film. I have to say I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s about as absurd and badly acted as the rest of the movie, but truly perverted, it strives to capture the disgusting depths of addiction and lechery. I couldn’t even believe what I was watching. It steals the film. I think To The Limit, things like that, straight-to-VHS bizarreness with ridiculous soft-core elements, that I can sort of fall asleep to, zone out to in a kind of bliss state. It may be less that they are deliberately and intentionally creating skillful art as that they are unexplainably bizarre and come out of the fantasies of a demented psyche. It is also that they are so absurd. That’s quite a combo. I’m a little a bit of a sketchy derelict and I like having a laugh at the expense of others, so those films are right up my alley.
Around the same time, there was another film with Anna Nicole Smith. Skyscraper, which is more or less the same plotline as the film Die Hard with a building being hijacked, but Anna Nicole Smith plays a helicopter pilot, which was hilarious because she appears to have been high on painkillers the entire time they shot the film.

New Contributor William Wheaton

2011-06-05T20:04:00.000-07:00

2011-06-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

2011-05-16T17:36:00.001-07:00

confessions of a shop-a-holic

2011-04-26T19:58:00.000-07:00

In watching this promo video are we witness to an act of genesis? I mean, take a good look at that STASH! A kid in a candyshop doesn't even begin to explain the glee that lights Kelley's face as he is caught in a moment of artistic reprieve and given wholly over to what very well could be a prelapsarian show'n'tell of his consuming habits. And, in keeping with some of Kelley's past work, his grin is not far from that of a child who over-zealously shares the fact of their first faecal property. With his griping at the end, his being only "known for the guy who did a sonic youth cover…", this vid makes thoroughly clear, to Kelley at least, that artistic genesis pales in comparison to a trip to the record store--that birthing ground of the consumptive subject.

He dives not only into the dustbin of culture but that of memory as well: the memories of a lifelong consumer freed of the burden of their daily labors, the daily grind of effectuating art as a career eschewed for shopping's eternal returns. As the naturalized act of consumption is increasingly understood as an aesthetic prerogative of emerging artists--an understanding whose benignly reflexive insight into this integral social ritual of international capital only serves to further affirm the altogether dismal public discourse surrounding organized labor's political form--watching Kelley in this vid we witness a historical antecedent to such emergent practices. The grin on his face is the grin of a godfatherly apparatus resplendent in its subjective immersion into the marketable goods that it misrecognizes as its own. Kelley may hate the artist he's become, this grinded-down soul of a blue-chip cyborg, but through the mnemonically (re)generative capacities of the cultural marketplace, he's always able to become himself again.

The goal of this brief text is not to slap Kelley on his wrist for promoting his shopping habits. Rather it is a consideration of the way in which consumption constitutes an operative horizon in a practice like Kelley's, that is a practice where the creative subjectivity employed by the artist cycles back to his role as a consumer emancipated from the demands of production--especially as many of these tax-deductible purchases will no doubt find their way into the content of his studio work. And while my critical speculation of Kelley's time spent 'off the clock' does succumb to the dubious policing routinely performed by the observing public of celebrity figures, a scrutiny that only further enforces the exploitative collapse of the distinction between labor and "free time". Yet through my capitulation to this particular technique of neoliberal culture it is my goal to ultimately question if the surplus of leisure time (and space for that matter) accumulated by artists like Kelley constitute an effective biopolitical horizon, especially if these well-earned moments of emancipation are in fact revivifying extensions of one's daily laboring for the subjugating demands of consumer culture.

When an artist has reached the level of visibility such as Kelley is it still possible to engender cultural alternatives or counter-productive antagonisms? This is especially an important question to ask in a scenario such as his where the historical value of cultural alterity has greatly contributed to the asking price of his art. Could it be the case that these potential alternatives (if they are even plausible) were to be effected, then we might not find ourselves in the company of a bitter artistic subject riddled by the affective pathologies of consumer culture--an artist bound to a career path that perpetuates a world that only brings them down. Where in the past Kelley has largely acted as the ironic janitor of institutional consciousness, it seems recently the last thing that he ironically mopped was his CV.

What makes this particular video so compelling is not only that Kelley is content to share what he put in his bag but that he is also content to share this very contentedness with his captivated public. This is no doubt naive to ask but might it be possible for an artist to advocate for an economy of desire in which the potlatch of contentment is not implicitly tied to a sales pitch--the questionable freedoms offered to an over-worked subject by marketable culture's bargain bins?

2011-04-18T22:12:00.001-07:00

Featured Artist: Robert Janitz

by Howard Hurst on January 12, 2011

I met this week’s featured artist, Robert Janitz, at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, where he is part of the new exhibition, Winter Break. Janitz grew up in Germany, and honed his artistic practice in France. His relationship to the space reflects this background. He arranges his paintings like installation, employing artificial backdrops made of cardboard. His interventions push as much against the old architectures of Western Europe as they do against the white of contemporary art galleries. When he speaks of the old great halls, and palaces of Europe, there is awe in his voice, though he speaks of tradition as an impossibly binding force.

When I first encountered them, the four paintings included in his show seemed sparse and harshly minimal. Looking closer, I realized each painting functions on a variety of levels. In them we see evidence of process, whether it’s the back of a canvas, or a portion of the stretcher, viewed through a translucent varnished surface. There is a serious level of self reflection in these paintings. This is not merely process painting, or art about art. Though they might speak with a different accent and walk with a strange gate, these are paintings nonetheless. To view Janitz’s work is to join the artist on a circuitous journey. Following him one gets the sense that the artist is searching for a new kind of space, somewhere to create work that is both powerful and approachable.

How do you view your paintings in relationship to their surroundings?
They eat the surroundings. Well, hmmm, let’s see. There’s a current show at Guggenheim “Classicism and Chaos” which i think reflects on skepticism about the architectural framing of art. One would think that a painting would have an autonomy that would be independent of architecture. Scratch that assumption. I walk away from that game entirely.

In relationship to the tradition of painting?
Parasites are quite abundant in a healthy ecosystem. Eliminating cash is getting rid of corruption. Every society needs a black market.

You have lived in New York for about a year and a half, before that you spent several years in Paris. You were raised in Germany. How do you think these shifts have effected your working practice?
It is a cornucopia of inspiration to me, how people enjoy their suffering and how they create their environments/cultures to do so. And they don’t want to be cured. I love New York and New York loves me.

You often utilize materials, such as tulle, unprimed canvas, varnish, and cardboard in your work. There is an often industrial feel to these materials, can you speak to this?
I’d like to tie in the surface issue and the notion of flatness. How in some pieces it is about scraping the surface and in others it’s about shiny, matte, glossy or muted. They provide planes of focus, from behind and in front. For instance the cardboard piece pulls you behind the surface. In a way its size and casualness dilates the focus.

Your paintings seem to subvert traditional notions of painting. Do they function as paintings in the traditional sense? What is it exactly that you are challenging/ negating?
They are a double negation.

How integral is installation to your process?
I envision painting with the canvas hung on the wall and then presenting it laid out flat on a table. When we’re talking about the place of the cardboard I think about the architectural constraints of fucking – or the evolution of the glory hole.

Do you work with an idea or space in mind, or does the final installation come as a secondary consideration?
If you think like a maggot: it would chew through what ever it is in. There is no consideration at all. There is just unmediated action. That is the point of my work.

(images courtesy of the artist)

2011-04-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

Some blog posts clearly need to happen. Unfortunately, they are rarely the ones that are realized. Posts that are necessary to give us deeper understanding of the history of forms, the conditions of their production, and their contributions to history, recent and long past. Based in research, scholarship, and professionalism, as much as aesthetic appreciation and pleasure, this interview is such an endeavor.
Dieter Roelstraete's is obviously and directly indexed to art/architecture/italian magazines in Berlin, but perhaps even more significant is his empirical relationship to the humanities in anal, critics, and perhaps speculative realism soon. Dieter Roelstraete seems to have investigated Jason Dodge as one would study language—that is, not dismissing him but precisely assessing his true potential. In seeming contradiction, he resisted the temptations of verbal manifesto and polemic. Such evasion—which sharply contrasts with the approach of his teacher, friend, and mentor ____ _____—leaves a clear path for the conversation itself or the experience of the conversation—allusive maybe but certainly not mute, opaque, uninterpretable, and definitely open, wide open to time and space and stuff. Ambitious projects require ambitious support and this is why we are honored to link to post-canvas' most recent post today.

http://post-canvas.blogspot.com/2011/04/reconstructing-conversation-with-poetic.html

Thank you,

Philippe Vergne

Director

2011-04-03T02:48:00.000-07:00

2011-03-22T19:58:00.001-07:00

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2011-03-20T13:37:00.001-07:00

hate is a strong word, love is a soft one. in thanks to the lazy god, sunday is a day of soft words: Bill F*cking Orcutt .

2011-03-17T16:44:00.001-07:00

magoo feels you… magoo feels you…

2011-03-16T00:04:00.000-07:00

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #?: Alex Olson @ Lisa Cooley

2011-03-07T06:01:00.000-08:00

Alex Olson’s epic squiggle fail at Lisa Cooley last September (a not-quite-acerbic showcase of forced whimsy) summoned the mild style of a young graphic designer with a heavy interest in Beat Happening album covers and raw denim.

While Olson might be convinced that she’s walking a viewer through the construction of a painting, and conjuring linguistic games along the way, “As a Verb, As a Noun, In Peach and Silver” actually has magnificently demonstrated the collective amnesia that exists regarding the work of Cy Twombly and Bernard Frize! (Not to mention Olson’s own lack of consideration for the reasoning behind developments during the past 60 or-so years of abstraction on both sides of the Atlantic.)

The crusts have been cut off, snooze button is being hit. Have you ever shopped at APC? Well, this is sort of the same. Dapper French vocab gets reduced to a smooth neutral: digestible and svelte with quirky corners. The unified color palate and recycled sets of moves that limp throughout Olson’s show is totes ready-to-wear Mercer Street hegemony.

It’s fey painting with blinders on, the Peter Pan collar of painting. Clunky marks attempt shy incisiveness, but instead splish-splash in the kiddie pool of Krebber-Lite. Take one home, hang it next to your books that are arranged in color order. Have some friends over, wrap yourself in your Hudson’s Bay blanket, debate washing your New Standards…

Arranging alchemically dry gestures, (not commanding or complex enough to really be slights of hand) Olson gives us painting inside itself- a land where signifiers are so open that they sit stalled out in neutral, referring really only to their own safe petit-bourgeois sensibility. Simultaneously tepid and arrogant, Olson’s decorative, self-satisfying twee formalism employs semiotics as a ruse for content, proposing that the journey IS the destination. But, what a brief, bland trip it’s been.

Delicate taste neutering the potential for interesting art is nothing new, it’s just kind of a major bummer when how a magnetic poetry jam between Olson, Prekop and Molzan would play out is the only question you leave the gallery wondering…

Score: 3 Red Velvet Brastch Wursts with cream cheese frosting from Magnolia.

Guest Post: David Hammons @ L&M

2011-03-04T19:19:00.000-08:00

million dollar paintings are too unanimously loved. i'd praise the bureau work, esp with its duchampian glimpse into a shallow void, but emphasize how these works too easily distill the contextual use of impoverished gestures into showroom-ready works sold by their critical aura. not that hammons' work doesn't "deserve" a high price tag, but it is convenient works like these, late works made by an established artist for the market's contemporary moment, that loudly reinforce not painting's limit as a socially-engaged artistic practice (there's a better, less condescending way of saying this…) but more so, given its unanimous praise, the ease with which contemporary art's public luxuriates in critique's objectified status as a privileged contemporary artwork.

POSEURCRUSHEUR

2011-03-04T10:03:00.000-08:00

twitter.com/jerrymagoo

one can never be too late for a party…

2011-03-01T12:27:00.001-08:00

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, part whatever: Gedi Sibony @ Greene Naftali

2011-02-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

When garbage activates the rest of the showroom, does that include its temporary visitors? What if Sibony's yoga-and-weed-fueled weltanschauung activated nothing but our bodies’ osmosic becoming-garbage under the orgon-ic assault of these meticulous bouquets of new-age detritus?

In what felt like a harsh swig of bongwater, Sibony revealed the earth-toned vacuousness that constitutes his sculptural practice. A levitating couch couldn’t even save this stinker from its Anthropologie display window patina. With Granola-friendly patterns, zoomorphic abstractions and fussy formal interventions, Sibony managed to further embarrass Brooklynites with the stereotypes that this increasingly petit-bourgeois suburb has assumed. Ideas swindled from the early works of Michael Asher and Lawrence Weiner are immersed into the total-work of the locavore, that entrepreneurial solve et coagula whose subjective mastering whips the dregs of metropolitan impoverishment into a gourmet cultural experience. Sibony plants our impoverished presence in the very soil where the "organic" Wirtschaftwunder of his gentrifying gestures takes flourishing root.

score: one Trader Joe’s bought dried-out BrätschWörst with a dab of dried ketchup

Digital Tour Bus

2011-02-18T17:53:00.000-08:00

Magoo is taking the weekend off. The Millionaires, though, are recording a new single with Jeffree Star which should be out very soon and which AO is eager to use at the bottom of a post. In the meanwhile, they let us visit their tour bus.
Digital Tour Bus

MNTW of 2010 entry #5: Elad Lassry@Luhring Augustine

2011-02-16T07:14:00.000-08:00

“Presented in the same context as his photographic work, the film serves as two interchangeable portraits that provide a relational narrative devoid of resolution.”

...in reference to a video piece located in the “back room” of Lassry’s exhibition, where an oversized reel projector projecting a digital video of an alt-attractive actress handling a snake greets visitors with congenial erotic implications not completely dissimilar to the twee sex of a Belle and Sebastian record sleeve. A ubiquitous late-noughties strategy especially among young artists who plunder late-20th century conceptual art aesthetics (most of T293+Simon Fujiwara, etc) and dead artist retrospectives, the use of obsolete projectors is intended less in, say, a Kluge-ian reflection on capitalist time and creative destruction that anthropologizes industrial detritus than a sort of American Apparel gesture based on the already-vintage items made new-in-box.

Passing on the dubious use of the word “relational” in the press text, “lack of resolution”, almost always invoked alongside ‘language”, applies here to a photographic language difficult to locate in time but which is clearly entrenched in post-war commercial photography. Starburst, American photography in the 70's. “Indecision” as a surrealist tool for detournement is found in a post-digestive state, after its been broken down by enzymes, guzzled by advertizing and re-packaged as an accessory for a cool item for your apartment. The new conceptual space is precisely the retail space of Urban Outfitters. Photos emptied of their associations are well composed and seem to always convey the etsy charm their intentionaly nebulous purposes need to achieve their mesmerizing and—arguably a better choice of word for the press release but possibly for different reasons than those invoked—disquieting effect. There are reasons to think that names like Jack Goldstein, maybe John Baldessari, are mentioned in the sales pitch, and it’s difficult to say whether the

work presents itself as updating some of the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of the past “critical” art or if it takes nothing but the west-coast hedonistic swag, dissolving semiotic concerns to the shelving strategy. Rather, “lack of resolution” seems to be Lassry’s only option as long as long as his art maintains its strict appropriative diet of ineffectual communication (there needs to be a better term than vintage or hipster art)—a point of comparison with the oddly pathological humor of recent young “conceptual” art that fails to understand that the future of smart is INFORMATION ART. Resolution is not desirable because the pictures have to be obsolete as economic objects of communication before they can be soaked in the enzyme. And the pr might be appropriate when it describes this art edible like underwear as bypassing intelligence or sensuality—money enjoys and produces the lap-dance.

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #4: Tobias Madison @ Swiss Institute

2011-02-15T05:49:00.000-08:00

It feels at once wrong, yet completely natural, that, as humanity plunges further toward its bitter conclusion, primary-market artworks aren’t as precious as the genetically kosher animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? However, it’s nice to try. And despite their shortcomings as biological commodities, Madison's augmented simulacras of euro-trash ebay curiosities do have promise for their potential use-value. For when the partition of the world's political economy disintegrates into roving packs of hooligan corporate liquidity managers trying their hand at primitive accumulation, much of Madison's art could function as barricade material. As it doesn't take much ingenuity to realize that Bamboo and sturdy climbing ropes can be jury rigged into all sorts of improvised—and edgy—guet-apens to protect both family and home...
Meanwhile, this faithless contemporary moment is salvaged only by the armored refuge of culture devoted solely to the benedictions of the bicephalous prophet, Guyton\Walker. Though, let's not ever entertain the ideologically cannibal notion that these defensive materials could be plied against us…

score: 30 thousand hundred million BrätschWörsts

guest post by Dee R. Schwigger: why Berlin now

2011-02-13T18:18:00.000-08:00

Having emerged from the boom years as a $oulle$$, balkanized and ambiguously urban aggregate where serious serious contemporary art transactions are being conducted within a growing patchwork/network of commercial contemporary galleries and artists which now seems—if not appealing or wholesome in any way—at least stable, Berlin is in fact under siege. Threatening the creative communities that found a welcoming terre d'adoption-cum-cheap rent and established the metropolis' reputation as an international center for art and culture, the deterritorializing workings of capitalism are slowly but surely poisoning the unique essence of this bustling post-Weimar bohemia. In these times when the market value of the cherished and "mandatory" (source: Artforum 4 years ago) 1-year German sojourn for predominantly white north-american artists is under attack, AO salutes creatives who resist heteronormative models of neo-liberal art capital with more décomplexé, utterly br00tal post-electroclash etsy neo-liberalism.

:(

2011-02-12T15:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #3:Free @ NuMu

2011-02-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

photo courtesy of disimages

“And in our ignorance we let them take control
And in their wisdom they decreed that we should bow
Their grips extending to encompass all the world
The cages open to accommodate the crowd
When we put our lives into their hands
We put our hands into their chains” - Amebix

A 17-story shitshow of the latest, most neo-liberal, dumbly naive and repulsive incarnations of overdetermined transparency, democracy and corporate-sponsored leftovers of “generational” tater tots. Etsy-esque in its user-generated fascism, countless with rampant sophisms that no seriously-minded institution could ever afford to approach with a ten foot pole… Free is chock-full o' WAGE-certified ingredients that make up this ideologically indigestible “magister smoothie” of entartete mediocrity.

Offering yet another example of the fanatical recasting of contemporary media’s enslaving jouissance as emancipatory artistic content, this exhibition's curatorial fixation on the vaporous stuff of digital ether—that evaporated substance whose mercurial relation to value maintains the post-Fordist bottom line—makes apparent the literal economy of form so crucial to the tumescent careers of young contemporary artists. With this artistic and curatorial inscription of emancipation onto the back of no-cost content, services and enthusiasms, it is necessary for one to critically examine their monadic relation to the communal becoming of this accursed share. We must parse our exegetical tie to the servile economy of these digitized potlatches; plumb the sumptuous abandon to which we subject our selves to this communal overflowing of marketable subject-identities. It remains up to the user-generated proletariat of self to will a discursive agency capable of contesting the very techniques of connexionist knowledge that foster its present conscription. And all while not lapsing into the affirmative cynicisms or catastrophic atavisms that have come to demarcate many of contemporary art's operative sites. That the coils of a serpent are more complex than the burrows of a molehill almost goes without noting given the context of Free, blah, blah, blah…

Another exhibition in a long line that continues to demonstrate that Marcia Tucker's lower-case museum has further left its socialist-inspired, non-museological roots in the dust with yet another group of bankable up-and-comers who make work "like, kind of about the internet," work perfectly sited for the 21st-century kunsthalle. Despite her noted sense of humor, Marcia no doubt rolls over in her grave once again.

score: 666 million BrätschWörsts

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #2:Rob Pruitt @ GBE

2011-02-11T07:00:00.000-08:00

Pruuuuuiitttt.

Of course it’s horrible. Why wouldn’t it be? Yet in comparison to Dan Colen’s NY Gagosian debut, Pruitt managed to actually keep the superficial perversity of Pop alive, or more accurately, exhume its corpse and prop it upright for at least month. Alongside the second, blah-ier version of his Art Awards, his exhibition at Gavin Brown presented art objects whose thought and consideration rivaled that of Miley Cyrus’ tweets. Shaped by the 21st-century spaces of American domesticity—that abundant nexus between cyberspace and the flea market—Pruitt’s gee-whiz artworks offered American decadence yet another material form tailored for the dignified hoarders of the collecting elite. And the biggest question lingers, is Pruitt’s affirmative Pop still art? Or has such a historico-cultural distinction been subsumed into the frenzied spirit of popular culture? Does his latest work artistically re-present the images and experiences of America’s hegemonic entertainment industry or is it simply another embodiment of one of its many totalizing facets? “To understand it is to understand why the terrorists hate us,” was film critic’s Armond White conclusive remark on Jackass 3D; that the same can be said of Pruitt’s 2010 contribution to American culture remains unclear, and perhaps disconcertingly so. However, there is no doubt that the title of White's review, "The Bland and the Bonkers," can fittingly describe Pruitt's celebutante playthings.

score: one large vegan BräschtWörst

2011-02-10T07:32:00.000-08:00

Just saw Spiderman on Broadway and it was f#%$ng AMAZING!!!!! I honestly cannot believe the haters (critics) stand a chance when the crowd from front to back to to bottom was totally electrified by this knockout show! I am not even interested in comics or the story of spiderman on any level and I was blown away by this production! I am definitely going back to see this show again!!! --Richard Phillips, 1:35 AM, facebook

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #1: Brätsch/DAS INSTITUT

2011-02-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

While no official show of this sleaze committee transpired this past year, it was very much in the air to feed the discourse of collaboration and “shared” authorship into the fluorescent euro-trash blender of post-recession amnesia.

How could it even be possible for artistic subjects to produce the absurdly normative stakes of corporate culture in a more exhausted fashion? Screen-saver doodles in favor of culture’s institutionalized ineffectualities? An ESL cathexis with the euro’s fiscal supremacy over the American dollar? If the life of the flaneur once lead to crime, then the life of the poseur now leads to the cubicle. What goes into the making of a Brätschwörst? One thing is for sure: nothing appetizing or healthy.

Only time—funkyzeit—will tell what exotic corners of the connexionist city this plaidoyer for across-the-board bullshit will manage to squat before it is rejected like the first dip into an expired half-eaten qvark. In the meanwhile, we impatiently wait for “Institutional Cupcake”, the Gavin Brown debut imminently scheduled for later this year.

score: a full cornucopia of BrätschWörst! :)

Magoo Rates

2011-02-08T07:00:00.000-08:00

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2011-02-05T14:07:00.000-08:00

despite the "apparent" lack of activity, Magoo has a lot in store... Expect 2010 holiday greetings, a top-notch selection of the best of the worst of last year and an exhaustive roundup of local and international contemporary art exhibitions and events served with an always generous scoopfull of the in-depth commentary that has made AO your destination of choice for one-stop up-to-date cultural commentary.

before the hot dog basket de résistance can be laid on the table, ao proposes this fine entrée of norwegian press release confit...

"Ekblad’s art has never been about cool, strategic, calculated appropriation – it is more a quite personal reworking of her own immediate reality."

"That Ida Ekblad’s exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall opens 45 years to the day after the Danish Cobra painter Asger Jorn filled the same exhibition premises (Bergens Kunst¬forening, 1965) is probably just a curious coincidence, but nevertheless..."

"“I believe in painting in the same way as I believe in music,” she has said in an interview..."

http://www.kunsthall.no/default_e.asp?AID=783&ID=26&K=1&act=kom

Tossing in the towel, Hanging up them boots…

2011-01-27T12:05:00.000-08:00

http://post-canvas.blogspot.com/
ROTFLMAO

2011-01-11T21:07:00.001-08:00

ruminations of a young artist continued...

2010-12-14T19:32:00.000-08:00

A young artist sits in front of the computer. The framerate flickers before his eyes. The first cup of coffee, one youtube video leads to another. Wikipedia. Learning many new things. This is a complex world. Information, Wikileaks. What is free? This is a fucked-up place.

Among the ruins, a small boy emerges. The villagers are in awe. A fantastical creature, half-cat half-dog, mister Sauerkraut. He whispers in the boy's ear: "use art the way you would use anything else." A sage's advice in a world that has already met its end.

The complications of having a post-studio practice in an object-selling world are many. What a sport to materialize ideas into appealing, transitive objects. Art schools are a site where this athletic imperative is in full gear. Given a studio by the same institution that produces legitimized value through academic credentials, how is one to imagine an adequate transition from this pedagogical conundrum to a professionalized adult life?

From the melancholic vacuousness of information's manic accessibility to the quirky hodge-podge of performative wikiselves, the labor of extracting historicity from the shallow tidepool of contemporary art's recent historical awareness becomes a key tool for constructing a career from other careers. Many emergent young players on art's Occidental map build these legitimizing techniques into careers marked by a fluidly object-based practice that relies wholly on the avoidance of redundancy. The need for an aesthetic that never repeats itself too much, concealing the repetitive pattern of labor through randomly assembled artistic novelties wrought material—art production to the tune of iShuffle. The economy's constant need for excitement and can-do imperatives re-territorialize the post-studio studio, transforming the site into a concept-engineering workshop that explores the art object's communicative appeal across the gamut of publicized taste. Within an open-source market, options abound.

Yet how many ideas can one fit in one show? Is more than one too much, falling as it could into tasteless excess? Should the multitude be crafted into a focus group, fanboys whose enthused will-to-consumption determines the very object-derived experiences that they seek? True, that the canalization of information's animistic spirit into discreet objects is a sorrowful affair. What constitutes the post-"studio" if not the begotten mind of the creative producer: a novel site where many moods and inspirations come and go at their own leisure. The stranglehold of the marketer's sardonic sentiments onto the art object is an inheritance best suited for nonentities; dupe artists keen on amassing slush funds for a political life possible outside of art.

Sitting with an artist. Punk rock pizza. Wearing bless pants. "The show will be remarkably clear: One idea, 13 oil paintings, 13 numbers. 1 to 13." Roman numerals? "Not this time. We could use them to number the slides though, what do you think?" The pizza is hot. It burns my tongue. "Are you okay?" I clench my sphincter.

ruminations of a young artist

2010-12-13T17:51:00.000-08:00

A young artist sits in front the computer. The framerate flickers before his eyes. The first cup of coffee, one youtube video leads to another. Wikipedia. Learning many new things. This is a complex world. Wikileaks. What a fucked-up place…

Among the ruins, a small boy emerges. The villagers are in awe. A fantastical creature, half-cat half-dog, mister Sauerkraut. He whispers in the boy's ear: "use art the way you would use anything else." Sage advice in a world that has already met its end.

for those long commutes…at war with the preps: magoo mix #1

2010-12-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

That contemporary art and fashion lacks rock'n'roll is without debate. However, the notion that it ever could ever make up for such a lack is just as—if not more so—naive and ludicrous, mapping as it would a global market with the ageist and hubristic spirit of imperial commerce. That the chauvinist-eschewing microgenres of deep house and coldwave have recently emerged as the martial score to metropolitan creativity and its libidinal After-Dark is a completely practical expression of the two faces, ecstasy and anxiety, of networked productivity and its progressive sexual identities. Rather than rock's aggressive communion between its fecund author and wanton audience—a heteronormative schtick whose pursuit leads only to the author's abject objectification (see this), these two genres disperse the authority of such a communion across the android sexual relations particular to immaterial captial—be it deep house's ecstasy of the non-reproductive city-as-factory or seen in coldwave's subject herking & jerking to an anxiously revised historical object.

It is within these contextual tensions that AOWJM is pleased to present "At War With The Preps," a mix of music that blindly instrumentalizes seraphic argot with an impolite brun canard.

DOWNLOAD

December Forecast

2010-12-07T13:49:00.000-08:00

update…

2010-12-07T10:25:00.001-08:00

magoo venues: apotheke

2010-12-03T16:20:00.000-08:00

wasn't there a certain brand of parsons-bred installation art use to look like this before being a crypto national-socialist was acceptable?

a warm feeling of nostalgia in time for the holidays!

where are you and who are these people? it is nice to not "get" the product you are consuming. is it magic?

dressed in silkscreened polyester guido shirts mocking the aryan beliefs via skulls and eagles they had originally integrated to their personal fashion style non-ironically, they made apotheke this groovy place to sip chartreuse and eat marinated pork tongues to the sound of relentless gabba.

many reasons to be excited by this bar—how many Chinese gangsters have shed their blood on the wooden surface your artiste biedemeyer cocktail rests on? the throbbing techno makes it impossible to have this conversation inside the bar, but it creates a binding atmosphere where all are forced to retreat into getting trashed on sophisticated cocktails as their skulls are raped by audio.

an provence launch? a multiplayer level for COD Black Ops? everything seems possible.

this place is a thrill...

2 get trashed

at apotheke
tonite, is cool

; -)

Antek Walczak @ Real Fine Arts

2010-12-01T17:07:00.000-08:00

Who constitutes the constituency of Jay-Z's recent hit, Empire State of Mind? Simple, Jay-Z himself. In this chintzy jingle advertising a city of one, Jay-Z offers a retrospective look at the able adaptation of his self to the mythic social technique of swapping destitute criminality for the assimilable constitution of respectable elites. Jay-Z's cashes in on the social machine that collapses illegality into legitimate being, the entrepreneurial spirituality that refines the streets on which anyone can walk into the limelight that shines only on, and for, you.

One could also view Antek Walczak's current show, "Empire State of Machine Mind," as a cash-in as well, albeit one mobilized for very different ends. Known previously for his involvement in Bernadette Corporation as well as a writer and filmmaker in his own right, compared to these diffuse, object-resistant projects Walczak's (one could say in the spirit of enterprise) latest artistic venture is a legitimately conventional one: painting—an object so conventionalized that even its ironic iterations are admitted to its assimilable pantheon.

"Empire State of Machine Mind" includes four large canvases whose sole formal element is a schematic illustration of the chorus of Jay-Z's obnoxious anthem compressed by the Lempel Ziv Welch algorithm hand-painted onto primed canvas. Visually and conceptually updating Picabia's machine paintings, OULIPO's textual laboratories and Warhol's dance diagrams for a virtual present, Walczak's paintings also seem fabricated for a contemporary moment that prefers painting "beside itself;" paintings as historically-privileged discursive objects whose commodity status is ostensibly unmoored by dispersive relationships to socially-networked productivity. Yet unlike many of Walczak's New York-based peers whose work operates within this broad rubric–a rubric that largely serves to legitimize epistemologically ineffectual object-based practices–"Empire State of Machine Mind" goes one step further by not taking it–the reprocessing of cultural artifacts into networkable datum, that is–all so sincerely.

Like Broodthaer's famous realization of poetry's impossible object as an insincere work of art, Walczak's use of the contemporary canvas mobilizes a similar critical resolve. By instrumentalizing the code of networked painting to this programmatic chorale of Gothamite success, Walczak's objects achieve a critical posture not through the sincere reterritorialization of medium-specificity across the spectrum of post-Fordist productivity (or perhaps is it just the indexical by-product, the gentrifying ordure of financialized conviviality?) but rather through the insincere re-presentation of such an art's epistemological use as the ideal object of governable subjects, as assimilable codes of being situated around the metropolitan canvas. "Empire State of Machine Mind" reminds viewers of the criminal artifact that informs contemporary art's legible objects. That it is within the coded translation, or compression, of illegitimate life–with its impossible poetry and criminality–into the enforced world of ledgered value rests the critical potential that is to be found within, or beside, the contemporary painted object.

Is it by working through the machinations of contemporary ("advanced") artistic production—which in Walczak's case is the supplementation of the ontological priorities of "transitive" commodity production with the material by-product of information capital, that art might conceivably defect from its servile conscription in the civil war of finance capital? Picture if you will, "I prefer not to…" forged from the soul of an IT technician.

No Presents for Christmas: Lionel Maunz @ Bureau

2010-11-30T09:53:00.000-08:00

The passage of extreme metal identities into the creative economies of post-Fordist capitalist culture is nothing surprising. These identities have been parasited by capital since their inception: Thurston Moore's bootleg 7" capturing Venom's stage-banter being a first-wave example of this, ossifying a highly circulated joke-tape among america's hardcore punk circles––the recording was made by a Black Flag crony when the band opened up for Venom in '86––into a saleable piece of wax for Moore's boutique "indie" label, Ecstatic Peace. Harmony Korine's use of Mystifier and Nifelheim as a score for his Dogpatch cum mondo-fashion ad, Gummo, is a prime example of the second wave, oedipally reprimanding all soon-to-be Vice readers for not matching their Darkthrone tees and homemade Slayer tattoos with red & black flannel or ironic mustaches. Furthermore that the identities associated with metal can be traced to the origin of KISS's merchandising empire goes to show how available such a subjective posture is to consumer docility and its resultant abject iterations.

So what happens when someone whose identity hinges on the cathexis with such consumer tropes decides to make contemporary art? Well, the last few decades brought us a taste in the guise of Matthew Barney. But now we are provided with a full-on feast thanks to Lionel Maunz's current show at Bureau, "Wail Eternal Scorn of Geologic." That I mentioned Barney is no coincidence, Maunz draws heavily from Barney's output as a sculptor and draughtsman, yet inauspiciously avoids the abject-baiting performativity that is the core of Barney's lionized practice. Instead, Maunz's sculptural work comes across like stage dressings for a concert (excuse me, "ritual") where even the scheduled acts don't even show up, sculptures that make one wish more people had taken to heart Michael Fried's foreswearings against theatricality.

The drawings fare better, perhaps solely on the merit that their physical encroachment on reality is limited to the virtual surfaces of the picture-plane. A mix of the mystical hoo-haw not only of Barney but also of wackos like Paul Laffoley or Stanislav Szukalski with the refined pencilwork of plagarized-by-Quorthon illustrator, Jos A. Smith. Within these works Maunz more convincingly illustrates the corporeal mysteries that are the emotional core of most "extreme" culture, offering the viewer schematic prompts to "Fornicate the Pyramid of Being" or that "Paradise lies in the shadow of swords," or no doubt other carnal mysteries to ambiguously seize.

Yet it is these very corporeal obsessions of extreme metal, the dasein of the mortuary, that provide it with a self-aware agency in the face of limitless capital; that the cognitive limit of mortal life is offered as a bitter riposte to Empire's enforced paradise of self. For a cultural knowledge that began within the logic of consumer goods whose preordained obsolescence effects an "inevitable death" upon their objective livelihood, being asked to "Fornicate the Pyramid of Being" isn't a half-bad notion.

MAGOO DIARY

2010-11-25T22:40:00.000-08:00

the beautiful ELAD LASSRY in my room at the STANDARD HOTEL

GUEST POST by DEE R. SCHWIGGER on a WHITE COLUMNS EXHIBITION

2010-11-22T19:30:00.000-08:00

Josh Kline, Stuff, 2010, Mixed Media

At the confluence of tenuously held real estate, fractured subjectivities, and contaminated wares one finds the recent group show at White Columns. No need to go into the details, all the moes who read this blog know it all anyway... So where to really start then? The collective vibe is thick but the butter is weak, especially when it replaces canvases—oh soap :(... In all frankness it feels like walking into a party where several good friends are lost in social haze rich with snooze, people droning off about celebrities you don't care about, food no one eats, viral vids, career outlook, etc. No, I don't want a cocktail; no, I don't read New York Magazine; no, I grew up without electricity. The chicanery of appropriated banality fails to cease being pulled from its quotidian mores, rather the dullness of lower manhattan's street commerce finds itself dumped into the flabby sac of air that epitomizes the lugubrity particular to new york's non-for-profits. Might as well buy a house in bergen county and get on with your ever-constricting Weltschmertz. Here I wrote you a poem:

Your youth is over
wasted on these wildless streets
woe is you even though you
will say woe is me.

Yes I'm the bitter dick,
ye olde Ragged Dick
savoring plastic water
tossed from a party window.
Hark! From that end of the spectrum,
do I swallow?

pure ravishing grimness

2010-11-18T20:32:00.000-08:00

CRITICAL CRITICALITY: AO's PICKS on this Thursday

while we here at AO are slowly warming up to the idea of publishing art criticism about less obvious targets, the tired, formless faces of the subhumans dragging tired repressed facebook bodies in the streets of the metropolis and the accumulation of increasingly decadent forms of cultural blasphemies reminds us that the finest dish one finds when out for free thrills on a Thursday night at the New Museum is not dumplings or void discursivity—although one surely finds a lot of that—it is PURE HATRED. There is nothing like the NuMu to stir up and actualize deeply held heartfelt monarchist convictions...

HAIL SATAN

is there anything in the NuMu—this temple of pure ravishing grimness where everything in place brutally assaults non-cybernetic thought, reaps lifeforms and militarizes "queer"—that doesn't call for a special tribunal against itself? while a lot on view at least offers a sacred orgonic tabernacle for PURE EXECRATION, AO only remembers very bad things from the NuMu date, adding to which countless others have been traumatically suppressed. here are artifacts that achieved the simultaneous traumatic value and putrid vileness required to win an AOWJM ZIVILISATIONSUNTERGANG AWARD!

1 - Takeshi Murata's fully retarded, autistic and surprisingly reactionary remake of now copyright-free popeye. long rendering times unfortunately cannot mask the vile stench..

2 - Rashaad Newsome's anal retentive, vacuous hipster collages from google image searches, framed in vintage gold frames borrow from all things low and manage to sink somewhat lower with added lameness. can such putrefaction be understood, as the moronic wall text suggests, to imitate hip-hop in its potential to "elicit emotional and visceral responses that can be universally recognized and felt"? hopefully, yes...

3 - Amanda Ross-Ho's terrible, highly bloggable and brutally camp hipster art. Pure hellenistic detritus? Trash-humping beside itself?

Honorable mention: NateLo's process-based addendum to a pestilential cluster of crafty detritus (in The Last Newspaper), DJ's playing loud music to a wall of dash snow collages, etc.

shows like these really make visible deterritorialized capital's tendency to justify itself by all means necessary as soon as it happens to slip beyond traditional models of relevance (or morality). what could possibly save this frigid neoliberal bunker from the inverted putrescence it's become a champion of?

could a curatorial program rooted in incest at least pack some donk?

AO wants order and discipline! HAIL SATAN

2010-11-16T21:53:00.001-08:00

Ull Hohn @ ALgus gReensPon

2010-11-13T21:21:00.000-08:00

Digging into the still unsettled soil of the 1990's, Algus pulls out another corpse for display. Is it a martyr or just a bad painter? or both ;-) From AO's recent on-site investigation we have concluded that, for reasons that escape us, no one cares. Is there a lacking alchemical essence, No solve et coagula that heats the seat of so many doe-eyed art critics? Yet what's on view is certainly worthy a glance. Most notably for its inverted take on art's lingering monographic obsessions as Hohn––himself facing the reaper's sickle––imagines gerhard richter's early death so as to piss on the old fart's heteronormative grave. The intricate Nachträglichkeit of being German has never before been so felt (or maybe it has, but only by Annette Schwarz), praise god, hail satan!

Hohn's frank statements, sometimes painted atop an "anal" wash or backdrop, elicit a train of connotations and ponderings; it's not hard to finish the punch line, follow the trail of urine and dook into whipsy hazes of knowing ineptitude. These works demand to be taken as a collection of ironic one-liners, despite all appearances of this work falling in line with recent Teutons' adorable criticality. They are total performative acts of painterly sacriledge, of singing heavy metal like a "faggot", of sodomizing aristocrats with a sunday painter's easel. An aptitude of cultivated insensitivity, shamelessly diving headlong into overdetermined painterly rough trades, as in Tan Enamel, 1993, a large canvas from a series in which abstraction is equated with abjection, where these works' alchemy is lead into gold but gold into excrement. Hohn's staged blasphemes of painted desecration and belligerent commentary both swap the painter's studio for a body whose sickness is an outrage––figuring a painting that is an explicit act of protest against the hegemonic valuations of a politically indifferent elite; confronting the viewer with the hazards of art and its miraculous potential––an alchemy created by the adversarial coupling of its basest material.

2010-10-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

2010-10-27T23:20:00.000-07:00

Hard not to think of closet gay Phil Anselmo's pre-adolescent musings about growing into a giant "godsize" overlord upon stepping into Chelsea Gagosian. A foreclosed hetero sexuality could be a site for a self-h8ing Guido-lifeform to lurk (not masturbating: a form of self-love or at least self-"though love" via purification...). Here, a straight-edge whatever-sexual top who lives by the code of penis hygiene, muscles and health. "Poetry"—"blue balls"?, "respect the cock"?—produces a morgue in which products generally "considered rogue by art and society"(a different class of consumers that never appears) provide the fitting backdrop to a casual cast of performers: professionalized 20-something girls behind laptops, too many security guards—everything awkwardly coagulating in a thin mist of depression. Fashion-the-reaper not as Leopardi's devote servant of Death, but something much worse: the cadaveric sight of a cop eating a fruit salad. What is most putrid about Dan Colen 2.0 is the zeal to demote lifeforms as "dirt", a disappearing "cleaning up" act accompanied by a clear injunction for the confused heterogeneity of the fucked-up body (the drug addict's, whose dick and art are interchangeable: prosthetic limbs (not just symbolically) penetrating the virginal apparatus of contemporary art) to be relegated to the realm of the dead—a crystalized cadaver walled in Interview Magazine and old issues of Vice. Now that the migration to a drug-free, toilet-trained jeune-fille body is complete, the objects are free to desire a thorough re-territorialization of the very processes they spawn from: a fascination with shit and it's cousin money. How would the fumes emanating from a large canvas covered in real shit commingle with all-american fragrances like bubble gum, turpentine, cum stain and brand new motorcycle tires in a showroom...

coming soon to magoo

2010-07-13T17:19:00.000-07:00

If you can't tell from the pic, aowjm is livid. Expect vitriolic reviews rife with belligerent imbecility and unmitigated thoughtlessness. uuuuughhh...

ART OBSERVATIONS WITH JERRY MAGOO

Pig (The Final Testament of Rozz Williams)

funky times

Response to the 2012 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductions

Guest post by Mark Weikel: How to Flirt at Holiday Parties

Paintings by Human Centipede 2 Director Tom Six

I Eat Your Skin

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

Contemporary Art Daily

Random Listings

Sponsor

Review: Into the Forbidden Zone by William T. Vollmann

blog paintings

Gothic Daydreams (Various Artists, Free MP3 album)

Gerhard Richter Painting

photostream jerry magoo twitter the human centipede 2

arboga teenage riot

weltschmertz demo

its a fucking trap - s/t

GROUNDBREAKING!

PROBLEM?

coming soon to chelsea AND brooklyn

ANARCHY IN THE U.K.?

'du bist schwul denn du saugst von einem typen den schwanz bitch'

JORDAN WOLFSON @ T293: AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE

Lou Reed and Metallica Single Released

is 47 orchard like 47 essex?

ASR: Magoo Rates

August-September Review 2011

Midnight: Satanic Royalty

the medium of contingency

Children of Technology: It’s Time to Face the Doomsday

The Boys from Brazil: The Neo-Nazi Black Metal Sounds of Goatpenis

If I Had A Hammer

Munchie

h8ball mrlam(e)

Metallica with Lou Reed: Full Album Recorded

The Pure Essence of Garbage

Human Centipede 2 BANNED IN THE UK!

Voices are Real

Which art is the worst out of all the trash Michael Krebber has knowingly / unknowingly breeded? pt. I

The Films of Anna Nicole Smith

confessions of a shop-a-holic

Featured Artist: Robert Janitz

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magoo feels you… magoo feels you…

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #?: Alex Olson @ Lisa Cooley

Guest Post: David Hammons @ L&M

POSEURCRUSHEUR

one can never be too late for a party…

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, part whatever: Gedi Sibony @ Greene Naftali

Digital Tour Bus

MNTW of 2010 entry #5: Elad Lassry@Luhring Augustine

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #4: Tobias Madison @ Swiss Institute

guest post by Dee R. Schwigger: why Berlin now

:(

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #3:Free @ NuMu

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #2:Rob Pruitt @ GBE

Maybe not the Woerst of 2010, entry #1: Brätsch/DAS INSTITUT

Magoo Rates

having trouble with your latest press release, official announcement or important personal email?

"Ekblad’s art has never been about cool, strategic, calculated appropriation – it is more a quite personal reworking of her own immediate reality."

"That Ida Ekblad’s exhibition in Bergen Kunsthall opens 45 years to the day after the Danish Cobra painter Asger Jorn filled the same exhibition premises (Bergens Kunst¬forening, 1965) is probably just a curious coincidence, but nevertheless..."

"“I believe in painting in the same way as I believe in music,” she has said in an interview..."

Tossing in the towel, Hanging up them boots…

ruminations of a young artist continued...

ruminations of a young artist

for those long commutes…at war with the preps: magoo mix #1

December Forecast

update…

magoo venues: apotheke

Antek Walczak @ Real Fine Arts

No Presents for Christmas: Lionel Maunz @ Bureau

MAGOO DIARY

GUEST POST by DEE R. SCHWIGGER on a WHITE COLUMNS EXHIBITION

pure ravishing grimness

Ull Hohn @ ALgus gReensPon

coming soon to magoo