Contradicta: Aphorisms

Contradicta: Aphorisms from Toni Simon on Vimeo.

Reading by Nick Piombino, drawings and video by Toni Simon.

Disruptive distinctions

Sometimes (well, oftentimes, and with the semester beginning, oftener-times) I need diversions, stark as a good Onion headline ("Nation's Weirdest Teenager Buys Season One DVD Of 'Murphy Brown'"), but nuanced enough to colonize my interest for several accidental minutes. At once permanent—or for the moment, permanently accessible, as in, wherever there's a WiFi hotspot—and ephemeral—no "object" in the sense of tangibly differentiated space; always remote from "I"—the projections/projectables/projective virtual "things" so far incapable of being possessed, bought (copyrighted?), except through Lindley's temporal act of installation (in this sense, of course, it is owned), or if I permit the temptation to fetishistically stick it to my desktop background; what do I want to say about them? Something simple. Something like, "She does it best." Isn't this the point, by varying degrees of totalizing statement, which art critics arrive at in their praise of a person, or his/her craft? I don't know. I'm happy it isn't my business to be an expert on such questions (for now, at least), but if I could just give a more intelligent, less inherited, sense of what I mean by "transfix," when I say I am trans-fixed (I stand or sit, and I am moved) by these pieces. If I could only inhabit these virtual works besides just within my own mind—but that thinking is illusory. The material, the tempo-real cannot (shouldn't?) be transmuted by the mind (only within its conceptual parameters). Nor can the virtual object coagulate, calcify, inhabit space in a solid, intransigent way; and this is the axiomatic takeaway of the medium itself: nothing, essentially, exists in this way. All is finally subject to corrosion, structural decomposition, liquification, elemental reconstitution.

I'm not nailing this aesthetic definition-thing down. It would be a mistake to think I could even attempt a potent critical investigation of Lindley's craft. And I don't mean for this reverence to lend more autonomy to the work than is due; it is just one of those pieces I would rather (for better/worse) let speak for itself.

"D.2" by Kasey Lou Lindley

Mixed media messages

The Introvert by Jill Moser, poems by Charles Bernstein

paint & words

'Da Bomb'

Flipped through the latest issue of BOMB Magazine today at B.A.M. Great interviews with Adam Pendleton and Rae Armantrout. Excellent literary supplement as well. Jotted the following notes:

"I couldn't say whether the Situationists failed or not. My feeling is that when you contribute, there is no failure. It's like an unspoken law. I like your use of 'provoke.' When you provoke you have contributed. When you become a part of what happens next you have contributed." -Adam Pendleton, in conversation with Thom Donovan

"Of course, there are so many hallmark readings of a person like [Rosa Parks], because it is more convenient to deradicalize her than to radicalize her. She becomes a hero. And to be labeled a hero is one of culture's ways of depoliticizing you. You become part of what culture has dealt with. In this sense, one should always strive to be the opposite of a hero." -again, Pendleton (emphases mine)

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Samuel Beckett's silent, quotidian-titled Film (1965), starring Buster Keaton

Soft spot for photo-collage

Brian F. Wilson at Booooooom

"Tom Edwards"

"Lena Wolff"

© Brian F. Wilson

Keep your eyes and ears on these two

Jen Nugent and Patrick Lynch give a layered, semi-aleatory sound & visual performance, stretching the attentions of audience as well as actor/performer. A full artist statement/description of the piece, as well as other, static, visual works, are provided at Jen's Tumblr. Enjoy!

Performance and Collaboration with Patrick Lynch from Jen Nugent on Vimeo.

Art (not for sale)

Ben Lerner, on the late Simon Hantaï: "A work that compels as painting has emerged from a procedure that questions painting’s possibility, and the pathos is in that contradiction."


Read the full Letter from New York, from Lana Turner No. 3

Salvation of moment

I'm glad to have caught the s/ART/q 2010 Invitational after work today, which included terrific new work (my personal definitions, by no means descriptively literate): Jen Nugent's abstracted landscapes, conflating neighborhoods/classes, Michael Panarella's portraiture-play, Caui Lofgren's "accidental collisions", Kim Russo's line and mind vagaries, and Kim S. Anderson's decontextualized subject sketches. A refreshing detour through others' minds as my own plods through the avalanching logjam of rhetorical fallacies this jolly election season.

Tonight is a Smörgåsbord of great new music, visual art, and projective curiosities at the Venue.

Briefly

One painter's abstractions seem to admit their containedness in the familiar, representational canvas.

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A few vastly different poets (briefly) comment on the state of American poetry today.

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My kind of philosophe offers an antidote to the warm, reassuring, over-affirmative, delusive commercial success that is self-help.

Adventures in abs(ex)traction

Simple, unabashed legibility, a paramarketable aesthetic, perhaps, or what else to fall back upon in times where "nothing [not even the grotesquely deviant] is sacred [commercially uncontaminated]." I mean, godspeed Ann Liv Young, but have you seen the new piece by Old Spice?





© Greg Eason

More (to love)

Don't expect much content beyond visual art links these next few weeks, unless you want frequent articles on any and all things W.C. Williams (current research project). Didn't think so. Hit up Wolfe von Lenkiewicz, if you aren't yet burnt on religious/consumerist icono-pastiche à la Enrique Chagoya (which I am not), and particularly his "Plura Culture" and "The Descent of Man" series. If you like, make sure to bookmark it before Verizoogle hides it under a heap of commercial rubble that you didn't yet know you really wanted.

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Things to love:

-Fresh caught salmon over mixed greens
-The Grecian Urns' new "Love Dream"
-Florida weather
-DVR (roommate is a cable guy, thanks roommate)
-Cheap Malbec from Mendoza
-Getting caught up in:

Rachel de Joode @ Booooooom

Kent Rogowski @ Booooooom

Carla Barth @ Booooooom

Adrian Ghenie @ Booooooom

Sterling Hundley @ Booooooom

Kristine Moran @ Booooooom

Kudos Booooooom, some great stuff can be found there!