Sunday, September 16, 2018
Saturday, September 15, 2018
Thursday, September 13, 2018
the witch hunt rages on here and I'm hoping this could be the beginning of the anti-art, pro-gentrification (despite claims to the exact opposite) in the politically righteous politburo pogrom that became intolerable with the last presidential campaign and got fully out of hand purely hysterical when trump won it. The level of conversation has stooped so, so low. Artforum, a magazine that was boring and out of touch but at least in touch with a generation that had once been in touch.. (john waters, bruce hainley, occasional others maybe?) is now an official organ of social eugenists who want (this is a direct quote from David Velasco's first editorial when he took over Michelle and it's something that would have been sure to amuse mike kelley) "free clinics to treat technobaroque masculinity", where men like Trump and Knight Landesman (one and the same, of course) could go and get "reprogrammed". Dr. Mengele looms large, but as Richard Spencer would say about identity politics, "this time, done right". Who holds power, how do they use it, who is abusing who, who is represented how and in what quantity and who profits from who's body and most importantly, who grieves more and what does this say about their identity. Well, Adrian Piper is 6.5% black, is anyone protesting the fact that her solo retrospective at MoMA is 93.5% white? Not Isabelle Graw, who is busy mourning the demise of the culturally vibrant art scene of midtown manhattan, where she worries "young artists" won't be able to afford studios any longer because Trump green-lighted all those high rises when he took office in 2016. Trump is also responsible for the ambulances who make so much noise on Torstrasse in Mitte in Berlin, ruining what was once a peaceful, non-bourgeois neighborhood to live in. If anyone ever had any doubt that Isabelle Graw's "marxism" was anything but a meaningless badge by which to telegraph solidarity for working classes or "young artists" she has nothing to do with and generally nothing but contempt for, this is a great read: https://www.textezurkunst.de/111/graw-letter-friend-new-york/
Reading it provides an exclusive insight in the abyssal delusion of an intellectually derelict, terminally authoritarian, Adornian pearl-clutching Tussi who's slid so far to the right (not unlike uhm, Margaret Lee and uhm, Wolfgang Tillmans), that she accuses her own friends of being "neoliberal artist celebrities" But more than anything, especially the part when she compares herself to Hannah Arendt, reading "letter to a friend in new york" provides the sensation of drowning in a river of shit.
So, to complete the first sentence of this email about the 47 canal program, they seem to be freaking out. For a second they put out a statement on their website claiming that they never moved to cancel the boyd rice show and that there are "false narratives" circulating about their artists' involvement in this. It turns out that both are lies, easily debunked by looking at the emails posted on instagram by Darja, the other artist in the show. Maybe they realized that and deleted it to avoid further embarrassment.
Now, in the name of fighting white supremacy, they're working policing every single instagram "like" anyone related to the gallery (and beyond, I'm sure) does, screenshots are passed around. Megan Marrin, who shows at David Lewis gallery, heard from her gallerist that a collector was no longer interested in a purchase and asking why he supports artists that like Boyd Rice posts, this post, which Margaret Lee claims is a threat to her person:
I don't know nazi history that well and I'm not sure if this is"night of the long knives" for them or the famous meme'd scene in Der Untergang when Hitler freaks out in the bunker for 5 full minutes. hopefully that happens this week!
this is a fun Boyd Rice record, actually the only one I know.. It's with the girl from Strawberry Switchblade who was also involved with Current 93 at some point. All love songs. The production is really cool.
47 canal statement deleted from their website
Lie 1: "overemphasizes the role of the Dole"
the pressure to cancel the exhibition started on the Dole. Margaret Lee then contacted Mitchell Algus (which she denies), who called and put pressure on Amy Greenspon to cancel the show. Margaret, Anicka Yi, contacted collectors who emphasized to Amy that she would face extreme backlash and should really cancel the show, regardless of the fact that she knows Boyd Rice isn't a nazi, that Darja isn't a nazi, and that Mitchell Algus is 100% lying about not knowing anything about Boyd Rice, since he repeatedly showed him until as recently as 2016 and never had a problem with him until Margaret Lee threaten to cut ties with him if didn't lie about the whole thing.
Lie 2: "this conversation was speculative with no explicit objective"
Lie 3: "neither I nor my partner Margaret Lee nor any of our artists reached out to Amy Greenspon or expressed any personal opinions to her prior to the cancelling of the show"
Oliver reached out, Margaret reached out with the explicit message "if you don't cancel, I will assume you are pro-rape, violence against women, white supremacy". Anicka Yi reached out to collectors who then reached out to Amy.
Lie 4: "I ask myself these questions daily in order to learn how to better serve my community"
Lol
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Friday, May 4, 2018
STOP THE HATE!!! Margaret Lee explained: 3 REASONS WHY IF MARGARET LEE IS NOT YOUR HERO, GO KILL YOURSELF, number 3 will shock you -- 3 RAZONES PORQUE Si Margaret Lee no es tu heroe, MATATE PUTA/BITCH
1- Some people think of Margaret Lee as a gallerist selling art in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. This is FALSE. In case you haven't noticed, Margaret Lee is NOT Laura Owens or Wendy Yao. Some people will say this is "racist" but let's get right down to it and be honest, people like Laura Owens and Wendy Yao, who are 100% ethnically white of european descent and whose ancestors played a central role in the native american genocide and raping of indigenous populations, just don't have the genes required to naturally defend the working people of color in a given neighborhood.
2 -
{img description: a working class activist of color wearing a tshirt of a political candidate who champions the working classes of chinatown at one of 47 canal gallery's two spaces, a gallery that has nothing to do with the gentrification of chinatown with a working class bag in the background indigenous to the neighborhood}
{img description: a working class bag indigenous to the neighborhood of chinatown and filled with anti-capitalist pamphlets}
To express her support for the working classes of Boyle Heights rightfully vandalizing white galleries in Los Angeles, Margaret Lee collaborated with Barney's to destroy capitalism by creating window displays that showcase her extremely political art. In this art, politics meets little shits made of plaster, simulations, the way capitalism is a simulation that must be destroyed, but Margaret Lee's art must not be destroyed. As a nod to Manual Labor, Margaret Lee used her hands and got them dirty.
By putting art in windows, one like, does not necessarily put "art" "art" like the kind of art that is sold on a market. This cactus, for example, expresses the true 14% xicano heritage of the artist by refering to the desert, a mainsay in her country of origin, Mexico.
As a gallery, 47 canal uses no money and does not engage with any form
of capital that comes from profit made on the real estate market. This would seem to pose a conflict with a collab w barneys because so far, this here seems like just some bullshit luxury art collab and the powerful class struggle isn't immediately apparent. That's a typical mistake when examining the work of Margaret Lee, an artist whose work is so subtle you have to wait until the last screenshot until the mark of the intellect is revealed.
Very, very, good and nice...
2 -
3 -
Tuesday, May 1, 2018
This is what it’s really like having fat sex
Step 1: Be flexible
When a sex scene appears on TV, it's
expected that both parties are conventionally, socially acceptable fit
people. Any first-time sex experience is always awkward if you don't
know the person all too well, but when you and your boyfriend are
heavysets, sex comes with a whole new set of rules.
When I was younger, my very first
boyfriend was tall, dark and plus-size. The first time I went over to
his house, making out with him was embarrassing because he tried
propping me up on his leg and I fell. Ouch. These are just some of the
issues that present themselves when having fat sex.
You have to get over your body insecurities immediately
Since me and my boyfriend at the time were
both big people, neither of us wanted to be the first one to shed a
lick of clothing. We simultaneously took off our shoes and socks, but
getting undressed in front of each other was super intimidating.
Regardless of us both being plus-size, we worried about what the other
would think.
When society splashes pictures of
beautiful straight-size men and women on cereal boxes, movies, magazine
covers and literally everywhere else, we look for that image in all our
relationships. Despite having been a plus-size girl and him a plus-size
guy, we aspired to be whatever is popular—and fat people haven't been
for years.
Break the bed, hunty! Don't be scuuurred
Yeah it's your bed, but sex is
only really good when it's spontaneous, wild and carefree. If you're
seriously into the partner you're throwing down with, then it'll be
worth it after you orgasm and your headboard is still intact.
Sex for anyone is cringeworthy when you
think you're being too loud, well imagine two hams slapping one another.
That's what plus-size sex can sound like when your partner is daggering
inside you and it can be hella awks for us big girls. But you're both
there to do one thing and that's to get it all the way in (hehe).
You can't allow the audible skin on skin
contact to bother you when all they want you to do is throw that ass
back. Just own your fat love-making sounds because the louder the sex,
the closer you are to climaxing.
Some days, all you can do is doggy
When your man has his own set of
hips, spreading your legs for him in missionary can be a bitch. There's a
lot of moving around and repositioning because it gets to be too much
on the muscles when you're in one tight position for too long.
The slappy sound always creeps you out
because more meat means more beat. After the two of you have been going
at it for a while, though, the sound of two steaks smacking each other
is drowned out by the heavy breathing from getting it in with each
other.
You both feel a little awkward lifting each others fat to get to the 'core'
My ass is fat, so even in doggy style,
guys find themselves having to give my butt a lift for better access to
get to the good stuff. While I, personally enjoy this dangerous sex position,
the minute the cheeks are spread, I feel like the other guy is drowning
in butt cheeks. Then again, maybe he just needs a long dong to meet me
in the middle. Compromise is key, my friends.
Eventually, you learn to love it
Once you've been getting to know your
thicc significant other for a while, you eliminate the fact that you're
not society's golden guy or golden girl. Having fat sex opens your eyes
to how insecure everyone is about their bodies and that there's
really not one fuck to give about looks. At the end of the day, you
only want someone you can make you laugh and make you cum. Size is just a
number on a clothing ticket.
Related stories recommended by this writer:
Monday, April 2, 2018
Finally something GOOD on Semiotext(e) part 1
prrttt
By Jeanne Graff.
Cover for prrttt by Jeanne Graff, published by Semiotext(e)
Excerpted from prrttt, a novel published by Semiotext(e).
°4
The flatulence has returned. The bread and the cheese I ate in Dongo formed into a thick paste that prevented gas to flow freely through my colon. I remember images of the ride twenty years ago, the LED lighting has just been installed in the Swiss wagons and on the train station’s information signs didn’t yet exist in Italy then; after Lake Geneva is Lake Maggiore, on the other side of the Alps, and today my stomach gargles ever so slightly which means the bloating is giving signs of pushing towards my exit. I’m hoping the train will arrive at Milano Centrale, that I will be able to attend this dinner and go home the next day. I hear a hesitant whistling as the train warms beneath me. If I have understood correctly, the strikes are only stopping the regional trains and not the international lines. I’m starting to feel much better as the gas leaves my body. That is normal and healthy. Not to move when sitting on a train for example, that’s what is causing bloating now now. The body has simply gotten used to being in movement.
Sushi in the United States. Sushi in the United States does not always sit well with me. There is something in the texture that encourages the formation of intestinal gas. When I eat it I fall asleep early, but sometimes late, it's very interesting. From the fish, I can feel some heated winds making their way down onto the chair. After three days, I am hoping to pass it completely; every day I use a different hot sauce to mark time and feel the sting on the way out – or it is the same hot sauce that stings on the way in but dissolves and passes incognito on the way out, or yes it does or something else stings like a very strong spice or undigested chunk or see– you don’t really know anymore. Constantly travelling is like ski touring every day: you have to keep checking your gear to make sure you have everything you need, that you didn’t forget anything – most important is the beano.
Sometimes you check twenty times a day to make sure if it is indeed in your pocket. You develop the skill of packing your suitcase in your head at any time of the day or night. You mentally scroll through your stuff, then compose combinations following the amount of fiber eaten at events you will have to attend and what gas-producing foods will be served. From fifteen days and up to one month, you have enough items to make a tour and the amount of tablets must be sufficient to handle any situation. The problem is crossing between a country with high gluten cuisine into bean/cheese/broccoli and fish/asparagus diet during the same trip, then it becomes disruptive to think of two moments of the year at the same time, to imagine your entire wardrobe simultaneously having to be dominated by spare underwear and without crossfading. It’s like layering two years of farts on top of each other, the past one and the one that’s coming.
When I go to Milan by train, I always think of a flatulence I produced in 1991. She was the result of a bean salad i ate in the neighboring town of N------, and the same kind accompanied me during my travel throughout the 90s, and in the 00s too. We were visiting family, Bruno and her cousin Jacqueline; they grew up like sisters in the 30s. Malou used to tell me that they would “hop their way to school,” propelled by an ancient type of fart resulting from a explosive mixture of acquafaba and a special type of fibrous italian artichoke available during the war at that time. Limping war casualties they were seeing everywhere. When Jacqueline died Bruno started to lose his mind: she was the love of his life, they did everything together. In the morning he was still okay, but at night he would mistake me for my doctor and would share hypotheses on the link between diet and gas. His mother used to visit him from Southern Italy – he would tell this story ten times a day – coming by train with a suitcase full of brussel sprouts, which she would store on the balcony and boil for dinner, one after another according to the number of guests. It was delicious. I remember the fresh breeze coming from the italian window punctuated by hot, peppery backdrafts coming from the kitchen pushing in the opposite direction. Today this would be forbidden by the health department. In the taxi with Massimiliano, he introduces me to Alberto who immediately farts. I tell them the story of Malou’s friend, an editor who decides one day to write his own book. He’s in his house in Venice, goes out to buy fancy toilet paper, beano and laxatives, and when he gets back home he recites the alphabet in fart thanks to a special italian technique of rectum gymnastics, then goes out again to take a walk and falls down dead. Alberto tells me I’m speaking about his grandfather.
My mother spoke Swiss German to me until I was five years old but I’ve forgotten everything. I could speak Italian but it’s a bit remote in my head, I can’t really find the words anymore. I’m listening to Liscio, who’s sitting next to me at this dinner, and when the hot stench comes in contact with my nostrils I understand he's passing asparagus mixed something else. Maybe pork. He explains that he holds back farts inside the small intestine to help them develop, mostly by building up intense pressure in the abdomen until they inevitably spill over to the large intestine and accelerate through a shitty corridor. Those techniques are widespread in Italy, most people have a high intestinal expansion potential but no vision for that. Most of them are family people and have this potential but they just don’t even think about it! So Liscio helps them to enlarge their colons and push air out only once a good temperature and density have built up. He tries whenever possible to keep the same students, which generally leads to better results but not always. Then he adds his dietary reccomendations like meat and cheese, onions, asparagus, fish, an additional layer, like frosting on a cake. His own colon has a capacity of seven thousand cc of stored gas. blahkjadsflhkahkjlsdklhjadskhjasfdkhljfsadkhjl whatever wwhatever This would have interested Malou. Then he asks me in English: “So who are you? What’s your essence? What’s your flavor?”
I command my sphincter to let go of the burning hot draft it's been striving to contain and soon we are enveloped by an intense, violent smell with kombucha, hot past due rice sake and spicypulled pork notes. We both smile.
Coming back from Vietnam, Massimiliano wakes up in the middle of the night and farts in his bed. The sphincter's vibration almost killed him. He’d simply forgotten where he was after having slept in a dozen of places over a dozen days, or maybe it was a hallucination due to jetlag sleep which can sometimes create a kind of fever, like a really deep sleep in the afternoon, where it’s difficult to distinguish reality from dream. From the notes of dried quid and hot sauce, he realizes he's in Hue, the city of love.
Born in Bergamo, he now lives between New York and Milan. His work takes him to Hô Chi Minh City and Poland, and he’s just decided to rent another flat in Los Angeles. Awesome. Meanwhile, he’s spread his butt cheeks to pass gas in every corner of the world and his rectum is split in two by a fine wall of skin noticed by the doctors at birth, creating two mirrored spaces with similar dimensions but different gases: one for the more peppery and dry notes of every fart, the other for the moist and hot drafts. Behind his bladder, there is an adjoining organ that serves to store gas his great-great-grand-mother stored in a similar organ two hundred years ago and passed on to her daughter to make room for other children. The special sphincter holding the little pouch airtight is inspected several times a day as a leak of the dank, century-old fart would prove fatal, their only movements consisting of these back-and-forth spams.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
ABOUT THE NOVEL
Composed between destinations, in cafes, museums, airplanes, and bars over three years, Jeanne Graff‘s PRRRRTTTTT captures the interesting musings of a loose sphincter passing gas resulting from consumption of from broccoli and fish, meats, dairy, wine, nuts and seeds whose smell in gas form is not always their own initial one. A loose chronicle masquerading as a novel, prrrrrt— like Michelle Bernstein‘s All The King’s Horses, the Bernadette Corporation‘s Reena Spaulings, and Natasha Stagg‘s Surveys — couches sharp observations in a laconic and ambient style. By not saying too much, prrrrtttt says everything about the vicissitudes of a creative and transient life.
“There’s an art of writing amidst the farts and almost-farts, and Graff‘s ear for existential specificity finds momentum in even the most glancing encounters. Always on the move Graff‘s phototropic texts incline toward human heat, hallucinating characters upon contact.”- Christopher Glazek
To read an interview with Jeanne Graff by Juliana Huxtable click here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Writer and curator Jeanne Graff was born in Lausanne, Switzerland and lives in New York. She is a columnist for May Revue (Paris), works in a vineyard, and teaches at HEAD art school in Geneva. In 2014, Graff founded 186f Kepler, an art space without walls. She has organized numerous international exhibitions, and perofrms with her band Solar Lice. Graff recently completed a writing residency at Villa Noailles in Hyeres, France.
Tuesday, March 27, 2018
tags
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cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson cheyney thompson egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz egan frantz sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer sam pulitzer
Thursday, March 15, 2018
2014 or 2015?
hello sir,
since my favorite blog jerry magoo has been censored by google, I have decided to repost a lot of the classic posts that have gone missing on here. this is only a partial repost and a lost may have been lost forever, like the excellent Anne Imhof review posted in late 2017. Please support this page and like. While it may not be at jerrymagoo.blogspot.com, the legacy of Sam Pulitzer who is the original disruptive genius and main orchestrator of this subversive defunct blog (remember those?) is alive and well here..
squad fam out!
-jmfp
ps: an image from 2012? 2013? 2014? #TBT
since my favorite blog jerry magoo has been censored by google, I have decided to repost a lot of the classic posts that have gone missing on here. this is only a partial repost and a lost may have been lost forever, like the excellent Anne Imhof review posted in late 2017. Please support this page and like. While it may not be at jerrymagoo.blogspot.com, the legacy of Sam Pulitzer who is the original disruptive genius and main orchestrator of this subversive defunct blog (remember those?) is alive and well here..
squad fam out!
-jmfp
ps: an image from 2012? 2013? 2014? #TBT
Saturday, May 6, 2017
Heji Shin at Real Fine Arts
The end of any year brings the same old habit of reflecting upon the past, the present and the future: what happened in our lives over the past year, what is to come and what we will gaze at into the future.
An exhibition of Heji Shin’s new works that opened in the last month of 2016 couldn’t have found a better time to be shown. These works mainly depict the emblem of future - newborn babies. Yet Shin’s photographs do not entirely evoke the emotionally charged topics that circle around when you think of babies.
Seven close up photographic images show the very moment of a child’s birth. By focusing on the head being pressed out of the vagina, the images do not show much more besides this first “act” of birth. Crumpled little heads covered in a mix of human discharge–especially blood and shit (and whatever else comes with it)–are the center of the photographs. Some babies are still strangled with a hand or the umbilical cord, some are screaming directly towards the viewer, but all babies have their eyes closed– none of them have ever seen the world around it yet; and especially not the artist’s camera! Just imagine if a camera was the first image you had of the world–a monstrous object rather than a smiling face? But the camera and the photographer think the same as they examine the babies: what is this new weird looking alien?
Every context of the situation is cut out. The background becomes is a blurry, dark undefined substance and there are no other disruptive elements that would give us a glimpse of the surroundings. Sometimes you see a bit of hospital inventory, but most of the time you don’t even see that much of the women’s body parts giving birth. The immediacy but also the estrangement of a child’s birth is aligned with so much orchestration, an almost magical description, while the true event is long, hard and disturbing. Shin knows a lot about this now!
Whatever is created and comes to life–it’s a painful event, bloody with images of dysmorphic body parts and far away from a cute little nature around the baby cult and their hetero normative family constructions! While obviously still being intimate due to its subject matter and the specific angle the artist chose, Shin’s photographs focus on a different aspect. They don’t fall into the trap of emotional overload. If one listens to birth stories that range from “I thought I’d die” to “the greatest trip of my life”, looking at these works by Heji Shin evoke completely other thoughts, since nothing of the above mentioned can be subjected to these photographs: the women are not the subject here! With an extreme directness, the little heads almost jump into your face. The colors of the photographs are not much more processed than the actual situation at hand and so the works become a very bold statement of “reality”. The photographic subject we see here cannot be staged or interfered with. Especially when the production must consider that being in labor can take up to 8 days with a lot of waiting, but the whole shoot only requires one minute or even less to get a good take.
The end of any year brings the same old habit of reflecting upon the past, the present and the future: what happened in our lives over the past year, what is to come and what we will gaze at into the future.
An exhibition of Heji Shin’s new works that opened in the last month of 2016 couldn’t have found a better time to be shown. These works mainly depict the emblem of future - newborn babies. Yet Shin’s photographs do not entirely evoke the emotionally charged topics that circle around when you think of babies.
Seven close up photographic images show the very moment of a child’s birth. By focusing on the head being pressed out of the vagina, the images do not show much more besides this first “act” of birth. Crumpled little heads covered in a mix of human discharge–especially blood and shit (and whatever else comes with it)–are the center of the photographs. Some babies are still strangled with a hand or the umbilical cord, some are screaming directly towards the viewer, but all babies have their eyes closed– none of them have ever seen the world around it yet; and especially not the artist’s camera! Just imagine if a camera was the first image you had of the world–a monstrous object rather than a smiling face? But the camera and the photographer think the same as they examine the babies: what is this new weird looking alien?
Every context of the situation is cut out. The background becomes is a blurry, dark undefined substance and there are no other disruptive elements that would give us a glimpse of the surroundings. Sometimes you see a bit of hospital inventory, but most of the time you don’t even see that much of the women’s body parts giving birth. The immediacy but also the estrangement of a child’s birth is aligned with so much orchestration, an almost magical description, while the true event is long, hard and disturbing. Shin knows a lot about this now!
Whatever is created and comes to life–it’s a painful event, bloody with images of dysmorphic body parts and far away from a cute little nature around the baby cult and their hetero normative family constructions! While obviously still being intimate due to its subject matter and the specific angle the artist chose, Shin’s photographs focus on a different aspect. They don’t fall into the trap of emotional overload. If one listens to birth stories that range from “I thought I’d die” to “the greatest trip of my life”, looking at these works by Heji Shin evoke completely other thoughts, since nothing of the above mentioned can be subjected to these photographs: the women are not the subject here! With an extreme directness, the little heads almost jump into your face. The colors of the photographs are not much more processed than the actual situation at hand and so the works become a very bold statement of “reality”. The photographic subject we see here cannot be staged or interfered with. Especially when the production must consider that being in labor can take up to 8 days with a lot of waiting, but the whole shoot only requires one minute or even less to get a good take.
Due to their reduction and the chosen close-up angle the images confront the viewer with a disturbing mix of voyeurism and intimacy.
While only hearing about Shin’s endeavor during the months of production, I always imagined the images to be way more brutal and violent. The works that one can see in the exhibition still are quite aesthetic. The color scheme and compositions of focused/unfocused parts are very defined and strong. It clearly shows that the medium is not only “a” message but its also the medium. Shin works as a commercial photographer and is used to dealing with “difficult models”. The photographer’s eye completely guides the viewer and won’t give him the chance to get lost in too many details. The images follow some hidden rules of composition and placement. Of course while the usual retouches have to be made, the works still operate on a level of a public realness. Displayed throughout Real Fine Art’s gallery space, they leave enough room given the selection is very much singled down and directed in such a way that won’t give too many chances to shy away!
Also on display are three installations of colored plinths that are building rather the opposite of the described above. Greeting the visitor at the entrance of the exhibition space, they show playfully arranged objects and paraphernalia. In a mix of fetish sex toys, children’s toys, decorative porcelain figures, all three sculptures are opposing the strong and direct imagery of the photographs. These works are the only titled works you’ll find in the show. While the photographs are just strung together as Babies 1-7 you find an Italian Vendor or a latex butt that greets you with a Good Morning America. One sculpture is still untitled. These titles give some hints about the direction they want to be thought about. Where the “In Your Face”-strategy of the photographs doesn’t really need titles for explanation, it’s a helpful guide for the sculptures to connect. The first assemblage on a black plinth is arranged with a little puppet sized wheelchair and a plastic toy goat that is pushing the chair. The goat wears a funky fedora and is attached to the wheelchair where a small b/w picture of Osama Bin Laden is pinned on its seat. On the second plinth, that is painted in a red color, one finds a latex butt that is in fact a real sex toy, decorated with cigarette ends, an American flag stuffed into the butthole and a fried egg on one butt cheek. For the third installation, the artist used a white plinth with a scene of two Italian lookalike porcelain figures lying/standing on a wig, one covered with a condom. The kitschy campiness of the installations is inevitable and a bit silly. But with this little foolish wink they comment on more or less recent political events of our time with a punk/pop/camp like gesture. The humor that comes through is a good and welcome balance to the boldness of the photographs. Completely revealing their playfulness and even silliness, the sculptures can all be associated with the areas of sex and domestic life. Therefore they draw a line to the subjects of the photographs– even if this can be a stretch. Notably this stretch is a challenging one but even more important for seeing the exhibition as exhibition. Particularly this balance that is created in connection to the sculptures is likely to be needed for the whole–even if it’s clear that the photographs stand out!
While only hearing about Shin’s endeavor during the months of production, I always imagined the images to be way more brutal and violent. The works that one can see in the exhibition still are quite aesthetic. The color scheme and compositions of focused/unfocused parts are very defined and strong. It clearly shows that the medium is not only “a” message but its also the medium. Shin works as a commercial photographer and is used to dealing with “difficult models”. The photographer’s eye completely guides the viewer and won’t give him the chance to get lost in too many details. The images follow some hidden rules of composition and placement. Of course while the usual retouches have to be made, the works still operate on a level of a public realness. Displayed throughout Real Fine Art’s gallery space, they leave enough room given the selection is very much singled down and directed in such a way that won’t give too many chances to shy away!
Also on display are three installations of colored plinths that are building rather the opposite of the described above. Greeting the visitor at the entrance of the exhibition space, they show playfully arranged objects and paraphernalia. In a mix of fetish sex toys, children’s toys, decorative porcelain figures, all three sculptures are opposing the strong and direct imagery of the photographs. These works are the only titled works you’ll find in the show. While the photographs are just strung together as Babies 1-7 you find an Italian Vendor or a latex butt that greets you with a Good Morning America. One sculpture is still untitled. These titles give some hints about the direction they want to be thought about. Where the “In Your Face”-strategy of the photographs doesn’t really need titles for explanation, it’s a helpful guide for the sculptures to connect. The first assemblage on a black plinth is arranged with a little puppet sized wheelchair and a plastic toy goat that is pushing the chair. The goat wears a funky fedora and is attached to the wheelchair where a small b/w picture of Osama Bin Laden is pinned on its seat. On the second plinth, that is painted in a red color, one finds a latex butt that is in fact a real sex toy, decorated with cigarette ends, an American flag stuffed into the butthole and a fried egg on one butt cheek. For the third installation, the artist used a white plinth with a scene of two Italian lookalike porcelain figures lying/standing on a wig, one covered with a condom. The kitschy campiness of the installations is inevitable and a bit silly. But with this little foolish wink they comment on more or less recent political events of our time with a punk/pop/camp like gesture. The humor that comes through is a good and welcome balance to the boldness of the photographs. Completely revealing their playfulness and even silliness, the sculptures can all be associated with the areas of sex and domestic life. Therefore they draw a line to the subjects of the photographs– even if this can be a stretch. Notably this stretch is a challenging one but even more important for seeing the exhibition as exhibition. Particularly this balance that is created in connection to the sculptures is likely to be needed for the whole–even if it’s clear that the photographs stand out!
Reproduction mostly serves the purpose of people’s desire to become immortal–since it can be understood as a egocentric reflection of the self. Therefore we can also question the idea of the ideological use of the baby. Here the baby as the outcome of a hetero normative family conception is especially in question. In a city like New York creating your family can’t be a “natural desire” anymore but has to be considered as some kind of “luxury” as it even more starkly divides the society into rich and poor. But despite exposing the ideological subject of the baby, Shin’s photographs imply these thoughts on a very concealed level as they just refuse to sugarcoat! But on the same concealed level they can function as an examination and empowerment of the female body: the women who agreed to get photographed are in fact freeing themselves from embellishment and obfuscation. From a pure angle, which is the only view the photos are taking on, this is even more a feminist proposition without the necessity of screaming it out loud.
So especially with a female mindset it’s hard to separate the seen from one’s own body (the changes that it’ll be affected by and the physical and emotional pain that is involved with it). Since cis-male bodies are still not able to execute reproduction, their interpretation won’t underlie so much emotional empathy; the images of male birth giving is still exclusively reserved to the film industry–thinking about Ridley Scott’s chestburster scene in Alien. But asking for the reaction within men, there seem to be more an interest in the weird sensation of examining the alienating look of the babies’ heads and body parts and therefore the followed estrangement of how to relate oneself to the seen image. These works build an immediate gut feeling–whatever reaction comes along–you can be sure that there is one.
- Monika Senz
So especially with a female mindset it’s hard to separate the seen from one’s own body (the changes that it’ll be affected by and the physical and emotional pain that is involved with it). Since cis-male bodies are still not able to execute reproduction, their interpretation won’t underlie so much emotional empathy; the images of male birth giving is still exclusively reserved to the film industry–thinking about Ridley Scott’s chestburster scene in Alien. But asking for the reaction within men, there seem to be more an interest in the weird sensation of examining the alienating look of the babies’ heads and body parts and therefore the followed estrangement of how to relate oneself to the seen image. These works build an immediate gut feeling–whatever reaction comes along–you can be sure that there is one.
- Monika Senz
Egan Frantz
The Oat Paintings
5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City, CA 90232, USASaturday, January 14, 2017–Saturday, February 18, 2017Opening Reception: Saturday, January 14, 2017, 6 p.m.–8 p.m.
5801 Washington Boulevard
Culver City, CA 90232, USA
I met Egan Frantz at the Independent Art Fair. I introduced myself as a fan of his and Liz Wendelbo’s picks for Ubu web, which included Kurt Kren and Xenakis. From the get go I identified as the beggar with my hand out (like Brancusi to his patrons). My mom had forgotten to transfer money that morning and couldn’t afford the pricey art fair drinks and he got me a beer. He made a series of toilet paper paintings and eggshell sculptures. The literary reference interested me as we talked about Broodthaers. As I write this, I am once again the beggar claiming my month’s rent in exchange for this press release: three hundred thirty seven dollars.
He would eventually end up taking me to nice dinners and became a patron of my work. Egan and I would love talking about Kippenberger and Beuys over these dinners. Afterwards, we'd play with our balls, make them go around each other inside the scrotum—res novae—"new things" for us but also, a revolutionary way to fühl each other's scrotae. Kippenberger would flaunt his balls by carrying wads of little photos of his balls around and enjoying fancy restaurants and hotels, while Beuys was discreet, parking his Bentley down the road and hiding his balls inside a little hidden compartment in his brieftaßshchen on the way to the Fridericianum to say, “I’m a member of Green Party.” I think we both identified with the former.
Liz and Egan’s interest in experimental music and poetry was a bonding point, as we would talk about Dopplereffekt, Serge synthesizers and Jack Spicer. In a specialized art world, a proclivity to consuming all of the arts is rare.
“My vocabulary did this to me”. Egan believes that the linguistic is folded underneath the visual and he exploits our idioms for material experiments. Within the material, he mines the English language, our existence, to create this lyrical abstraction in substance ex nihilum. ”Man speaks” as Heidegger says. An inversion of Lawrence Weiner’s substance poems and wall-text didacticism. These idioms point to the fabulous theologico-political fables of post-secular expression: “pee” is for painting; “sowing his oats”; “full of piss and vinegar.”
Our deep upper-middle class lack of humor and love of all things German brings me to the legend of Cologne. Saskia Draxler would tell Egan the oats were reminiscent of Albert Oehlen and Kippenberger’s oat car, a joke about Anselm Kiefer. Carpenter would write his patricide of Kippenberger and explain the distinction between “bad bad art” and “good bad art”. Carpenter’s paintings (as Kippenberger) were too good so they had be trashed but before, seriously documented… Egan’s paintings are seriously performed jokes. When Egan showed with Nagel in Berlin and saw his paintings through the glass facade of the gallery from a bar across Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, he saw new paintings, literally framed by that history, and had to contend with that. Maybe he’s advocating instead for “smart dumb” as the alternative to “dumb dumb” and “smart smart” as laid out by Ubu’s Kenneth Goldsmith.
Egan identifies as an amateur, plopped into a network of professional curators, gallerists and artists. The amateur loves crafts. When we did a show together at Kavita B Schmid, he quoted Blanchot on love and water in the title. Heidegger talks about handicraft in What is Called Thinking?For the carpenter’s apprentice, she does not learn the customary forms of the wood or how to use tools, but to love the resonances of woodness, the bringing-forth of these resonances. For Jean-Luc Nancy, art is “the productive technique of presence”, the act of bringing-forth guided by techne. These paintings make use of many faculties, social, historical, linguistic, all in all, technically skilled, to bring forth a complex matrix of loves around literary philosophy, literary high capitalism and literary professionality. - Mathieu Malouf
He would eventually end up taking me to nice dinners and became a patron of my work. Egan and I would love talking about Kippenberger and Beuys over these dinners. Afterwards, we'd play with our balls, make them go around each other inside the scrotum—res novae—"new things" for us but also, a revolutionary way to fühl each other's scrotae. Kippenberger would flaunt his balls by carrying wads of little photos of his balls around and enjoying fancy restaurants and hotels, while Beuys was discreet, parking his Bentley down the road and hiding his balls inside a little hidden compartment in his brieftaßshchen on the way to the Fridericianum to say, “I’m a member of Green Party.” I think we both identified with the former.
Liz and Egan’s interest in experimental music and poetry was a bonding point, as we would talk about Dopplereffekt, Serge synthesizers and Jack Spicer. In a specialized art world, a proclivity to consuming all of the arts is rare.
“My vocabulary did this to me”. Egan believes that the linguistic is folded underneath the visual and he exploits our idioms for material experiments. Within the material, he mines the English language, our existence, to create this lyrical abstraction in substance ex nihilum. ”Man speaks” as Heidegger says. An inversion of Lawrence Weiner’s substance poems and wall-text didacticism. These idioms point to the fabulous theologico-political fables of post-secular expression: “pee” is for painting; “sowing his oats”; “full of piss and vinegar.”
Our deep upper-middle class lack of humor and love of all things German brings me to the legend of Cologne. Saskia Draxler would tell Egan the oats were reminiscent of Albert Oehlen and Kippenberger’s oat car, a joke about Anselm Kiefer. Carpenter would write his patricide of Kippenberger and explain the distinction between “bad bad art” and “good bad art”. Carpenter’s paintings (as Kippenberger) were too good so they had be trashed but before, seriously documented… Egan’s paintings are seriously performed jokes. When Egan showed with Nagel in Berlin and saw his paintings through the glass facade of the gallery from a bar across Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, he saw new paintings, literally framed by that history, and had to contend with that. Maybe he’s advocating instead for “smart dumb” as the alternative to “dumb dumb” and “smart smart” as laid out by Ubu’s Kenneth Goldsmith.
Egan identifies as an amateur, plopped into a network of professional curators, gallerists and artists. The amateur loves crafts. When we did a show together at Kavita B Schmid, he quoted Blanchot on love and water in the title. Heidegger talks about handicraft in What is Called Thinking?For the carpenter’s apprentice, she does not learn the customary forms of the wood or how to use tools, but to love the resonances of woodness, the bringing-forth of these resonances. For Jean-Luc Nancy, art is “the productive technique of presence”, the act of bringing-forth guided by techne. These paintings make use of many faculties, social, historical, linguistic, all in all, technically skilled, to bring forth a complex matrix of loves around literary philosophy, literary high capitalism and literary professionality. - Mathieu Malouf
2 comments:
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Egan FrantzFebruary 12, 2017 at 5:53 PMThis comment has been removed by the author.Reply
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Egan FrantzFebruary 12, 2017 at 11:17 PMThis comment has been removed by the author.Reply
thanks for visiting the jerry magoo blog guys. I won't sugar-coat it, it's been a pretty tough couple of years.. oh so it's instgram now? not here it's not. this is jerry-zone, where stuff actually gets written not farted. looking at this on your "mobile device"? go fuck a citi bike! *coughs* haha f u *smokes pipe*
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
https://youtu.be/--14I6ajk5c?t=555
Tillmans may work with digital imagery rather than darkrooms these days, but he’s forever developing and enlarging.
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