You Can Get With THIS
June 9th, 2009To save money like everyone else, I’ve committed to doing my own laundry. The inconvenience is a drag, but I like using the “Not-Going-Anywhere-for-a-While?” time to read. My laundry book this week was THIS, a collection of artists’ writings, edited by NYC artist Susan Jennings. 45 artists have contributed poems, lists, conversations, letters, manifestos, and more. (Did you already see this in the Wall Street Journal?)
Welcoming the thesis-driven and the anecdotal, THIS encompasses theory and practice. Fia Backström conducts a rigorous survey of blondes, channeling post-colonial thought, Brigitte Bardot, and an art historian’s index of references. A blonde herself, Fia digs up a fascinating passage from the travel diary of Michel Leiris, his account of a brothel visit in “exotic” Ethiopia. Fia observes, “He had seen himself from this other into his own body, seen from within. He was in perspective, no ground zero.” A different take on the male gaze occurs as Lydia Dona takes us out of the streets and into the museum to describe a metaphysical, metaplastical trajectory of Mondrian, through which Mondrian “pulled the spectator into the space formed by the projection of his unconscious gaze, only to push him away again,” making the spectator a stranger in the strange land of “perception, recollection, and signification.”
Vargas Suarez Universal delivers an intimate recollection of Mark Lombardi, the late conceptual artist whose research-based maps of power brokering and financial channels famously alerted the FBI, which seized the drawings from the Whitney Museum for its own research. Vargas Suarez Universal recounts Lombardi as a rigorous artist with enlightened views of art history and lineage (and a pothead?).
Craig Kalpakjian conducts a thorough, thoughtful report on the life of Lev Sergeyevich Termen (León Theremin) who invented the Theremin, sci-fi essential and Pixies accoutrement. The Russian inventor also applied his mastery of electromagnetic fields to surveillance and espionage. Termen also married an African-American dancer, Lavinia Williams, despite the scorn and miscegnation panic of his high-society audience. That was nearly forty years before Loving vs. Virginia.
Sam Gordon contributes a time capsule entry of five art wonders of the world, charging young artists to get political while placing the Bush/Iraq War protests in an art historical context. “Where are the Gran Fury and Guerilla Girls of the Bush 00′s?” Sam overlaps with THIS fellow Huma Bhabha; they both note the protest signs against George W. Bush, “Bush pull out. Your father should have.”
Other highlights include:
• Dan Torop on a schism between users of programming text editors Emacs and those of Vi. Art history is filled with rivaling camps: neo-classical painters vs. the romantics, Apollonians vs. Dionysians, Picasso vs. Matisse, Mondrian vs. diagonal lines, mods vs. rockers. Computer programmers also are divided when acknowledging which of the two is the more elegant, intuitive program. “Within the Vi culture, Emacs is considered bloated and awkward,” he shares, and later adds, “What Emacs users hate about Vi is its austere disdain for gratuitous luxury.”
• Ingrid Calame finding the taxidermy in collecting art: “I thought of making art as creating a lineage similar to living a life. An artwork as the product of this process, felt like a corpse – a memento of ideas. So it felt somewhat morbid to be invested in collecting these shells, investing in the body while I had been focused on the spirit.”
• Christie Interlante, “It Might as well be Evian,” which convinced me to flush less frequently and to take quicker showers, though I won’t compromise on being thorough. She reminds us that natural resources are as limited as a print editions, when you think about it, and definitely more precious.
Sean Landers – hey, when does he get a new york museum retrospective? who else reflects the “me generation” crisis? – closes the collection with a rant, I mean, an insanely egomaniacal tour de force:
“God in heaven bestow upon me the power to create and perhaps if I take nothingness and work it between my two hands and create something-ness that act will elevate my existence above that of ordinary cosmic dust. My hands in my mind in my sadness about the briefness of life will create objects so poignant that my life will have not been lived in vain. And this act is what separates humanity form that of insects, of bacteria, and I am one man, but one man greater than others because I create and I create with such love and meaning, what I make speaks of your dilemmas.”