I’m not Jewish; nobody’s perfect.  Beyond my aesthetic interests, I also worry that not being Jewish makes me miss out. With neither bloodline nor lifeline to Judaism, I can’t really absorb the solemn history Jewish people suffer, nor the wisdom their experience imparts to the rest of us.  Not being Jewish is a tattered quilt that insulates me from a heritage as constantly endangered yet always indestructible as mankind itself.

Were I half Jewish, would that improve me 50 percent?  Or would that bring me the best of both worlds?  One enlightening proposal is an excerpt from Alessandro Piperno’s Proust, Anti-Jew.  It is the most stirring text in SEMITES, the new magazine conceived, designed, and curated by New York artist and poet Daniel Feinberg.

Piperno parses through the network of conflicting ideas and memories that customized Proust’s reality as a half-Jew, and Proust’s subsequent sublimation of that material into Remembrance of Things Past.  Often unrecognized as Jewish, Proust accidentally infiltrated his anti-semitic neighbors.  Like a silent spook among vocal anti-Semites, he had a rhetorical dual citizenship during the divisive Dreyfus affair, and a prescient vision of aging and destiny.

Marcel Proust on His Deathbed, Man Ray, 1922

In the 48 pages of SEMITES and the accompanying multimedia website, provocative text coexists with lively images ranging from (and blending) camp with iconoclasm.  The apocalyptic humor plants ambiguous criticism, which befits the Israeli conflict, entombed under countless layers of sorrow and confusion.  Daniel’s “chosen” style, handcrafted appropriation, invokes guerilla art and Dada collages, perfect for such unstable subject matter.  An infinity loop of “An I for an I,” handwritten, wraps around a Pyramid in Giza, part of a series of retouched Polaroids that haunt us with ancient history.  Retouched film stills remind us of the cycles of war that have befallen us all (and certain drunk Hollywood actors).  Through SEMITES, Daniel Feinberg joins the roster of artists researching and addressing Middle Eastern Turmoil, including Emily Jacir, Francis Alÿs, and Walid Raad, to name just a few.

Walid Raad; Let's Be Honest, the Weather Helped (Finland, Germany, Greece, Egypt, Belgium), 1984-2007

What do Christians Want: is a conversation with Gil Anidjar, in which the Columbia University professor makes the revolutionary claim that the Christian West controls Jews and Arabs by pitting them against each other in a divide-and-conquer triangle.  Following his late model, Edward Said, and teaching alongside the controversial Joseph Massad at Columbia, Professor Anidjar deconstructs the Israeli conflict through a lens of power and security.

(l-r) Gil Anidjar, Joseph Massad, stone, Edward Said

To warm up readers for such worldly rigor, Daniel prints Theologico-Political Fragmenta by Walter Benjamin.  The essay is a dialectic trip-out posing the “Messianic” against the “historical” and “political.”  Warning of nihilism, Benjamin proposes isolation and suffering until redemption by restitutio in integrum, which introduces immortality (and headache, for me).

If you prefer list mode, try the streaming roundtable train of defenses and  condemnations of circumcision, “docked” by a sizzling centerfold appropriation.

I’m curating a show about videos that trick out movies into trippy abstraction.  Not just visual abstraction, but also sound, space, and time.  More synesthetic and metaphysical.  Included are :

Silver (2006) by Takeshi Murata,

Repeating the End (2007) by Les Leveque

left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999) by Douglas Gordon, which mirrors Preminger’s Whirlpool with itself, flickering frame by frame from one screen to the other.  Like a strobe light, it’s more arresting than Gordon’s more famous 24 Hour Psycho.

My video show wouldn’t be in a gallery, but an abandoned mansion or hotel in the country.  It would open only after sunset, because those creepy videos should screen in the dark.  The biggest room is reserved for and dedicated to Perpetual Zooz (2005-6) by Michael Joaquin Grey.

Michael Joaquin Grey's Perpetual Zooz at PS1

Now screening with gut-rattling stereo bass at PS1, the video uses The Wizard of Oz as its material.  In a rectangle nestled within the surrounding rectangular projection, the movie “screen” tumbles in 3-dimensional space, contorting into elliptical trapezoids.  One facet bears the movie playing forward from the beginning, while the opposite plays backward from the end.  Their junction is the scene in which Dorothy opens her door to the world of color.

That reflexive relation is where Douglas Gordon might stop.  But MJG adds another  ”dimension” by voluminizing the images through custom software (designed with R. Luke DuBois) that maps the images into extreme shaded relief.  Throbbing in three-D, Dorothy’s face swells and morphs into the grotesque inflated visage of the Marshmallow Man, and then into the Sierra Nevadas.

Meanwhile, the dynamic digital elevation stalagmites/tites jump with each thump of the stereo sound, a recording of two simultaneous heart beats pumping in and out of phase: those of the artist and his mother.  When the phasing lines up and the hearts beat in unison, the th-thump goes THUD, a reciprocal canceling out, like the black holes we make while jumping with a sibling on a big trampoline.

Burst Mode

Artist : mother :: black & white : color :: film : digital video :: staying young : growing old

Perpetual Zooz is the climax of an exhibition that reads like a rebus or flowchart about creation, human reproduction, object relations, language development, identity, and adaptation.

One wall displays an astounding cross-pollination of objects: along a parabola from left to right, we see schematics of heterosexual mating, two vinyl stickers before-and-aftering the inevitable union of a pair of red blocks, a stereolithographic sculpture of those blocks, and finally an inkjet print of a baby playing the two red blocks.  It’s a narrative arc that blends Aristophanes, Joseph Kosuth, Thomas Edison, and Fisher Price.

This friendly guard helped me with Northern Romantic Citrus

Northern Romantic Citrus is a “computational drawing” that very gradually develops from its origin in a readymade landscape painting reproduced digitally. Watch closely enough and you’ll spot one colossal orange after another “growing” on the central tree.  (Decades ago, this clever substitution would have saved Guernica from the malodorous mitts of Tony Shafrazi.)

Timelapsed

The oranges we track take us back to the navel-gazing baby in an inkjet sequence demonstrating how we learn by distinguishing things from us and vice-versa, how that helps us perceive order, and how that itself  is part of a larger order that we measure through science.

“Far from the body being first for us and revealing things to us, it is the instrumental-things which in their original appearance indicate our body to us,” says Sartre.

The spinning baby is the progeny of two diagrams above it that connect a woman’s body with the orbits of the moon, a cosmological frequency with a range vast enough to contain both scientific enlightenment and mythological necessity, with the comfort of two peas in a pod.

In fact, Spiritual proposals find room in this cerebral show.  Michael Joaquin Grey decorates the red blocks stickers with mandalas, while naming the stereolithographed blocks Gametes.  The slow pace and low position of Northern Romantic Citrus together suggest that you should kneel down and silently concentrate for several minutes.  If that doesn’t help you find meditation, then the larger video will help meditation find you.

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough

Sign the waiver, then step through crumbled, Chinese text newspapers covering the floor like dry leaves in late autumn.  Nestled within is an album of aging photos.  Handwritten titles on the reverse side meant something to someone: “Joe Wishey dressing room” and “Carla’s last night.”  They are dated 1979-1988, summertime, and record a group of people involved in a theatrical production, perhaps everyday life, All the World’s a Stage?  We also see dull photos of the family dog: as puppy and then mature. Not catching Frisbees; he’s just sitting there, looking on as time passes.

The Lining...

Like a moth to a flame, we follow the fluorescent glow into a barren shop with slatted walls resembling those used by Canal Street hucksters. Garish lighting, nappy wigs on headforms, colored pebbles: all symbols for Sisyphian, futile beautification.  Superficial self-transformation is cheap and easy; hence, this is the first room we enter on our journey.  A sledgehammered passage leads to a small room with a door.  The door is locked. Dead end. It is also papered with catalog pages displaying not couture, but banal apparel and mom jeans, more plain than the most generic store-brand.  Mirrored mylar drapes the walls like sagging mirrors – hapless, sagging mirrors. Vanity gets you nowhere.

...the Witch...

...the Wardrobe

Hurry out.  Where to now?  Door number one, two, or three?  Choose your own adventure. But first, pause and contemplate the naïvely rendered painting on canvas of a molecule that might be a drug, but is not LSD, psylocibin, THC, cocaine, amphetamine, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, nor heroin.  I checked.

Saving the staircases for later, enter the twine-lined dojo, where bulletin boards bear snapshots mingled with photocopied astrological readings.  Letterhead identifies astrologists in Maine and one from Manhattan.  Details reveal that the photos are decades old: we see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes; an office calendar from 1996; a Bobby Brown clone, an acid washed denim jacket, and even a teen reenacting Nirvana’s swimming baby.

Up the steps into a disheveled mobile home that defines abandoned squalor.  Nobody would endure the stale odor, let alone rest on the hideous brown couch with cigarette burns on the armrests.  Fireproofed windows keep things dark.  Next to the couch are a sewing table and machine.  White powder is scattered (drugs? fire extinguisher?) and there’s a wanted poster for a male, African-American arson suspect; the text absurdly mutates into a textbook lesson for police faced with domestic disturbances.  The rotting kitchen is cluttered with meth lab accoutrement and a grocery list of pseudoephedrine, matches, Drano, Winstons, Mountain Dew, coffee filters, funnels, bleach, beer, aluminum foil.  Some of these items are scattered about, all with contemporary packaging.  There’s also a Richard Simmons Disco Sweat Farewell to Fat VHS.  Chalky ash and cinder cover everything.

Interior details and surfaces suggest that the mobile home connects to an R.V., but it’s hard to make sense of this labyrinth.  For example, why does a timber post support the rear ceiling, more typical of a cabin?  Cupboards along the walls are empty, except for two ironing boards.  Aluminum ventilation ducts intrude from overhead.  The bathroom floor is carpeted, dark muck fills the toilet bowl, and the cabinet is tied shut with a wire hangar.  A rotting corpse will howl from the bathtub any minute now.

Turning around, we see knitted fabric hanging above a homemade frame containing a NY Times page from 1980 reporting the surrender of Weather Underground leaders, along with a button for The Pretenders, and a mysterious concert photo.  And the Richard Simmons fan has left a weigh scale in the middle of the floor.

The R.V. reveals the source of the ash and cinder.  Its kitchen is ruined after an explosion.  The oven is missing and a recliner sits atop a table, whose formica surface has peeled away from the MDF underneath.  Expanding outward, blisters and shadowy scorch marks record the trajectory and reach of the ghostly blast.

Climb through the wall to an intact meth lab majestically positioned like an amphetamine altar.  A can of Ice CRYSTALS.  The floor is carpeted with torn clippings from a Dr. Leonard’s Discount Health Store catalog.  A sci-fi fan must have brought out the Terminator 3 and Mars Attacks trappings.  Terminator 3 ends at the fictitious CRYSTAL Peak.  We also see clippings of sports cars and lingerie catalogs.  A man worked here.  But what about the pair of posters depicting one white horse and one black horse?

Comb through the Sudafed boxes to a refrigerator portal leading us to a creepy chamber where a musty boxspring leans against the wall.

In the study next door, we can view footage from surveillance cameras monitoring the compoud.  This shelving unit looks a lot like the refrigerator Justin Lowe used in Helter Swelter, his earlier summer blockbuster. Smart to recycle things like that.  Printed matter is stacked, filed, and bound among a wall of office shelves.  The books are missing their covers, and someone has handwritten custom titles. Many of them, such as The Ardor of Plunderers and Undoing of Foolish Virgins, come from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell.  Facing this library are more bulletin boards with astrological diagrams, now joined by photocopied text on palmistry and parapsychology, and a seemingly random production image from Black Shampoo.

The high ceilings and open space in following room offer relief from the musty claustrophobia everywhere else.  This parlour/ gallery rolls out the red carpet for the tuxedoed elite depicted in framed, b&w photos of gatherings involving CACTUS and CRYSTALS.  Also exhibited here are collages of appropriated media photos layered beneath fragmented CACTUS images.

Note the coyote

Next door is its bizarro counterpart.  A single light bulb illuminates the circular mystical symbol on the wall, which has survived the peeling paint; but the decaying red carpet and drop ceiling panels are beyond repair.  (My friend, Dennis Hoekstra, executed this marvelous space, what a wiz!)  I don’t know what the symbol symbolizes, but maybe it’s just a super-symbol, standing in for myriad subcultures and countercultures, none of which really exist without suffering commodification first.  Look at the 3GS punks on St. Mark’s Place.  It’s over, man!  By the time the world discovers something, it’s already over.  Hence, this vacant new age temple/parlour is empty and decrepit.  And next door in the upper-crust gallery, visitors fetishize pictures of people fetishizing objects.  The cactuses and crystals thumbed by the clad-in-black elitists meant something to someone, like the notes in the photo album, but now they are just abused signifiers.

Yet, I couldn’t help walking through the show wondering, “How would they sell this? Do they sell the couch?  Or the room?”  The vitrines in the red-carpeted gallery contain apparent fragments from the Tweeker pad, as if snidely, literally answering our query about a saleable art object.  They’ll chop a piece out of the installation, a bite-sized morsel, and you can buy it and show it off to your friends.

Break on Through

Commercial Space Available

Now we can return to the crossroads at the beginning of the show.  Downstairs, the Chinatown head shop offers glass wands, bundles of herbal remedies and Sudafed, CRYSTALS, minerals, roots, and bark. Terrariums incubate gnarled plant life, like CACTUS, possibly the ephedra Ma Huang: the Mandarin meth.  Candy-colored airbrushed T-shirts on hangars portray hard core sex between buxom women, fruit, a dog, and much more.  A lone television conveys a montage of what appear to be Eastern and Western T.V. commercials, a telenovela, and a glimpse of Syd Barrett’s acid trip.

Terrarium in Back

And No Exit

Upstairs is a mysterious dwelling.  Fur boots outside the door suggest a cold climate.  Colorado?  That was the site of Drop City, which surely inspired the fabric, geodesic panels overhead. Transparent, dust-covered glass jars fill the room, containing pickled memories, many echoing objects unearthed elsewhere in the show: tobacco packaging, Chinatown shopping bags, a 21st birthday foil balloon, Christmas ornaments, Elmer’s school glue for elementary huffing, spray paint with a tube for teenage huffing, beer cans, burned books, rotting fruit, an ad for Similac, coffee cups, machine parts, packing bubbles, a Tony Little workout video, wig price tags, a book called Rebels bundled with a photo of Chinese students, chicken wire fence reminiscent of the molecule painting downstairs, and a murder mystery by Lucha Corpi, CACTUS Blood.

Tony Little: You Can Do It!

The bedroom is a haphazard nest amidst collages made from books about science, communes, and Heloise All Around the House.  We find CRYSTALS, and illustrations of people with CRYSTALS substituted for heads.

Coyotes in sweaters (also recycled from Helter Swelter) snuggle in the back corner.  Above them is a sequence of cinematic photos of a man carrying woman’s body up a hill, and said woman bleeding from the mouth, unconscious.

Pickled Memories

Is Black Acid Co-op – the extraordinary undertaking by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, at Deitch Projects in its third generation after protean transformations in Marfa and Miami, a culmination for Justin Lowe and a leap for Jonah Freeman, overwhelmingly maximalist and immeasurably significant – the tale of a square-peg, desperate housewife? Here’s the story that I detected, at least in my imagination. Said desperate housewife sought spiritual fulfillment to ameliorate the drudgery of dog days, rode Women’s Rights out of suburbia, briefly indulged in cosmopolitanism but didn’t fit, opened the gateway to substances, got deeper, got hooked, took jobs only an addict would take, found a partner, stayed on in an interracial relationship with a meth chef, sleeping with the source, who died in an explosion, leaving her a drug-addled widow with paranoid delusions and separatist leanings, who dabbled or even employed herself in astrology, then tried to find solitude by building an individual commune, the definition of which precludes solitude, and fell victim to foul play or other ill fate?  Printed matter downstairs includes a Black male arsonist, a Blaxploitation poster, and the racially suggestive pair of b&w horses: clues about her mate? The book about housewives and the family photo album indicate family life conflicts, as do the gendered clothing catalogs, which would appeal to an isolated meth maker, as well.  And the stray weigh scale, fitness videos, and sewing machine for tailoring all intimate a woman’s burdensome body consciousness, inextricably connected one way or the other to meth abuse.

Damien Hirst at Gagosian, 2005

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough, Gagosian Gallery