Susan Klein

I'm writing this so I can remember Susan Klein. Every day I see, read and hear of and about so many incredible and interesting things. Every day I learn of and about some interesting person — often three or four. And then I immediately forget it all. So, it occurs to me, one reason to write is to remember. And I want to remember Susan Klein. 

Susan Klein's work came across my mind screen in the excellent four person group show at Crossing Collective called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast". It's a collection of kinda whimsical abstract art. Whimsical in terms of it's color palette mostly. Everything in the show is very likable but there is something about Klein's work that singles out my attention. I'm not sure I can yet explain what that is. I'm still processing, still "framing" it for myself. All thoughts that follow are tentative. 

One. Her art makes me think of Philip Guston's later work. And I very much like this about it. Not the earlier work documented on her website but, rather, the stuff from 2016 onward. Which, of course, includes the pieces in the Crossing Collective show. It's not obviously like Guston. For one thing, many of the pieces are in a different medium, ceramics. For another, there are no Guston-like figures in her work. The closest thing to that is those fingers. No, what it is is the loose, sketch-like mark making that she adopts in 2016. 

Two. If you look at the work Klein documents on her site, one of the stories it tells is a movement from something that is more precise and precious to something that is faster and more fun. Something that is more brittle to something that is more loose. It's a movement from what I want to call "the intellectual architectural" to something  that is weird, psychological and slightly hallucinogenic. 

Three. Are those things fingers, people, or penises?  

Four. There is an aspect to Klein's work that makes me think Memphis-style design. A looser, less hard-edged version. 

                               

                                            

                                                 

Dropping out while dropping in

I've been exploring the Bronx a fair amount the past couple of years and this has gotten me wondering a lot lately about why there are not more small artist communities scattered around New York City. I'm not talking about large concentrations of artists like the one in Bushwick (right now). Or the way Williamsburg or SoHo used to be. I'm talking about smaller groups of intrepid and avant garde deep thinkers and creators who relocate to more remote and poorer parts of the city in order to take advantage of cheap real estate so that they can concentrate on their work in solitude while simultaneously staying connected to the life pulse of New York City. Leaving the city is always an option. But "leaving" while staying is more interesting. Dropping out while dropping in is what I say, man. I lived in the middle of nowhere for much of childhood. I hated it.

If you ask me, groups of artists should band together and relocate to these farer flung locations in New York City. They should band together, buy real estate and create secret communes within the city. They should create places where they can securely go deep into their own weirdness, cross pollinate with a small group of like minded freaks, and develop unique and hidden perspectives. They should move like tortoises, resisting the public eye. They should kill the rabbits. They should NOT become real estate speculators attempting to bet on where the next hot, gentrifying artist neighborhood will emerge. They should go to unexpected places and turn inward while secretly remaining fully present in the city.

New York City is both bigger and smaller than most people think. It's more interesting than the handful of well worn places everyone treads. There are a lot of interesting places within the city that are completely unknown and totally off the master beaten path.

You're not real, girl.

This is my favorite St. Vincent song

And All Across America
The Poison Fires Glow
And In The Blood Of Our Procreation
...Annihilation Grows
Yes Love Was Made For Slaves Like Us
Designed To Fetishize
Consumption, Waste And An Identity
Based On A Dying Lie
So God Forgive America
The End Of History Is Now
And God May Save The Victim
But Only The Murderer Holds Real Power

We Came Across The Seas
We'd Fill With Offal And Disgust
And Any Object Industry Required
We Bought, Enslaved, Or We Crushed
And Now Our Minds Are As Naked
As The Paradise We Stripped
And Our Reward Is Our Entropy
Our Emptiness Is Our Gift
So God Forgive America
And Every Human On This Earth
And God Forgive The Ruined Lives
And Nothing Is What It's Worth

This article intrigues me.

This article intrigues me: it has some very deep life lessons.

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Alex Bogusky is an interesting guy.

A really, really, really bad trip...

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  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1282647/US-cage-fighter-Jarrod-Wyatt-rips-training-partner-Taylor-Powells-heart.html
  


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  http://www.times-standard.com/ci_15174272
  


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curating/creating

These two blogs are listed as referrers on my Flickr account. They're both collections of found images. This is one of the ways people use Flickr too, as a place to collect or archive found images. This is what some of my favorite Flickr streams do. It's the internet equivalent of collecting magazine and newspaper images. But what intrigues me is the magnification/escalation/acceleration of the activity — and that it's visible. We're peeking in one another's photo albums and scrap books. We're looking through the photos, newspaper clippings, letters and porn each of us keeps stashed in a box under the bed.



*http://crotchbuffet.blogspot.com/


*http://lookcaitlin.tumblr.com/page/2

Digital Natives

I'm completely intrigued by this article. You can see the outline of an entirely new media apparatus coming into sharp focus. It makes Gregory Ulmer's theorizing (which I know mostly from classes with him at University of Florida and his book Teletheory) seem unbelievably prescient. I'm thinking, in particular, of his concept of 'electracy', his notion of electronic media literacy. What made me think of this are the comments in the article about how the college students under scrutiny get their news in a 'disaggregated' way. They pay almost no attention to the big 20th Century forms of mass media (television and newspapers). This is a kind of media engagement, an electronic media apparatus, that, as theorized by Ulmer owes as much to pre-Gutenberg oral cultures as it does to post-Gutenberg print ones. Mcluhan was not fooling around when he coined term "Global Village." And I feel like now, more than ever, I need to go back and not just read more Ulmer, but Walter J. Ong and Marshall Mcluhan as well.

I like this too...

SSION: WOMAN from john dretzka on Vimeo.

I like this but if you lived through the 80s, if it was thee formative period of your life, it just doesn't seem all that original. It's a collection of footnotes and references. It's a good example of how the footnote — or hyperlink perhaps — has become the prevailing content of our time. And, the funny thing about this is that the vanguard period for this (the footnote as content) also goes back to the 80s: to post-structuralist experiments in writing. It always intrigued me that these experiments (with their obsession with the footnote and the comment in the margin) presaged the hypertext and the rise of internet. So this video is good (especially the body-faces) — just not all that original. The never ending end of history... Everything has already happened... No future... And the end of history more or less coincides with the rise of youth culture — in the Sixties. "Don't trust anyone over 30" — which morphed, in our time, into an endless succession of "blah blah is the new 20s" ("the 40s is the new 20s", "the 50s is the new 20", "the 60s is the new 20s"). We live in culture that's obsessed with youth, one that's hysterically obsessed with getting old, of being outdated. So in the future of no future there are no old people and the present is an endless nostalgia for the recent past. Heaven is a place where nothing — and hence everything — ever happens. And the kids these days, the youths, are vanguarding it.

Welcome to Griddleville

I want to see more Griddleville. Is there more? Is there only 14 minutes? Go here and watch these 14 amazing minutes, now, man.

Design is fucking with something for a while. It's not a negative thing.

All you need is authoritraian-style capitalism

China's "economic miracle, the newspaper People’s Daily boasted last week, exists because its leaders — unlike those in other, unnamed nations — can make quick decisions and ensure underlings carry them out. The Great Recession, the newspaper said, has laid bare cracks in plodding Western-style capitalism."

[source: "As China Rises, Fears Grow on Whether Boom Can Endure", Michael Wines, January 11, 2009]

"Antennas of the Race..."

I don't know why but, for some reason, I thought it wasn't published... "Antennas of the Race: Kevin Regan vs. Radek Szczesny" was done for FreeWilliamsburg in conjunction with the Bushwick Biennial. It was a bunch of fun doing studio visits with Radek. First we drank beer at his studio and then at mine. The recorded discussion was done via email in the days after that.

James Kalm Frames New York episode on Drippy at Famous Accountants

I talk a lot.

United States of Art

Because I think the last sentence in what I wrote is hilarious, and I get the feeling no one saw it, I'm copying a comment I made in the discussion/thread on Jerry Saltz's Facebook Wall today and pasting it here. I think my comment is the 95th one in the thread.

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Jerry Saltz: "My esteemd friend Howard Halle says “It’s a widely held belief ... that painting is dead.” Come on! No one has actually believed this since at least the Nixon administration! The 'P. is D.' canard is dead rhetoric, a way to keep art boxed in. Mediums don’t die until all of the problems they were invented to solve are s...olved. If anyone can prove that P. is D. I will give them a $10,000 ‘Jerry Saltz Tautology Prize.’"

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Kevin Regan: "I think the p is d camp just wanted to undermine the privileged status of painting. Just look at the controversy caused by the Richard Tuttle show at the Whitney back in the mid 70s (not really all that long ago). And even if those aforementioned POMO critics blew the door open for other forms, other media, more often than not, if I tell someone I'm an artist they assume I'm a painter. And, not only that, painting sells better (and for more money) than any other medium. In other words, painting is the United States of art."

Drippy

Drippy is the second show at Famous Accountants. I should have posted images of the first one. We got a great response for the first one but, I think because the content was so personal, so close to me, I spent less time trying to get the word out on it. Whateva. I came up with the idea for Drippy. Ellen Letcher, my partner at Famous Accountants, and I painted the blood dripping down the walls. Ben Godward made the amazing, colorful sculpture on the floor. Ellen took the two photos of the show here. They were taken the night before the opening. One of the photos features Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and my self. I designed the flyer for the show but Ellen made the illustration. Word.

It's weird how the blog theme is clipping off the edges of the photos. Click on them to see the whole image. I don't feel like figuring it out.