A Present : 2009 Song Mix

My narrative medium is the mix!
I have divided it into three parts for download frustration (and also because they're about CD length)(and to minimize damage if I have to take anything down). Each has a bit of art. The art dividers are the download links. Songs with links are to videos, when the video improves the song even more. 8tracks mixes (also imbedded below)1, 2, 3. Naturally, you will pick and choose amongst them, so I've tried to cluster by genre and mood, somewhat. Apply your favorite mapping; I like future/present/past.


0 TITLE ARTIST ALBUM

1 Bad Romance Lady GaGa The Fame Monster 4:57
2 Fixin To Thrill Dragonette Fixin To Thrill 4:08
3 I Feel Cream Peaches I Feel Cream 4:33
4 Actor Out Of Work St. Vincent Actor 2:15
5 Turn It on Franz Ferdinand Tonight Franz Ferdinand 2:21
6 Games For Days Julian Plenti is... Skyscraper 3:57
7 1901 Phoenix Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix 3:18
8 Sweetheart Micachu Jewellery 0:53
9 Michael Telepathe Dance Mother 4:15
10 All The Kings Men Wild Beasts Two Dancers 4:00
11 Little Secrets Passion Pit Manners 3:59 (their videos are making me like them even better)
12 Zero Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz! 4:26
13 Glass Bat For Lashes Two Suns 4:33
14 Hell Tegan & Sara Sainthood 3:25 (Amanda Palmer Karaoke Verite)
15 Idiot Heart Sunset Rubdown Dragonslayer 6:09
16 Psychic City YACHT See Mystery Lights 5:09
17 New In Town Little Boots Hands 3:19
18 Summertime Clothes Animal Collective Merriweather Post Pavilion 4:32
19 Daylight Outro Mix Matt & Kim Grand 3:11
20 Moonson Delorean Ayrton Senna EP 3:45

21 M Telefon Tel Aviv Immolate Yourself 3:42
22 Tricky Tricky Röyksopp Junior 5:59
23 The Fear Lily Allen It's Not Me, It's You 3:26
24 Dominos The Big Pink A Brief History Of Love 3:46
25 One Day The Juan MacLean The Future Will Come 4:17
26 Bulletproof La Roux 3:27
27 2012 Gossip Music For Men 3:50
28 Break Up Girls! The Raveonettes In And Out Of Control 4:00
29 The End Vivian Girls Everything Goes Wrong 3:16
30 Hot Song Talk Normal Sugarland 4:06
31 Wet Hair Japandroids Post-Nothing (Promo) 3:12
32 So Bored Wavves Wavvves 3:14
33 The Turn Around The Oh Sees Help 1:03
34 Keep Me In Dark The Fiery Furnaces I'm Going Away 4:04
35 Shelter The xx xx 4:30
36 Stillness Is the Move The Dirty Projectors Bitte Orca 5:14
37 Real Live Flesh Tune-Yards Bird-Brains 3:33

38 People Got a Lotta Nerve Neko Case Middle Cyclone 2:34
39 The Forest Mirah (A)Spera 3:30
40 Avalanches Jordaan Mason And The Horse Museum Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head 2:18
41 Hands Like Roots The Builders And The Butchers Salvation Is A Deep Dark Well 2:18
42 See The Leaves The Flaming Lips Embryonic 4:24
43 Easy Thao with the Get Down Stay Down Know Better Learn Faster 3:37
44 Dog Days Are Over Florence And The Machine Lungs 4:16
45 The Wooden Chair Jenny Wilson Hardships! 3:15
46 Gimme Sympathy Metric Fantasies 3:55
47 Sylvia The Antlers Hospice 5:25
48 Triangle Walks Fever Ray Fever Ray 4:23 (really hard to pick a favorite song. This video looks like her live show.)
49 Bloody Palms Phantogram Eyelid Movies 3:32
50 Fake Out Bear In Heaven Beast Rest Forth Mouth 3:14
51 Trace A Line Au Revoir Simone Still Night, Still Light 3:58
52 On Rose Walk, Insomniac Why? Eskimo Snow 2:08
53 It's All Good Bob Dylan Together Through Life 5:28

Janet's Favorite Albums of 2009

Subject to editing and the addition of 10 more albums.

30. The Gossip - Music For Men
29. Phantogram - Eyelid Movies
28. Dragonette - Fixin to Thrill
27. The Raveonettes - In and Out of Control
26. The Oh Sees - Help
25. Jenny Wilson - Hardships!
24. Bear in Heaven - Beast Rest Forth Mouth
23. Thao with the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster
22. The Antlers - Hospice
21. the xx - xx

20. Royksopp - Junior


19. Wild Beasts - Two Dancers


18. tUnE-yArDs - Bird-Brains

a.k.a. Merrill Garber with a ukelele and a laptop.

17. Micachu and the Shapes- Jewellery

Young experimentalists to keep an ear on.

16. Telepathe - Dance Mother
Experimental female electronica duo. Very Brooklyn. Looking forward to their future.

So Fine video
I liked the pink dead rat they had as the cover when it leaked. Ah well.

15. St. Vincent - Actor Out Of Work

Like the other Bush-descendant, a giant leap on the sophomore album. Actor Out Of Work, Marrow.

14. Passion Pit - Manners

All-male dance pop with falsettos and beards. To Kingdom Come! is not the song we thought it was

13. La Roux

Sharp retro-synthpop. If their videos keep improving does that mean their budget's increasing? Of course. In For The Kill, Bulletproof, I'm Not Your Toy.

12. Fiery Furnaces - I'm Going Away

They've taken their own premise in yet another weird direction - less produced, more accessible, and resembling live blues-pop, it's not their strongest, but there's something perfectly deadpan about it. Even in the Rain.

11. Yacht - See Mystery Lights

Listen to these fucking hipsters. Summer Song.


10. Little Boots - Hands

Victoria Heskel is a vulnerably pretty, slightly awkward music nerd who makes energetic catchy spacey electro-dance-pop. She also has a good buzz management system and shares my aesthetic. The album kind of drifts overly cheesy toward the end. New In Town video hobo, gangbanger and whore minstrelry for the times. Other videos try to avoid boots herself dancing. What is a laser harp? It's a harp, made of laser.

9. Vivian Girls - Everything Goes Wrong

I like almost every song. Maybe I'm naive and just like songs about boys by girls and nice simple chords. Maybe I wouldn't like it if it didn't roar with distortion. Maybe I'll be deaf enough to like Times New Viking soon.
Moped Girls I had not seen before. When I'm Gone.

8. The Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

Yeah, but who didn't list them this year? Stillness is the Move: llama wanker, wanker llama

7. Sunset Rubdown - Dragonslayer

This band is better than Spencer Krug's other band[s]. Proggy. Ambitious. Fantastical. Fun. And this is the album that makes it better. They don't make videos, but the do play Nightingale/December Song live (with an obscene number of drummers).

6. Bat for Lashes - Two Suns

Huge conceptual and technical leap forward from her debut. She is a worthy Pakistani-British successor to Kate Bush. Daniel, Pearl's Dream (Lynchy!), Sleep Alone.

5. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone

The impression I get of this is that it's one great and one okay EP with a lot of filler, scrambled together. It could lose the covers and the crickets. Then I realized that's still half an hour of better music than anything else ever.
People Got A Lotta Nerve video based on Julie Morstad's drawings. If I listen to this too much I cry. Onward.

4. Fever Ray s/t

(probably the 3rd best album cover, isn't this an odd pattern?)
Truly a grower, and a profoundly lonely album, by Karin Dreijer-Andersson, a.k.a. the female sibling of The Knife. Her increasing influence on that band's sound is evident in the similarity between Fever Ray and Silent Shout. Her and her cohorts are as weird as they want to be, coldly maintaining their performance of electronic shamanism in natural virtuality. When I Grow Up, Seven.

3. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
Natch. Also, second best cover. Shut up, I like crawly op-art.


2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!
Also wins "best album cover". Decade-defining art-rock trio does electropop. So some of them might be dicks.

Video for "heads will roll" featuring two of 2009's other memes, a werewolf Michael Jackson.

1. Metric - Fantasies

If you're gonna self-release an album, it's good if it's your best, and there's still plenty of budget, and a whole series of Buenos Aires street art by Hollwood Cambodia for each song. Here's the video for"Gimme Sympathy" in which members of the band switch within, seemingly, the same shot.
Emily Haines is also in this excellent video for "Games For Days" with Julian Plenti / Paul Banks of Interpol.

Two Days in Miami

Back in October, Steve Cannon called me up at work and told me he wanted to send me to Art Basel Miami. I had no idea what form that would take, and said as much, and then didn't fully take him up on the offer until three weeks beforehand. Since I figured I didn't have a gallery to show with, I figured I'd do a curatorial wander, make connections, and plan for future visits, or not.



What allowed Steve to send me down was, in fact, the sale of the David Hammons installation that is truly incomplete without him. The original buyer, Jeanne Greenberg, gave him a percentage of the proceeds. Jeanne's gallery, and the gallery of another of Steve's art patrons, Jack Tilton, would be showing there, which is also, probably, how he heard about it. On Thursday, stopping by Salon 94's booth, I didn't know if I wanted to remind its proprietor that her largesse sent artists to hound her. I suppose it's better to be briefly bothered by artists than aggressively pursued by the sort of charity organizations that spend all your money to get more of your money.
Anyway, consider this a ninja gonzo report. During and after the trip I read Sarah Thornton's 7 Days in the Art World, which colored my perceptions a bit and turned up the dial on my five different kinds of status anxiety (as artist, as dealer, as curator, as some kind of reporter, as politically aware, or rather not very) with its outsider viewpoint. In her chapter on art fairs she quotes John Baldessari saying that an artist at an art fair is like a child walking in on his parents fucking. It's more like a child walking in oh her father making sausage with a high-class escort. Also the sausage is made of poor people. Then the father says "I'M DOING THIS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEN THOUSAND OVEREDUCATED SIBLINGS", and then your older brother gets to give the escort a wedgie. Where was I?
On a plane, sitting next to Rickshaw Spiderman, who called everyone he didn't like a "nitwit" on the phone. I did my best to make it onto his nitwit list. We shared a cab driven by a Jamaican woman who didn't know where anything was. I stayed with someone I may or may not have ever met before, besides on Facebook, who moved down there from NYC to earn scary money through one of those companies that advertises skin cream and tooth whitener on the internet.
I was frozen for an hour or two Wednesday morning, and not just because of the air conditioning. Ha ha. Whoa, deja vu. Eventually I headed over to the mainland on a city bus. I sat next to a couple of dudes who were supposed to help install David Lynch's show at O.H.W.O.W. and tried to pretend I didn't exist, and then tried to lose me. Then I went to Pulse Art Fair being set up nearby at the Ice Palace film studio. Ninja'd in there very easily, wandered around avoiding dealers and their minions setting up (although it's likely most wouldn't have cared). It was probably the best fair there.
By ninja what I mean is that if you're dressed well enough, as long as you're neither giving or getting money out of this superfair, you are invisible. Thornton's first chapter does not state, but implies, genders to buying and selling art, amongst collectors. By extension, everyone selling their labor is in a femme role, and the few buyers are the only butches. So perhaps it's a very dystopian gender structure. Androgyne symbiotes like myself may still be in the majority.
I walked up Miami and ran into a warehouse that Brooklyn's Pierogi had rented out. They had a pretty terrific show there, with some rooms dedicated to individual artists and larger rooms with multiple pieces, working well with the space. It had a recurring Urban Studies feel. I know I'm being unspecific about things I like and specific about things I don't like. Good people, anyway.
Next were the conjoined twins of Scope Art Fair and the Asia Art Fair. Together they were nearly as large and busier than Art Basel. I believe I overheard a few collectors enthusing about seeking out Asian art specifically, in the manner of stock traders. BUY. I like Scope because they had an opening party while I was there with free rum and Cuban food.

I knew there was another party at Art Miami but I did not make it in time. I'm not sure what sidelined me - I was supposed to meet my host back in South Beach for dinner, and there were yet more galleries along the way. There were at least three satellite fairs I missed (Red Dot, Aqua, Nada). Art Miami kind of felt like the resold art that only a collector could love.
It took me two hours to get back to South Beach because they'd stopped running shuttles, all the cabs seemed to be taken, and the bus I needed left from and dropped me off half a mile north of both my origin and destination. But I took the opportunity to walk along the boardwalk and take a dip in the ocean. I ran into a couple art pro girls with a joint and they didn't share. Bitches.
We had dinner at a Peruvian diner, where I discovered that the very best Telenovela is Victorinos. Then caught the end of the Ebony Bones concert on the beach, and found that alcohol increases in price over the course of the day. We managed to join one of those outnumber-the-guard sneak-ins to some swanky hotel's party where Santigold was playing. The chess pieces in the hotel's lounge could not play traditional chess, but we imagined some kind of Democratic Chess with too many pawns and only bishops and knights. The goal could be to kill one's own bishops.
Thursday I figured would be a rushed day, taking in all of Art Basel and the remaining fairs. It turned out to be pretty leisurely. Sneaking in was easy through the front and not so easy through the back, I discovered after returning from a two-mojito lunch. Basel was clearly on a grander scale but, as many have been saying this year, quantity beat quality. Still, there was plenty worth seeing in person, like Evan Penny's hyperreal optically stretched sculptures.

I could sense that this was a deliberately staged battle in the class war, and that a reaction to the sorts of parties that are more work than work was coming, but possibly only in the form of more parties.


I didn't take note of who made this. Oops.

As an artist, especially one traveling as someone else's ends, I am declaring this whole thing's teleology (art itself) unsacred. No, I do not have to report on the art. At least not yet. I have a pile of cards. I'm sorting through them. Looking at all the websites induces nearly as much aesthetic fatigue as the fairs, and makes me glad I went only as long as I knew I would be able to.

Art and Astronomy

An article I read about private funding for telescopes reminded me why I use space photography in my paintings. Both these disciplines have appealed to me for most of my life. They have similar positions of purity, or of transcendence, of a near-complete irrelevance to the mundane, the practical, and the necessary. In a way, they are the least humane human pursuits, which all the contradiction that entails. They therefore use similar justifications for their expenses, relying primarily on an appeal to aethetics, curiosity, and values about the search for truth.


There are, of course, both exceptions and loopholes. The best art engages directly with political, social, and economic interests, and part of the liberal and radical tendency of art is based on a goal of greater leisure and freedom to make useless objects. Astronomical research can be the source of better understanding of consistent and inconsistent physical laws, which has led to technological innovation. Most of the research that serves purely to disabuse society of superstition has been done. Monitoring for potentially disastrous comets or meteors is a not-insignificant part of astronomy, as is study of other planets to better understand where we're living.

But it's not those parts that interest me. It's the selling of what is superfluous even to a society based on the escalating transformation of wants into needs. Super-saturated, highly-manipulated photographs of interstellar gases are in one way a byproduct of billions invested in telescopes for better pure research, but in another way, they sell the research. By using them in paintings and digital sketches, I insert the efforts and investment of an entire industrial network, of what some might consider the loftiest achievements of "civilization". There's a sense of wonder there, and a sense of absurd amusement at the forgetting of wonder.

The sensation of a density of information, essentially indecipherable, behind an expensive image, is also why I consider all my work to be about knowledge, communication, and cybernetics. The final step, the work I do in nearly the least technologically entrenched medium that allows full color, involves the re-creation of signal from the noise remaining from an entirely different signal. Interstellar and intergalactic images are extremely lossy - as with any scientific measurement, entropy rules, and we only see a small part of the vast system we want to describe. Light from so far away is also light from far in the past - cosmology makes us recognize time's dimensionality. It's like archaeology in that much of the causality is lost. We're also looking at essentially a snapshot, since very little changes at that scale at biological speed. We haven't been observing long, nor may we be able to much longer, since it's possible astrophysical research itself was a cold war symptom. We can only observe from one angle, enforcing the primacy of two-dimensionality that I embrace with the abolition of ground. I replace space with space. Time becomes the uncertain palimpsest of historical process, the abstract unidentifiability of the original image. It's a discussion of re-interpretation, the use of one useless thing by another useless thing, and a celebration of affording any of it.

A Letter for the Younger Generation

This is by Steve Cannon and Chavisa Woods
bdlilrbt@gmail.com- (Chavisa's email)
www.tribes.org

You must remember, it was the exciting sixties when all the contradictions of American society showed their ugly face. There was a fight against racism and of course, the was a fight against the war in Vietnam. And of course there were other fights as well on a local Level. Then also, feminism was just emerging, the same with gay rights. As writers, we were concerned (and the same was true with most other types of artists at that time) not only with our own voices being heard, but that whatever we said or did would have impact on the society at large. We argued incessantly with one another. We critiqued the civil rights movement and the anti war movement in terms of do’s and don’ts. As artists we did not believe that we should “join” a movement, but, as Picasso is quoted in Marshal McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”, that artists are by nature, anarchists. Our job was to stand outside the movements and look in. Aside from arguing, of course we listened to lots and lots of music. It wasn’t only that crowd that invaded the states from England, like the Beatles, but also that crowd from Detroit; meaning Motown, etc. Of course there were people like James Brown, later Bon Marley, and Aretha Franklin yelling and screaming, “RESPECT.”



Everything was cut and dry, or, to use a cliche, black and white. Every weekend we would go to demonstrations, and after, party all night. ACID was in, so was Marijuana. The hard drugs, we stayed away from. But bear in mind, as far as we were concerned, everything in the country, especially communities in the lower east side, Venice beach, et.- wherever Bohemians lived, was involved actively in changing the country.



We read everything we could get our hands on, criticized it, and came up with our own ideas of what should be done to make changes in our local communities. We started our own presses, others started making their own independent movies, and others founded art galleries, collectives, etc. in contrast to the “establishment.” Fact is, we made our own newspaper called the East Village Other, which was involved with the LNS, newspapers like the LA Free Press, etc.



The difference between then and now, is everything was clear-cut, we knew the lines of offence and defense. Things are much more complicated for young people now, and on this note, I will let a twenty-something speak for her own generation.



The American radicals of the sixties had a distinctively oppressive culture, which they rebelled against and re-structured. When critiquing the current generation, you must not forget, they raised us. The lost hippies the un-caged panthers, the beat beats, the rockin’ rolling punks, are our fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles and bosses. Although those movements played a vital role in re-structuring the social mores and influencing today’s social codes, as far as getting to the core of it, abolishing the very thing that actually divides us (as sexism racism, homophobia, etc.. are obvious symptoms of that which even the most radical movements of the past failed to abolish) the hierarchical corporate (free market) class structure and the corporate military industrial complex. These are the institutions many of the radicals of the past eventually joined and helped to continue to create; when they reached a certain age, as Valerie Solanas warned, many of them did, “whisk their partners off to suburbs” to raise, us. We are the children of the eighties, the time of excess, riches, sexual freedom, celebration of individualism, tabu, etc.. Even those of us who were raised in lower class families were also raised with these icons and symbols of sensationalized individual success and fame as a future promise, only to find ourselves in massive debt, often time without any sense or experience real and vital of community upon reaching adulthood.

Still, you must recognize there are and have been real radical movements and communities created by the twenty something’s of today . Those of you who know will know, when I say, Stone Soup, CAMP, Slingshot, anywhere IMC, Idapalooza, Influx, and on and on it goes. From California to Chicago, to New York, to Tennessee and back up, the radical dykes of the sixties had womyn’s land, and we had/have a network of crusty collectives and we will surely look back on our days of protest and alternative lifestyles with the same nostalgia the sixties radicals do theirs , although, it seems, many of the older generation know nothing of this.

And this is the greater problem. Our generation’s radical re-structuring has consisted mainly of personal lifestyle politics, influenced no doubt by the mainstream indicators of our youth; taking on the form of urban farming, thifting, DIY, collective living, queerness, etc.. with some vital political and environmental action interspersed throughout. In order not to fall into the trap of the focus of our lives becoming personal survival upon reaching a more real adulthood, we, the younger radicals must make a conscious continuous effort to diversify. We must continue to create new movements hand in hand with the older generation, not be afraid to critique one another and accept critique, and above all we must find some way to believe, as the radicals of the past did, that we can have some real effect and impact on the MTV Militarized super dome projecting those binary images of pornographied success we seem to have been born into.

Portraits of charismatic men

Virgil, oils on linen, 12"x12".


Steve Cannon, oils on linen, 16"x20".
A blind subject is interesting because the object doesn't gaze back.

Works in progress

Titles possible: "Misunderstand Me", "Make People Like You". Oils on canvas, 24"x24". Invention, intended to tile.


Potential titles are "Reproductive Display", "Humor Me", "Make People Like You". Oils on canvas, 40"x40"? Working from models. Nebula base will change, otherwise would be recycling the Tarantula from "I Am Whatever You Say I Am", although a different photo.

Nothing for Itself Catalog

Nothing for Itself – Price List

1. Allison Moore, "Easter Lambs at Veniero's", 24"x24" oil on panel, 2007, $1000


2. Janet Bruesselbach, "Entitled Mediocrity", oils on linen, 12"x12", $600


3. Allison Moore, "The Most Expensive Perfumes in the World for Less", 24"x24" oil on canvas 2008 $1200

4. Janet Bruesselbach, "I'm Doing What I Wanna Do", oils on linen, 32"x32", 2008, $1200


5. Jason Talley, right panel of triptych “Karma Sutra” 7x5 ft. $30,000


6. Janet Bruesselbach, "I Am Whatever You Say I Am", oils on canvas, 32"x35", 2008, $3000


7. Allison Moore, "Bodega II", 38"x46" oil on canvas 2008 $3000


8. JS Flores, “Depleting silence”, Oil on canvas 48”X60” 2009, $6000


9. Janet Bruesselbach, "Misogynation", oils on linen/cotton blend, 36"x36", 2008, $3000


10. JS Flores, “Remanence of glee”, Oil on birch panel 48”X36” 2009, $4000


11. Janet Bruesselbach, "Alexithymia", oils on canvas in found frame, 26"x34", 2008, $1500


12. Janet Bruesselbach, "It's Something You Would Do If You Were Me", oils on linen, 23"x32", 2008, $2300


13. Jason Talley, “Velvet” oil on canvas 8”x12” $1000


14. Allison Moore, "Seafood Buffet, Revisited", 36"x52" oil on canvas, 2007 $2500


15. Jason Talley, Wet#1 oil on canvas 5by6 ft $20,000


16. Janet Bruesselbach, "I Know What I'm Doing: I Don't Know What I'm Doing", oils on canvas, 23"x36", 2007, $2000


Nothing for Itself: Pluralist Paintings Born in the Middle of Salad
Curatorial Statement by Janet Bruesselbach, M.F.A., T.M.I.

The concept of “nothing for itself” came about in the conversation between representation and diversity. Representative objects are xenophiles, other-lovers. The frequency of sexual imagery in this show acts as an attractor towards further replication of people and things. Representation and diversity are organic, and, seeing culture as an ecology, benefit the whole system. At the same time, any individual artwork, and any one of its settings, can be seen as its own system. These paintings are outcomes of open-ended processes, in which individual parts respond dynamically to each other. Any of these artists could show alone, but we have chosen to divert and diversify.
The Lower East Side is often described as having both vivacity and diversity, in that there are cultures continually warring each other -- long habituated, although not necessarily superlatively so, to the continual financial encroachment cycle of NYC. There is a particular tendency towards a kind of micro-radicalism, an insistence on artists remaining equally poor but supporting each other within, and in direct resistance to, one of the most purely fiscally motivated geographies in the world.
The city is rich in resources that art needs to reproduce itself – money, and attention. So the image of NYC is fixated on raw competition, self-awareness, and its own marketability. A kind of continually fulfilled desire for plurality over a gained majority, as with people and groups of people, motivates a democratic culture. Yet moderation, collaboration, or cooperation for its own sake cannot benefit other qualities. Such is the melting pot to the salad. The qualities that attract resources are not necessarily aesthetic, although the concept of considering what takes a greater share of resources aesthetically superior has its own attraction. We choose to counteract the qualities of self-aggrandizement and narcissism. Some things will be for their own sake, others for the sake of others, some in a continuous chain, some in loops, all in complicatedly interdependent relationships.
This is not another gripe about commoditization and the market, nor does it praise it. If it contradicts itself, all the better. Although any solo show exists in a jungle of other art within the same market, the generous aim of diversity in Nothing For Itself permeates fractally within the individual works, artists, painting styles, the show, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, and the multiverse.
In the current economic stall, it has become important to develop economies of generosity beyond, and instead of, financial ones. JS Flores’s recently executed painting reflects the feeling of the times, of a multitude of desperate people competing for nothing more than your attention. In Allison Moore’s interpretations of images from nearby locales, displays of variety awaiting the choice of the consumer become competitions between the very colors and shapes used to represent them. Like Moore, Bruesselbach dizzies and disorients, to the point of making explicitly depicted human bodies flatten and abstract, in parody of the flattening liquidation of material culture. Talley also uses the most eye-capturing possible images, taken from pornography, and saturated colors appealing to inner and outer children. Yet the compositions are continuous playful processes more open-ended than traditional representation.
Through three of the four artists, California manifests strongly in this show, particularly the distributed post-city of Los Angeles. Certainly the imagery addresses distinctly American experiences, including two second-generation meso-Americans, a product of secular Jewish matriarchy, and an African-American from D.C.
To divertify is to desire that by being set with each other, the qualities of any given piece of this show become greater. Hope that they are not ends in themselves. Intend to be for something else, not because it is for itself, but because it is for many others. Be a nature preserve for endangered ideas. See something else in everything, and take nothing for itself.

Nada para si Mismo

(Translacion para JS Flores)

Pinturas de diversidad, Nacido en el centro de ensalada
Octubre 1-31
Apertura Sabado 3 de Octubre 6-9 PM
Una exibicion de emergiendo jovenes artistas en una irracional exuberante involucracion con la ciudad, coadjuntor Janet Bruesselbach con Allison Moore, Jason Talley, y Julio Stanly Flores
La divesidad de estos artistas emerge en contraste con su similaridad. Se ocupan con el cuerpo humano y el tacto de la pintura. La representation se presta al objeto y se somete a una orgia de realimentacion. Esta no es arte por su propia cuenta, pero es cualquier cosa por la razon de ser algo mas. Vivacidad es el intercabio entre el cuerpo y sus alrededores, y la ciudad de New York todavia en su post-modernidad modernidad da vida a nuestras imagenes. Llenas de chaos pero completamente intencional, estos enbudos de deseo, su entropia, y la vida de los objetos que ellos sugieren, hacen un carnaval lleno de color para el otoño.
Allison Moore genera respuestas neo–cubista al Mercado del medio ambiente, en espeluznante, y intoxicante formas y colores. Es bi-costal.
Jason Talley supremamente delinea y forma figuras y jugetes en una manera erotica con ideas freudianas, jugando con la claridad en su lenguaje y nuestra resintencial a el.
JS Flores ataca la superficie de pinturas figurativas, apareando effectos visuals con su tactilidad. Sus figuras estan envueltas en su material dandoles una presencia poderosa. Esto engrana una tension a la destrucion de la piel humana.
Janet Bruesselbach improvisa y acomoda pinturas en olios surreales con indiferencia jugando con la gravedad y la profundidad, en donde todo se convierte en figura.
Tambien al ser la viva imagen, “nacido en el centro de ensalada” es aquella matafora anti-utopica de New York no como punto de fusion pero, en la manera inperfecta de todas otras metaforas, un multicultural, multi directional conglomerado de gustos.
Para mas informacion, contacte a janet@bruesselbach.com / (310) 617-3366

Nothing for Itself - Curatorial Statement

Pluralist Paintings, Born in the Middle of Salad

The concept of “nothing for itself” came about in the conversation between representation and diversity. Representative objects are xenophiles, referring away from themselves. The frequency of sexual imagery in this show acts as an attractor towards further replication of people and things. Representation and diversity are organic, and, seeing culture as an ecology, benefit the whole system. At the same time, any individual artwork, and any one of its settings, can be seen as its own system.



The Lower East Side is often described as having both vivacity and diversity, in that there are cultures continually warring each other -- long habituated, although not necessarily superlatively so, to the continual financial encroachment cycle of NYC. There is a particular tendency towards a kind of micro-radicalism, an insistence on artists remaining equally poor but supporting each other within, and in direct resistance to, one of the most purely fiscally motivated geographies in the world.



The city is rich in resources that art needs to reproduce itself – money, and attention. So the image of Nuyorican imagery, since Andy Warhol, is fixated on raw competition, self-awareness, and its own marketability. A kind of continually fulfilled desire for plurality over a gained majority, as with people and groups of people, motivates a democratic culture. Yet moderation, collaboration, or cooperation for its own sake cannot benefit other qualities. Such is the melting pot to the salad. The qualities that attract resources are not necessarily aesthetic, although the concept of considering what takes a greater share of resources aesthetically superior has its own attraction. The qualities of self-aggrandizement and narcissism are strong attractors, and it is a choice to counteract them. Some things will be for their own sake, others for the sake of others, some in a continuous chain, some in loops, all in complicatedly interdependent relationships. Be a nature preserve for endangered ideas.
This is not another gripe about commoditization and the market, nor does it praise it. If it contradicts itself, all the better. Although any solo show exists in a jungle of other art within the same market, the generous aim of diversity in Nothing For Itself permeates fractally within the individual works, artists, painting styles, the show, the neighborhood, the city, the country, the world, and the multiverse.



In the current economic stall, it has become important to develop economies of service and giving to others. JS Flores’s recently executed painting reflects the feeling of the times, of a multitude of desperate people competing for nothing more than your attention. In Allison Moore’s interpretations of images from nearby locales, displays of variety awaiting the choice of the consumer become competitions between the very colors and shapes used to represent them. Like Moore, Bruesselbach dizzies and disorients, to the point of making explicitly depicted human bodies flatten and abstract, in parody of the flattening liquidation of material culture. Talley also uses the most eye-capturing possible images, taken from pornography, and saturated colors appealing to inner and outer children. Yet the compositions are continuous playful processes without the cyclopean vision of traditional representation.



Through three of the four artists, California manifests strongly in this show, particularly the distributed post-city of Los Angeles. Certainly the imagery addresses distinctly American experiences, including two second-generation meso-Americans, a product of secular Jewish matriarchy, and an African-American from D.C.
Desire that by being set with each other, the qualities of any given piece of this show become greater. Hope that they do not necessarily have to fight for themselves. Intend to be for something else, not because it is for itself, but because it is for many others. Or be for something selfish, because agenda forget pluralism. See something else in everything, and take nothing for itself.