limnrix

2011 Albums

2011-12-14T23:09:00.000-08:00

Janet's 25 Favorite LP Albums released in 2011

In very rough increasing favoriteness

With self-defeatingly defensive commentary

25. David Lynch - Crazy Clown Time
I don't care to defend myself.
best tracks: Pinky's Dream, Strange and Unproductive Thinking, Stone's Gone Up, Crazy Clown Time

24. Summer Camp - Welcome to Condale
Okay, like a lot of other stuff this year, it's variously retro. English people doing American new wave pop. Not exactly heavy listening, but easy on the ears with the occasional subversive complexity.
Best tracks: Brian Krakow, Summer Camp, Nobody Knows You, Down, Ghost Train, 1988

23. Wild Flag
This is a great choice. It is. It's only this low because okay, I couldn't always listen to all of it. But it's a supergroup made of the best musicians in 90s feminist indie rock!
Romance, Boom, Short Version, Racehorse

22. Ladytron - Gravity the Seducer
Usually Ladytron would be up near the top of the list, but this is their only weak album. It was about time they made one - it is a grower, as it turns out, much more atmospheric and mature. It's quite pleasant, because the weakness is only in comparison to other Ladytron, and that's just not fair.
Mirage, Moon Palace, Altitude Blues, Ambulances, Melting Ice

21. Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil
Along with and despite of a concept somehow revolving around nuclear world war is some of the genre-eluding band's catchiest nonsense.
The Merry Barracks, Super Duper Rescue Heads!, Secret Mobilization, I Did Crimes For You

20. Starfucker - Reptilians
This just some great dance music. Plus there are Alan Watts samples.
Best tracks: all of them, whatever

19. John Maus - We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
That there were ads for this guy on Spotify did the opposite thing ads are supposed to do and made me put off listening to him. The guy is a philosophy professor at some college in Hawaii, and what he does is Ariel Pink like.
Quantum Leap, Head for the Country, Matter of Fact, Believer

18. Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes
It occurs to me that nobody's paying me to recommend anything.
Youth Knows Know Pain, I Follow Rivers, Get Some, Sadness is a Blessing, Jerome

17. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life
Hardcore punk anarchist romance story cycle
Queen of Hearts, The Other Shoe, like most of the songs are worth listening to in order, it's pretty impressive

16. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
To be honest, I kept feeling like I should like this album more.
Cruel, Surgeon, Northern Lights, Dilettante

15. Neon Indian - Era Extraña
I don't know how to describe what the kids are doing these days except that I think it sounds like they were conceived to it.
Polish Girl, Blindside Kiss, Hex Girlfriend, Suns Irrupt, Arcade Blues

14. Cults
Well-hyped faux indie that is quite good actually
Abducted, Go Outside, Never Heal Myself, Oh My God

13. Dum Dum Girls - Only In Dreams
I like the EP they released this year better, but Dee Dee & co's second album brings the best things about rock n roll from the last 40 years into its girl-group reinvention.
In My Head, Heartbeat, Wasted Away

12. Dengue Fever - Cannibal Courtship
Stand back, everyone. Let the 60s Cambodian pop inspired professionals handle all your amazing music needs.
Cannibal Courtship, Cement Slipper, Family Business, Thank You Goodbye

11. Thee Oh Sees - Carrion Crawler / The Dream
This thing just goes by in a blur whenever I listen to it. A mindblowing blur of psych punk that keeps me churning along in my meatpuppet as long as it lasts.
Fucking everything, okay

10. Ponytail - Do Whatever You Want All The Time
The LAST ALBUM. Probably. Which is too bad because Ponytail could probably be prescribed as an anti-depressant. At least it takes a while to build up a tolerance.
Easy Peasy, AwayWay, Music Tunes
9. Hooray for Earth - True Loves
I don't know anything about this band really. Nevertheless, I stand behind this album's high placement.
Sails, True Loves, No Love

8. Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years
Goth your face off
Confetti, Underworld USA, Alchemy and You

7. Austra - Feel It Break
I'm actually just really emotionally attached to this album by Canada's answer to The Knife. It may or may not have staying power.
Lose It, Beat and the Pulse, Hate Crime, The Noise

6. Man Man - Life Fantastic
As my date to their amazing live show dubbed them, Man Man Man Man Man. Man, Man Man, Man. Man!
Piranhas Club, Haute Tropique, Shameless, Bangkok Necktie

5. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
In which Polly Jean becomes a belated World War I poet.
Let England Shake, The Glorious Land, The Words That Maketh Murder, Bitter Branches

4. MEN - Talk About Body
It is weird that this shot so high on this list, but I feel like JD Samson fronting an art pop band that may or may not be a queer deconstruction of DEVO was necessary.
Life's Half Price, Credit Card Babie$, Boom Boom Boom, Rip Off

3. YACHT - Shangri-La
Sci fi dance music. YACHT do what they want. I like her voice.
Dystopia, Love in the Dark, Holy Roller, Paradise Engineering.
Shangri-La the song makes me cry.

2. Tune-Yards - W H O K I L L
Merrill Garber has that voice AND mad percussion skills AND does live loops AND righteous lyrics AND made that energy fit on her second long record. Okay? Can we at least agree on this?
My Country, Gangsta, Bizness

1. Pictureplane - Thee Physical
This year belongs to horny 20 year old kids with synthy gadgets, careful extraction from pop and trance, elaborate retro-futuristic ideologies (like "cyberculture" is still a relevent term here), and an impossible nostalgia for the early 90s. I'm sorry. It probably just hit me at the right moment and won't appeal to you. Thanks for listening, anyway.
Post Physical, Trancegender, Breath Work

2011 Tracks

2011-12-04T22:12:00.001-08:00

I spend every year building a narrative playlist of my favorite music released that year. I only include one song per artist, and usually it's a single if they've denoted them, but, you'll see on this list, often not.I'm blogging about each individual song on my tumblr. This mix is somewhat inverse: it starts with the end of the world, and moves on relentlessly from there. I aim for a smooth flow through genres, with the occasional necessary leap. Contact limnrix at gmail for an 80-minute gift mix customized to your taste.

Right click to download 500MB, be careful with it

1 Deerhoof Super Duper Rescue Heads! Deerhoof vs. Evil 2:36
2 Ponytail Easy Peasy Do Whatever You Want All The Time 5:48
3 Battles Wall Street Gloss Drop 5:25
4 Does it Offend You, Yeah? Yeah Don't Say We Didn't Warn You 4:13
5 Fucked Up The Other Shoe David Comes To Life 4:57
6 Man Man Piranhas Club Life Fantastic 3:52
7 Tom Waits Bad As Me Bad As Me 3:10
8 The Builders And The Butchers Black Elevator Dead Reckoning 5:37
9 Eleanor Friedberger My Mistakes Last Summer 4:29
10 The Kills You Don't Own The Road Blood Pressures 3:23
11 David Lynch Pinky's Dream Crazy Clown Time 4:01
12 Thee Oh Sees The Dream Carrion Crawler / The Dream 6:52
13 The Antlers Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out Burst Apart 3:25
14 The Decemberists Calamity Song The King Is Dead 3:50
15 Yacht Dystopia (The Earth is on Fire) Shangri-La 4:01

16 Gang Gang Dance MindKilla Eye Contact 5:17
17 Rainbow Arabia Mechanical Boys And Diamonds 4:13
18 Zola Jesus Vessel Conatus 4:42
19 Björk Mutual Core Biophilia 5:06
20 Esben and the Witch Marching Song Violet Cries 3:56
21 PJ Harvey The Words That Maketh Murder Let England Shake 3:41
22 Tori Amos The Chase Night Of Hunters 3:03
23 Kate Bush Wild Man 50 Words For Snow 7:17
24 St. Vincent Cruel Strange Mercy 3:35
25 Braids Plath Heart Native Speaker 4:26
26 Thao & Mirah Eleven Thao & Mirah 4:01
27 Tune-Yards Bizness W H O K I L L 4:26
28 Dengue Fever Family Business Cannibal Courtship 3:38
29 MEN Boom Boom Boom Talk About Body 4:07
30 Wild Flag Boom Wild Flag 2:45
31 Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Maniac Hysterical 3:04
32 Foster The People Pumped Up Kicks Torches 4:00

33 They Might Be Giants Cloisonne´ Join Us 2:38
34 Jens Lekman An Argument with Myself An Argument with Myself 3:49
35 CSS Hits Me Like A Rock La Liberacion 3:36
36 Hooray For Earth True Loves True Loves 3:30
37 Memory Tapes Sun Hits Player Piano 3:34
38 Dum Dum Girls He Gets Me High He Gets Me High 3:00
39 Tennis Seafarer Cape Dory 3:03
40 EMA Milkman Past Life Martyred Saints 3:21
41 Cults Abducted Cults 2:53
42 Summer Camp Down Welcome to Condale 2:33
43 Vivian Girls Take It As It Comes Share The Joy 3:01
44 Lykke Li Sadness Is A Blessing Wounded Rhymes 4:01
45 Adele Rolling In The Deep 21 3:49
46 Beth Ditto Open Heart Surgery - Original Mix Solo EP 5:40
47 Lady Gaga Scheiße Born This Way (Standard Edition) 3:46
48 きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ PONPONPON もしもし原宿 4:05
49 Monarchy Love Get Out Of My Way Monarchy 3:20
50 Oh Land Sun Of A Gun Oh Land 3:27
51 Iamamiwhoami ; John ; John - Single 6:39
52 Ladytron Mirage Gravity The Seducer 4:22

53 Glass Candy Beautiful Object Warm in the Winter 6:08
54 Neon Indian Polish Girl Era Extraña 4:24
55 John Maus Quantum Leap We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves 2:53
56 Cold Cave Underworld USA Cherish the Light Years 4:59
57 M83 Midnight City Hurry Up, We're Dreaming 4:03
58 The Naked and Famous Young Blood Passive Me, Aggressive You 4:07
59 The Raveonettes Ignite Raven in the Grave 3:06
60 SBTRKT Wildfire SBTRKT 3:25
61 Little Dragon Shuffle A Dream Ritual Union 2:55
62 Pictureplane Post Physical Thee Physical 4:17
63 Starfucker Hungry Ghost Reptilians 2:10
64 Planningtorock The Breaks W 4:38
65 Austra Lose It Feel It Break 4:29
66 Metronomy Corinne The English Riviera 3:16
67 Wild Beasts Loop The Loop Smother 4:07
68 Radiohead Lotus Flower The King Of Limbs 5:00
69 Panda Bear Slow Motion Tomboy 4:37
70 Moonface Shit-Hawk in the Snow Organ Music Not Vibraphone Like I'd Hoped 7:29

Here's the short version:
1. Deerhoof - Super Duper Rescue Heads!
2. Ponytail - Easy Peasy
3. Memory Tapes - Sun Hits
4. Dum Dum Girls - He Gets Me High
5. Man Man - Pirahnas Club
6. Hooray for Earth - True Loves
7. Gang Gang Dance - Mindkilla
8. Yacht - Dystopia
9. MEN - Boom Boom Boom
10. Dengue Fever - Family Business
11. tUnE-YaRdS - Bizness
12. PJ Harvey - The Words That Maketh Murder
13. Metronomy - Corinne
14. Antlers - Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out
15. Thee Oh Sees - The Dream
16. Austra - Lose It
17. Cold Cave - Underworld USA
18. M83 - Midnight City
19. Pictureplane - Post-Physical

Frieze Art Fair 2011

2011-10-26T17:27:00.001-07:00

Frieze is the fourth art fair I've tasked myself with reporting. I'm not sure how extensively I should discuss the parts of it that are the same as all other art fairs. There is some absurdity to traveling to London for it, considering that the majority of the galleries exhibiting there are American. Of course, that means these American galleries know there's enough money in Britain's collecting institutions - including museums, other galleries, and collectors - to invest in making a showing and bringing everything over. And somehow, given both the experience I've already had and the much more serious, if not sober, attitude of Frieze, I'm inclined to be a bit less gonzo about the whole thing. That means I step away from my own experience and actually tell you what this particular white circus says about contemporary art. Unfortunately, because I'm far too rude for the double snobbery of the London art world, I was usually intimidated away from talking to more people or finding out how sales were, or if there were after-hours events, or any satellite shows in time to attend them. c'est la vie.

Hover over the images to get all the information.

Because it's nearly the same people and the same art in very different modes, the most striking social difference can be found between Art Basel Miami and Frieze. Miami is a drug-funded party full of free food and drink and music. Frieze is all business. I suspect the difference in sponsors is a major factor: Frieze's sponsor is mainly Deutsche Bank and several other large German companies. I do rather like the better organization and lack of silliness this gave the show.

Frieze is held, in what may have been an enormous structure to construct for a single weekend, in Regent's Park, in the north near King's Cross station and somewhat mid-city. Once inside, I lost all city orientation. In fact, on the second day I came, I persuaded the VIP desk to escort me through their lounge because I thought that way I would start at the side I hadn't cruised yet. It turned out to still be near the regular entrance, so it was as if the back of the walled tent extended into another dimension.

As with other information-dense environments - like academic texts or postmodern novels or the internet - I focus on finding the most interesting art to me and those I experience these things vicariously for. Though it may be interesting to many, I've developed a blindness toward most abstract art, conceptual shtick, and supposed attempts at the avante-garde that so please critics. I focus on figurative painting because it's what I do, web art and tech responses, cheeky references to art commodification, meta-genre, post-media, non-fetishizing multiculturalism, and things that remind me of people I like. So there I am, up front with my underinformed biases.

London and Frieze presented some clear themes to me. One was that I kept seeing trees in everything - information trees as well as a distincly English manner of painted tree. At the Tate, mostly, I also noticed an odd tendency to organize rooms so that the minority or political issues were always in dead end side rooms. Another Tateism that definitely reflected in Frieze was post-historicism: London's millenium of political continuity encourages a disbelief in modernist style breaks. Art of the past is not only appropriated or responded to by contemporary art, but considered within the same context, with the same tropes.

Because art shows are only curated within the gallery booths, I can't speak for the overall choices of the organizers. As usual, most of the space is rented by blue chip galleries, with a few solo shows in smaller spaces by galleries established in the last 10 years. There are several commissioned Projects. One was the giant hand-changed train station style sign, above, by Bik Van Der Pol. The most notable was Laure Prevoust's series of small white text on black enamel paintings custom made for specific spots throughout the tent. Here's a set of all those I could find. A bit more invisible is Oliver Laric's recording of fair footage to be released as stock video footage - guaranteeing that this fair will come to represent all art fairs.

There were also a few particularly well-curated booths. The most eye-catching was Long March Space out of Beijing. Another was a conceptual installation by Austrian couple Muntean and Rosenblum using other artists' work as well as their own.

Unfortunately, I don't know which of those artists made this, which I would usually skip, as it's all the worst well-used art historical tropes, but it charmed me:

There were these two guys, a good one and a bad one, who were constantly chasing each other, thus maintaining the Good & Bad balance in the world. One day, due to some heavy thoughts in the bad guy's head (about the misleading representation of evil in general and in the movie industry in particular), he slowed down the pace a bit and the good guy stared to catch up to him. "What if I stop entirely and the good guy reaches, even touches me?" The bad guy suddenly got this very unorthodox idea in his head, which, luckily, didn't slow him down more.

"What is he doing?!" The good guy was really stressed by trying to maintain the centuries-old established distance between the two. There will be a happy ending to this extremely dangerous situation, though.

From the very center of this golden circle, through the holes, a fresh idea will come out and will pop simultaneously into the good and the bad guys' heads. And almost immediately after the two of them will take off their white and black skins, the symbols for good and bad, and throw them into that opening, and they will hug each other, and will have a very good fuck (for which they have been waiting since the dawn of civilization) and after a short, unforgettable moment of relaxation, the two will spin out of the golden circle, which, from that moment on will become useless - and that is the really good news.

Interestingly, I am drawn to relatively abstract art when the abstraction derives from Middle Eastern tradition, as in this handwritten plexiglass and pen installation (using repeated quotes from the Cyrus Charter of Human Rights) at Dubai gallery The Third Line. I do get the sense that the strongest collecting force at Frieze is Arab royalty. I also overheard more conversations in German, Dutch, and French than in English. This is the realm of international elites, for whom all these fairs are in different parts of the same worldwide metropolis.

A schoolmate I'm happy to see make it here, and through a Vienna gallery at that. I do wonder whether this sold - it would have been lost in the crowd had I not recognized his work.

Grayson Perry combines several of the themes I saw: the New Aesthetic attraction to information spaces, and uses of historical craft techniques. In this case it almost orientalizes a Western tradition.

The biological mapping trope often aims to distill the appearance but not the goal of communicating, even though the artists that make it are usually close enough to crazy that they do have an untranslatable system.

The combination of impasto in these subtle colors with the scientific illustration style I found very fresh.

With its title, this analog application of digital vision also draws map analogies.

Three of extremely enlarged computer printouts of meta-digital art: one referring to the programs used, at several levels mixed with physical paint, to generate it. The second is an old, much-resaved, originally analog image blown up large enough to make a point of the jpg compression artifacts. Finally, an image made in 3 seconds with a default gradient but likely much more time was spent getting it transferred around and printed.

And net art is printed out and neatly framed in white, which is rather absurd.

In Damien Hirst's art world, the artist's identity, and issues of both uniqueness and ubiquitous surveillance, come into combination with generic artiness, sometimes more cleverly than others.

Somehow I'm more uneasy about including living animals in installations

Than I am about the treatment of your average artist's assistant.

They say bankers talk about art and artists talk about money. Well, Torres makes art out of money, especially very inflated or nearly useless currencies. Here he picks up on the martial themes in a collage of different currencies.

One must always consider our poor, neon sign makers, exposed to the egotistical demands of artists not content to pick a medium they know and stick to it.

Finally, an image of some relevant nearby street art, and a hint at the missed alternatives:

Interview in the Forest Hills Times Ledger

2011-10-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

Art from Science
Forest Hills artist taps into scientific intuition and applies it to the canvas

By Allison Plitt
Thursday, September 29, 2011 12:34 PM EDT
Comment (No comments posted.) Email To a Friend

Janet Bruesselbach with her cerebral paintings, which blend the principles of art and science. Photo by Allison Plitt

Raised in Southern California by parents who are both laser physicists, Forest Hills painter Janet Bruesselbach grew up surrounded by a world of science that serves as a pervasive theme throughout her artwork. While most artists refer to their pieces as “creations,” Bruesselbach discusses her work in more scientific terms such as “experiments” or “inventions.”

Even Bruesselbach admits to her unconventional view of art. “I have this weird kind of thinking in terms of optics and thinking of things objectively and experimentally — like seeing everything I do as an experiment that I don’t see a lot of other artists doing and I know that is because I always wanted to be in science a lot more actually,” she said.

Bruesselbach divides her artwork into three different categories. The first group is a series of works called “astrae,” in which Bruesselbach paints female models set against different backgrounds of celestial galaxies. Displaying her fascination with astronomy, she employed an inventive technique to create this type of artwork.

Bruesselbach designed each “astrae” piece using what she calls “digital painting.” Describing the process, she said “it started when I happened to have my laptop with me during a figure drawing class in high school. I opened a photo of a space nebula in Photoshop, put another layer on top of it and drew the model as if the nebula were a setting.”

Bruesselbach also conceded to a lifelong love of science fiction as seen by her second genre of paintings, in which bodies — be they human or alien — transform into various shapes. She said, “There’s this crazy stuff with the bodies morphing into each other, which is always sort of based on rules that I make. It’s like an algorithm, kind of like a process of giving myself a lot of invention, but, at the same time, keeping a firm structure in there. I’m actually trying to replace space with space in a way.”

Bruesselbach’s third category of artwork is portraiture, in which she employs her professional training in “traditional representative painting.” She holds a bachelor of fine arts in illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design and a master of fine arts in painting from the New York Academy of Art.

Rejecting the idea of painting a person from a photo, she prefers the human interaction that develops between herself and live models. “I know that my skills lie directly in working with a human subject and I know that all I want to paint is people,” Bruesselbach remarked. “Quite often with portraits you end up with parts of a person’s personality being revealed that you didn’t expect to.”

In the future, Bruesselbach hopes to do more portraits through a video chat technology she uses on her computer. Describing her portraiture via video chat as a “remote intimacy,” she said, “I am really interested in these sort of contradictions in the way we like to think how technology changes us or contradictions to how we think science works because I basically grew up on the Internet. I feel that connections that we make there are much more intimate and more emotional than those that I have in person.”

Another goal for Bruesselbach is to possibly become an artist representative or open a gallery focused on affordable art, which she says is a current movement in the art world. “I am a great believer in the middle classes being able to afford art,” she said.

From 2009 until 2011, Bruesselbach worked as a curator at a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side called, “A Gathering of the Tribes.” Since the owner of the gallery, Steve Cannon, is blind, she needed to verbally describe each piece of artwork to him. As a result of this experience, Bruesselbach was inspired to work on her current venture which involves finding writers to depict artwork that artists will need to reproduce. By combining the efforts of both the writers and the painters, she intends to organize an art show to exhibit at various galleries.

“In taking Steve Cannon to art openings and describing the work to him, I realized how much effort was involved in really describing imagery, especially considering that many art reviews and press releases neglect to do this properly,” she said. “High art, for a few years, has been so conceptually oriented that it’s more about language and less about exploring the complicated relationships between the verbal and the visual.”

For more information about Janet Bruesselbach’s artwork and upcoming exhibits, you can visit her website at www.bruesselbach.com or email her at janet@bruesselbach.com.

Teleportraiture

2011-08-19T10:26:00.000-07:00

Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am a classically-trained portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Unlike paintings from photos, these portraits capture a personality over time. Sometimes things occur like the mirror effect, where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. Yet the resulting painting is still, choosing challenge over cubist adaptations.

I’ve grown up on the internet, communicating throught text, but in the past few years interacting face-to-face remotely has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers. This toggling between performing and concentrating means that, more often than not, the absent, concentrating expression of the computer user will be depicted – if I allow it to be.

This project seeks to examine the tenuous, technology, strange intimacy, and charged emotions around communicating remotely, by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.

I have worked this way on three occasions prior to starting this campaign: once with deep romance, once with a stranger speaking another language, and once for a self-portrait. Teleportraiture in part examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity. In the course of the project I hope to see many faces I haven’t seen in person or ever before. Ultimately, my goal is always to make my subject look good, and give them a unique experience with a tangible result – the conceptual aspects will never supercede that. By making your backing part of this project specifically, you get to participate in a techno-social experiment marking a particular cultural moment in an oddly old-school way.

Your money buys you a portrait, images thereof, and videos of sessions, or goes toward a book, poster, and exhibition of the series. The backing structure is based around backers of the smallest amounts being able to sit in and watch the process. At the next level, you’ll get a pdf book and poster of every portrait. Mid-range backers actively contribute by sitting to have their portrait painted, and keep a scan, but I keep the painting. With the permission of the sitter, sessions will be recorded, and a little more money gets you the video. At a relatively low cost for oil portrait commissions, backerss can buy the painting. Even higher donations will keep lower backers from viewing the session, plus no limitations on time or size. I will continue to take commissions for these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled. All backers receive an invitation to a preview reception of the exhibition of these works. The exhibition’s location is undetermined, but should be longer than a month in New York City in mid-2012, somewhere with wifi and computers for remote attendance and so I can keep painting teleportraits from the space.

I'm hoping to make 20-30 paintings over the course of 2 months. Sittings usually take about 3 hours. Most of the paintings I make through Teleportraiture will be between 8x10 inches and 12x16 inches. Usually, I charge $400 or more for a head and shoulders portrait. That means what I really want to raise is $8000. This is, at bare minimum, what your donation goes towards:

Studio rental 800

Electricity 100

Cable 100

Painting Supplies 300

Printing 300

Shipping 400

Frames 200

Exhibition space rental 2000

Exhibition ad/promo 500

Exhibition hardware and labor 300

TOTAL: 5000

With $3000 more, at least, though, I can rent the space for longer, invest in a bigger, better scanner, and provide a computer and projector for the opening. In fact, I'm looking for a good tech-friendly space for this, and if it's non-profit, that would be a huge help, as well.

Here's a 10-minute demo video in which I paint Lauren while discussing the project.

Teleportraiture

2011-08-09T10:45:00.000-07:00

Kickstarter approved my project!

Teleportraiture is a series of oil portraits painted through videochat. I am an accomplished portrait artist whose work has always been based around the intimacy generated during the interaction between painter and subject. The painting is artifact of a performance of relationship and conversation, mutual but asymmetrical observation. Often I describe things like the mirror effect where I have to put the expression on my face that my subject should have in the painting. The outcome is the result of a face moving through time, capturing a personality, and particularly a personality in interaction with my own.
I’ve grown up on the internet, and in the past few years interacting remotely in this same facial, visual and vocal way has become commonplace. In videochat, the mirror effect is more explicit, as you’re always able to see yourself as the other sees you. You find yourself having to alter your face from the way people look at computers to how they look at people – yet the portrait artist often looks at people the way people look at computers.
This project seeks to examine the strange intimacy and changed emotions around communicating remotely by making the archaic oil portraiture tradition site-unspecific and international in a way that, if anything, makes it more personalized. This differentiates it from the portrait-by-photo services made affordable by outsourcing. The ultimate images use the intermediary camera and compression to generate artifact artifacts. They are not supposed to look like they were done in person, but reflect their particular system of old and new technologies.
I have worked this way on two occasions: once with deep romance, and once with a complete stranger speaking another language, on chatroulette, where most other video screens showed penises. Thus this project examines the current trend toward erosion of online anonymity.
The donor structure is based around other donors being able to sit in and watch the process, and, with the permission of the subjects, will be recorded. Higher donations are given private sessions, and there’s plenty to be had if one is shy. A lower donation will allow posing without buying the painting. The intent is to continue to make these after the project funded through kickstarter is fulfilled.
I’m aiming to complete 20-30 paintings through this project and exhibit them. Guests will be able to attend the exhibit remotely.

Blind Painting, or, The Canvas Game

2011-07-30T19:56:00.000-07:00

Artists, Writers, and Persons of Interest,

This is an invitation to participate in a collaborative project and
exhibition. I've been brainstorming it as "blind painting": what it
resembles is a surrealist game (Ipupukat/ the Paper Game, a little
bit), and, while it's probably been done before, every time it's done
is vastly different depending on the participants.

Artists will contribute one of their works - we'll stick to
2-dimensional, with a maximum largest dimension of 36 inches, to keep
it simple. Writers will be assigned (randomly) one of these works to
describe as extensively as possible, as if it were to be destroyed, or
needed to be forged. Then I will give another participating artist one of these descriptions of
another artist's submitted piece, and they will attempt to replicate the artwork
from that.

There are a lot of interesting things about image and
language being tested experimentally, here. Go with it. Ultimately,
both the original works and the telephone-reproductions will be
displayed in an exhibit, accompanied by the descriptions.
This project will evolve greatly as it goes on. Clearly, I know more
artists than writers, so please pass this on to more writers. If
you're an artist, and know you're good at visual verbiage, you may
save yourself a lot of work by volunteering to be a writer. I may
change it so that it's all artists, especially if we have mostly
artists who write well. Finishing on deadline will be important for
this project, since there are two stages of difficult creative work
before the exhibition materials can even be prepared.

If you're interested in participating as an artist, reply with a jpg
of the work you'd like to include (with media, dimensions, and date),
or say you want to make something specifically for it. If you'd like
to only be a writer, reply with a short sample of observational
writing. If you think you can do both, send both. If pulling those
together is slowing you down from replying to this, then worry about
it later and just reply.

I'm hoping to have an exhibition sometime in early 2012 - March, in
New York. By default, I can hold the show at A Gathering of the
Tribes, blind guy Steve Cannon's alternative space in the East
VIllage, but if you like the idea and can provide a more accessible
space for 4-6 weeks, or somewhere to re-exhibit, I would love that,
and we should discuss it.

I've sent this call to a very diverse crowd at all career stages. The
project's ultimate form will depend on who responds. Please pass it
on, post it, and let those you think would enjoy it know. They should
contact janet@bruesselbach.com (I may set up another address if things
get too intense).
And if you'd like to be involved in planning or funding, I'd love the help.

Some Remarks by Jeffrey Grunthaner on the paintings of Janet Bruesselbach

2011-06-22T12:46:00.001-07:00

Arty review of "I Hate Art"

Hosts

2011-06-19T20:39:00.000-07:00

I wanted to generate what the aliens, Ariekei, in Embassytown by China Mieville look like before I looked up the better job other artists have probably done. It's almost instantly one of my favorite books, everyone. I don't think I have any better examples of Literary Sci Fi. I can compare it to Babel-17 or Anathem but better.

Anyway, the Ariekei are described with mixed analogies to earth creatures, enough that you get an idea of something very alien-looking. Their technology is all biological and they speak a non-representational language with two harmonizing mouths, the "cut" (above, on the neck) and the "turn" (at chest level). They walk on four "spider"-like legs ending in "hooves", with spines and dark hair. They have two coral-like "wings", the giftwing (manipulation, from under the turn mouth) and the fanwing (hearing, behind cutmouth and eye antlers). Wings and eye-antlers all retract or furl and emerge like those of sea creatures or stop-motion plants. Mature hosts are accompanied by battery creatures (zelles) and older ones grow edible sacs.

Show music

2011-04-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

I put together a playlist for the show. This is how it goes:

1. How To Be Eaten By A Woman / The Glitch Mob 5:58
2. Quality Time / Starfucker 2:58
3. A/B Machines / Sleigh Bells 3:35
4. Down On Yourself / Shy Child 3:13
5. Destroy Everything You Touch / Ladytron 4:37
6. Dolls / New Young Pony Club 3:16
7. Mirrorage / Glasser 3:39
8. Artificial Intelligence / Nite Jewel 3:52
9. Conversation / Gary Numan 7:37
10. Universe / Fujiya & Miyagi 4:25
11. Can't Hear My Eyes / Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti 3:20
12. Twin Flames / Klaxons 4:20
13. Too Much / Sufjan Stevens 6:44
14. Go Long / Joanna Newsom 8:03
15. Madder Red / Yeasayer 4:06
16. Red Star / EMA 6:36

Plus entire albums : Ponytail's "Do Whatever You Want All The Time", tUnE-yArDs' w h o k i l l , Marnie Stern, Geneva Jacuzzi, Crystal Castles, The Fiery Furnaces' Bitter Tea.

I Hate Art

2011-04-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

I now have a preview available of my show here: bruesselbach.com. Yes, you contact me for purchases and to set up portrait sittings.

I Hate Art

2011-03-21T15:36:00.000-07:00

Janet Bruesselbach

the "I Hate Art" show

April 23 - May 23, 2011

Opening Reception Saturday, April 23, 7-9 pm

Tribes Gallery

285 E 3rd St. 2nd Floor

New York, NY 10009
212 674 3778

"The Artist is Absent" minded : Live Portraits Every Saturday

You have assumptions, if you’re reading this. Either that it will explain what you’re looking at, or that it will be theoretical gibberish, or that it will be yet another idiot artist whose shtick is to defy of either of those assumptions. There are many ways what you are observing could only fulfill your expectations.

You should probably tell Janet what you’re seeing, and tell her what to paint. She doesn’t know either any more. If you have empty wall space, maybe you should put art in it. Otherwise, it’s not going to try to be socially conscious or transcendent or even successfully satirize those goals.

Consider these experiments produced by an algorithm that forces choices on a well-trained* unconscious human machine. See something not about art, but about science, that is, the pursuit of truth, and therefore, compulsively honest, to the point of both representational loyalty and continuous contradiction. Choices were made to please you, to make something that is simultaneously what you want to see and what you’ve never seen before. They were made by finding sympathetic shapes in other shapes, generating one signal out of another by treating it as noise. Or simply trying to make a self-deprecating joke.

You should visit on Saturdays and sit for the artist. You may buy the portraits, and the proceeds will go towards turning this building into somewhere artists can be as stupid as they want to be. You should leave feedback, but only if it’s negative. We are fishing for insults, here. If this attitude annoys, you can reasonably be expected to ignore it. Thank you. I’m sorry.

* MFA, New York Academy, 2009. BFA, RISD, 2006. TMI, Internet, just Google her, you hardly know her.

Letter from Steve: Repossession of property at 285 E 3rd St.

2011-03-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

A Gathering of the Tribes

(where I'm doing my first solo show next month)

Say folks,

Here's the situation, read it and weep: NY Times Article

Because of the situation I find myself in, and I'm certainly not going to get my eyesight back anytime soon, I need your help.

Since selling this building to Lorraine Zhang, I have found that she has no idea how to manage this property here in NYC. She seems to have found herself in an awful lot of debt.

With your help, I was hoping you might know anyone with deep pockets or charitable organizations that might help me with repossessing the building to place it under new management.

I've owned the building for over 40 years and in the process, lost my eyesight, and currently have nobody around to manage the property. I'll need someone to manage the property properly.

If you know anyone that might be able to help with this current crisis here, please forward this email to them.

For the last 20 years, for the most part I, Steve Cannon, have been financing Tribes myself. 2/3 on my own, and 1/3 funding

The total loss in running Tribes since opening is well over a million dollars, if not more. Since Lorraine has proven incapable of keeping up with the bills of the property (tax, mortgage, bills, etc.), she finds that she's had to put it on the market.

What I'd like to do is to rent the other spaces out to artists. Have them pay a maintenance fee... And find a philanthropist or charity to pay off the mortgage. I need your help in this search and if you know someone who can help, let me know. The discrepancy between rich and poor is ever widening in the nation, and artists are among the people who suffer most. For over 20 years, Tribes has sought to help emergent and established artists pursue their calling in the arts, and I should like to keep it that way.

If you have any questions, please give me a call: 212-674-8262

Please read the article line by line carefully.

And here's another article to consider as well:

Create an East Village Dream House by Evicting a Local Legend

For more info about Tribes, check out www.tribes.org. We're also on Flickr, Youtube, Twitter and Facebook.

Love you madly,
Steve

Mix for my dad's birthday

2011-03-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

I used to send him these pretty regularly. This year I reinstituted the tradition. It's got lots of good music I've been listening to lately, on it. It's topical and stuff.

Side A: War dead baby blues

1. Holly Golightly & the Brokeoffs - Devil Do
2. The Builders & the Butchers - Cradle on Fire
3. O'Death - Only Daughter
4. Vivian Girls - Sixteen Ways
5. Amanda Palmer (on her magical ukelele)-Idioteque
6. PJ Harvey - The Glorious Land
7. Arcade Fire - Half Light II (No Celebration)
8. David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, and Roisin Murphy - Don't You Agree
9. Cut Copy - Blink and You'll Miss A Revolution
10. Deerhoof - I Did Crimes For You

(not on 8tracks) 11. Anna Calvi - I'll Be Your Man

Side B : wallow in immanence

12. The National - Conversation 16
13. Wolf Parade - Pobody's Nerfect
14. Jenny & Johnny - Committed
15. Tennis - Baltimore
16. Dum Dum Girls - Jail LA LA
17. Lykke Li - Rich Kids Blues
18. Best Coast - Bratty B
19. Wavves - Green Eyes (these two songs are basically about each other)
20. Thee Oh Sees - MT Work
(not on 8tracks) 21. Scott Pilgrim Soundtrack - Sex Bo-bomb - Threshold
22. Andrew Jackson Jihad - We Didn't Come Here to Rock
23. The Books - Group Autogenics II

Download before March 31

SCOPE Art Fair highlights

2011-03-08T22:16:00.000-08:00

       Oh, SCOPE. You are a symptom that screams "ENJOY ME!" I hate myself for loving you, because it means that, whether I enjoy their company or not, I, too, am a hipster.
       This was my last fair. I visited on Saturday around 2. As mentioned before, SCOPE took over Pulse's space from last year, a sprawling seaside warehouse block beside the West Side Highway at Houston. To get to the entrance you had to walk by the entire building, which involved passing a half-open loading bay where they'd parked trailer potties next to their resident caterer, Roberta's, a trendy North Brooklyn pizza place that was selling no pizza but lots of booze. I'll also get Roberta's out of the way by saying the restaurant area was decked out like a space disco on several different drugs. The space seems to go on forever and is easy to get lost in, which very much suited the fair. Maybe I just like the space a lot, because I liked the irrational exuberance of Pulse last year.
       SCOPE is the most promo-savvy (I got updates every day on their schedule, and I'm not even sure how I got on their mailing list). Geographically, this one seemed very Brooklyn- and Miami-heavy, with enough Asian to be notable, as well. They show up at every major art fair cluster, although they never create one. They are the most like a trade fair, the most commercial, the most circus-like, and possibly the most self-conscious about all of the above. But you know what? There's more art I like here than anywhere else. Which is to say, there's a lot, and it's made more provocative in the competition. By admitting to pretention, they are less pretentious. They're selling to art lovers and collectors, not museums and dealers. It's the middle class, which right now is a bit concerned with its own mortality, and loves to look like the rich and poor, fucking.

Renee Gertier - Space Junk

An image of satellites in earth orbit made by poking holes in paper bags. Okay.

Kris Knight - "Belladona Atropos" and "Blood Flower"

Miami's Spinello Projects had a sprawling area of the front of the warehouse space, without great identification, and sometimes work displayed on tables like this - possibly visiting-collector fallout. Another highlight of theirs was Antonia Wright's "Are You Okay?", video of her crying in crowded public places.

Jorge Santos - Soapbox King

David M Bowers - The Collector

David Bowers! He has often been one of my favorite artists, illustrating fantasy covers with these classicist allegories. He advised me to join a country club if I wanted to sell work.

Ori G. Carino - "Selfexistenlessness" at Dean Projects

Carino counts as my favorite "find", since I'm a sucker for East/West clashes and stuff that looks like porn. Also he titles well. Jenny Bhatt, take note. I like the Dean Project. I hope I deserve to show there someday. My quibble with this is that the airbrushing makes the figuration weak.

TRUSTOCORP at Contra Projects (a street art/lowbrow gallery based in Detroit)

Lluis Barba

Jennifer Cutrone and Paul Outlaw for Artists Wanted

Yeah, so, this was performance art about decadence and so forth. A bunch of artists being assholes. Every once and a while one was going around with a platter and offering you his sliced sausage at groin level. They probably took turns - I was also handed some grape juice from that golden fountain.

Andrew Ohanesian (image courtesy of the artist), "Mandies" at English Kills (Brooklyn)

Carrying on with the theme of free booze as relational aesthetics, this was my very favorite. There were two doors, looking grimy and clubby and run-down and covered in graffiti, with "please keep the noise to a minimum and respect our neighbors" signs on the front. One door led to behind the bar, one to in front of the bar. There was space for one or two people on either side. There was a keg underneath and a tap. Whoever entered behind the bar ended up in the role of bartender, and whoever entered on the patron side tried to get beer from them, generating these ad hoc arrangements. The doors weren't marked, so you didn't really know what to expect, approaching them, or which side you'd end up on. I'm told they temporarily had a tip jar going, so it was like a job of a couple of minutes. Maybe it's just because I got weak beer out of this, but I thought it was brilliant.

Apparently there was also a "frat party" performance that was supposed to be going on, but nobody was in the zoo-like enclosure, and I didn't want to volunteer. The upper lounge, "Home Away From Home", had a massage station and meditation and comfort foods and free condoms, and an author.

Matthew Oates - "Red in Red"

Station Independent is not a gallery, but a group of curators and consultants that mostly just do SCOPE NY. Oates's painting caught my eye immediately - he's probing the uncanny world of living dead faces.

Jenny Morgan - "All This Time" at Like the Spice

I hit this near the end and after going to Mandies until the keg ran out, so I don't have a great description besides that I love Jenny Morgan's work.

Maybe next year I'll try to hit up Volta finally, and a different set of third-tier fairs, and whatever Dalton and Powhida and Rad and such cool kids have set up for institutional critique (this year it was the Failure Desk). You should too. Look for jobs a couple weeks before hand, lots are available. Call yourself press, I'll show you how, and help me out with this, it's revelatory. Thanks for your attention, and see you next year.

Pulse 2011 NYC

2011-03-08T18:08:00.000-08:00

What happened, Pulse? Was I rushed? Hungry? Or were you just small? You were definitely smaller than last year. You were in the Metropolitan Pavilion on 18th, right in the middle of the city, nearly. Last year, you were where Scope is now, which encourages even more qualitative description in the form of contrasts between you and Scope, and only serves to confuse the two more.

Here's a contrast: 20x200 and Jen Bekman projects gave out free swag bags including useful art tools, canned coffee, chips, and way too much breath-freshening (mints, tongue brush) to avoid insult. A little art fair humor, aimed more at art proles than VIPs. Scope, my last stop, was all about the free beer, and wine, and condoms.
It appears that what caught my eye was mostly based on personal affect, here. Or maybe Pulse really does lean towards more work by women, more focused on craft, and often concerned with technology. In fact, the frequency of animals and machines I've seen at it everywhere gives it a perpetually cybernetic theme. Galleries from Canada and the West coast make a good showing. I often wonder how much local galleries debate whether they can just lure collectors in town for the fair directly to them without renting a booth. I also skipped last year's repeats, of which I saw plenty.

Cindy Wright, "Web of Tears" at Mark Moore gallery

She makes big juicy paintings from closeups. Non-human subjects fare better - "bacon cube" was another highlight, but I like starry rhizomes, even with maudlin titles.

Laura Ball

These were exquisitely detailed, delicate watercolors, primarily of animals made of animals, were just spread out on a table. I suppose there were too many and they wanted to sell as many as possible.

Tim Etchells

Oh. More neon. Can we stop? With the neon? We get it. Then again, it always does get my attention.

Carla Camino

Ironically, I cannot find a web presence for her. Maybe I mis-transcribed her name. She had some less impressive work up amongst this assortment of small drawings, but I dug this one.

Kevin Bourgeouis - "Inventions of Love (Natural Discourse)"

Syncronicity! Nina at Causey in Williamsburg got back to me super fast after we chatted. She is clearly a networker to emulate.

I don't think I liked anything in the artist project spaces upstairs ("Impulse").
Still, so:
Pulse: hip but friendly.

Independent Art Fair, NYC 2011

2011-03-07T18:00:00.000-08:00

The Independent is in the X-Initiative, formerly DIA, building in Chelsea. It's touted as being "by and for gallerists", and is the more intellectual but less commercial (and less expensive, being free) Armory satellite. Very curator-friendly, and dominated by Europeans. It can claim to be the most vertical of the fairs, and the least walled-in, with natural lighting and a rooftop lounge. The result was several galleries collaborating to assemble a somewhat cohesive museum show - a socially magic accomplishment! Labels and identifying info were sometimes hard to find, though.

David Shrigley

Zach Feuer gallery is right next door, and has an eclectic, hilarious, brilliant solo show by Mark Flood (Murk Fluid) up now.

Alex Brown - Hummingbird

Ryan Gander - N.. n... n...nostalgia

This caught my eye because I'm a little nerdy. That's an enlarged replica of a Roman d20, and there are some magic-force doodles stuck to the wall behind it.

Ricci Albenda - "Universe (Benny)/ Negative - Left"

I'm a fan of these in-wall sculptures. Overheard collectors: "It IS part of the wall!" "Anish Kapoor does a lot of that."

To play art fair bingo. I'm that much closer thanks to you, Neon Art.

Maybe I'm weak, but I think art fairs need regular kitten breaks. We understand these aesthetics. Kitty!

John Pylypchuk, you had me at "cigarettes smoking cigarettes". Why did you put other stupid crap in there?

This wasn't at the Independent. This was a weird painting about old Kraftwerk in a nearby Chelsea show. I don't know where. Sorry.

I walked to Pulse from there. That is coming soon.

Verge Brooklyn Art Fair

2011-03-06T22:09:00.000-08:00

I'm going to write wrap-ups of art fair week, even though they're all closing down now, so you can't take my recommendations, except to have an idea of what to do next year.

I went to this Brooklyn thing Thursday night. My friend Cecilia got a piece in A.I.R.'s biennial. She is a better Alice Neel who doesn't ruin children. You also just missed her show at Tribes. Speaking of which, Its building needs a friendly buyer

So this fair took over 111 Front, DUMBO's art building. Plus a nearby ground floor space, which I could see was probably still being set up, and I didn't make it over there. Some of the galleries were curated by video reporter and artist Loren Munk, who was wearily lamenting intra-Brooklyn art politics.

This is all I saw that I liked:

Stephen Brower - Child Astronaut. The caption described a company researching reducing payloads by using orphans as experimental astronauts - "half the weight of a real person".

Patricia Smith and Eric Ayotte are also highlights.

I considered buying an artist project space but then realized it was basically for suckers. I was right - and seeing that many desperate artists in a space that would have made them look bad even if any of them were good kind of made me lose interest in looking at art. The crazy cyberpunk Chiézo was memorable, mostly because of her elaborate installation, costuming, and extremely detailed electronic-looking narrative drawing cycle.

Coming up next: the classy Independent.

Armory Show 2011

2011-03-03T12:40:00.000-08:00

This show seemed much much smaller than the previous two years. Either I've learned how to efficiently find what I like or it's a really boring year.

$25 prints on dollar bills by Reed Seifer (the artist that presented the "spray to forget" campaign last year). It looks like he has a very close relationship with the fair as a designer and marketer, and always has this little booth to present ad-art projects.

Laura Oldfield Ford is fun, either slightly scrambled or not. I'm really into word art at the moment - the only opportunity for narrative in a show sparsely populated by representative imagery.

Ron Mandos was raving about his prodigal artist Anthony Goicolea, although only this funny piece got me.

Erwin Wurm at Regina Gallery - Es, Ich, Uber-Ich (Id, Ego, Superego)
There's so much stuff like this. Rehashed Freudianism thrown at abstraction with a frisson. shrug.

Everyone liked this series by Gustavo Artigas of pure pigment painted canvases with the health dangers of the pigment, at Mexico City's Caja Blanca. The show features galleries from a particular geographic region. Last year it was Berlin, one city. This year it was Latin America, so, pretty much a quarter of the earth. Equal wealth? Probably more. Stronger showing than Berlin, in fact - they could have limited it to one country.

Xia Xiaowan at Galerie Urs Miele - Human Body. Drawing on layers of plexi. Lovely!

Jonathan Schipper at Pierogi, which has moved into the big leagues this year after previously being sort of Brooklyn and Indie. This was a machine that was dragging these porcelain sculptures up and down, slowly breaking them apart. The mechanism was repetitive, but of course, the movements change chaotically. Liked this much. Also at Pierogi were super-detailed drawings by Daniel Zeller that must have taken infinite patience.

Untitled Gallery seems to always have an unusual setup, in this case tiles made of pennies on the floor and canvas prints with art jokes by Andrew Hahn.

Erik Thor Sandberg was in Pulse last year, but here's some gorgeous skeeve showing up at the Armory. Almost soothing, since such classicism was rare this year.

Naaaaaah na na na na na nah naa, na nah na na-na-naahhhhh. It's like everything you gather on a trip balled together. Katamari lodged itself firmly in the cultural unconscious like some self metaphor. "Cheap Magic Is Anticipated", by Ryan Garder.

I may be my usual unobservant self but that's about all the highlights worth sharing. Tonight: too many openings? Independent? Pulse? We'll see!

John Wellington

2011-02-28T18:08:00.000-08:00

John Wellington and I share many resume points - RISD, NYAA, Santa Monica, The Village. It's funny work - the man has based his career around his Asian fetish, essentially, although his artist's statement plays dumb/defensive/evasive about that. Or, like many artists, he can't write about his own work very well.

Still, the pastiche of Asian pop culture with Western classicism, paired with his dedication to craft, makes for an ironic profundity. I love the game-like captions and the combination of cultural levels - he doesn't just nod to Murakami, he includes him in a painting that seems to mock orientalizing generalizations:

Of course there's always that topic of the anti-real idol, the object of desire, but at times it's just another politically incorrect piece of cultural effluvia. The strength is the bizarre narratives implied by the game captions, set in these semi-medieval, semi-postmodern worlds.

Limnrix On Limerence

2011-02-08T18:42:00.000-08:00

I know we're all trying to ignore Valentine's Day. I, for one, know that this will be the year the tradition of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind alone and crynerbating will be firmly established.

I Am Whatever You Say I Am, 2008

I did not know this word existed until two days ago.

This may or may not be your response to reading the extensive attempt to define this: I know that I have felt something like it, but my experience differs in various ways from Tennov's attributions to it. I think it's possible that people experience it in different ways, and this is the root of some things attributed to limerence. Like many psychological definitions, you try to self diagnose. Personally, I know that most meaning in my life comes from one or two limerent attachments I've had - primarily one that was, for a while, mutual. My tendency when discussing it is to not be able to articulate more than snarky soundbites.

Dorothy Tennov coined the term "limerence" to describe a kind of long-term infatuation her subjects were describing in her study of love. Limerence and love are not two different things - limerence is a kind of love. (Officially, it's the early stage of love, but I consider that limiting.) It's also a way of evading the dismissiveness of terms like "infatuation" or "crush", although the dismissiveness creeps in as a kind of attempted antidote to limerence's hightened affect. Limerence is both itself an emotion and an intensifier of emotion. It's produced a lot of good music, great literature, and probably not a lot of great art, although it is a decent motivator - or extreme demotivator. The reaction is not binary "elation or despair". Even a good interaction can induce the emotion that, like limerence, needed an English word, but which I have seen called "sangry".

Limerence attaches every intense emotion one feels, regardless of connection through anything but oneself, to the limerence object (LO, or, as I will put it in tribute to David Foster Wallace, subject). If you've resolved to cure your limerence, you will end up avoiding anything interesting or that you like.

One way of thinking about it: If you have love or affection toward a subject, you google it. If you are limerent, you avoid googling anything closely connected to the subject, because you are afraid you will run across them, and end up unable to think about anything else for weeks.

An objection I have to part of the definition is the part about how limerence can end with consummation or conclusive knowledge of reciprocation status. Even with confirmed reciprocation, terror that one's limerent subject would lose the limerence reignited the feeling. Once I'd stopped feeling that fear, the limerence was less urgent, turned into an entity supported by two bodies. Whether an asymmetrically limerent relationship should be terminated is a difference of opinion that can terminate any kind - according to Tennov, relationships with one limerent member are sustainable, though commonly maligned.

The "limerent-limerent" relationship is what I've called a "positive-feedback-based assemblage", but why most agree that that coupling (which I want to think can contain any number, including not just integers but imaginaries, etc. ) is itself inherently unsustainable is hard to define. Positive feedback exceeds the boundaries of its system within some amount of time. With limerence the result could be a "burned out" emotional sensorium. I can't tell whether being unable to become interested in anything without limerence is still limerence, or its fallout.

While it's said that different people are more inclined toward limerence or inducing limerence, I suspect it's more likely that people have different and incompatible ways of effectively de-limerencing. I'd like to hear from anyone who hasn't ever felt limerent. I remember sustaining something from 2000 onward, which was replaced in 2006 by definite limerence - I don't think any was involved in the long-term, healthy relationship I was in starting in the middle of that time. Possibly, I always require transformation - a new subject. Which is kind of a bitch, and something I may have immunized against now, but two years of starvation haven't been cutting it.

I have resolved that next time, instead of having most interaction, with a human, mediated by the internet, I'll aim to be limerent towards a nonhuman (non-animal, probably non-carbon-based) entity. I'm not going to assume it would be an AI, partially because the determination of intelligence and whether it's required for limerence are part of what's so fascinating about this particular weird-ass fantasy. Remember, this woman married the goddamn Berlin Wall.Possibly an element of what makes someone more limerent has to do with how much they question the communication system and what constitutes an autonomous entity capable of reciprocation. Example: I do not believe I can be objectively determined to be intelligent or autonomous. Second example: My subject may have been incapable of reciprocal feeling, only attached if returned feeling was ambiguous. There is nothing psychically sick about either of these attitudes - maybe not even with Mrs. Berliner-Mauer.

Here's a paper(pdf) that argues that limerence is problematic, different from love as seen from instances of persisting into later stages of a relationship. I haven't read the whole thing, but without a threshold in the form of an amount of time or interaction after which limerence shouldn't persist, all it really does is, well, piss me off, make me sad, various other limerence-enhanced emotions, based on feeling that my subject had set a short time after consummation it was appropriate for me to still act limerent, I had appeared to exceed it, and that I am therefore entirely responsible for my own pain, emo emo etc. Basically all this does is induce another source of fear and anxiety in the limerent, towards their own limerence and its inappropriateness. I would say that most defined psychological states, like most things, should ethically lack the presence of either "goodness" or "badness".

Another objection I have to the definition is that the limerent inflates the subject's good qualities. Part of the involuntarity of limerence is not that you think everything the subject does is great, but that everything they do is relevent to your interests. The subject is not superhuman, or uniquely qualified: they are simply what the limerent is About. In fact, the word I was using before I heard "limerence" wasn't "in-love-ness", it was "aboutness", and I felt it could apply to particularly dedicated biographers and specialists. Perceived flaws aren't transformed to virtues, they are considered more important than the flaws of other entities, and have a huge emotional impact on the limerent.

I don't know whether it seems immature and self-absorbed to be discussing what is too often stigmatized as immature absorption, but I'm sick of not talking about what I think about. What are your responses?

Elf Deprecate

2011-01-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

9:30-12, THIS Thursday, Jan 27th, Niagara Bar, 7th and A.
You can pay through the bar, and their commission is lower if you pay cash. I will buy you a drink if you show up at 8 to help install, or stick around to 12:30 to help pack. There will be a couple other artists, I don't know who.
This is what I'm putting in. Please comment on whether I should lean toward one genre or another or if something is AWFUL.

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc 11x17 mounted poster

Only did one of these but if it sells I'll do another run.
Preorder:

Pinwheel 8x10 digital matted inkjet print

Anthropic 8x10 digital matted inkjet print

Andrea 4x5 digital matted inkjet print

Swan 4x5 digital matted inkjet print

Orbit 5x5 digital matted inkjet print

Bubbles 3x6 digital mounted inkjet print

Violet 4x10 digital mounted inkjet print

Stella 8x8 digital mounted inkjet print

Indulgent

Masturbatory

Derivative

Wasteful

Elf Pity

Elf Sabotage

Elf Efface

Elf Pity Party:
This Won't Help
Therapy
I feel your pain

I am considering, but may not have room for:
Guilt of Representation, 2008, oils on plastic, 7"x8".

Misunderstand Me 2010 23x23 oils

Wallow in Immanence 32x32 oils

Don't buy it. I'm really just competing with worthy charities, and don't need the validation at all. I'm already looking like a self-aggrandizing jerk by announcing all of this when it's a tiny multi-artists popup thing. Wait, I'm sorry, this shtick is really annoying.
Where there are paypal buttons above, domestic shipping is included. If you're up for it, you can just send as a friend/family to jupitre at gmail dot com to rob Paypal of their cut. Also email for arranging details of faster and international shipping. I know personal interaction, especially around money, is a pain in the ass. My etsy may rise from the grave, unless ugallery gets some attention.

Wallow in Immanence

2011-01-20T11:49:00.000-08:00

WALLOW IN IMMANENCE. 2011, Oil on canvas, 32 by 32 inches.

I used digital sketches and mockups and 3-d ray-tracing in an ongoing back-and-forth with this one, which is definitely supposed to be apparent. I don’t know what else is apparent, but since the amateur feedback I’ve been getting is approximately “THE COLORS MAN THE COLORS”, which gives no indication of what anyone is actually seeing besides colors, I'll provide a little more background and fish for insults.
The painting is structured by a composite image (i.e. not the visible light, but a visualization of the spectra of several common elements) of the Snake nebula. To the point of total coverage and saturation, it generated a multi-directional figure salad of drawings and paintings from at least 5 different male models, usually with the colors shifted to match the composite image or to pursue humanoid spectral extremes. There are some aliens and some anatomical absurdities and a lot of face avoidance.
The central figure is a female figure that mirrors those surroundings - again, not the way it would visibly work, but the way a 3-d program calculates it when the underlying image is 2-dimensional and ubiquitous.
The title refers to the old translation of The Second Sex, in which Simone De Beauvoir describes how women denied transcendence will defiantly, and somewhat masochistically, dedicate themselves to the material and present.

A Superficial Gender Critique of Poser 7

2011-01-19T11:37:00.000-08:00

By default the program makes inverse normals black on render (i.e. no maps for the inside of a skin), but this is what Poser says a big inverted vagina looks like.

About 2 years ago I started using Poser 7. I’ve come back to it recently, to work out reflections for Wallow in Immanence, and discovered that among the options for altering the bodies they introduced to the default library with this version (and previous ones, I think, although the newest figures are the least anatomically wonky so I’ve stuck to those) is a “genital” scroll bar that can make genitals more or less prominent.

There are many things one can learn about the assumptions and political weirdnesses of Poser’s design team by seeing what you’re limited to when using the program superficially. Firstly, nobody has genitals to start with. The female figure only has genitals if you turn her genital bar to positive - and, of course, INVERSE GENITALS if you turn it negative.

The male figure is a meaty Ken doll, all taint, with no option for genitals at all. The menu option called “genitals” can have a check next to it or not, it makes no difference. Male genitals load separately and you have to position them on the body. The man’s junk has its own sliding sets of criteria. I know, dudes, this is exactly how it is, sure, thanks, got it, whatever. You can’t make an inverse penis, but you CAN make an inverse boner. I have yet to find an uncircumsized Poser penis, though.

Previous male poser library figures DID come with genitals on them. You could do an inverse boner with those, too. The men are by default more mesomorphic, females endomorphic. The three “body types” have scrollables, in 7, and the same figure can be both bony and muscular, and so on. I enjoy that, it looks like it took a lot of work and research.

Female figures have no body hair, and the male’s is Porn Star trimmed, but then, hair is something Poser has a whole separate interface for, and I haven’t yet figured out whether it limits where you can put that hair.

It’s almost like the primary users of Poser are supposed to be a category of people who are not allowed anywhere near real bodies and are specifically working for censored media. At the same time, they tried to anticipate users making porn with their program. The naturalistic territory between those extremes became narrow because they were thinking like Americans. By the way, none of the default library characters that I can find come in any color but beige, although the Poser 7 characters have ethnically-mixed-looking features. Regardless of how Poser’s designers and managers justify the options based on their feedback, the weird, weird decisions were theirs.

And oh, Breast Controls! Breasts are unnaturally perky unless you crank up the “breastsnatural”. One of the strangest scrollables is “Nonipples”: by default, nipples are totally flat, but a positive value on that one makes them holes on the breasts. What the positive and negative values entail is counter-intuitive, there. You can move and orient breasts together, apart, up, down, asymmetrical, whatever you need. But you can’t have a negative value for “breastsflatten”. No way can you simulate gravity making breasts DANGLE.

Also? While dicks can be resized (whether separately or, clumsily, as another body part), whatever size breasts the female figure has, you cannot change them. I mean… okay. Womens’ breast sizes can alter radically over the course of a month, even! And you can’t… I can understand preventing Poser users from going nuts with boob jobs, but the nonsensical double standard with male junk? I’m having a lot of fun with the mega-erections. With everyone looking so porny anyway, could Poser please just let us have fun with it? Is it that all the potentially x-rated stuff installs separately, so there's a sexless (but definitely not genderless) version that would be possible?

It’s actually pretty hard to get to various stages of androgeny, except in faces. Poser, you fail. And you clearly tried so hard, too.

Don't Get It

2011-01-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

Don't Get It. 2011, oil on canvas, 32 x 36 inches. Model Kate P.
You may think I didn't do anything with this, but no, I wanted to make it finished before I turned it into something else.

short show short notice

2011-01-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

These weirdos the Antagonist Art Movement (Ethan, Un) are letting me do a little popup (that means ONE NIGHT ART PARTY). If it goes well, I'll probably curate something later, with more artists and more time to plan.

ELF DEPRECATE
Thursday, January 27, 2011
9 pm - 12:30 am

NIAGARA BAR
112 Avenue A & 7th St. NYC
212 420 9517

I'm selling small, fun work, most of which I'll make between now and then.

Resolutions

2010-12-31T14:10:00.000-08:00

1. I've tentatively struck an agreement that a friend will stop drinking for three months if I stop watching TV and eat more fruits and veggies, so that's more than fair.

2. I vow to make some art every day. Even if it's just a subway doodle on a work day. I have a show in May, so with that deadline in mind, I will paint for at least 6 hours a week. I've threatened retirement, since I've had a lot of trouble actively making art lately, but hopefully building a habit will change that. The only reason I'm not switching careers is that I have no idea what else I could do that wouldn't require going into more training and debt. I hate how it sounds when people get all positivist about unpaid creative work, though. It's really not important and I just don't feel entitled to self-indulgence but, if anything, I do want to somehow communicate this cynicism.

3. This is not a resolution, but, Yom Kippur style, an apology for something I've particularly done a lot of this year. Men who I have pushed away as friends because I was afraid I'd try to make it romantic or just sexy, I am sorry. I will be your friend, I will not awkwardly try to bone you, and I will try to actually be good company. (If you do want to mate, it's your lead.)

4. I will stop cutting my hair, for the love of god. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, lady, just stop. Hide the scissors if you have to. Let that shit grow out. I don't care if it feels uneven.

2010 albums

2010-12-12T08:47:00.000-08:00

Hey! You don't care what I like because I have no taste! I've limited the numbered list to 20 this year, but some other good ones were: Vampire Weekend - Cousins, Ratatat - LP4 , Bear Hands - Burning Bush Supper Club , LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
Anyway. If you click on the links I think I might get some money no matter what you buy, so get to Amazon through me, thanks!

20. Woodhands - Remorsecapade

19. Holy Fuck - Latin

18. Wavves - King of the Beach

17. Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be

16. Girl Talk - All Day.

15. Robyn - Body Talk . Favorites: Fembot, Time Machine, Cry When You Get Older, Love Kills

14. Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz. Favorites: Age of Adz, Too Much, Vesuvius, I Want To Be Well, Impossible Soul

13. Jenny and Johnny - I'm Having Fun Now. Jenny Lewis, Jonathan Rice. Favorites: My Pet Snakes, Big Wave, Animal, Committed

12. Wolf Parade - Expo 86. Favorites: What Did My Lover Say? (It always had to go this way.) , Yulia, ghost pressure, cave-o-sapien

11. Best Coast - Crazy for You . Sounds like missing L.A. from New York. Favorites: Boyfriend (quinceañera video), Crazy For You, When I'm With You, Bratty B

10. New Young Pony Club - The Optimist. Favorites: Lost a Girl, Dolls, Chaos, The Optimist. Mostly-female dry-voiced dance rock.

9. Janelle Monáe - The Archandroid (Metropolis Suites II-III)
If I were more into every song, instead of just Cold War (EMOBOT), Tightrope, Faster, and Come Alive, her persona and the urban SF messiah story which is not nearly central enough to the album, this would be top 5.

8. The Knife, Planningtorock, and Mt. Sims - Tomorrow, In A Year . This is nothing like a The Knife album, even the parts that mix techno in with postmodern opera and sound-evolution minimalism. Favorites: Minerals, Seeds, Colouring of Pigeons

7. Sleigh Bells - Treats . You either love or can't stand these Cool Kids, cheerleader-like vocals by 5th grade teacher Alexis Krauss and punk fuzzed guitar by Derek Miller. I played it at work once and a toddler sang along. Favorites: Kids, Infinity Guitars, Rill Rill, Crown on the Ground, A/B Machines, Riot Rhythm

6. Marnie Stern - Marnie Stern . Supposedly she went through a dry spell of writing and the suicide of the ex that got her into "good music" provoked more abject songwriting. Though it's not the breakthrough I was expecting to come next, it's a grower. Favorites: For Ash, Risky Biz, Female Guitar Players are the New Black, Gimme, Building a Body

.
5. David Byrne, Fatboy Slim, a kajillion collaborators - Here Lies Love. It's a disco biopic of Imelda Marcos told through the class tensions between her, her nanny, and other mostly female voices. Byrne's explanations of it suggest it's examining how the personal is political. Favorites: Every Drop of Rain, Don't You Agree, Please Don't, Order 1081, Why Don't You Love Me

4. Yeasayer - Odd Blood The video for ONE resembles a Samuel Delany story. Madder Red. Ambling Alp, Mondegreen, Rome.

3. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs . The Suburbs, We Used To Wait, Half Light II, Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains). FULL OF WIN.

2. Crystal Castles II . I love them more than you'd expect of someone who's never done coke. Favorites: Doe Deer, Baptism, Empathy, Pap Smear (platform dance!)

1. Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me. It's big and long and it hurts so good. Favorite tracks: Have One On Me, Good Intentions Paving Company, Go Long, Soft as Chalk, Kingfisher

Some 2010 books

2010-12-10T11:20:00.000-08:00

Despite spending 35 hours a week sitting in a bookstore, a good deal of which time I do spend reading, I haven't done an extensive survey of everything released this year that I should. HOWEVER, these 10 are recommended, and if you want one or two to be your holiday present and I know you that well, email me.

Also, if you follow these links and buy anything I get a little money from Amazon Associates so help a sister out.

(technically released last year, but got much wider print this year due to the Hugo nomination and win)

Also last year, but in softcover this year.

Re-released.

Lauren astrae

2010-12-08T11:54:00.000-08:00

2010 playlist

2010-12-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

I make a long and a short version of the Best Songs of the Year playlist every year. The long version is in 3 parts, roughly by genre. Songs in bold are on the short version. Description / commentary in italics. Sometimes with a quote from the song there's a link to either info about the band or a video if it's good. Talk to me about music! I've probably missed things and will still be editing the playlists a bit.

1. Moonface (a.k.a. Spencer Krug) - Dreamland EP : marimba and shit-drums . It's worth listening to the whole thing. It's the Inception of songs, constructed from Krug's dream journals with minimal accompaniment that kicks in just right. "I'll prove how much I love you with this handstand."

2. Joanna Newsom - Kingfisher . An epic standout on her 3-part album Have One On Me. It mixes times and places, pre- and post-industrial, human and nonhuman. "I had a dream you came to me / said 'you shall not do me harm anymore'/ and with your knife you evicted my life / from its little light-house by the sea-shore."

3. Sufjan Stevens - Vesuvius . Sufjan's introspective "Age of Adz" sounds like him deciding to remove the limits he's given himself before, like seperating electronics and orchestras or pretending he can write like a non-Christian. It's hard to decide which is the best track - that may be the 25 minute "Impossible Soul". "In life as in death, I'd rather be burned than be living in debt"

4. The Knife - The Height of Summer . Experimental Darwin Art Opera "Tomorrow, In A Year" is all about sonic diversity and evolution, so naturally one outcome makes a flitting pop song of Mrs. Darwin's letters. "A thousand years seem to pass so quickly".

5. David Byrne & Fatboy Slim, sung by Santigold - Please Don't . In which Imelda Marcos explains how she convinces world leaders to serve the Philippines' interests. "A woman knows relationships. That's why I take my little trips."

6. Arcade Fire - Ready to Start . There are too many good songs on The Suburbs. "If I was scared, I would. And if I was bored, you know I would."

7. Wolf Parade - What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had To Go This Way) . Despite releasing a phenomenal third album, Expo 86, Wolf Parade has become the least interesting Spencer Krug project. "I've got a sandcastle heart made out of fine black sand / sometimes it turns into glass when shit gets hot.

8. Black Mountain - Old Fangs . Solidly retro (to the point of weird misogyny in the video, despite the band's core being a married couple) prog-rock, more accessible than "In the Future". Is it foolish to know what you want before you've begun?

9. MGMT - Flash Delirium . Look, you guys. We do a lot of drugs, and we've been touring and getting way too much attention. We really only have okay songs in us right now, plus this freakout. Hope you understand.

10. Klaxons - Twin Flames . Mostly I like that this video looks like my paintings. "Join in our sick second life."

11. Yeasayer - Ambling Alp . It's okay, MGMT, Yeasayer can fill in. I like to think of Ambling Alp as Almond Joy to Madder Red's Mounds. Finger on the Steam does its research on this song. "Keep your fleet feed sliding side to side."

12. New Young Pony Club - The Optimist . "I try not to be disappointed"

13. Autechre - known(1) .

14. The Glitch Mob - Drive It Like You Stole It

15. Holy Fuck - P.I.G.S. Analog electronica like the unholy union of Jam Band and House DJ.

16. Zach Hill - House of Hits . So I've liked the math-rocker's drumming with Marnie Stern for three albums and it turns out he writes good songs. I could not get that pow-pow-pow powPOW! out of my head for ages. What time signature IS this? His last.fm is super geeky.

17. Marnie Stern - Gimme . Combines arcing riffs with frenetic noodling with her trademark art-metal bubblegum pop joy. "Things are different in the body, things are different in the city".

18. Sleigh Bells - Kids . Carries with the childlike vocals (and story, as only a 5th grade teacher can tell it) and high-decibel shreds."Everything was just perfect. I got a nice sunburn, though."

19. Crystal Castles - Doe Deer . It sure does sound like Alice yells "STEP OFF THE TRAIN, SAY HI TO MY DADDY" but officially the lyrics are 8 deathrays

20. Draculatron - Artmouth

21. Xiu Xiu - Dear God, I Hate Myself. "Don't ask if this line is about you."

22. Wavves - Post Acid . Surf garage pop sarcasm is one of L.A. stoner culture's better progeny. "misery, will you comfort me in my time of need?"

23. Vampire Weekend - Cousins . A Paul Simon punk tribute that is better than Paul Simon. hot brats. "you greatest hits 2006 little listmaker."

24. Thee Oh Sees - I Was Denied . "I got fucked up, suffice to say."

25. Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be . L.A.'s take on the noisy girl group are darker and immersed.

26. Best Coast - Crazy For You . Beth Cosentino brings a ringing voice to California retro-rock. "Even though you are my guy, I always freak when I get high."

27. The Like - He's Not A Boy. Crossroads producer-spawn return with a together girl-group sound and this sharp single. "Even when he lies, he means every word he says."

28. Jenny and Johnny - Big Wave . I spent so long deliberating between this and My Pet Snakes, but Big Wave is current and Social Issue-ey. "My doctor she says they're safe, but I've been sleepwalking down to the lake and waking up in the water."

29. Starfucker (formerly Pyramiddd) - Medicine . "Because as Aristotle said, Philosophy is the expression of man's curiosity about the world."

30. Ratatat - Drugs . The vocal-less, hip-hop-like beats & guitar combo makes my feet explode. The video is like stock photo shoots with some random Cunninghamesque uncanniness.

31. Health - USA Boys . I hadn't loved anything else Health did before this, whose video makes me feel so very old.

32. Delorean - Grow . Joyous spanish rave-pop. "Will we ever understand the sensation of pain?"

33. Matt & Kim - Cameras . Their simple hooks and energy are good enough to forgive the couple's Brooklyn Smug. I see that we’re made of / More then blood and bones / See we’re made of / Sticks and stones

34. Marina and the Diamonds - Mowgli's Road . Like most of the Greek-Welsh siren's songs, it's about Girl Defies The Man in the most Manufactured way, but I really don't know what metaphor exactly Kipling and utensils provide for career decisions. "You say Y-E-S to everything. Do you think that will guarantee a win?"

35. M.I.A. - XXXO . The best of an uneven album about the Internet. "If you like what you see you can download and store."

36. Chew Lips - Toro "Mouth make the word electricity"

37. Goldfrapp - Rocket . This song, and album, made me nostalgic (which is always for something never actually experienced). Video is a goofy sadistic fantasy matching the song's double entendre revenge threat / lesbian subtext: "You're never coming back"

38. Woodhands - CP24 . Smarmy Canadian keytar drums new rave hot nerd duo awesome. "I can't playact disaffected"

39. Future Islands - Long Flight . Baltimore art pop Prodigal Cuckold story. "Who are you thinking 'bout? It couldn't be me."

40. L.C.D. Soundsystem - Drunk Girls . Maybe it's a little bit Cool Dad but I can't get it out of my head. "Honestly, unless it hurts, why do it?"

41. Robyn - Fembot . "The calculator in my pocket got you all in check."

42. Janelle Monae - Tightrope (feat. Big Boi) . The voice of the Obama era. There's so much brilliance in her performance, mythology, THING. "I'm another flavor, something like a Terminator."

43. Cee Lo Green - Fuck You . This is everywhere, and you probably don't mind more of it. "Although there's pain in my chest, I still wish you the best with a 'fuck you!'"

44. Das Racist - hahahaha jk? Those brown hipster stoners from Queens who did Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell did a mix tape. It's pretty funny.

45. Die Antwoord - Enter the Ninja . The South African rap-ravers are a complicated, filthy joke. They are the sonic Aristocrats. "I need your production"?

46. Matthew Dear - Slowdance . "It's like every bee sting tries to make my ears ring."

SHORT (20 songs):

download from here.

Shane Hope

2010-12-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

Whenever someone asks who my favorite artist is, from now on I might go with Shane Hope. I get the feeling this guy could be personally difficult, which I love in people, especially when they turn it into this kind of immersive post-humanism. The point is, just because I think he's brilliant and I love his work doesn't mean I want him to sign my boob, or even that I want to make this kind of work. There's no way. Anyone writing about his work will describe it as "mind-blowing" because that's what people say about hyper-intellectual, involved weirdness. It's not necessarily, though - he's the fine art tendril, and critic, of speculative programming and Singularity fetishism. I like that he's managed to THINK in gibberish, or at least always respond in interviews that way.

You have no idea what this is just from looking at it. It's a print of an open source 3-d modeling program that visualizes molecules. Lots and lots on nonexistent molecules. Nobody writing about this can figure it out, either, and the way Hope describes the process is not exactly transparent. But they sure are pretty. h_bond_from_proton, 2010, lenticular 3D pigment print, 24″x24″

I found out about him through Edward Winkleman, who probably has the best taste of any gallerist and seems to pick artists on cerebral-ness : he shows Jennifer Dalton, as well.

The "compile-a-child" series may be the best lay introduction to Shane Hope, since fake children's drawings often serve as simplified versions of inconceivably different cultures. It also highlights what hard SF is really talking about, with the singularity: if it's about machines being able to make machines smarter than themselves, that's just children outdoing their parents. To be Imortel, 2081, pencil and crayon on paper, 9″x12″

These were all in a show in 2009 titled "Your Mom Is Open Source" (<3!). Winkleman's showing the latest hijinx at SEVEN in Miami, your typical 3-D printer printed on a 3-D printer (also known as an objectum-sexy Von Neumann Machine)

so. wankerrrr.

New heavenly bodies

2010-11-17T21:17:00.000-08:00

Solar spicules and model Jimbé, from Liam's Saturday workshop in DUMBO.

Andromeda in ultraviolet and model Liliana, from Tribes Drink & Draw.

I also did Dr. Sketchy's Does The Factory, but nothing really suited digital drawing or went on long enough for it.

This calendar has 12 of my digital figure drawings with space backgrounds from the last 10 years. Whatever you do, don't buy it for everyone you know.

Never let me go against the day

2010-11-12T15:26:00.000-08:00

I love chasing something long and silly with something short and intense.

I don't think I want to see the movie of the latter. Ishiguro does something brilliantly interior with the dystopian genre that either the reviewers are missing or the filmmakers did. My post-humanism is showing in that it never occured to me that anyone would have to prove the existence of their "soul", since nobody has one, yet my moral outrage still stands at having to prove one suffers when one's purpose in life is dying of other peoples' diseases. Arguably it's a book about the ethical treatment of animals, although I don't think Ishiguro meant it that way.
A shared theme of human's inhumanity to human, or when there is not enough labor in society for its majority to is too trite when what a historical outlook on ethical trends reveals is that there have always been subhumans among humans. These connections are still too broad. Is it also offensive to you when anyone says "just a copy"? It just shows how far behind normal people are on this whole science ethics thing. Speaking of post-humanism -
Pynchon's family anarchist steampunk western focuses post-historically on the end of the enlightenment project, during the build-up to World War One. Plus, something about relativity. It's like watching anachronistic cartoons stoned for a year.
Here is my illustration for everything Pynchon wrote:

I do need something better than a facebook app to log my reading, but I need to be able to export from the app I'm using. Anyone know of one already?

Wallow in Immanence in progress 5

2010-11-01T18:58:00.000-07:00

Oil on canvas, 32 inches square. Added a Na'vi. I'm keeping a lot of artifacts from doing studies in Photoshop, including color changes with simple hue shifts.

BAND NAMES.

2010-10-22T09:48:00.000-07:00

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN. CMJ.

ALSO INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY. I'M NOT MAD.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE NEW THIS YEAR:

2 Cow Garage
Blast Off!!!
The Chaotic Good
The Class Machine
CurT@!N$
Dances With White Girls
Death Before Dishonor
decibel.
Dominant Legs
Down With Webster
Everything Everything
Everything Is Terrible
Ex Humans
Food Will Win The War
Free Moral Agents
The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger
Good Kids Sprouting Horns
Hammer No More The Fingers
Hatesphere
Hoodie Allen
I Love Monsters
Jenny & the Holzers (this is Dorothy and I missed them again last night)
Meek is Murder
Mantyhose
Me You Us Them
Morning Teleportation
OFF!
Oh Snap!
Paper Thick Walls
The Poison Control Center
Popo
The Problemaddicts
PS I Love You
quiet Loudly
Room Full of Strangers
SAD and FRENCH
Viva l'American Death Ray Music
Vonnegutt
Yuck

"The Unpronouncable" would be a great band name. Other Godelist names I want for the band I will never have because I do not practice:
What (quoi, que, nani, etc.)
TBA (answering differently every time as to what it stands for)
Special Guest
There Isn't One
Dunno
Artist Unknown
Compilation

Sketch

2010-10-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I forgot to write about this here, but I'm running a Tuesday night Drink & Draw.
7-10 at Tribes Gallery at 285 E 3rd St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10009.
Because I am a bit fail at planning, we may be taking a break next week and will resume on October 26.

The space is occupied and owned by a retired blind professor, and can get mildly rowdy and smokey at times. We’ll use the big living room, where there are ongoing art shows, a couch, a piano, chairs, and a P.A. system. All media are allowed, although I’d avoid flammable materials like varnishes and enamels and mineral spirits. Bring your own media and clean up after yourself. We’ll have one nude or costumed model a week.

$10 for 3 hours, running from shorter to longer poses, with the option to pick poses, costumes, and models you might need. We appreciate if you bring snacks and drinks, and usually have wine or beer for an extra $3 contribution.

This is for artists and illustrators at all skill levels who need practice and regular reference, and have at least some figure drawing experience. You are expected to be respectful of the models and in control of your drinking. If you’re here, you’re paying, and if you’re paying, you’re drawing or painting. Photography only allowed with special permission from the model.

RSVP to Janet at Bruesselbach dot com / join here. I'm working towards a high enough attendance to subscribe to Meetup, or maybe we won't need it if you pass this on and bring friends.

I made three digital sketches of Vivian on Andreo's composite image of Cepheus nebulae. I don't know which one to put up on the site and print or put in future calendars.

Which Bubbles Vivian do you like best?

1

2

3

What are you, twenty something?

2010-09-28T21:50:00.000-07:00

Hi. My birthday is October 12.
I barely ever buy anything for myself, but if I did, it would be some of these things:
Wish List
Better, you could make an offer on a painting.
Sometimes people give you a favorite charity. I don't have one right now. A cancer research fund I have never heard of gave me (and probably all my neighbors) a lot of kitschy address labels I will never use, instead of, say, finding a student to put through med school, so I'm leery of how much money charities put towards further fundraising over shopping for places to put that money. But that's irrelevent, and more a way of me saying that giving me a birthday boost actually kind of is charity because I'm pretty sure most panhandlers make more than I do.
Paypal goes to jupitre@gmail.com ; you have to make sure to say it's a family/friend loan so they don't take a cut.

I haven't been openly bitter and cynical for a while. It feels a little weird.

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

2010-09-09T20:41:00.000-07:00

2010, oils on canvas, 54"x42".
This took a year to complete, mostly because I've been taking a bit of a break from painting to curate a lot.
I was thinking about constructed causality, consequence, and how easily we mystify. Post Hoc is the "correlation implies causation" logical fallacy underlying much of religion and a great deal of bad science and rhetoric. I like to extremely remove it - to live in truth is to live in doubt. Although even drawing that connection is a causal relationship subject to methods of disambiguation. What does this have to do with insecty elf robots? Nothing, basically.
I did start with another astrophysics metaphor: the binary recurring nova system as a feedback loop. As in Veritas Odium Parit, a painting preceding and arguably causing Post Hoc, personal communication represents mass gravitational interaction. I kept going with redefining paint as figure until almost nothing was only itself any more. The scale has been reduced somewhat, and the interaction is asymmetrical. There are distinctly different regions with expanded rules for visual improvisation. There are fewer illusions of depth or animism and more archetypality and cartooniness to forms. The evasive mosaics are solid pixels rather than mimicking compression artifacts. What do you see here?

Ernest Hemingway

2010-08-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

Crossposted to these lovely people:
Kittysneezes and A Gathering of the Tribes
Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Tao Lin is one of the best examples of conveying flat affect and anhedonia as currently endemic and kind of pleasant. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It's just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don't know what that is, it's when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don't think the "spoiler" concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. I think the worst party girls got into really intense relationships based on mutual social anxiety when they were 22. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous, but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

UNPOP

2010-08-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

September 4-30
Opening Reception September 4 8-10 pm
285 E 3rd St. #2
New York, NY 10009

Curatorial statement by Janet Bruesselbach

“A free society is one in which it is safe to be unpopular.” –Adlai Stevenson

Unpop has a variety of playful reactions to both art as commodity and the legacy of pop art. Art is a commodity so oversupplied that it may be the testing grounds for a post-scarcity economy. Its economy of attention is particularly independent from its capital economy. No artist avoids status anxiety from the judgments of polymarkets, and it often seems the only ideology defining art remains anti-Capitalism, despite pop art’s ubiquitous ironic recombination of fine and commercial art.

The “problem” of existing in a market, one particularly labor-saturated, occupies context-conscious artists worldwide. While we often acknowledge that good art is not necessarily sold art, some of the best commercially-overlooked work is anything but anti- or a- commercial. Duplicating the structures, and becoming part of, the system one is critiquing, is conspicuous, but not the only means of critique. Nor is critique ever a simple argumentative stance.

I would not be surprised if there were not already consumption artists: individuals who self-consciously defined a particular pattern and choice of spending as an art form. We could easily say that any consumer is an artist, ironically or not. While defining art has become entertainingly open-ended, fitting some unpop work into the context of gallery exhibition was unexpected - particularly Chavez and Pocker. Chavez's videos were byproducts of his struggle to market other artwork, while Pocker's photos document hyper-attentive shopping (consumption artistry) and are more jokes or marketing tools themselves.

Sam Pocker, "Fashion Freeze"

Everything in the marketplace is simultaneously buyer and seller. Sam Pocker, Jenny Bhatt, and Lauren Hoffen deal most directly with consumer identity. The freedom a consumer has is to defy neoliberal economics with their irrationality, and not necessarily succumb to the cultural pressure to not be a sucker. Art buyers most intend to defy homo economicus as a type. At the same time, considering art buying as a form of charity, done more because the artist needs money than because the artist did work, enables neoliberalism, as this essay by Yasmin Nair explains.

The peculiar irony of UnPop is that A Gathering of the Tribes, its natal location, as of September 2010, is a nearly broke non-profit, non-commercial, arts organization run out of an old blind guy’s apartment. Traditionally, this is an opportunity to exhibit the kind of work that fronts at freedom from the constraints of marketability. But the competition for grant money in this part-socialized, part-privatized alternative to a capitalist-style marketplace for art, has tightened in the recession. As of the dispossessed among nonprofits, the venue avoids insipid "art for arts sake" and leans toward the dangers of demanding free labor for political reasons that Nair takes apart so well.

Contemporary pop art rules the market because it is self-consciously and self-righteously a commodity. They are artists who refuse to pretend the very obliviousness to their worth that collectors value. In Unpop, we show that spaces peripheral to the art market are all the more market-obsessed. The more money one has the more one can afford not to think about it, so to display reticence toward naming or discussing prices of art objects, or arguments for "pricelessness" (that is, worthlessness) can conventionally be interpreted as anti-radical, siding with the owners. Naturally the politics are more complex than that, and stigma shouldn't be placed either way, but to avoid discussing money out of anxiety or enmity may as well be reverence, especially when one is, reasons aside, unpopular.

Jenny Bhatt, "Reverence Mandala"

Status anxiety extends to the transitional attention economy. Too easily can we both say and hear the myths connecting fame to money and vice versa: that success is just who you know, that art and politics and business and so on are all popularity contests, that self-promotion is most if not all that matters. Such simplifications are both true and devalue the complex interplay of measures of value. Ubiquitous cynicism generates its own measures of worth as art entertainingly becomes social - or a-, or anti-social. Run through your supply of prefixes.

There is as much conceptual beauty to be found in examining our resistance to the pressure to socialize as there is in flattening the dynamic and generating the image of popularity. And popularity is just that: not an actual measure of who knows whom or what, but a self-perpetuating infectious meme, a variable assigned but not necessarily related to anything else. In a cultural turn perhaps not inherently recent, popularity can be a label more detrimental than not. Unpopularity, while feared in acknowledgement of a society that will likely never be perfectly free, can be beneficial as a label – if only in the modern, very NYC phenomenon of Indie Cred.

Many visual styles have come to be called pop, or post-pop, or pop surreal, and so on, all functioning with a specific kind of irony that differentiates between commerciality and anti-commerciality by fulfilling both simultaneously. Unpop involves artists who either use pop tropes or engage commodification in non-dialectical ways. The advertising-inspired aesthetic of high-saturation solid colors, forms simplified to communicate, and assumed exuberant optimism, still pervade. But they are always tempered by something that undermines pop art historically, or doesn't necessarily shape itself to the demands of as many people as possible.

Jenny Bhatt has sent paintings from India that fuse cartoon Western popism with the well-established philosophical conversation of Hindu Buddhist mythology, featuring a cast of conceptual deities in consumerist narratives. She makes interactive work and comic strips at her site
Washington Chavez went to every gallery in New York City asking them to look at his paintings, and filmed all of it. The result is a queasy litany of rejection, the dying profession of door-to-door salesman multiplied by the eternal buyer’s market of art, emotional sadomasochism intensified by raw documentary recording.
Rita Alves’s anamorphic installation paintings are more engaged with the national politics of U.S. human rights violations than directly with consumer politics. The use of funhouse optics to undistort image evidence of atrocities questions the tension artists feel between the obligations to be both sensitizing activists and entertainers. It makes the whole commodity issue look selfish.
Lauren Hoffen paints commercial parodies that literalize ironic double-speak through blacklight-sensitive paint.
James Mercer assembles ephemeral cardboard and paint installations (as well as digital and ink drawings) resembling video game levels. They are idiosyncratic, generative rewarders of attention from Millenial observers trained by extremely creative-labor-intensive products.

Static page for UNPOP

Greater New York

2010-07-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently every five years PS1, MoMA's converted-school extension in Long Island City, has a huge group show featuring local artists. Third time, as they say, makes it tradition. One of the biggest contradictions of having a "local artists" show in this city is that most of the artists will be either immigrants or part-time residents. Perhaps the joke is that the entire world is really Greater New York.

PS1 is disorienting. It's nice to have another context besides Art to see art in, but the elementary school vibes throw things weirdly and I always feel like I'm missing something. But hey, it's one of those "pay what you want" places, so the only thing you have to lose is your time and maybe a buck.

Okay, so the worst thing is that there's too much video in this show. Video is by nature a selfish medium, not only because it demands time but because it requires technological support. I thought I would feel more envy of the artists included and wonder why I wasn't included, or wonder why I wasn't curating. I felt a twinge when I saw that one of the videos included someone I knew in college, but I didn't feel any of that envy at the show, because I wouldn't want to be the person who had made or chosen these things. I hate cool people.

This is the retrospective room.

It became one of those "find a redeeming thing" games. Individually most of the pieces had something going for them, or, at least, those that weren't goofy videos. If there isn't something funny about art, if there isn't a joke to "get" or "buy" about it, I tend to skim over it, maybe just because I'm biased against romanticism and transcendence. Then again, maybe this show could use some transcendence. Artists are perverts. The walls were full of glory holes. At all levels, for all sizes and shapes of perverts! The whole thing is a dirty joke and the biggest influence on my entire generation has been internet porn. But maybe that's just me?

DETEXT was an installation that shaped the show. I only later found out that DETEXT had removed the "con" from what it was doing, intentionally, and that all the phrases in giant letters in hallways were excerpted from spam messages. The museum has 4 levels (0, 1, 2, 3) and it seemed like the level of innuendo in the phrases corresponded with the levels.

Here are some things I liked:

Tommy Hartung is good conceptually but I get the feeling he outsources the craft. Some drawings a friend did for him weren't very crafty, either.

Michele Abeles's photography

Ishmael Randall Weeks had a very scientific feel.

Nearby on the second floor, and whose label I couldn't find (making them all the more confusing) were a couple of museum-style stands with bits of archaeological-looking artifacts in them, but all pretty obviously made out of contemporary cheap materials. The artifacts were mostly fimo clay.
Everything by the Atlas of Radical Cartography in a third floor hallway also had a research feel that fit very well in the school building. I particularly remember copies of maps with "latino" and "america" labeling two general (and reversed) areas of the Americas which had been given to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border and undergone evident wear. There were "maps" there with significant research behind them that remind me of how awesome Jen Dalton is.

Ashley Hunt: "The rich can be rich because they got tired of being poor." That reminds me. If you haven't been listening to David Byrne's Here Lies Love you should.

This is going to look really dated in 5 years, Debo Eilers. There's nothing wrong with that.

Brody Condon's video of a smurf tribe finally makes that wooden sculpture outside the Hamburger Banhof make sense.

An artist with the hip-as-dick name Liz Magic Laser displayed her purse taken apart by a surgery and dissection robot, the "Da Vinci System".

Hank Willis Thomas's isolation of depictions of blacks in mainstream magazine ads filled a room and held our attention for way longer than anything else. If nothing else it showed that progress is never continuous and always double-edged at least.

David Brooks is a rainforest conservationist.

Some of the only painting featured included Dave Miko and Leidy Churchman, whose "Three Beards" reassures me that there is nothing more macho than two cocks in your ass.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation can always be relied upon to be sickeningly hip, filling one room with artists' genitals and another with a pedestal exchange program, "Perpetual Monument to Students of Art", in which clean sculpture pedestals are substituted for used ones from local schools throughout the show. It sort of looks like the holocaust memorial in Berlin. Anyone who's done gallery installation will like stuff like that. All the jack-off-in-a-box glory hole installation elements, not so much.

Aki Sakamoto's "skewed lies / Central Governor" had a great steampunk, participatory mood and kept the basement feeling like a paranoid secret center of operations we children had illicitly discovered. Also there was goldleaf.

And uniforms:

My date said "I feel like my time has been raped".

Census 3

2010-07-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm being asked for my badge back, so I'm officially no longer a federal employee. Of course, I don't really trust some random guy texting me asking for my badge, and will probably ignore whoever tries next. How impossible does it seem for anyone to abuse the badge? They're meant to just sit around doing nothing after they've served their purpose. That's how it would work.

Let's pick back up with the narrative. I tried to build up a reputation of near-superhuman efficiency. I estimated it would be possible to actually complete two forms an hour, if it took 10 minutes for an interview and 5 minutes to fill out an NV (Notice of Visit) form. We were told that the main thing they were able to note about our performance was the number of completions per hour, but naturally we could tweak this based on what hours we reported.

The absolute rule was No Overtime: if we filed for more than 40 hours we would be immediately fired. This was never a problem because it was so unlikely we would find anyone at home and answering the door at anything other than the evening that it was pointless working entire days. Of course, we were encouraged to vary our hours, so that we weren't always visiting a particular home at the same time every time and wasting our three in-person visits. Especially once I came back from Europe and was essentially mopping up complete non-responders, we often had to work weekdays in order to interview superintendents and building managers during their working hours.

I had a binder with a list of addresses and the EQs (Enumerator Questionnaires) for two buildings still waiting to be finished when I got back. I'd done most of one building and none of the other. While I'd been gone, extra paperwork (a list of submitted cases for each day) had been added on to try and improve the way EQs were being sort of lost between enumerator and area supervisor and prevent overworking crew leaders. Naturally, we would forget to mark the status of cases in the binder before turning these in and then wouldn't remember what to write in there. I'm not sure how the address lists were used, but they were the source of the most sensitive bulk name/address information.

The mop-up we were doing at the end of May was mostly EQs without binders, anyway. I became the person sent out to clean up after census takers who had already quit or been fired, usually quietly. I am quite proud of being good at this job, and do wish there were something similar I could do permanently. Being retained may have just meant they didn't want to waste my training, or that I'd had less time to fuck up already, but I it may also have meant I was more persistent or could take rejection better or maybe was just less likely to be rejected - or wasted less time. Which is not to say I didn't have many, many reasons to question what I was doing and how I appeared.

Whatever the reason, most of what I did this point involved some real problem-solving, a little sleuthing, and a lot of dealing with doormen, supers, and building managers who only knew their non-disclosure policies and financially-motivated private ownership loyalties. Sometimes I felt that all they were trying to conceal with indignant hostility was simply ignorance. The most memorable instance was when a building super refused to even read the confidentiality agreement. When I slipped it under his door, he opened the door, crumpled it up, threw it at me, and said "make yourself a meatball". Then threatened to call the cops. We just talked to management instead.

I've been asked for more jokes, but unfortunately I have a New Yorker cartoon instead.

Christ, what an asshole.

Naturally, I have some nitpicks with census humor. The big problem is that it always seems to be about nonconformity. But also: why does the census taker know his name already? That's what he's there to find out. Yes, even the association of a name with an address needs recording. This may be why our neighborhood ended up with a lot of doorman proxies. Also, the question is not "What is your sex?" It is "are you male or female?" I kept hoping I'd run into anyone who'd say yes to both or neither, but it was always that question we had to sort of apologize for asking. The point is, it's gender (social information) rather than sex (biological information). Although apparently the census really makes a point of reminding people that their babies are people. Especially when it's not their baby.

There's always that question that's more of just a thing we had to remember to fill out than something we always asked: was there anyone else who may have been staying with you on April 1? And a list of options including foster children, relatives, and transients "without a permanent place to stay".

How do you really know cats aren't homeless guys in fur coats?

I think my favorite part of training was when someone started making assumptions within an example, and our instructor said, "you're making sense. Stop it." Fighting the superstitious qualities of assumption is one of my favorite issues: stop making sense stop making sense. It actually was a bad idea to fill in gaps, because there really is a wide variety of living arrangements. In NYC especially there are a lot of the very fun-to-say WHUHE (woo-hee) situations: Whole Household Usual Home Elsewhere. Families keep their Queens toehold and have relatives staying there while they live in another country entirely, or travel for work, etc. In practice, if we made too much sense, and it was wrong, we actually would get less information, sometimes because it alienated our enumeratee. But again, we had to apply sense as to when to make sense. Sense is sensual, logic embodied.

I don't know whether it was because the objective of the census triggered my pre-existing scientific fundamentalism, or I was just really happy to have a job that required brains, but I got annoyingly passionate about justifying counting people. A friend admitted that he lived in a non-residential building and would likely not be counted, and it drove me nuts, especially when it appeared that, like many hip kids these days, he'd rather not officially exist. Often in these cases a reluctance to reveal the illicitness of one's living conditions is cited as the justification for reluctance, and I've become severely frustrated that I lack the rhetoric to explain the isolation of the census from any authority who would care.

I know that my emotional and intellectual involvement in my tiny uninformed corner of the information-constructor makes me exceptional, and is the attitude most likely to prevent exactly the desultory functioning for which I advocate. The high-functioning stupidity required is a role all of us had to play, and I suspect it doesn't matter how thoroughly one obervational tool observes when it can't observe another part of the machine. If I used body metaphors here I think that would really defeat the purpose - the more mixed the metaphor the better, when we know that what we're talking about is a complicated social interaction of humans, paper, and computers (and a few others).

The enumerator handbook writers certainly don't know how to put it. Their dialogue of escalating refusal ends with a history lesson. Of course, saying the U.S. census started in 1790 only cements its status as symptom of the modern state. My plan was to appeal to peoples' natural curiosity, but it turns out curiosity is anything but natural or even common. "How do you imagine we know how many people exist at all?" I want to ask. Democracy itself is a minority, and people just don't see themselves as makers of the information they need. I grew up with Sim City, in which the headcount was just a computer calculation. My mind wants there to be a stable truth, not one generated by and even contingent upon the very cultural attitudes and fluctuations it records.

"When you read a statistic, do you consider yourself to be included in it?" I want to ask. Are those who don't think anyone needs to know how old they are or where they live the same people who lament that statistics they hear don't seem to represent their everyday reality, or seem too fuzzy? The census advertising focused on "the community", which automatically doesn't make people recognize how defined they are by their geographical location, but implies something they already feel separate from.

It should be less difficult to make the connection between micro and macro, but the way that connection is made - pulled through the bureaucratic medium toward the center of the katamari ball - stymies our social minds because not even the starseed can see the big picture. It is always hard to understand how a series of individual decisions add up to government. Conspiracy theorists feed on this kind of psychological gap, because this is how evil is done without anyone to blame - and how individual lives are improved without any particular hero. I do wonder if the moral reliability of census workers plays a significant part in how well the count improves local services. The causal relationships are extremely shakey, and it's best to keep causality out of things like this. I actually feel that the system works based on indifference to the values of its cogs. It is, in fact, the indifference of the cogs to what they are doing that contains the minimal information, keeping them from either getting it from anywhere else or giving it to anyone but their immediate superiors. The most critical part is that the information actually isn't useful except on the wider "general statistics" scale for which it is intended.

I think I've covered everything from my perspective but if you think there's something missing or are less than reassured by my approach let's get into that. Thanks for reading, and please add anything else you know. I'd like to touch these posts up and republish them, if there's somewhere I can do that. I mostly hope my census discussion inspires you to hire me.

Census 2

2010-06-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

There was another day of field training under supervision, a meeting of the whole local crew, and then, by the middle of the first week of May, we had all been issued binders for one or two blocks of buildings and the addresses of everyone in those buildings, including the names of those who had already responded by April 15. We could not have another binder until we had completed every questionnaire for the non-responding addresses. We were on our own.

The immediate obsession of most enumerators is the dreaded Refusal. In that first week there were a fair number of people who'd simply forgotten, neglected or sent in late their mail-in questionnaires. But those that require in-person visits are naturally far more likely to be suspicious and reluctant, and literally the second door I knocked on was an RE. I developed a pleasant persistentness I doubt I could maintain for door-to-door sales - and naturally, since most people are more used to the idea of strangers ringing their doorbells selling something, the first priority was making sure they know that's not what I was. The second was making them understand how little information I wanted and how bound I was not to share it, and sometimes I never got that far. I have a particular personality that's very concerned with the sharing of information, but also feared that this eagerness would be counter-productive. It's an extremely emotionally draining job, with soaring highs and crushing lows and everything in between.

As reformed in Title 13, the census is deliberately intended to be independent of other data collection, especially the IRS and INS. Not that my saying so will reassure immigrants. All of them must come from somewhere with some form of population estimation, for the determination of geographic vote allotment or otherwise. But the principle of keeping all authorities' hands from knowing what the other hands are doing as a means of protection may be counter-intuitive even - maybe especially - to those raised in the American educational system. And then again, why trust me just because I trust the principle? Bureaucracy too easily is considered to go hand in hand with corruption. The same law that criminalizes my leaking anything within a boundary of paperwork also criminalizes not cooperating with me. Census policy amongst enumerators is to keep most ignorant of this threat, partially because prosecuting is so much harder than allowing a wider statistical margin of error.

While I have a massively bothersome conscience, it's not that I can't imagine how the census system could be abused. I know that the census materials, seemingly completely innocuous, could be used for identity theft if leaked. What's on the short-form questionnaire can't be use for that, of course, but with a few tweaks you could get social security numbers. It probably wasn't in my interest, but when people used the excuse of having "done it over the phone" or "already sent it back", I was willing to suggest that they hadn't been responding to the real census, especially when we'd finish and they'd ask "that's it?"

It wasn't particularly useful to take on an air of authority or even dress as well as they wanted us to. I enjoyed the position of authority too much to be utterly casual enough to be asking birthdays innocuously, but approaching that was far more effective than confrontation. Of course, there are many people who respond badly to both chattiness and officiality. Fast=painless was a useful thing to mention when not going by the book, the book being just going straight through the questionnaire.

One critical limitation was that we ourselves were not a proxy respondent. Information could not be generated by the observations of the enumerators, only by the responses of the interviewee to questions. I find this a very important argument against the all-too-easy The Truth Is Out There model, in which facts already exist before they are recorded. The census form itself carefully delineates the grammatology of facts - who or what counts as a person, and a residence, and an occupant, not to mention gender and race, and the especially fuzzy Hispanic Origin distinction. Any change in the shape these values fit into changes the fact.

Department of Redundancy Department, Ironic Ignorance Division

Bruno Latour is the source for this kind of post-de-structuralist understanding of the social mechanisms of knowledge. Even looking at the root of "fact", you can see that it's something that is made, arduously. Information does not want to be free. Information wants to be wrong, and countering that entropy demands labor, and anywhere there is labor there is the question of pay.

It may be easier to think about hard sciences as a collaboration between human, non-human, and hybrid objects when we look at the humanist biases of the census's statistical baseline for social science. Every quantum of personal information intends to be self-identification. Since it's faster to just let an informed respondent (who must be over 14) describe the entire household, this is merely an ideal. Critically, as with the Pirahã language, everything requires a source. At the NRFU stage, this is even limited to only a person that a person working as an enumerator has talked to. There is something very interesting that happens to social interaction when it is ordered by paper and print infrastructure as a means of constructing facts. The strategies of enumerators often aim to downplay this weirdness despite the legal carefulness of official instruction.

The very distinction between social and physical is limned by the human-paper work collaboration called the Census. By limn, I mean that it is a hybrid that creates the boundary by entangling its sides as much as possible. That we are specifically gathering social facts is entangled with way the bureau has defined society as made of humans. Like their lag on computer-based forms, this is one aspect of the census that I want to say makes it outdated in comparison to almost all other statistical sources - but embedded in that criticism is a contradictory The Truth Is Out There Error, as the census makes the understanding of society as without people.

To be continued. Again: questions and comments, please! I'm trying to remember what everyone has been curious about and curiously incurious about. I also need to get more non-identifying anecdotes in here and less generalizations. If you need me to explain some of the more arcane theory here I can do that.

Census 1

2010-06-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

It was my intention to write from my temporary job this year as a census enumerator from the very beginning. Somehow, I never got any of it written down while it was still fresh in my mind. I'll try to do this narratively, and hopefully that will jog my memory about the procedural and theoretical curiosities. Much like the times I've worked for the Board of Elections, my intention is to emphasize the virtues of bureaucracy, or rather, how a well-organized system of the mostly-ignorant can both generate accurate information and protect individual rights.
I'm aware that many commentaries are beyond critical of blunders, evils and abuses. Many of these are typical small-scale workplace cynicisms or highlight the gap between planning and execution. I consider both criticism and the things criticised symptoms of a working social measurement machine. On the whole, census employees themselves are cynical and practical if they're not overly eager. I am most critical of the amount that my positive spin is an outcome of training myself to persuade people to respond. It also seems to me that the public news about this has been superficial, uninformative, and passive aggressive, so I also see this as an opportunity to discuss attitudes at a personal level.
About a month into the job, employees were sent a notice about what they reveal in social media, emphasizing that they must be clear that their opinions are not those of the Census Bureau. Also, of course, reminding them of their confidentiality oath, which I'll get to. I'm not sure whether particular incidents resulted in the reminder. I did tweet briefly while in training with another trainee in Louisiana, and I heard enough to know that the relative sanity and ease of my local operation was the exception to the rule.
I took the test last summer (quite proudly one of the first to finish it), and got a call a few weeks later saying my score was in the 98th percentile. Good, but easily beaten by anyone with the 5% extra given to veterans. They called me at least twice again asking if I were still available. My response was always yes, but not until the third call did they offer an actual job. Contrary to the expectations I had that the census would require far more office than field work, it is during May's NRFU (Non-Response Follow-Up, pronounced "narfoo" - oh how the government loves its acronyms), a.k.a. door to door interviewing, that the bureau's payroll bloats by a factor of about 4. (I got this information from a news report I now can't find, my deepest apologies.)
Interestingly, coverage of the census has focused more on the jobs it created and money they government spends on it than on what it actually is. It's interesting to note that, partially because I had scheduled a ten day trip to Germany at the peak of NRFU, I've only made twice as much actually working as I did during the 40 hour training week.

Only in retrospect, knowing that, do I consider that training week to be rather too long. It seems they hired as many to be trained as possible, expecting to eliminate many of the trainees, and the hiring bloated so much that it was nearly impossible for instructors, themselves only trained the previous week, to even communicate enough with the next level up to get materials and organize field work. It was at this point that I referred to the organizational structure as being nothing like the already-redundant root system of clerks and supervisors provided in our handbooks, but like a katamari ball. Extension of this analogy becomes ridiculous.

The training location wasn't set until fairly late, and I think our instructor may have been the last to know. Training was in a cram school in Flushing, a 30-minute bus or subway ride from the neighborhood we all lived in and would work in, and the transportation costs were paid. The sardonic instructor, crew leader for half the class, set the attitudes of the more socially attentive of the group. The different supervisor for my area was even more down-to earth. For a highly social job there seemed to be a high percentage of the less socially attentive, so much so that I felt gregarious in comparison. It is, after all, a job for those shaken loose from other jobs, and did not require an interview. I gained about 10 pounds that week thanks to Flushing's pan-Asian deliciousness.
One major joke that came up was the fact that the government thought to issue us all ballpoint pens for those carbon-paper forms that required them, but blue ones. The fingerprinting required of all Federal employees required black pen. Hilarity, we all carefully agreed. Fingerprinting is regarded as a fine art involving careful choreography. Because the only people available to do the fingerprinting had had a single day of training the previous week, a lot of the fingerprinting had to be redone in the office later in the week with a touch-sensitive machine. Whether the amount of extra time paid to trainees amounted to enough to have bought enough of these machines for all the classes, I don't know. It only occurred to me later that it was especially important to fingerprint census enumerators because the temptation to do a little breaking and entering is strong. It's the momentum of the thing.

We swore the Oath on the first day. We put our hands over our hearts and swore... jeez, I'll have to look this up. I'm not being paid to write about this, and I made sure to check that I was allowed to leak instructions to enumerators and such (all very boring). The central tenet was that we could not use any of the personal information we gathered for any purpose other than the census. I understand it may still be hard to trust someone based on their taking an oath (I left the "so help me God" part out, even), but there's a quarter million fine threat behind that oath, plus jail time. And again, I'm aware incentives are better than threats - more than aware, after my door-to-door experiences - but we all both took that pledge seriously and thought it a goofy cinch. More on that later.

Although it at first seemed tedious to go through the many practice questionnaires covering different ways we'd have to fill out the form, the only one I never had to use was the instance of an address that was a vanished trailer on a yard. Even then, I had to do many "deletes" for joined, mislabeled, or under construction homes. I don't know what it is about any classroom situation that turns everyone into a surly teenager uneasy about how they appear to other students, but the reluctance to actually pretend to be performing interviews was stupid. After filling in time with practice, paperwork, and a test one of whose official answers was wrong, we did go "into the field", and discovered that most of it was the repeated writing of Notice of Visit forms. A scourge, as it must be noted as a personal visit, of which we were only allowed three.

Technically we were all supposed to start the day after training, but the mid-managing level understandably delayed that at least two days. Trainees in areas requiring even more enumerators were just left in not-enough-supervisors limbo for a while.

I would like to emphasize that I consider this kind of obvious human frailty combined with persistence of the structure - everyone knew where they were supposed to be getting what, and didn't just go rogue with their badges counting whoever they thought needed counting out of zealousy or institutional mistrust. Discussing problems wasn't penalized, but making problems official was mostly understood to be counterproductive. As an apparatchik, I simultaneously understood myself to be paper's tool, and also knew that paper needed me to be smart and responsible and make empathetic and logical decisions. It's the lack of imagination, the discussion of alternatives without initiative, that keeps the information gathered consistent, and the information-making apparatus predictable. Predictability is not only critical when we see this as demographic science, but also maintains the trust of the people being measured. The census is an extensive self-check whose only goal is thoroughness, above all else.

The next installment will go more into ideology. Is there anything you want to know? Please ask! Also, I'd like to republish this series, or a summary, if you have a blog where I can guest post.

10 Books

2010-06-19T15:12:00.000-07:00

I know I did this one four years ago, and it trended again a year or two ago, and I never really got around to it then, but I've been thinking about what books changed me. Also I just integrated Amazon into the blog so this is kind of a way of testing that "I get a little if you go through me" deal. It's supposed to be just what pops into one's mind at some time, so here, currently, are 10 books that occur to me as being important, in no order:

1. Malcolm X's autobiography. I don't know why this had such an impact. I'm a white chick and he's pretty dismissive of white chicks. Maybe it's the way he implies that any former hoodlum could have the leadership to make a fringe church humanistically righeous, while clearly being the only possible one. Maybe it's the "self-made man" aspect. Maybe it's that halfway through the book he takes Hajj and loses his separatism - it's an example of inconsistent opinion within a single work that makes the work stronger. Alex Haley didn't try to consolidate too much, working as medium, and is brilliant for it. Red's pretty funny too, in a dry, angry way. Too much of mainstream race politics avoids obvious, historical bitterness, that both supports Obama and continues despite him, and is not necessarily symptomatic or problematic.

2. Samuel Delaney - Dhalgren. I think this book took a lot of the uneasiness I felt about sexuality and how it's treated in literature, and turned it inside out. Same with race and class. There's a casual lack of repression, including repression about how it's repression that makes things hot, that I suppose can only come from a writer for whom sex with strangers of all varieties was so normalized. I'll admit I still don't entirely get what's going on with Bellona, or why the book is more science fiction than magical realist meta literature. Probably the temporal paradoxes, the continuous entropy.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
3. Julie Phillips - James Tiptree, Jr. (and Tiptree's short story compilation).
I feel a certain kinship with Sheldon, mostly because she considered herself a painter, then an art writer, before joining the army. She's one of my heroes, and to compare myself to her makes me realize how lucky I am for my historical circumstances. She was brilliant, depressive, and indefinably queer before there was a community and politics for such, and only in her age did she begin to see changes that would have made sense of her younger self. Tip's experience of the conservative turn of post-war America made her/him deeply cynical about feminism, with a certain biologically deterministic resignation that serves to question the concept of progress.

4. Donna Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Primarily the essay "A Cyborg Manifesto", which aims to reprogram the language we use about nature, culture, human and nonhuman (and animal and object)in a way that feels like it's been there all along. Perhaps it's a female perspective, but the implication is that not all females will agree and that there's nothing particularly biologically automatic about rhetoric or belief - both of which are immanently physical phenomena. At the same time, I wouldn't say that this approach to animal rights necessarily prescribes a code of action. Nor am I entirely sure the culture of criticality about science can own this, either.

5. Bruno Latour - We Have Never Been Modern
Especially in translation, sometimes you just have to let the nonsense sweep over you and own whatever misinterpretation of it you make. He's thinking about social science, meta-history, and how facts are constructed in democratic collaboration between human and nonhuman members of society. There's a defiance for the objective against post-structuralist relativism while using its rhetorical slipperiness. What I take from it applies to art history and the absurdity of 20th century theory, an understanding of any majority as infinitely complex.

6. Jared Diamond - Collapse
It's not so fresh on my mind as the others but it has to be in here because I still think in terms of wastes of resources, and how to define a society and the decisions it makes. While Guns, Germs, and Steel, despite the complicated research, had a simple and somewhat deterministic thesis, Collapse is not only more thorough but more urgently emphasizes sustainability in the relationship of system and environment. The many contradictions don't overpower the obvious quite enough, and it's more a link between sciences and history than an examination of how those are made (which is what I really like), but it at least overturns what we imagine to be prosperity, civilization, and success.

7. David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
What can I possibly say? Take drugs or kill yourself. My sister and I realized that we were way less interested in reading anything after reading this. And it's not that it argues that, or anything. But having an answer that the best answer is always having more questions (which is not the only possible takeaway) kind of spoils you for reading. It changes something. I'm also pretty much always rereading it because it's in my bathroom. I don't know what kind of hubris that implies.

8. Michael Pollan - Omnivore's Dilemma
In a few years this won't be in my mind as quite so influential, but it's one of the most impactful books I've read. It makes you think about how food links you to society, and how strong the urge is to not worry about where it comes from. I'm less worried about health issues than the fact that so many cheap calories are basically petroleum. And again, it's realist. It recognizes that knowledge does not necessitate practice.

9. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
This didn't blow me away topic-wise or revolutionize my bio-ethics, which were already made posthuman by previous entries. It did make me imagine going into science journalism. It's simply a very good example of the genre, that I've read recently.

10. Thomas Pynchon - V.
Gravity's Rainbow is hot shit, too, but V. is almost the dry run for Gravity's Rainbow, so that what's in the former is almost taken for granted by the latter. It's a much more intimate, personal pastiche, much more concerned with the problems of desire and the interiority of things. It's one of those books that influenced a lot afterward, yet is primarily about taking influence from everywhere. It's about the sexuality of inanimate objects, okay? Basically making an existentialist-mocking joke of all the modernist literature puzzling over the female other. It's by the same sort of wanker, but one who emphatically wants the book, in its duplicates and internal separability to speak for itself.

Caveat Emptor in Concreto

2010-06-18T21:26:00.000-07:00

Tasteful and subtle, yes?

CAVEAT EMPTOR

2010-06-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

CAVEAT EMPTOR FULLY FUNDED!

I am raising money for a tattoo.
UPDATE: spoke to my desired artist, who said it would be $80. Kickstarter disapproves, since I'm not in fact giving you anything back but the thrill of spending. I'll keep updating here with how much you've given:

$80/80

The tattoo will be on the back side of my right forearm near my wrist. It will be very small and read "CAVEAT EMPTOR". Likely it will be in Myriad or a simple all-caps sans-serif at the artist's discretion. I got the idea from Philip K. Dick's Ubik, in which Pat Conley, a young and unusually innocuous (for a female Dick character) psychic history-editor, is mentioned as having the tattoo.

Naturally I do not want to pay for an always-already-regrettable "buyer beware" cheeky consumer awareness permanent reminder with my own wage labor. If you donate even a little bit I will consider it an early birthday present. If I do not get $80 by October 12 I will give you your money back. I want this to be specifically dedicated money rather than associating the event with a particular job.

Thank you very much! Have a nice life.

Bushwick Open Studios

2010-06-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

Look, I had this really great idea. I would crash at a friend's place in Bed Stuy Friday night and then walk around Bushwick visiting friends and art heroes with studios there. This all went exactly according to plan except that I was hung over (I swear, three drinks does not usually do that), it was 90 degrees Farenheit, and 100% humidity. After elbowing into the downstairs neighbors' recovery Rock Band, I attempted to live the Summer in Brooklyn way.
Rapid movement was out of the question. I uneasily digested a cheeseburger and 32 oz. of iced coffee and wandered over to 1717 Troutman. Some NYAA alums had been the first to rent a space in the warehouse-turned-workshop building, and it was great to see them churning out new work, plus all the artists who had moved in since then.

Cecilia Roberts, "Dierdre and a Rat Trap"

Sarah Elise Hall, "stasis" sculpture

Leelee Chan and Ginny Casey, a couple of recent RISD grads, have studios in the same building. Leelee is doing some great thing with recycled material sculpture, my favorite medium of late.

Jeff Fichera does extremely closely observed paintings and drawings (from a landscape painting background) of chaotic everyday surfaces.

Jessica Angel uses stencils to make Janet-bait techno-kitch paintings.

Further Janet-bait is Aaron Williams' collaged and constructed uses of space photography.

There were something like 100 other studios besides this big building but I was too knackered to do more than stick my hair under yet another open fire hydrant and nap through my friend's birthday party.

Sustainability as an idea is everywhere but I am still always amazed at how art keeps being made, and therefore leisure time bankrolled, somehow. I know it comes from the idea that beauty is important to have around all the time. I don't want to take that for granted while every grant, mostly unfulfilled, argues it over and over.

There are still things going on today out there so get thee to the Jefferson stop!

Portrait median

2010-06-01T12:05:00.000-07:00

The median trick with portraits. I deliberately resized and picked ones with about the same figure-to-frame proportions, and still we learn two things:
1. I do not have a compositional formula and mix up poses pretty well.
2. I love alizarin crimson a little too much.

Another thing we learn is that all portraits converge on the Mona Lisa.

Median

2010-05-31T07:14:00.000-07:00

There's an article at Shutterstock about how to take a personless picture of a crowded place using Photoshop's statistical scripts. My first thought, of course, is: what happens if you do this with a stack of photos of different things? Are the artifacts it generates interesting?
I have a series of digital drawings I've been making for 10 years, made according to a formula of nude models drawn with colors sampled from a background of satellite space photography. I did this to all 50 of them, and this is the result:

That's pretty cool.
Then I did it to my grad thesis paintings, which don't even have up and down orientations, to see whether I had compositional tendencies with those:

It doesn't really know what to do when you tell it to automatically align things. I'm going to keep playing with this and see if I can get the other statistical options to do anything interesting besides black, white, and gray blocks. There's something fascinating about using a formula made to find signal on noise.

résumé

2010-05-26T22:27:00.001-07:00

Janet Bruesselbach

janet@bruesselbach.com 69-60 108^th St. Apt. 517

(310) 617-3366 Forest Hills, NY 11375

I’m a figurative oil painter, designer, curator and writer looking to join my energy and intelligence with others involved with culture, sustainability, science and technology.

Employment History

2010 Enumerator for the U.S. Census Bureau Non-Response Follow-Up operation.

- Temporary May-June position interviewing at addresses that hadn’t mailed in their decennial census questionnaires. Responsible for keeping personal information confidential, pursuing proxy sources, and working mixed hours on my own schedule.

Supervisor: Danny Weiss, d.aryeh.weiss@gmail.com (917) 214-3027

2009- Curator of A Gathering of the Tribes gallery, 285 E 3^rd St. New York, NY 10009 www.tribes.org

- Coordinated with and selected artists for shows in an alternative exhibition space owned by

Steve Cannon. (212) 674-8262

- Art Editor for Issue 13 of A Gathering of the Tribes literary magazine.

2006- Bookseller, Shakespeare & Co., 716 Broadway, New York, NY (212) 529-1330 Rebecca Lambrecht - Retail clerk responsible for friendly customer service, register, shelving, textbooks, stock.

2006-2008 Information Clerk, Board of Elections.

- On election days, I guided voters to their appropriate districts at my local polling site.

Queens Board of Elections (718) 730-6730

2007 Library Assistant, New York Academy of Art. Reference: Kristine Paulus, Kristine@nyaa.edu

2007 Intern, Location One nonprofit arts organization, 26 Greene St., NYC

Steve Cukierski, steve@location1.org, artists Ligorano/Reese

2007 Art Director, Chromed Productions. Game design.

Irfaan Chaudhry, irfaanc@gmail.com; Adam Kenney, adam.kenney@chromed.com

2006 Intern, Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63^rd St. New York, NY 10021 (212) 838-2560

2005-2006 Gallery Installer for RISD Exhibitions, 62 Prospect St.. Providence, RI 02903

Supervisor: Mark Moscone, mmoscone@risd.edu, (401) 454-6141

2004 Intern, Tor Books, 175 5^th Ave., New York, NY with art director Irene Gallo, Irene.gallo@tor.com

Education

2007-2009 Master of Fine Arts in Painting, New York Academy of Art

111 Franklin St., New York, NY 10013 www.nyaa.edu

Studied with John Jacobsmeyer, Catherine Howe, Nicola Verlato, Will Cotton, and Kurt Kauper

2002-2006 Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration, and Concentration in European History

Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) 2 College St. Providence, RI

1999-2002 Crossroads School for the Arts and Sciences.

21^st St. Santa Monica, CA. (310)829-7391 GPA: 3.8 SAT: 720V 710M

Other Education

2005 Summer program in painting and history, Rome, Italy

2004 Summer Art/Technology History class at Columbia, New York, NY

2001-2003 Summer classes in Astronomy, Microbiology, Science Fiction, Baroque Art. UCLA, CA.

2001-2002 California Art Institute, Westlake, CA.

1994-2002 O’Neill Fine Art Studio, Malibu, CA.

Exhibitions & Awards

April 2010 The Girleye Show – Curator of feminist photography exhibition with Beth Hommel, Cassie Olander, Lauren Goldberg and Marie Hansen. A Gathering of the Tribes, 285 E 3^rd St. NYC

October 2009 Nothing For Itself at A Gathering of the Tribes, 285 E 3^rd St. New York, NY

May 2009 A Figurative Reconstruction, New York Academy of Art, 111 Franklin St, NYC

December 2007 Sebrof International at the New York City Hungarian Cultural Institute

2006 RAINN t-shirt art competition winner

3/2-3/7, 2006 3-Person Senior Show, RISD Illustration Gallery, Providence, RI

May 2005 Burleson Painting Competition, First Place Junior Award

10/28-11/5, 2004 Junior Show (Organizer & Exhibitor), RISD Illustration Gallery, Providence, RI

Skills - Traditional representational painting, photography, instruction in old and new art media

- Gallery administration and maintenance.

- Communication, writing, editing, copy editing, blogging, social media

- Computer game and user interface design, project coordination, graphic design print and web

- Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Microsoft Office , Maya, Mac, Windows, html , css, php

Girleye Show response

2010-04-19T13:49:00.000-07:00

Response to Chavisa Woods and Art Less on The Girleye Show.

Thank you for wrapping your superior minds so attentively around this tawdry project. So I think what’s coming together is an awareness of the tension between feminisms. Namely, a contention of how best to address Laura Mulvey’s legacy and the “male gaze”: do we subvert the supposed dominant paradigm by rearranging the organs, or nullify the her mere Freudianism by proliferating the other configurations that had always appeared?
This namely comes to light when A notes that there’s nothing in many of the photographs that indicates authorial gender: “Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all.” This is the nullifying side, analogous to moderate feminism, arguing variations of style as genderless. Whereas a radical could say that in order to reveal that such disembodied art inherently oppresses, we must actively pursue unfamiliar forms, we might also claim the paradigm by majority, or reverse the unfamiliar into the canny.
Though not the only strategy, I was drawn sometimes in images to what I knew, not historically specifically, but of the conventional uses of stock photography, the myths it proliferates, and the role of women in generating and managing these images. Part of what I try to get at with “formal queerness” concerns an interest in professional interactions between women. This isn’t necessarily “linked and loving” or without power dynamics and communication errors. It is perhaps related to my interest in understanding what “generic” is to me personally and how it differs from how similar people see it.
So yes, this gets to A’s best point: the collection is regrettably mono-ethnic. It’s unfortunate considering Tribes’s mission of diversity. I’d all too easily turn this into a parody of Stuff White People Like in honest self-defense. I guess I didn’t find any photographers of color, and Marie’s stranger on the subway became a token to highlight the unfair consistency.
To address the other criticism A made, of the subjects’ gender, which she already de-polarized fairly well: the focus of the show narrowed in the making. At first, I was considering photographers of a range of genders, although always addressing feminist issues. Without actually prodding at gender boundaries, we might take femaleness or femininity or whatever the as-opposed-to-what theme is here for granted by limiting it to cisgender. Cassie may have re-titled several photos to negate gender-identified names, hopefully not out of a depersonalizing pressure from me, but to let the androgenous continuum decouple from the models’ names. Even trans men are girls too. My only regret is an accidental exclusion of transwomen.
Perhaps I’m keeping too specific here, and perhaps we’re all happier spared my nitpicking on content and symbol. The show’s faggot-coined shadow title indicates a parodic encouragement of the medium’s (being bodies and cameras and everything that surrounds them) more confrontationally radical interpretations. Yet the actual title is a take on the show-within-the-show (The Girlie Show, sold by the inclusion of a funny black man) on 30 Rock, whose protagonist has lately been the feminist feminists love to hate. Treating a diversification as a simple inversion still invites a complication of the sexual politics involved: Does the subject possess the artist if their autonomy penetrates the lens, as Chavisa suggests? When each image is the evidence of a different reinterpretation of a seemingly limited set of givens, we can see either something only these women could do, or something anyone (or thing!) could do. Is anyone insulted if I’m more excited, and intend more of a compliment, by the second?

Girleye Background by Art Less

2010-04-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

GIRLEYE: AN EXPLANATION OF THE TITLE

Walking into the Girleye show at Tribes unprepared, an ordinary viewer might find herself thinking something like, hmmm, Girleye: Women looking at women. But women look at women all the time. We’re sighted creatures. Duh! And what the heck does ‘girleye’ mean anyway? It’s not a word, people.

Would you care for a little background? Good, because you’re going to get a lot.

The Girleye Show was first ever-so-slyly named after a wrongfully cut scene in John Waters’ 1977 film Pink Flamingoes. Mocking Laura Mulvey a scant two years after the publication of her “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Waters wrote (and later, blaming “all the marijuana I was smoking,” discarded):

A lot of people like cunt, you know. Men, women. But your eyes are like a cunt to me, honey. You can look and look and look...and still I wake up wishing you were there... watching me twenty-four hours a day. Them cunt eyes.

Hilarious, right? Especially if, like John Waters as he wrote the infamous monologue, you have smoked too much marijuana. But whatever does it mean? And how does it relate to the Girleye title? (Another answer, the answer to how the monologue relates to the film from which it was excised will not be given by this blog post primarily because, as the scene has been made available to the public, it does not relate to the rest of Pink Flamingoes at all. How very John Waters, and lovingly so . . . )

First things first. There’s more to the humor here than meets the . . . eye. One suspects that, regardless of the author’s herbal proclivities, he finds the scene funny primarily because he himself is an unreconstructed homosexual. Waters will never find cunt desirable, and he will certainly never wake up wishing two vulvas were staring him down twenty-four hours a day. Moreover, almost all human beings (we can safely extrapolate, but if anyone does scientific research to the contrary, I for one would love to know) would be just the slightest smidge disturbed to see vulvas in the place of eyes on any face—male, female, human, nonhuman; it really doesn’t matter. (Maybe this is why the eye of Sauron squicks us out so?) A cunt for an eye, taken literally, implies a uterus for a brain, and that shit just ain’t genetically viable, so it’s going to squick us out. You can go even further with the visualization and reflect that two tiny cunts correctly positioned under the forehead and above the nose will look not unlike an extremely diseased, shut-swollen, pus-leaking, inflamed and lash-plucked pair of eyes currently visible only on the most destitute Third World beggars, and best avoided in any case if you want to keep your lunch. So it’s funny that anybody, even a John Waters character, would want to see eyes that looked like cunts. And this humor should certainly be kept in mind, and one’s tongue concordantly kept in cheek, as the viewer regards the Girleye selections.

Is there another, more pointed level to the humor? You betcha—it’s one I hinted at earlier, when I mentioned that Waters was mocking Laura Mulvey’s screed “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey’s whole deal with “Visual Pleasure” was the idea that, in narrative cinema at least, men were necessarily phallic possessive camera-wielding filmmakers and women were necessarily pretty passive vulval looked-at objects, because women didn’t have penises. If women had penises, they’d be potent, but women are born without them, so instead they symbolize castration anxieties. Freud said it, so it’s true. Or thus spake Laura Mulvey.

To review: male looker, female hooker. It totally sucked. But, Mulvey predicted confidently, women didn’t have to worry for too long because narrative cinema was like totally dying out! A narrative film, by the way, is a movie with a story. We can see how well that prediction turned out.

Meanwhile, a whole generation of feminist artists (and writers, and filmmakers, and whatnot) had rightly gotten sick of waiting for their male peers to recognize that women could do technique gud, too. So they chucked it out the window. Technique, that is. The more apologetic of this crowd had a habit of explaining that poorer—no, make that rawer, edgier—technique would a) better show their rage, and b) demarcate them from the tools of the male predecessors and sometime oppressors. In doing so, these artists yielded just about all of their theoretical ground to and via the tool of their male predecessor Marshall McLuhan.

Before we get too snarky here, let’s get something straight. Some of these artists were absolutely brilliant. Personally I have a big fat girl-crush on primitivist sex/art-goddess filmmaker Carolee Schneeman. Back in the sixties, Schneeman liked to film herself getting head from her boyfriend, both elegantly predicting and refuting Mulvey through these sumptuous pieces. (And absolutely no one paid attention, which is why we need shows like Girleye now.)

But most of these radical feminist anti-technique artists were crap. And you can see why. A great idea with a crap presentation is still a great idea, albeit with a crap presentation. At least it’s going to sound good when you tell it to people, even if it sounds better than, sigh, it looks. But a crap idea with crap presentation is doubly crap, or even craptastic. (Footnote: Sometimes I fantasize that a learned speaker will recite a passage such as the above to honor me at my funeral, with a little note of explanation such as, “The crap passage exemplifies the sort of brilliant, and brilliantly subtle, wordplay at which Spitzer excelled”.)

Modern female artists have largely split into two camps—those who continue the tradition of feminist mostly-crap, and those who make beautiful art that is cough, cough, silent on the subject of femininity. Intentionally or not, a silence that reflects a tradition of misogyny all too often propagates that tradition—a tradition which Mulvey, however poor her underlying logic, was perfectly correct to rally against.

But hey. It’s 2010 already.

Remember John Waters’ monologue. The passive cunt becomes an eye: greedy, seeking, it enthralls, sexy in its active power. Let’s reverse our own looking at the text. The figurative made flesh is quite grotesque; the flesh made figurative is . . . fine art . . .

Eye the doubly fine art of Girleye, and enjoy.

Guest essay - A Girl Eyes "Girleye"

2010-04-17T10:37:00.001-07:00

A girl eyes GIRLEYE: WOMEN LOOKING AT WOMEN, © Art Less (April 2010)

All too often, looking at a collection of fine art “women regarding women” pieces is like inspecting a crèche of Tracy Enim clones. When you’ve seen the Enim originals, you know that this cannot be an easy sight to behold. Perhaps inspired by a collective misreading of Audre Lorde, certain feminist fine artists of the late twentieth century indulged a tendency to chuck out technique in its entirety, with the unfortunate, and predictable, result that many pivotal artworks of that movement come off rather worse in the looking than in the retelling. It is thus with great joy that I report that the photographs in Girleye: Women Looking at Women are by and large gorgeous, but also acutely conscious of sexual politics. (Fiiiiiinally!)

Instead of trouncing technique and tradition by, say, sculpting vulvas out of used car parts and calling them art when the spackle is dry, many of the artists of Girleye have instead chosen to (mis)appropriate the techniques and styles of their most misogynistic forebears for their own, empowered ends. In particular, the young, preternaturally skilled Lauren Goldberg channels the surrealist misogynist Man Ray through her photographs Disconnect and Distance.

That Ms Goldberg has even thought to rework Man Ray instead of, say, posing for him as a model would have constituted, from Man Ray’s or his contemporaries’ points of view, a radically feminist act. Isn’t progress grand?

Meanwhile, the sensitive and gifted Cassie Olander conjures Imogen Cunningham’s Triangles and similar carnal landscapes through her photograph "Unity".

Cunningham was, of course, a woman as well, so the homage initially seems uncomplicated. When the viewer, however, realizes that "Unity" teasingly, almost coyly depicts two nude women locked in a soft embrace, it becomes clear that Olander is repurposing Cunningham’s lauded and, by now, canonical means to send a still unconventional, perhaps radical message.

With LES, Anne Marie Hansen kills her father with rebellious joy and an almost mathematical elegance. The image is simple, powerfully so. A drunk girl in a tacky gold bathing suit dangles a bunch of grapes before her open mouth. The crook of her elbow suggestively obscures the head of a young man standing just behind her. The viewer’s gaze comes to rest on his not-yet-distended swim trunks.

With this image, Ms Hansen lays waste to Magritte, American Apparel ads, real pornography and countless other misogynistic portrayals of women reduced to their capacity as passive sex-recipients . . . by using their motifs and techniques to shoot a message of female sexual hunger straight down our hungry maws. (My father was quick to note that Hansen has reworked surrealist painting The Rape as The Grapes. Let the artist make of this what she may.)

Many other photographs in the set are simply beautiful portraiture. Amanda Palmer (making one of several cameos) has bad sunburn. A pair of nimble clowns practice what looks like acroyoga. Swimmers dot the surf like foam. Progress shows subtly, like light through a lattice. Slowly, we come to understand that it is the essence of the radical (and a slap in the face to both Laura Mulvey and the men whom she rightly criticized) for these photographers merely to portray their subjects with the variegation natural to two (or more) humans playing in the light, linked and loving through a camera lens, and nobody shunned or stopped or subjugated by the process at all. Most of all, that we cannot tell by any trick that these photographers were female is, upon (another) reflection, a most gorgeous happening.

Where, then, the rhymes and reasons to this set? There are many. We can start with the most unsubtle geometry exploited to great effect by the expert artists whose work is featured here—or perhaps, given the show’s very particular theme and patterning, by their curator. To put it bluntly: sexually evocative arcs and swoops and circles, punctuated, or punctured, by the occasional blunt or slender pole, abound in the collection. The vivid plethora of ovoid-and-spike figurings conjure an almost subliminal, spooky mentation reminiscent of Charles Burns’ Black Holes, which turned the vulva-shape into a repeated signifier of horror, a foreshadower of doom nested in appearances of the unexpected—such as a dissected frog’s back, a cut wrist, a lake where children skinny-dip. (Really, if you haven’t read a copy yet, you must—it’s the rare graphic novelist who can make the vulva into a Lovecraftian destroyer of worlds, and absolutely terrify you to pieces with it, and then make you cry.) I leave the viewer to pick his or her own incautious, revelatory path through the darkling bogs and brambles that litter the track of Girleye with a beauty, and a stillness, and danger.

Additionally, and flowing nicely from my bogs’n’brambles metaphor if I do write-so myself, bathing imagery pervades the show. Including the web-only images, roughly one sixth to one seventh of the pieces either allude to bathing or actually feature a nude lady bather or set of bathers. Factor in the joyous lesbian kissing, lesbian sex, and—let’s face it, people—lesbian hairstyles on display in several of the other photographs, and the images of happy women cavorting in water take on a rawer, sexier connotation.

In fact, the show seems to posit the old Radicalesbian message that one of the most authentic ways for women to relate to one another happily as women is by the art of sexual love. In Anne-Marie Hansen’s "Naughty",

a seemingly drunken reveler tilts a frenemy’s chin toward hers in a parody of sexual love, a parody that conceals revulsion. Immediately, for your own psychological wellbeing if for no other cause, contrast this deeply discomfiting (though beautifully done) image with Beth Hommel’s soothing Kiss,

a gentle expression of adoration between women who are real lovers, at least for the moment the camera saw.

Speaking of sex, or politics, or merely the bonds imposed, displaced, ignored or adored by the act of looking: a teasing kind of bondage pervades the images of Girleye. Cassie Olander wraps one subject in a dress of loose bondage tape marked “DANGER”, and another in what looks like a symbolic bracelet of packing tape about the upper arm. Allison Green wraps two nude females against one anther in a web of loose bondage tape that looks a bit like toilet paper or crepe streamers. One thing is clear—these bonds aren’t holding anybody anywhere. Are they jokes, suggestions, denials, teases? On or of the viewer, always—the bondage never holds the subject, in these photos. Greene also photographs two straight lovers turned away from each other in a scarlet bed, a strip of pure white tape pasted across their snuggly bods. The photographer seems to suggest that the bonds—of love, sex, of matrimony, for all we know—that hold these lovers together are as flimsy as the tape she has strewn atop them. (A commentary on the “sanctity” of marriage? Or just of young lusts?)

One rather wishes that curator Janet Bruesselbach’s work had been featured in this show. Indeed, the images seem to have been selected so that, en masse, they resemble one of her massive artworks. With her physics-defying, anatomically incorrect oil orgies and other acts of sly painterly nihilism, Bruesselbach has assembled a career out of teasingly cinching and severing the ties of artist to subject, subject to viewer, male to female, armpit to elbow and whatever else you can think of, always with an eye to disassembling old theory and provoking transformation. The child of two eccentric physicists forever rusticating in one of the more precarious reaches of the rarefied Malibu wasteland, Bruesselbach understands difference with anything but difference, and from more angles than even her most multiply valenced works could invite you, dear Reader, to contemplate.

So it is surprising and perhaps offensive, with all the above dimensions of diversity in mind from both curator and photographers, that all the subjects of Girleye (minus one) are white. One doubts that the artists of Girleye have conspired to constrict the scope of femininity to a single, whitewashed point. Rather, the show evidences by strong implication that the photographers simply don’t hang out with many people who aren’t white. Even Hommel’s Mail Order, a seeming send-up of (Third World, usually nonwhite) mail-order brides, features a white subject as the mailed party. The only actual nonwhite subject in the entire set appears to be a stranger to the photographer (Hansen in this case). Most other subjects meet Ms Hansen’s gaze with ease, evincing familiarity if not friendship. Her lips parted slightly, this subject gazes straight ahead, meditating to the music on her iPod as she wills the subway ride to be over. She appears to be a stranger whom Hansen happened to snap on a long train ride. The image is remarkable for its ordinariness, its emotional opacity. Hansen never knew her subject’s story and, therefore, we viewers will never know it, either.

Another note on difference: one wonders if artist Cassie Olander’s male-presenting subjects Liz and David (and I mean to mark the subject named David especially) would especially desire their images used in a collection of women who are nominally looking at women. The above are also two of the only brooding subjects in the entire show, and their haunted eyes shy from the camera’s shutter, leaving us only with the impression of hunched shoulders and obsessively pomaded hair. Hardly a representative image of butch or—more appropriately—trans moodiness, unless these two just started on their testosterone regimen, in which case, of course, all bets are off (just kidding!). I for one am willing to believe that Ms. Olander accurately captured sad moments in the lives of these two subjects, and from Olander’s other, also beautifully felt work must believe that Olander selected these moments, not to portray transmen as a sad breed generally but to show us the sadness of the falling cherry blossoms, as they happened to fall.

Maybe David and (probably) Liz are not transmen in the first place, but playful young women who happened to butch it up for their respective shoots. Maybe, maybe. But maybe not. What if they are transgendered? What if they really aren’t women? What if they hate the very idea of being included in this show? Well, have I got an interpretation for you.

Noted drag warrior and gender obscurist James St James writes wisely in his novel Freak Show (if you will allow me, dear Reader, to extend and wriggle a bit in this authorial stretch) that the transfolk of our society are trammeled and trashed by the violent misapprehensions of our culture, but the very chains (of thorns or flowers, of iron or of gold) that yoke transfolk into endocultural conflict enable them to act as revolutionary agents, and aching reminders of the impermanence of “fates”.

If this were a slightly academic article and not a (bl)o(g)nanism, I’d write some lameass transition phrase like:

If my interpretation of St James is to be believed, we may celebrate Girleye’s inclusion of transmen—not for the men’s futures qua men, but for the intersection of their futures with their girlish pasts. Or, to misappropriate the oft-appearing Amanda Fucking Palmer, girls will be girls will be boys with no warning. Such transitions imply a potential for our own . . . into boys, into women, into whatever the hell we want, be it sexes or genders or any of the manifold wondrous identities that lie not between our legs but in our lives.

Trans is Latin for across, after all. It would be great if transmen, biowomen, and everyone in between could appreciate the plenitude of identities open to them throughout their lives. And that’s just what this show is for. Let us embrace David, Liz, and all the rest with open arms and mouths and water-forms, and hope that perhaps they like us, too, just a bit at least . . .

On that note, let us close by oh so gleefully misusing a monster quote from that master of misuse, and of potential-play, Donald Barthelme, masquerading here under the voice of a woman impregnated with a fetus by three men—in our interpretation, a woman who becomes us, impregnated with transformative potential by the girls of Girleye:

The engendering force was, perhaps, the fused glance of all of them. From the millions of units crawling about on the surface of the city, their wavering desirous eye selected me. The pupil enlarged to admit more light: more me. They began dancing little dances of suggestion and fear. These dances constitute an invitation of unmistakable import—an invitation which, if accepted, leads one down many muddy roads.

I accepted. What was the alternative?

9

The Girleye Show

2010-04-03T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Girleye Show

April 3-30, 2010

Tribes Gallery 285 E 3rd St. 2nd Floor NYC 10009

Beth Hommel is a photographer and multimedia artist originally from Vandergrift, Pennsylvania. Her primary focus is the creation of truthful, unusual portraits. Her work has been seen in magazines and newspapers worldwide, and more than a dozen of her photographs were included in Who Killed Amanda Palmer: A Book of Photographic Evidence, which she also designed. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner Kayla.

View more at www.bethhommel.com

Beth Hommel

Before 10 am

16x20

$300

Beth Hommel

Sarah

11x17

$200

Beth Hommel

Cello

11x17

$200

Beth Hommel

Kitchen

11x17

$200

Beth Hommel

Palms & Knees

11x17

$200

Beth Hommel

Sunburn

8x12

$200

Beth Hommel

Courage

8x12

$150

Beth Hommel

Caress

8x12

$150

Beth Hommel

Ripples II

8x10

$100

Beth Hommel

Murder Was The Case They Gave Me

8x10

$100

Beth Hommel

125

8x10

$100

Beth Hommel

Casey

8x10

$100

Beth Hommel

Red & Blue

$150

Beth Hommel

Fingers Crossed

5x7

$80

Beth Hommel

Light

5x7

$80

Beth Hommel

Kiss

5x7

$80

Beth Hommel

Mail Order

4x6

$50

Anne Marie Hansen

Anne Marie Hansen

A Soho Sky

11x14

$150

Anne Marie Hansen

Ice

8x10

$150

Anne Marie Hansen

Miss Mercier

8x10

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

Naughty

8x10

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

Beach

5x7

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

Jump Rose

8x10

$100

Ann Marie Hansen

Babeland at 10 am

5x7

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

LES

5x7

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

Katonah Swimmers

8x10

$80

Anne Marie Hansen

F Train

5x7

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

Wedding Day

5x7

$100

Anne Marie Hansen

A Deck of Cards

5x7

$60

Anne Marie Hansen

Lady Lily

5x7

$60

Cassandra Olander resides in Brooklyn, New York and has been a photographer for several years. She has had over 50+ photographs published in Curve, InsideOut, She and GoNYC Magazine, including online features. Her style concentrates on black & white portraiture from a feminist and/or queer perspective. View more at cassandraolander.com

Cassie Olander

Danger

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Reaching

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Unity

5x7

$100

Cassie Olander

Silver

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Vulnerability

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Contemplative

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Reflect

8x10

$125

Cassie Olander

Bubbly

8x10

$125

Lauren Goldberg is photographer based in New York City. Lauren specializes in band and fine art photography. Aside from photography, she works on film and video, as well as graphic design, silkscreen, painting and drawing, and as many other forms of art as possible. She is attending the School of Visual Arts as of Fall 2009 for photography.

Her work is at fairytalevegas.com

Lauren Goldberg

Crying Statue

20x30

$300

Lauren Goldberg

Dismemberment

20x30

$300

Lauren Goldberg

Through the Looking Glass

20x30

$300

Lauren Goldberg

Dead in the Garden

11x17

$250

Lauren Goldberg

Hand

11x17

$200

Lauren Goldberg

Distance

11x17

$200

Lauren Goldberg

Reflection

11x17

$200

Lauren Goldberg

Stairs

11x17

$200

Lauren Goldberg

Arch

8x12

$125

Lauren Goldberg

Reach

8x12

$125

Belatedly, the 2010 Whitney Biennial

2010-04-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

About a month ago, I accompanied Steve Cannon to the Whitney Biennial. I took some pictures but my report was eclipsed by the next week's art fair glut. This was a different experience from the last Whitney event we attended, for several reasons. The Biennial is much higher profile and larger and affords the curators the opportunity to organize multiple floors as an architectural installation. It was very crowded. We ran into some absurd problems. I relish the uncomfortable and awkward, because it's more to talk about.
One absurd thing is that we bypassed the line around the block of guests with the same sort of invitations as ours by approaching the front doors and - I feel terrible having actually said "he can't wait in line, he's blind". It was completely ridiculous, but one of the staff recognized Steve and let us in. I count it as one of the many situations where it's easier to acquiesce to the entitled than stick to principles.
The first place everyone ended up was on the long coat-check line. Steve claimed he didn't want to check his coat so I had to figure ou how to get out of the line.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation is a collective with its own response-nnial. Their piece was an ancient ambulance with scenes from movies projected on the front window, narrated by a woman who spoke of their relationship with a personified America. Boring but it did have presence.

My favorite piece was a sculpture installation involving glasses of water and video cameras hanging in orange nets from a system of wires. The cameras fed live to projectors embedded in tables around the room, semi-randomly.

Tauba Auerbach makes large, very flat paintings of crumpled canvases. This was the highlight of the Art Materials Reflexivity Room.

After two floors Steve, who was still wearing two layers of coats, overheated and needed to sit down. I took him to the stairwell where we caused a serious fire code violation and had to ask security for a wheelchair. Most were okay but one oblivious security guy just told us not to block the stairs as he passed. So, thank you Whitney: not only did you allow the absurdity of a blind dude at a visual art opening, but you gave him a wheelchair.
I then parked him in a corner with a makeshift label on the wall and finished my tour of the 2-d-oriented floor, to report back.

Aurel Schmidt exemplifies what I might call hipster art - young Americans who tend to focus on detailed craftwork. Work like hers, colored drawings in which figures are assembled from junk objects, combine the generation's preoccupations with recycling and non-fractal scaling.

These concerns manifest best in the sculptures and installations Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have selected this year. Other notable decisions are the decrease in artists from the last biennial, and the female majority. Viewing it at the opening meant that the crowd overwhelmed the work - or that the work was trying particularly hard for a stillness that resisted the party atmosphere. I definitely felt that the curators knew more what to look for in 3-D and virtual work than in 2-D, or were encouraging a "painting is dead, and really, we're trying to believe it isn't" attitude. I don't think that represents any general reality in art right now - but I prefer the post-historical approach, anyway.

Taking a Blind Man to See Marina Abramovic

2010-03-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

The first day, March 10, of member previews of the Marina Abromovic retrospective at MoMA, Steve Cannon asked me to take him up there to say hello to her. He remembered interviewing her by email eight years ago when she spent 6 weeks living in three exposed, spartan rooms at Sean Kelly gallery for House with an Ocean View. In "The Artist Is Present", on MoMA's second floor, he understood she would be present, and therefore wanted to present himself to her and mention he'd interviewed her.
"The Artist Is Present" consists of Marina sitting at a table, for three months of MoMA open hours, in the middle of a large open space under massive lights from four corners. Museum attendees are invited to individually sit across from her. She does not speak. She barely emotes. She sometimes rests and shifts when she needs to.
When we got there, there was a line to sit with the artist. We didn't notice the line, and when the middle-aged tourist who had been placidly staring Marina down got up, I tried to guide Steve out there. Naturally the next person in line moved faster and we retreated. It would have been very curious to have heard and seen Steve trying to engage the Present Marina: the perfect communication of the blind with the mute.
The power of many of her works does derive from her visual impact as a tall, very striking, seemingly ageless woman, and the long dress she wears during The Artist Is Present emphasizes that. Yet performance art is a field whose aesthetics derive very little from visuality itself and can primarily consist of description. Some of Marina's best works are rejected proposals. Many are explicitly self-destructive or masochistic to the point of the audience having to call 911 to revive the artist. The best, indeed, rely on trust games with the audience. Documentation is the form in which performance art becomes present and possessable by museums. This means it's more perceptible to the blind than almost anything else that has grown from the Visual Art field (touchable sculptures and sound installations still cling to a certain visual-spatial approach), at the expense of reliance on the verbal.
The rest of the retrospective fills the sixth floor. MoMA makes a point of announcing that this is their first performance art retrospective. It's also a great deal of attention given to a female artist, one who is, as she puts it, the "grandmother" of performance art. In the seventies her work was done in collaboration with German partner Ulay, and the documentation makes it seem that she was the more passionate and dedicated to the interventions they staged, higher profile, the brains of the operation. My favorites are those done with no props, or few, like AAA AAA AAAA (in which they scream louder and louder at each other) or one in which they slap each other. Perhaps the best-known is "Rest Energy"(video), consisting of Marina holding a bow with Ulay holding an arrow cocked in it towards her heart. The best of these were videos - only the less dangerous are reperformed in the retrospective, prompting accusations of a declawing by historical institution. Marina and Ulay's relationship was their work and vice versa, and their collaboration ended through hiking along the Great Wall of China towards each other and then separating. In her maturity, Marina's performances and films tap her Slavic roots and often include dedications and reperformances of other artists' work.
Marina's own work is reperformed in shifts by an army of the body-aware. One of the best is that in which she and Ulay stood naked in a narrow doorway facing each other, while everyone who entered the gallery pushed past them. In the reperformance the gap between them was made large enough to pass by without turning sideways, which Marina was uncomfortable about, but arguably the average body passing through in 2000s America is larger than that in 1970s Europe - a suggestion that, when I brought it up, was considered a bit taboo. When Steve passed through between his two dates, we suggested he face the woman and we the man. He gently stepped on the man's feet and rubbed noses with the woman. The most interesting part of this was peoples' expressions as they came through. A camera crew shooting a feature film documentary on Marina noticed us, and later interviewed Steve and the female performer about experiencing art after losing his sight. "Do you smell them?" were among the stranger questions. My co-date Hilary Maslon answered: "He smokes, he can't smell anything."
In his usual humor, Steve claims that he writes about art easily by just saying what the artist says. One element of this show was that the art itself could potentially react to how I was describing it - although the performative discipline is not to do so.
The performer enjoyed, as I would too, the occasional jostling and scratches that provided some relief from standing in one place for two hours or more. After all, when you've set yourself up to break down your physical boundaries with strangers, violation is the best possible thing that could happen, and yet distance reasserts itself as it must. The prescriptiveness of the verbal documentation and proposals convey far better than any warm analysis the numinosity, zen or shamanistic qualities of Marina's art.

Art Week Dessert and Snacks

2010-03-09T17:29:00.000-08:00

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don't think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It's ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic's heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn't work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we'd get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I've said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn't teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to "social media expert"/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton's husband and friends. Everyone's kids were there. Bill showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don't think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I'm made nervous that everyone else has better day jobs.

Pulse

2010-03-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here's what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.'s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40x60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art's snarky political cartoonist. He'll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we're really post-Oedipal, and I don't think so). He's been working incredibly hard this year, and I don't know why he's not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend's dessert, #class - its strength is that it's such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: "Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?"

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I'd already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting dessert.

Who did the hypervirtual photo that's on the cover of Lethem's Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that's who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48"x60" (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

The End.
(or is it...?)

Verge

2010-03-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

So the weekend got so busy I haven't been updating much. We will catch up today.

A quick overview of Verge: it's young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace "emerging" and "overlooked" art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn't have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather's was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche's Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

SCOPE

2010-03-05T10:37:00.000-08:00

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn't be enough security personnel even with well-behaved informed crowds.
That's part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than metacommentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn't it taste great? David Stein's absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE's corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People's Revolution, Kelly Cutron's PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE's VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Hey, another one I thought I knew too well to forget and now I feel like I'm cheating them.

Bad boy scout making noises.

Next post: Verge