shelflife by visitor

A good deal of the work I produce is fundamentally about language and word-play. When I first stumble over a concept, brush my knees off and decide whether I’m gonna curb this thing and make a bracelet from its bloody teeth or take it home, clean it up and help it grow up into more than just an intellectual trip-hazard, I flip thru my bins of cultural memory. Is it something I saw somewhere and am about to re-hash? If it is, can I step it up and own it? That’s tough with book-art and text-centric conceptual art–mostly on account of a necessity to adhere to some sense of rigorous visual simplicity that subverts more elegant ideas by encoding them in the algorithm of plain sight.

That’s where freaky academic surveys like EXPERIMENTAL-VISUAL-CONCRETE: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960’s come in handy. This book’s a language fan’s New Wave Hookers. It’s got it all plus a merry-go-round and a harem. I expected a mostly visual survey when I first tracked the book down. I’ll admit to a certain amount of frustration when I flipped thru it and realized how heavy it was with essays. I was thumbing past occasional reproductions of lettrism, experimental typography, poetic holography, video poetry and fluxus sound-poetry and was cognitively gut-punched by how unfamiliar I was with so much of what I was seeing. That disorientation coupled with the intense density of academic commentary led to an initial reaction of, “what is this bullshit!”

But I stepped back and thought about it. I read some of the essays and made sense of the book’s editing. I accepted the editors’ structural and evolutionary concepts–and more importantly, accepted the book as a valuable proof of how primally ideas excite consumers, harvesters and aficionados of molested text.

I’ve received a lot of email about a shirt that Thurston Moore wore on the Jimmy Fallon Show last night. That shirt was the fallout of the Choir Practice watercolor edition I released earlier in the year. That edition was the fallout of the wallpaper designs that all of the pages of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK are hand-painted atop.

Since I picked up my laser engraver, I’ve gotten into the habit of creating vector artwork from all of my ink drawings. I repurpose the artwork into all sorts of one-off projects that never *really* see the light of day. The shirt Thurston wore is exactly that. It doesn’t exist. It’s not a product. It isn’t for sale. In fact, I’m so perplexed by people’s infatuation with the issue that I’ve been addressing it via the following reciprocally confounding statement:

“It’s a graphic about america’s collective willingness to roll over and take it in the ass from corporations like monsanto, cargil, ADM and IBP. Eating, much like sex, should be an exciting interaction between two people–the consumer and a local farmer. Failure to pursue such interactions leads to freakish displays of primal boredom which, when finally placed beneath the microscope of tabloid gossip columns, generate whispers and speculation about the lifestyle choices we make–be they food, sex, fashion or art.”

My girlfriend responded to that with, “I thought it was about taking a shit in your partner’s ass as an alternative to procreating.”

I revised my perspective. “Well, yeah, but that’s more or less the same thing as factory farming.
They take a shit on your dinner plate as an alternative to sustaining life.”

a freakish display of primal boredom

So, that brings us to handcrafted leathergoods etched into deerskin likely churned out of some vile deathfactory somewhere–leathergoods featuring the design on the shirt Thurston *almost* wore on the show…

This was one of the best, most enigmatic pieces of mail unintended for opening that I’ve ever tried to open. When I explained to Phil that I’d tried to get at the contents, he laughed–adding, “you did? that’s funny. there’s nothing in there.” nothing except for glue. I’d given him a book on mail art and he in turn, in time, sent this my way.

Leah Singer’s film work has always been mind-blowing. Her live performances with analyzer projectors are some of the most phenomenal bits of visceral human interaction with technology that I’ve ever had the good fortune to see. I remember when she first started talking about her concept for COPY. I was excited to see how her relationship with media would translate from film to serial book art.

At the time, she had been working in the archives of the New York Post as they were migrating to digital storage. She’d found a treasure trove of inspiration in the ruby-lith film that had been used and then, apparently, stored after being exploited to create photo knockouts in the pages of the Post. Drawn to the mysterious abstractions presented by the disembodied ruby-liths, Leah started editing simple, abstract layouts from the forms. They were essentially silhouettes. I’ve always been suspicious that an art director working on Apple’s iPod silhouette campaign stole the premise from the several volumes of COPY that had been released before anyone ever associated a silhouette with an MP3 player. I still am. Ad agencies steal oodles from underground ephemera.

Here’s the cover and centerfold from Leah’s first release:

I was asked on a Thursday to contribute designs to a sticker-sheet for the soon-to-be-released ltd edition lee ranaldo and thurston moore jazz blaster/jazz master guitars. It was suggested that the designs be submitted by the following Monday–on a weekend rich with NYC springtime hectic. In the interest of time and submitting work I knew I’d be happy with, I reheated a couple of things I’d drawn recently that weren’t used, hadn’t been used yet or were used previously in some very limited capacity. This is what I submitted:

Ultimately, one design was selected and paired with designs from the likes of Savage Pencil, Dennis Tyfus, Cameron Jamie, Matthew Ritchie and Kim Gordon. (seen here along with a zine that SY and their road crew pulled together)

Anyway, the reheating process got me to thinking about intellectual waste. I decided to dig up 12 sketch scraps I had laying around the studio, write a story tying them together and then design the collected elements into a conceptual book all inside of a 3-hour window. I did it. A month later, I finally figured out how to present and execute the edition. Look for more info on WASTE here soon.

I started this project a little over a year ago, but haven’t had much time to seriously sort out the distribution logistics. I’ll mention it here as a way of thinking aloud. Retailers and gallerists tend toward cognitive implosion when they try to decode the pricey-fair-wage-USA-produced/low margin/charity-project puzzle. That leaves me in a bind with projects like this.

In the Spring of 2007, Korean cab driver, Heo Se-Wook sacrificed himself to the elemental hunger of flame. His self-immolation was an effort to awaken his country to the threats of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. $119 billion dollars in aid over ten years was agreed to be paid to Korean farmers to mitigate the adverse impacts of the KORUS-FTA. Two critical points of contention between farmers and both the Korean and American governments were that rice and beef should be eliminated from the trade agreement. The import of these commodities into Korea from America would devastate family farmers. Unable to match American prices, Koreans would be forced to foreclose on their farms.

Heo Se-Wook’s protest was neither without reward nor without peer. Self-immolation has always been a rare but notorious, Artaudian, theatrical form of protest. Other Korean farmers allegedly followed in Se-Wook’s fiery footsteps–which had likely been inspired by the actions of monks and farmers before them. Following Se-Wook’s self-immolation and a series of large, organized protests, rice was ultimately eliminated from the implemented KORUS FTA. Sold to the Korean people as a path to cheaper goods and prosperity, KORUS FTA has adversely impacted industries as disparate as agriculture, textiles, pharmaceuticals and the Korean legal market. KORUS joins NAFTA and CAFTA as another slow-release Amerotoxin in the resource-rich waters of emerging markets.

Not directly influenced by any imagery of Se-Wook’s protest, “Acts of God: Rugs for Lost Homes–Vol. 1: Korean Farmer” is an homage to the contributions of those who have sacrificed themselves in the Theater of Pain to sustain the viability of local production. The 10′ x 5′ hand-made berber wool rug is the first in a series of 5 Acts of God rug editions intended to benefit NGOs with missions to mediate grass-roots land and property conflicts in emerging economies. A dark play on western imperialism, the Acts of God rugs amplify and glorify the actions of people who would otherwise go largely ignored in popular culture–laying these heroes out to be stomped upon by people who unconsciously and compulsively fill their homes with the products of exploitation. Collectors involuntarily tithe 5-10% of the price of the AOG pieces to organizations founded to protect the individuals upon whom the wealthy and powerful habitually traipse so viciously with the contents of their shopping bags and the thoughtlessness of their votes.

Pricing available on request. Each volume editioned at 25 rugs and intended to benefit a different NGO involved in a different conflict. 10% of sale donated on direct purchases or sales where retailers match a 5% retail donation.

The nineties weren’t bad. When people collaborated on projects, nobody slapped the presently ubiquitous X between collaborator names. They shoved that X right up there in the only name that matters–the singular brand-name. Executives at companies like Nike enjoy staring robotodreamily out their windows, surveying little fish-bowls like Portland and scheming up new ways to force-feed the notion that they’re not only relevant, but, get this–iconic–down culture’s consumption-addicted blogschlong-worn throat.

Manipulating your perception keeps their cool-consultants, marketing, advertising, publicity and street-team resources busy. Brands today are as iconic as their pockets are deep, their publicists are connected and everyone’s favors are owed. Beyond that, their products are what they are–the same crap they’ve been churning out for the past 20 years in a new colorway on another blog. There’s not much mystery there. There’s no sincere, primal cachet. There’s little style. There’s nothing to merit a glance back 15 years from now accompanied by the single-note sonata of a heartfelt pang of nostalgia for the story of why something was. In the nineties, the dotcom-induced virus of chronic entrepreneurial masturbation was neither as accessible nor pervasive as it is today. Creative people did creative shit because they were creative and they could. They had style to say, and damnit–that saying was gonna be said.

A few organizations came to epitomize merit-based brand-cachet in those years. X-girl was one of them. Kim Gordon, Daisy von Furth, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Chloé Sevigny, Mike Mills, Free Kitten, Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys–they didn’t just wear the stuff–they were all involved in it. They packaged it their way. The shop was their shop. The cuts were their cuts. The visual vernacular was their vernacular. They sampled wisely from a disparate past and a pop-then, but the wells they pulled from were of their personalities–as opposed to the pong-like tedium of the inter-brand quoting so pervasive today.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of old catalogs scanned. I’m making animated gifs of them. This first one is a xeroxed/stapled mini-zine they did in 1994. I’ll post the others in the future if this one goes well. If it’s not animating for you, shut off your fucking iPhone and get on a real computer.

The time that Sensational Fix curator, Roland Groenenboom, has spent with the work of Sonic Youth and their friends seems to have been superbly digested. Something that many of the artists involved in the show share widely in common is an involvement in the production of accessible, serial ephemera. Most are still generating print editions, publishing or writing zines, books, broadsides, chapbooks or pamphlets, printing tshirts, making records… Regardless of perceived value as artists, most everyone in the show is still actively making collectible works available to admirers of their creativity via channels beyond the hyper-inflated fantasy-priceland of galleries.

Having completed an exhibition catalog potentially priced beyond the reach of many young exhibition attendees, Roland decided to tap the over-arching communal belief in democratic content distribution and enlist exhibiting artists to contribute new work to a series of cheap, numbered, thematic, xeroxed zines. I contributed the piece below to the first issue, SILENCE. I can’t wait to stuff a sliver of my shelves with the entire series.

Kim and Jutta curated a radically organic project at Kenny Schachter’s conTEMPorary in the far West Village–the Club in the Shadow. I had a ton of films on a loop upstairs. Kim and I collaborated on a series of videos of artists dancing in the spare, curved steel-mesh, Vito Acconci designed gallery. I shot Alan Licht, Jutta Koether, Karen Finley and Kim each performing to music of their choosing and cranked out a hyper-slow, meditative abstraction of those performances as an edition for the show. Double Leopards, Charalambides, Magick Markers, Alan Licht and a number of other phenomenal bands did sporadic sets. Electrophilia played what I seem to remember being one of their final shows before Steve Parrino’s fatal motorcycle accident. The space was more about sitting on the cold concrete floor and enjoying the ephemerality of whatever it was that would soon no longer be contained within it than it was about absorbing the few things that remained inside it as constants.

Kim printed up a box of membership cards for the club. I think Kenny was giving them away. Maybe they were for sale. I can’t remember. The image on the front is of Monica Lewinsky shuddering at the girth of Thurston’s tip-nibbled, unpeeled banana. It was taken in a trailer backstage at one of the Central Park Wilco/Sonic Youth shows. I have video of this…going down…somewhere. Somehow, though–neither the tropical cock, nor the gash at the end of the Clinton Administration are what make that picture. Thurston’s shirt… The thing people who’ve never been in or toured with a band don’t understand is that the access you gain to incredible t-shirts by driving thru every po’ dunk town in the many armpits of this globe is a luxury few torso’d mortals can really fathom.

Romain Slocombe is one of my favorite image makers. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll never fall for an artist on account of technical skill, pedigree or sundry other trite academic bullshit. I love Romain’s passion for fantasy, his rapport with his models, his oblique love of prosthesis and injury makeup and his effortless ability to wash pain and suffering with the precious pigment of humor.

Tristes Vacances is a small chap-book with some text by Francois Landon preceding a set of 15 color plates of paintings Romain made based on photographs of Japanese girls in various states of undress, bondage, bandage, battery and bliss. He gave me the book and a bunch of other work when we were cranking away on some film projects in NYC in 1996.

So, someone wants to have a naked-lady-t-shirt-wearing-night out at a bar. Great idea. I don’t go to bars. I hate ‘em. They’re depressing shitholes–but nonetheless–great idea. Someone else jokes about naked guy shirts. Equally great idea. I mention that I have drawings I’ve made of plenty of both and offer up stencils so that anyone with a wardrobe lacking in smut may rectify the situation and participate. Someone volunteers to come grab the stencils so I can avoid both setting foot in Williamsburg Brooklyn and a bar. I stencilify three of the drawings that I don’t already have drawn up as stencils and think–”Fuck. These would look good bigger–bigger and in an orgy.”

So, a small laser cut batch for the pervs at the bar and a larger knife-cut batch for me. Then I realize how sick I am of spraying stencils, but how I could use some unwinding. A friend asks if I’ll be working on Sunday or at “choir practice.” I start obsessing about choirs and realize how well orgies and choirs compliment one another. Instead of working on finishing the drawings for Volume 3 of But They Don’t Blink, I take a detour, whip out the watercolor and decide to do an edition of 50 hand brush-painted, 3-color, 18″x24″ paintings on 140LB cold-press watercolor paper. I finish the first and decide, “Choir Practice.”

It includes a mobius of gay guys fisting themselves and one-another, a woman shoving her fist down the throat of another–much heftier–woman and a guy penetrating a contortionist in utter enuii.

I’m only gonna make them available via this post, cos they take too long to paint. $80. Signed and numbered. Edition of 50. Email me if you want one.