This is the sibling sculpture to the female sex-traffic victim neon. Surprisingly—or maybe not—abducted boys who aren’t trafficked into rough-trade are generally indoctrinated into militias, armies or guerilla groups as child soldiers. I guess the pragmatism of that enterprise seemed to me a more shocking reality to illustrate than some easy homopedotableaux. That children are ever-increasingly racked as surplus resources to exploit and dispose of in the dumpsters of brothels or the mountains, jungles and deserts of countries in conflict is intriguing.
It’s intriguing because just as commonly, America’s becoming this stress-shocked, permissive parent. It collectively glances away as its own teens are embroiled in sexually-coercive relationships where a notable trend of forced-breeding as branding starts blipping away on statisticians’ radars in beat to the cadence of the marching boots of plane-loads of teens drip-fed into the military’s surge-stream. The pseudo-elective method-study of the same emotional atrophy once—maybe, hypocritically, still—considered so savage in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Near/Far East and South/Central America is now just another extra-curricular pursuit American parents are failing to read from the busy agendas of their own children.
Dimensions are around 80″ x 24″ x 30″. 3-stage neon sculpture on child’s school desk. Edition of 4 plus artist prototype. Price available by request. The GIF below is animated (depending on your browser, you may need to wait around 30 seconds for the animation to begin cycling).
I don’t have the attention span for creative blocks. I procrastinate my way around them by inventing newer/quicker projects to cough-up with Heimlich-like thrust. The first of what’ll be a two to four-issue stretch of M.D, F.A.C.S. Poetry Zine was my most recent heave of creative bulimia.
I was born on the Upper East Side of New York City. I’ve lived there most of my life. The neighborhood has the same perverse magnetism that homeless men shitting in phone booths, crime scenes, multi-car pile-ups, serial killers, bottled siamese fetuses and pregnant crack addicts have. It’s a Morrissey fan’s wet-dream–a wilted daisy to tear flaccid petals from–all the while mumbling,”she hates me. she hates me more.” The Upper East Side’s a bottomless banquet of pop-corn vulgarity and beer-battered decadence, and the shame I carry knowing that I’m an alum of the Madison Presbyterian Day School is enough to make me want to gift every anxious mommy-business-card-toting, wait-list-play-group-attending mother in the ‘hood an Hermes-boxed, stainless-steel razor blade for Christmas. That, or… write a zine.
M.D, F.A.C.S. is my trophy room. After a 2-week safari–armed with only a pen, a book of cloakroom check tickets and an intimate familiarity with the migratory habits of the garishly wealthy–I’d accumulated the shorthand genomes of a dozen botox-rigored corpses in dire need of taxidermic attention. Two-dimensional pen and ink busts upon Haiku pedestals would be the aesthetic. Each set of trophies would be displayed behind a vitrine bearing the tools of the hunt. The entire exhibition hall would be cloned 200 times–stapled, folded, chopped, signed and numbered.
Neighbor, won’t you sniff my sawdust and hides? Please?
Every step of WASTE has taken considerably longer to complete than I’d hoped. I’m finally starting to letterpress finished books on laser-cut, grommet-bound canvas pages. Printed Matter should have at least a few early copies in the next 2 weeks. Upset with how much time each book takes to make–and the resulting book price associated with those hours–I decided to do something to at least make the content of the book accessible to people who might not otherwise want to shell-out for a spendy edition.
I made 50 MASSIVE newsprint xeroxes of a first-proof collage from the hand-burnished prints I pulled off of the woodblocks. That basically means that the artwork represented in this edition is, in some cases, substantially different than the artwork that’ll be in the final book. I’ve made a number of revisions after having seen these proofs. So, in effect, this poster is an artifact of my book-making process.
The posters are 36″ x 72″ in a numbered edition of 50 and have obi wrappers to keep them rolled. The obis are all coffee cup hand-protectors I’ve been pulling out of the trash and spraypainting with a stencil of the WASTE logotype. Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, 7-11 and an assortment of other random local coffee houses are represented in the re-purposed cardboard wraps.
Printed Matter has them here for $30. If you contact me directly, I can sell you one for $20 in NYC or $25 shipped in the US.
I can’t believe I released this thing almost a year ago and keep forgetting to mention it. I posted about Volume 1 of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK last year. That volume was a series of 5 hand-painted posters addressing the hardships facing families in what remains today, an uncertain job market. The relevance of many of the tableaux depicted in that volume has been amplified by events having occurred since its release.
Volume 2 OF BUT THEY DON’T BLINK tackled the decaying US social safety net. Now, more than perhaps last year when it was released, do the tableaux in this volume bear weight. Beyond this administration’s rhetoric and circumlocution–very few of the topics discussed in the first 2 volumes of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK have been substantially addressed. The issues broached by BLINK still plague a massive percentage of Americans. Instead of embarking on a long-winded diatribe about those issues, I’ll just share the images I drew:
Each of the 3 volumes of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK consists of 5 individually hand-painted 18×24 inch posters, a block-printed mylar cover and a removable, screw-bound, plastic and cardboard spine. The folios are each signed, numbered and rolled into hand-printed kraft paper blueprint bags. Volume 1 & Volume 2 are available from Printed Matter for $60 each. Volume 3 is in production.
It feels like I’ve been working on this new book forever. Par for the course, I guess. FORE took me 10 years to finish. A year after delivering the first two volumes, I’m still waiting on politics to deliver the final volume of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK. WASTE is different, though. It’s a different sort of forever–a forever from another place.
I wanted WASTE to be all about potential energy. It’s a collection of scrap illustrations and studies for sculptural work I’ve done or am presently working on. I forced a ridiculous tale of explosive potential atop a curated set of 12 sketches, xeroxes, stamps and collages. “Not enough,” I thought to myself. “This has gotta be a more outlandish game.” So, I begged for and stole some lumber. I got a cheap, used 10-Ton bottle jack. I got some scrap steel.
Two sleepless weeks after collecting things and 4 or 5 months after pulling the story together, I’ve built my own letterpress on which to print the book. I tracked down scrap canvas in the form of sail-maker scraps, military tarps and painter’s drop-cloth (could still use more of any of this if anybody’s holding…). The canvas all gets laser-cut into specially shaped pages. The story gets pressed on ‘em. The pages get grommeted together and a lot of waste delivers on its potential.
I’ve not yet decided on the edition size, but I know it’s being split up 75%-25% between two flavors. One’s gonna be a bit more expensive and use special ink. The other’s plain-jane jet black. That said, the amount of time it seems it’ll take to generate each book means it’s looking like this sadly isn’t going to be an inexpensive edition. Each hand-pressed, 12-page, 11×17, laser-cut, canvas book will likely be between 100-200 dollars. The caveat here is that the book can also be made to “do things.” More on that when I launch the edition in November…
Here are the very first proofs off of the woodblocks for the first two pages. I’ve never used a letterpress before, so I have no idea what I’m doing, but it actually seems to have worked–even on this crappy utrecht newsprint. A bunch of grumpy whiners on printing forums seemed to imply that using anything larger than a 9×12 block in a homemade press won’t work. To the whiners out there–fuck you. It works. Build the press frame out of steel and use a more robust jack along with a platen design that considers pressure application to your target-size block.
2007 statistics on global human trafficking state that in the neighborhood of 1.2 million people are sold into slavery annually. That was up from around 800,000 in 2005 by Department of Justice accounting. I’m guessing that close to 2 million people will have been sold into slavery this year alone by the time January rolls around. So, every minute, nearly 4 people are disappeared as commodities. 95% of them are sexually abused. 70% are female. 50% are children. Almost all are under 21 years of age and most are at least marginally educated.
THEY GROW UP FAST is several thousand volts of flickering testimony to the brutal efficiency with which human traffickers grind lives into ruin. STUDENT #1 / GIRL is the first of two editioned visitordesign works addressing contemporary slavery. Manufactured by LiteBrite in Brooklyn from visitordesign drawings, THEY GROW UP FAST is a component of a larger conceptual visitordesign project in progress.
Dimensions are around 80″ x 24″ x 30″. 3-stage neon sculpture on child’s school desk. Edition of 4 plus artist prototype. Price available by request. The GIF below is animated (depending on your browser, you may need to wait around 30 seconds for the animation to begin cycling).
There’s this weird, union-oriented, bullshit rule that’s enforced at a lot of venues in New York. It wasn’t always as pervasive as it is now and essentially amounts to extortion. Basically, many larger venues in the city forbid artists from documenting their own shows in film or video. Many offer permission (i.e. extortion) for around a thousand dollars per camera–sometimes more. They claim that allowing one to document one’s own intellectual property is “a service”. I claim they’re thuggish money-grubbers.
There are a few non-conglomeratized venues here that have the decency to permit at least a single handheld camera for archival use as long as a waiver is signed. A couple of venues, providing you request permission sufficiently in advance, even still have anything goes policies. In general, the whole thing’s a bit of a head-scratcher. The venues are, by and large, nothing to write home about. They’re magnificently mundane spaces. Friday, though, we got permission to do a single handheld camera up at a gorgeous theater in Harlem. Hospitality’s alive and well up on Sugar Hill.
Here’s what I cranked out of my solitary, forearm supported moving-picture-making machine.
Thanks, Harlem. Thanks, Sonic Youth. The lighting design for this tour is sensational.
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 industrial agricultural corporations. 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…
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 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.
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.
When the Sonic Youth studio still sat hovering in the chasm of Echo Canyon and the band collectively exploited it as a well-worn sonic workshop, I was there at least a couple of times a week filming.
A lot of that material is now in the Sensational Fix exhibition as it tours museums peppered about the globe. I actually still need to edit a couple of new films for that. Apparently, aspects of the show will evolve and change in each museum anyway, so I’m excited to contribute to its dynamic nature thru my tardiness.
One of my favorite pieces in the show–an utterly failed exercise in improvisation and cogent filmmaking…and stupid as sin–is ECHOSCAM. We used to have this 24/7 webcam installed at the studio. It was accessible from the homepage of sonicyouth.com and people watched it compulsively. It was this creepy stalker destination that was A-OK to frequent–so frequented, it was.
One afternoon in 2002, Thurston was working on some overdubs with Jim and Aaron. While I was documenting that, I got to thinking about stalking, obsession and the stereotypical Sonic Youth fan. Somehow that train of thought detoured and I began pondering petty theft and wondering how frequently criminals used the internet for research. Would engaging in online communities to research a heist leave the well-read criminal touched by any sort of fandom or tainted by residual trivia–to be mnemonically unleashed when presented with the appropriate stimulation?
I asked Thurston to bring a ski mask to the studio the following day. I’d bring two flashlights. “What’s my motivation?” Thurston asked, curiously. “You saw the place on the EchoCam. You’re a criminal, but you also kind of get the fan thing. We break in thru the fire escape and case the place. We’re pretty clueless. We comment on shit that we see, but the comments are absurd. Before we get to steal anything, Jim chases us out.” As evidenced by the video, neither staying in character nor any sort of planning were part of either of our motivation. Also…I can’t act–let alone act and film simultaneously.
I’m warning you–this is ridiculous. Your 12 minutes will not be refunded. No re-entry. No returns.
