shelflife by visitor

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.

I’ve mentioned before that I was asked to create and gather work from material in my archive for the upcoming Sensational Fix touring Sonic Youth exhibition. Something I’d been meaning to make for a long time, but never got around to–until last week–was an impressionistic audio/video collage about the making of Harmony Korine’s Sunday.

I shot 3 hours of material the day Harmony made the video. That was over 11 years ago, and re-visiting such old footage is difficult. Different equipment, shooting styles, subject-focus… I get this one thing I want to make–it’s done in my head–been done for years–ready to encode, burn and rip–but I jog thru the footage and the fragments I’ve edited in my memory don’t exist on the tapes. I experienced them, but never recorded them. Maybe I misremembered them over time.

So, a simple 8-minute edit becomes this painful exercise in compromising memory while trying to convey some sense of the experience to a viewer. All the while, I don’t really want to convey the experience–at all. I never really do. I just want to frustrate people, so I’m not so isolated in my perplexed recollection. This is why I’ll never be a real filmmaker.

I’ve got no stories to tell. I’ve just got this compulsion to document things and these thoughts I reflect on while I re-examine footage. I lack a fundamental interest in structure and basically want a viewer to vicariously experience my high blood pressure, confusion and angina more than anything else. Always Seems To Move So Slow is representative of that process–but somehow, the jarring sound edit, lack of anchors and surreal, sensual and sensational subject matter make a looming aneurysm slightly endearing.

Maybe I’ll stream it after the opening on June 17th. For now, I leave you with stills.