It’s been a decade since I left New York that first time. Escaping an abusive partner, I found myself in the Bay. I remember how disorienting it was. Suddenly, I was standing on a BART platform in Oakland. I remember the heat. I remember asking myself what the fuck I was doing there. I couldn’t believe how my life had collapsed so fast. It took me time to accept what should have been obvious: I was a victim of domestic violence. Being punched in the face while asleep should have been a red flag, but we are repeatedly told these things don’t happen to men. The depression was heavy, like a claw digging into the back of my skull. In some ways, returning to New York has been cathartic. I feel like I’ve regained control over my life.
Despite the gloomy anniversary, positive things have happened over the past six months. In November, I went to the Brant Foundation to see Jordan Wolfson’s Female Figure. It’s an automatic woman, a robot, done up like a stripper and covered in bruises. She’s wearing a half-mask that makes her look like an old hag. Her body is attached to a mirrored wall with a chrome rod that allows her to move and dance. I guess this automaton is an example of teledildonics. This work seems to coincide well with the ongoing discussions about artificial intelligence in the arts. My big question about artificial intelligence doesn’t revolve around the legitimacy of the art made. My question is why can’t we create A.I. that does the work we hate? Shouldn’t A.I. be freeing us to make art, not doing the creating itself? I’m reminded of Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” where the coming of robots lets humans return to nature. Unfortunately, as much as I love Brautigan’s vision, the powers that be would never let this release from servitude become a reality.
David Lynch had two shows in New York recently. One was at the Pace Gallery and another at the Sperone Westwater Gallery. Lynch used a lot of recurring motifs in these works: planes, car crashes, physical conflict, and weird black balloons. They reminded me of those old séance photos where ectoplasm is floating in the air. But these are done in cartoon form with a crime scene feel. Another show I went to was Leonor Fini’s at Kasmin Gallery. It was a tiny show. I remember seeing drawings of hangings and in another, there was a deer fucking a woman. What I greatly enjoyed was her masks. They appeared made from wood and other natural elements. In another room at Kasmin, I found a piece by Diana Al-Hadid called The Long Defeat. It was as if dripping paint was turned upside down and dried into a sculptural form, almost like stalagmites, or an alien ice castle in a fantasy movie.
Narcissister was in a group show at the Margot Samel Gallery. It was a quick stop for me. They had three of her masks, but one was cracked. They also had some of her collages, which I hadn’t seen in person until this show. There is one I found very clever where she uses Cezanne’s The Large Bathers and mixes woman from porn magazines within Cezanne’s bathers. The Found Art Show made its annual return in March. It was a much larger show this time, and there was a cover charge. I was disappointed to see price tags on many of the pieces, but I tried to enjoy the experience nonetheless. They had a collection of weird stuffed animals, but I also noticed a running theme of masks, or mask-like objects, throughout the different vendors. Most of the masks were removed from their original purpose, and it was fun to wonder just what many of them were originally used for.
And, of course, I made several trips to the Museum of Modern Art. I revisited the Meret Oppenheim show, and then returned to see the Georgia O’Keefe show. I’m not a fan of O’Keefe’s, but these early works were curious. There was one I liked that represented a migraine headache. It almost looked like an abstracted version of Munch’s Scream without the figure. On the top floor was a show dedicated to video art, with works by Sandra Mujinga and Sondra Perry as standouts. There were some new works on the lower floors as well: Yoko Ono’s hilarious film Bottoms was playing, and there was a collection of Toyen prints on display. One of the reasons I returned to MoMA so soon was to see John Giorno’s Dial-A-Poem exhibit. While the show was just a number of black telephones, each that played one of the archival recordings, I was kind of giddy seeing it. I dialed the number a few times on the black phones, then tried the number on my iPhone. The number still worked!
In terms of film, I went to Spectacle Theatre to see a collection of Carolee Schneemann’s short films. I was somewhat disappointed by Schneemann’s cinematic works, but I did enjoy one film where she had a group of women inside a water-filled cave reenacting her Internal Scroll piece. I went to The Bunker to catch Jean-Jacques Lebel’s film Sun Love, an event hosted by the Giorno Foundation. Label’s film felt like a voyeuristic step into the world of a 60s sex cult. There is a band playing in one scene, but the music they’re playing is replaced by a sort of proto-noise piece, creating a disembodied quality to the film. I also finally got to see Beth B’s notorious film Black Box at Metrograph. The story is simple but impactful: a beautiful man is abducted. A sort of dominatrix, played by Lydia Lunch, abuses him while he’s naked. She berates him and puts him in a black box. The box has a silver lining to it, and there’s a flashing light. Using some sound equipment, Lunch pumps weird noises and squeals into the box, which causes the naked blonde man to squirm and twist. The film is like a masochistic fantasy, a type of torture porn, that, like Lebel’s film, anticipates noise music.
At the beginning of the year I watched the controversial Skinamarink, one of the most hated films in recent memory. I enjoyed how untraditional this film was. We almost never see a human face, just two shots of the kids with their faces obscured. There’s little to no soundtrack, no musical queues, no musical tension, just the television cartoon noises bleeding through the kid’s quiet whispers. I think these two factors are why people have a hard time watching the film: the lack of faces and the lack of sound. It’s like when people say they can’t stand silent films. I guess this type of filmmaking is referred to as analog horror and the director, Kyle Edward Ball, has a youtube channel devoted to this kind of stuff called Bitesized Nightmares. On the channel he asks people to submit their dreams and then he attempts to illustrate them through short abstract films.
Musically, I only had a few highlights this time around. My friend from Portland, Rex Marshall, opened for Modest Mouse in Manhattan at Terminal 5. Rex’s quasi-lounge persona Mattress can be a challenge for a rock-focused crowd, but I love his one-man band confidence. I was also able to see the legendary Swedish noise rock band Brainbombs twice, once at Saint Vitus and another time at TV Eye. Admittedly, Brainbombs were not up to par, as it was hard to hear the vocalist. He seemed kind of fragile and terrified. He had a binder with his lyrics in it, and at the TV Eye show, a kid stole it from him. But the old man gave chase, and the kid gave it back. The kid apologized and the old dude gave the kid the set list in exchange. Brainbombs rarely play, so just seeing them was amazing. But I did see Skinny Puppy on their final tour and they sounded perfect. When Ogre came onto the stage, he was wearing a black frilly cloak that covered his entire face except for his mouth. His head looked very big underneath the cloak, like the Elephant Man, but that’s because, when he removed the cloak, he had the head of an alien. My favorite part was when they performed “Assimilate” and the crowd sang along.
In early April I took a trip to Texas. I started in San Antonio, because I wanted to go to the Natural Bridge Caverns. The Caverns are an expensive Uber drive outside of San Antonio, but worth the price. I went through both caverns, and it felt like I was on a different planet. It’s incredible how deep these caves can go into the ground. Even more shocking is that there might be a cavern underneath the ground where you’re standing right now! The rooms were as big as football fields, and some of the stalagmites towered upward like mythical ghosts. The next day, after the trip to the cave, I went to the San Antonio Museum of Art, which wasn’t as impressive. One area it did excel was its Latin America collection, which had a lot of popular and modern works of art, and strange miniatures, many unlike anything I’d ever seen in another museum. And I really loved this cat mask.
After a few days in San Antonio, I went to Austin. The first place I visited was the Museum of the Weird. They had a lot of strange artifacts, but much of it was a rehashing of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search of… TV series. They did have a fascinating painting of a Pancho Villa centaur with an explosion behind him. Following this, I went down to the Congress Avenue Bridge to see the bats come out at dust. They did come out, but they looked more like a swarm of insects than the flock they’re advertised as. The weather in Austin turn rather intolerable the next day. Heavy rains came down and I felt trapped at the rather shitty hostel I was staying at. I was rather pissed about all this, but braved the rain to visit the Blanton Museum of Art, home of Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin chapel. There are some wonderful little pieces by Leonora Carrington, Enrico Donati, and Alice Rahon, at the Blanton. The highlight though was Brazilian Cildo Meirceles’s Missions (How to Build Cathedrals). In a dark room, there is a square of pennies on the floor and an upper portion, like a canopy, covered with bones. A light shines through the bones. From the canopy hangs black see-through drapes. In the middle of the square of pennies is a tower of pennies that reaches up to the bones.
That evening it was still raining, and my friend Bad Joel picked me up at the hostel. We drove around Austin getting drunk. Joel would tell me things about Austin’s history, and I wasn’t sure if he was making shit up or if he was telling me the truth. It didn’t matter either way. We went to a bar that my friend Kitty worked at and got even drunker. I know both Joel and Kitty from the old Cook Street days in Portland.
My final day in Austin, the weather cleared up and I took the bus to the Cathedral of Junk. I was shocked to learn there are three stories to this tower of trash. I guess the guy, Vince Hannemann, is actually a concrete layer. The walls are filled with barbie dolls, toys, and just about anything he could find. In the back there’s a pyramid structure that acts as a tomb for his deceased cat. He said many of the things incorporated were simply dumped on his lawn, like an old vending machine. My favorite parts were obviously the mannequins. One had a unicorn horn, while another had shells on her breasts. But there was also a fantastic pillar of toy horses. The mirrors and glass in the walls make a maze of it all. I was truly impressed with just how tall and sturdy this thing was.
At the end of April, I went to the second day of the Ende Tymes Festival. The second to last performer was Alessandra Zerbinati. When she was setting up I noticed she had some makeshift boxcutters. She set them down next to two My Little Pony dolls. She had something wrapped to her ankle. It reminded me of an ankle bracelet they use for people on house arrest, but I think it was just something to create noise with. She had these long blonde dreads and, after she disrobed, she began dancing around wildly in a blue light. The performance was almost butoh-like. Then she took one of the razors and began cutting herself. She cut her leg rapidly and viciously. Then she lied down on the ground and began cutting her stomach while placing a contact mic in her vagina. This was followed by her sticking her tongue out and slicing it with the razor. Her blood was all over her body, and she smeared it over her face. Alessandra came down from the stage and into the crowd, covered in blood, and started confronting the audience. She looked in people’s faces and many people hid or looked away. I was the last person in the front row, and when she got to me, we looked into each other’s eyes. Then, as if we had known each other for our entire lives, we embraced, hugging each other for what seemed like hours. When we finally let go, she said thank you to me. Her blood was all over my overalls.
What I’ve been watching:
Skinamarink (Kyle Edward Ball, 2022)
Alphaville (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)
Boro in a Box (Bertrand Mandico, 2011)
The Wild Boys (Bertrand Mandico, 2017)
Mill of the Stone Women (Giorgio Ferroni, 1960)
What I’ve been reading:
Kid Congo Powers - Some New Kind of Kick
Paul Eluard - Capital of Pain
Ric Kasini Kadour, ed. - Kolaj Magazine #11
John Maizels, ed. - Raw Vision #107
Adam Keith, ed. - Baited Area #5
What I’ve been listening to on the subway:
Brainbombs - Disposal of a Dead Body
U-Men - U-Men
Melissa - II
David Bowie - Low
Skinny Puppy - Too Dark Park
Notes:
My review of Nick Zedd’s film War is Menstrual Envy appeared in Cinema Schism #3.