BOMB Magazine (features)
The Tragic Last Stand of the Skyhorse Clan, by Brando Skyhorse
(11/23/2012)
A piece that Brando wrote about “presumed identities.” Here’s the Bomb tagline and a few selects. Thanks Brando, for the dedication …
… If art, if literature, is a form of love—it is—the exclusion of subjects is the equivalent of banning mixed-race couples. Creative separatism is defended like this: so-and-so doesn’t have the experience to write about the subject. But artists often reach beyond their own lives; part of the drive to be an artist is to understand outside oneself. That non-Western stories are so xenophobic is more a mechanism of our marketplace than our artists. “Coming home” is the advertising platform. You join culture, you buy this, you will be happier. The “I” story, the story of personal want, ambition, desire, is the story of capitalization itself: the capitalization of identity. The question of high market (literature) or low market (Hollywood, genre, etc) is merely one of degree; the assimilation in a low-market context results in winning the Gold, or the Academy Award, or whatever, while the assimilation in a high-market context is one complicated by misgivings (which, however profound, don’t offset the “rightness” of assimilating). …
… Western arts, Western artists, Western appreciators of art, function as a first wave of assault. Very much like a missionary movement—which is entirely well-intentioned but subversive of the occupied culture—the arts wash over a culture, drenching a people with the cult of “I.” On an international stage, the arts are unaware, or perhaps insensible is the right word, to their goal, the first economic goal–to strip the culture of anything of value, to replace all worth, including personal worth, with a need for Western goods, ideas and affirmation. Western arts place individual identity under continuous assault. The message: success/failure is a process of self-discovery, of true identity. Of course, this “true identity” is ersatz, furnished externally through cultural transactions, through the stuff—CDs, jeans, books, movies—that you buy. …
Whitney Biennial 2012
(05/07/2012)
Ok, proposed experiment: what if one were to write about a cultural event in two venues, one venue being a corporately owned venue, one venue being an independent, arts venue? Let’s say they’re both excellent venues, with excellent editorial.
DB Art
The 2012 Whitney Biennial presents a ranging meditation on home. The theme is fitting, in that the museum is in the midst of moving to a new home, the fourth in its history, a 200,000-square-foot newly constructed building in Chelsea. With thirty-three film, video, digital, performance, and installation artists, accounting for 30+ hours of watching time, the emphasis on the show is distinctly media. (Thomas Beard and Ed Halter contributed to the curatorial efforts of Elisabeth Sussman, the museum’s photography curator, and Jay Sanders, an independent curator apprised of performance.) There’s so little space left over that the remaining artists—ten sculptors, six painters, two photographers, two text artists, and one textile—are contained in a greatly reduced Whitney. The impression is of two distinct Biennials: a media, performance, and installation Biennial, which looks to the future of the Museum, and a “formal” Biennial, which stands the turf of historically held territories….
BOMB
We are privatized. In the United States a trend toward privatization has commodified domains traditionally thought of as public or free. “Most of what we currently perceive as value and wealth,” noted Alan Greenspan in 1999 speech at the Gerald R. Ford Museum, “is intellectual and impalpable.” The seemingly innocuous statement was a bombshell, one that would eventually explode the Western economy: valuation was no longer an objective assessment of materials, it was a subjective assessment of ideas. The Information by bestselling author James Gleick, chronicles the seismic economic shift, exclusive to our time: information is available, but at a price…
The Eye-Popping Spectacles of Stuart Sherman
(01/20/2012)
… The new catalog Beginningless Thought/Endless Seeing: the Works of Stuart Sherman documents and reflects upon the performance and mixed media art of this mercurial artist, gathering archival materials from a 2009 exhibition curated by John Hagan, Yolanda Hawkins and John Matturri. Sherman (1945-2001) was an early member of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company and Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theatre; he matured into a wide-ranging creative force: performances, film and video, writing, drawing, collage and sculpture. The catalog compiles essays written by Sherman’s colleagues, stills from performances, and reproductions of Sherman’s drawings and collages. Entries and poems from Sherman’s journals are inset in the pages, allowing Sherman to posthumously contribute to the dialogue. …