Courtesy of Neox Image and the artist

On Friday, April 27 at 9:31pm, A.G. Viva will broadcast a five minute photo shoot on www.lowlives.net

1) By coupling the photo shoot with the webcam, you fuse two functions of photography that are very different. The webcam is democratic, while the photo shoot, as a being an offshoot of the fashion industry and celebrity, insists upon a hierarchy between subjects and viewers. Where do your sympathies lie?

There is a juxtaposition of two contexts in this singular experience. Here, hierarchy between subject and viewers seemingly require secondary priority as the various levels of accessibility are offered simultaneously. There’s an excitement whenever a “behind-the-scenes” process is exposed and observed. In this case it’s a photo shoot of the actual artist, the creator, where the decisions of self-representation are occurring in real-time. These decisions become the hyper-important tools in the art-making. Every change in physicality is like a brushstroke, that carries with it an expression and vision for the whole painting. Using the photo shoot as a template for these representational techniques, the added element of the live voyeur creates a new direction for intent and outcome.

2) How does this performance relate to your other work?

I’m ultimately creating a trajectory where image and context are the tools for a grander vision. I’m trying to stay in the desert for 40 days and nights, forever. Resurrections happen sporadically. And when they do, that’s my work.

3) You say that the photographs are produced with “an unknowing as to their intent and destination.” Do you think that digital modes of dissemination (be it facebook pages or chat roulette) has obscured the knowledge of where the photographs will go and why, or clarified it on some initial level? I would argue the latter, but add that digital photographs have interesting and rambling afterlives.

With this experiment, there’s an implication that the final images are less important than the awareness of the image-making, and the witnessing of that awareness. I don’t know about you, but when I make the decision to gargle smoke through a mouthful of whiskey at a bar in front of a friend’s camera, I’m no longer making an image just for the moment, I’m making it for the Internet. And this shift in projected outcome is a result of the Internet and social media, so it’ll hold true for the global audience.

4) This is exciting way to connect viewers from across the globe, provided that people are aware of the event. What challenges and benefits does the live video stream model provide? Without the social component (free wine), will people watch from their living room? Was Henry Rollins on to something when he began chanting “TV Party Tonight?”

Low Lives is being presented by about 26 international art institutions in locations such as Japan, Paris, Bogotá, Norway, New York, Tulsa, Sydney, the Caribbean, and in Miami at Diaspora Vibe Gallery. But yes, you can also watch it from the comfort of your Snuggie. You’re welcome.

You aren’t exposed, then you are. In the most fundamental sense, it’s a bridge that collapses behind you. Given that we begin in a womb, and that a womb is darkness, then birth, the coming of light, is trauma. These photographs were taken in the mid 1980s in Lincoln, Nebraska. Rita Ann Cihlar Hermann was working three jobs, trying to negotiate her place in the world. As are the people that she photographed. With unsure faces, they try to exert a physical presence. But the camera, quite literally, sees through them.

When exposed to light, photosensitive film gradually moves from light transparence to dark opacity. Representation lies between there these two poles, and is threatened by different quirks of the medium. Blurring and double exposure are several among many. While these are often considered a defect, the blur or the faulty exposure represent the resistance of the mechanical. The medium is not transparent; it has limits that must be considered.

Wikipedia has this to say about intentional uses of the multiple exposures: The technique can be used to create ghostly images or to add people and objects to a scene that were not originally there. It is frequently used in photographic hoaxes. It also is sometimes used as an artistic visual effect, especially when filming singers or musicians.

The camera’s orneriness nature is used, like a bloodhound, to capture those living on a different plane: the nation’s ghosts or jazz singers. Then there are the dropouts and hometown heroes. Many in this country are struggling to get out or in to the frame. These pictures capture this desire to move. That it is ultimately frustrated adds to their power.

Forcefully manipulating the print in the darkroom can be done by several actions. Dodging occurs when light is kept off the paper, resulting in a lighter image. Burning is the opposite. It’s telling that these terms are synonymous with evasion and violent retribution, respectively. Again, light is trauma.

Leaving Nebraska. Twenty-five years ago, before fleeing again, this time for good, I wanted to say goodbye. Goodbye to all the places in Nebraska that were, in my mind at least, quintessentially Nebraskan. And make them mine. Make them belong to me, instead of me belonging to them. The places that contained everyone, held everyone, together and apart. Some were places of ritual, like Chicken Days in Wayne. Most were simple gathering places, a friend of a friend’s Tupperware party, a summer softball tournament, a batting cage business, a drive-in movie, a miniature golf course, a band setting up one afternoon outside Gateway Mall. Some came with, a singular status: Ole’s in Paxton, which I could never do justice in photographs, or Lee’s at the edge of town, and the rural Polka Festival with its own runway for private planes. Those places still stand, even more regionally regal-kitsch. Some, like the El Rancho on Highway 6, even the YWCA downtown pool, are boarded up and gone. Pool halls, dance halls, games, movies, restaurants in which to eat, night clubs in which to drink while an organist amplifies a singer’s song, roadhouses that hung Elvis on velvet next to a confederate flag, places everyone played and stayed, together and apart. Now I’ve come back. Being back, I can see that I’ve lost more than I’ve gained, looking at these pictures again, I can see just how much, of each. The look of these pictures has to do with something as a young woman I was sure I was sure about, and I was sure sure about a lot of things then. Now, I’m not sure I could explain it, just that I still feel the feeling I wanted to make happen inside the camera. Form and content all one thing, gathered together for a picture. Casting back, I can see that these images hold the great plain shadow cast over my past here, my present here, maybe, my future here. It is a shadow that I longed to slip out from under, a shadow I ran from, a shadow I thought I had left behind. Now that I’m back I can see that the shadow – and I – never escaped. For as long as I can remember, I have been dreaming of where home can become. These images were and are a dream, a dream of home that would never come true. The images carried on the dream. They carry the ominous quality, the nightmare, home can make come true, instead.

Being here then, leaving here behind, being back here now, the shadow and I, we are together. We can be each other’s form, each other’s content. This time, picture this. Until it’s time to leave dreaming a home and home’s nightmare, behind. Then, the great plain shadow and I will be able to part ways, or mend our way, for good.

Rita Ann Cihlar Hermann

Lincoln, Nebraska, February 2nd, 2012

Jan van de Velde II. Still Life with Tall Beer Glass, 1647.

Recently, I had the pleasure to break bread with Prof. Jan Peeters and Hermann Wundrum, the two minds behind the excellent On Familiar Things. Over the course of an afternoon, we discussed the current ramifications of painting from the Dutch Gouden Eeuw. The following is a transcription of that conversation.

Prof. Jan Peeters is on research leave from the art history department at the University of Utrecht. His new book, The Sacred Kitchen, about domesticity and religious reformation in 17th century Dutch painting, is available from Cambridge University Press. Prof. Peeters is an occasional advisor to Haarlem’s Frans Hals Museum.

Can we begin with an introduction? How did you arrive at this point, both as gentlemen and scholars? How did you meet?

HW:  I was born in 1954 in Holset, a village near the Vaalserberg in the Netherlands.  Nearing my twenties and floundering I took up an apprenticeship with my uncle Willem, a furniture maker.

In the spring of 1979 I made my first visit to the Rijksmuseum, traveling with a few friends.  This was when I first laid eyes on Jan van de Velde the second’s Still Life with Tall Beer Glass.  It awakened something within me, and it’s an experience I’m still trying to piece together.  Only a few weeks passed between my visit to the Rijksmuseum and my acceptance to study art history at Oxford University.  I stayed on at Oxford for quite a long time — I’ve always been known for my loyalties — where I earned my masters and then doctorate.  There were a few interceding years, where I took a job editing for a university press before accepting a job at the University of Amsterdam, where I stayed for more than a decade.

Beginning in the mid-nineties I worked for a time at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt, as a consultant in acquiring paintings by Old Masters.  Traveling for the Stadel had me running all over Europe, tracking paintings and bidding at auctions of  behalf of the museum.  By the end of the nineties I decided enough was enough.  When the College of William and Mary asked if I’d be interested in joining the faculty to teach two courses on the Old Masters I could not refuse.  It was an easy offer to accept, with Jan already on board with their art history department.

My days in Williamsburg were some of my finest, professionally.  Jan and I greatly enjoyed our time as professors adjunct, often talking late into the night at the Green Leafe over glasses of Chimay and soft pretzels loaded with spicy mustards.

JP: Yes, indeed! Many of my scholarly peers see me as a kind of devotee of Old Europe, and intellectually I suppose I am, but one cannot forget that I completed my doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, eating cheese fries with my American colleagues and playing Boggle by the lake with my then advisor, now dear friend Jane Hutchison. As a boy I always imagined that I would one day spend time in the United States. But I never lived my dream until I went to Wisconsin, still one of my favorite places (so like the Netherlands in some ways), after finishing up at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where I studied the History of Art. I developed a real fascination — maybe an obsession — growing up in Leiden, where my parents were Lecturers in Economics and Politics. I had so many opportunities then to lurk about Leiden’s many comic and baseball card shops, as so many artists have done, growing from there into my love of the figurative and domestic. And then —

HW: Jan, did I mistake you, or did your phrasing suggest that you too were an artist, once?

JP: A-ha! My dark secret, as we’ve always said. [HW & JP chuckle over their bagels.] When I was a teen I imagined myself in the company of Claesz and van Hoogstraten, as I whiled away the hours in my bedroom, copying Asterix strips. But in the end it was my fascination with art history that both humbled me and revealed my true path: I knew that I simply did not have the gift for producing art myself, but at Cambridge and Wisconsin I realized that I had a natural talent for conveying my excitement about art to others, which is why I was drawn to teach.

HW: Jan and I met at the University of Leiden, where both Rembrandt and Jan Steen were once students, in 1988, is that right?

JP: I think it was ‘89.  Francesca had just retired. Hunter — could you pass the butter?

HW: Oh, was it really?  Ah, yes. I remember now.  At the time I was teaching at the University of Amsterdam.  I had been invited to Leiden to lecture on the festival scenes of Jan Steen.  There was a faculty dinner following the lecture where I met Jan, who had read my book.  We were fast friends!

JP: Your book was something like a revelation, a work of real honesty and integrity among what I still see as a lot of high-minded nonsense. Indeed, it was Hermann’s friendship that rekindled my love for teaching and studying after several years of what you could call dead-end academic fellowships around Europe. During those years, despite my growing scholarly output, I had trouble finding my way, professionally. The trouble was, as I learned through hours of discussion with Hermann and our small cohort, was that I had ignored the simplest path of all: to use my academic work as a way to invite others to rediscover classical painting, to pay attention to the ways artists capture and amplify the everyday.

Frans Hals. Willem van Heythuyzen, c. 1625.

Speaking of the everyday, how do you feel focusing on art history in a world that seems all too contemporary?

JP: Perhaps your eyes deceive you, living as you do in gleaming, glossy, modern Miami! History is all around us. One need only take a moment, perhaps relaxing in a favorite chair with a pot of tea and a snack, to think of all the familiar things that surround us always. These things aren’t history — they’re always present, from the 17th Century until now, and that’s what the Old Masters teach!

HW: Just think, Hunter, earlier this morning at brunch the three of us were chatting over tea, clementines, bagels, fig jam and tubs of whipped Philadelphia!  Our world and the world of our Old Masters are entirely different, of course.  Just think of how we can walk a few blocks to Trader Joe’s for chocolate-covered coffee beans, and small jars of saffron, cumin and cardamom.  These are the things that turned the Netherlands into the financial capital of the world.  Today, they are groceries.

Jan and I have been very lucky to build our careers around the legacies of our favorite painters and to spend a bit of time among their paintings.

JP: A considerable amount of time!

HW: I might add, that in terms of sheer skill, technique and fidelity, many of these painters have never been bettered.  It’s important to me that we remember their craft, in a world today where Jenny Holzer can take a phrase, turn it into a neon sign, and be done with it.  It’s scandalous.

JP: Indeed. I admit that my own opinions on art sometimes border on the conservative — my apologies to the artists on your blog, Hunter — but I am often alienated by contemporary artists. I have always thought, throughout my career, that even though artists may not have a distinct role in every society, they nevertheless reflect the everyday in their work, whatever their message. But what is the everyday for these artists? Is modern life so terrifying? When I go to contemporary museums, most of what I see is enough to send me down to the café for a hot chocolate.

Hermann Wundrum. Familiar Feasts (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

The inclusion of consumer goods in these paintings, both in a central and peripheral manner, suggests an oscillation between resisting and embracing consumerism. Did these artists find themselves in opposition to the Mercantilism, or did they cooperate with it, even exploiting protocapitalist processes for their own gain?

JP:  It’s clear, on a material level, that Dutch artists of the time relied deeply on mercantilism. The brothers de Bray sketched on Japanese paper, straight from the Dutch outpost at Dejima! The very earliest coffeehouse of the time, where many artists whiled away the hours, sourced coffee beans, flour, marijuana, and sugar (critical for making stroopwaffel and drop) from warmer climates.

But as goods and money flowed into the 17th Century Netherlands, social strata began to shift. The upper classes became wealthier, and the economies of the lower classes began to stagnate. Naturally, as societies liberalize in this way, visionaries can become malcontent: the real Mercantilists read their Roger Coke, while many painters like Dirk van Baburen read Abbie Hoffman. So the Dutch painters were indeed in an odd kind of tension. Their patrons obviously relied on mercantilism — international trade and credit paid the high costs of the painters’ portraits and church embellishments. The painters relied on mercantilism too, for materiel, processed snacks, and marijuana, but they, as van Baburen did, denied the qualitative values of mercantilism and capitalism more generally. What I find most interesting, as the painter Job Adriaenszoon Berckheyde describes in his utterly charming 1672 painting “A Dealer in His ‘Office,’” are the unofficial economies that cropped up around artists and their hangers on. You could call it “homegrown Mercantilism!”

HW: And the painters were sometimes reliant on the merchants, themselves!  Frans Hals’s portrait of Willem van Heythuyzen is extraordinary.  Holbein’s Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve is among the best.

JP: Yes, indeed. Holbein’s Double Portrait is one of my favorite depictions of friendship that crosses class lines (something dear to me, as I was once a scholarship student at Peterhouse). Holbein, de Dinteville, and De Selve were known to stay up late into the night after their transactions were finished, playing Xbox until the Ambassadors’ duties called them away. Moments like that might lead one to conclude that these painters “cooperated” with Mercantilism or protocapitalism, Hunter, but I think the question itself is too normative. The answer is simply that these artists did what they could — they “Kept on Truckin’,” as a famous comic of the day put it — day to day. And that day to day is what Hermann and I are most concerned with in our work. I am not much of a dialectical scholar, despite a brief flirtation with (a young lady in!) the fashionable Cambridge Marxists of the 1970s.

HW: Oh, Rachel, was it? I remember she had quite a good nickname for you.

JP: Oh, my.

What was that, Professor Wundrum?

HW: One spring Jan declined an opportunity to join Rachel in a protest at the Chancellor’s office.

What were they protesting?

HW: Oh, they probably stopped buying vegetables for their cafeteria from a local farm.

JP: They were upset about the wages paid to custodial staff.

HW: At any rate, Jan stayed in his dorm to study and from then on Rachel called him “Yawn” Peeters!  Y-a-w-n for our transcriber.  Decades later, a few students took to calling him the same in Williamsburg.  But in kind jest.

JP: If those students didn’t return year after year with gifts of kroketten and instant coffee, I’d have taken it personally!

Jan Davidszoon de Heem. Student in His Study, 1628.

Can you describe the path to becoming an artist? Supposing that financially independent painters were few and far between, how did most pay the bills? Did they have day jobs?

JP: Then, as now, it was not uncommon for young artists to blossom from notebook doodlers into masters of common feeling. Van Hoogstraten immortalized this feeling in his self-portrait of himself as a young sketcher of rock musicians. It takes no art historian to see how far he came! Take the famous portrait by Jan Davidszoon de Heem’s, the young Student in His Study — one of my favorite paintings to visit at the Ashmolean at Oxford, there among so many young students.

HW: Mine, as well.

JP:  It’s a popular version of the same theme, so popular among these artists whose artistic educations generally began (as so many modern artists’ have) copying comic books but sometimes — what luck! — matured under the tutelage of those we now know as the Old Masters.

HW: And to speak a bit of the path.  Learning the trade of the painter was quite similar to learning another trade.  Like the cobbler, the cooper and the luthier, the painter learned by apprenticeships and communion with guilds of craftsmen.

It would seem that making a living as an artist has always been difficult.  Golden Age artists made a living in the same ways artists do today.  Many were reliant on benefactors and enthusiastic collectors.  Others were born of wealthy families – Nicolas Maes, Joachaim Stradart and Claesz’s rival in the ontbijt — Willem Claeszoon Heda.

JP: The mere mention of Heda always evokes his Banquet Piece with Mince Pie.

HW: Is it nearing lunch time, Hunter?

JP: I saved two clementines from brunch and brought along a bag of Nestle Flipz.  Would you like some?

HW: You know me all too well, Jan!  At any rate, it was seldom the case that painters, who in time have become our Old Masters, flourished by their talents.  We must remember that some of our finest painters, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Hals, lived along the raw lines of poverty.

While he enjoyed a lengthy period of success, late in life Hals was bankrupted.  After which he continued to paint, working on a few commissions, most famously the governors of the Haarlem almshouse.

There is bitter irony in the fact that an impoverished Hals was employed to paint his wealthiest neighbors.  Their costumes were likely more valuable than all of Hals’s possessions combined.  But of course he completed his portraits and painted them brilliantly, focused on the canvas rather than the contents of his pantry: half of a jar of Nutella.  We can be sure that, at times, Hals was nourished only by his love of sunlight!

I must say, Jan, this is becoming quite the lecture!

JP: I’m having the time of my life! Moments like this are really what I treasure most: to sit among snacks and friends, discussing art. I almost feel, Hunter, that these artists of whom we speak sit here with us now, scooping handfuls of Ruffles from the bowl on the counter and listening eagerly to the way we remember them, almost as if they are old friends visiting again, laughing over old stories, half-forgotten through the haze!

Theodora Allen’s Brand New Heartache, a selection of paintings mourning the death of Gram Parsons, are on display at Michael Jon Gallery until April 14th, 2012.

Can you introduce yourself? Where did you grow up? Go to school?

My name is Theodora Allen, and I’m a native of Los Angeles, California. I grew up in Studio City, a stretch of valley between Burbank and Hollywood. Home to a variety of film industry back lots and sound stages, this area of the valley also had a bustling country music scene at one point. My father worked as a production designer for 20 years, and my grandfather had worked as an illustrator for Walt Disney.  Thus, an education in imagined histories. I went to the arts high school in east LA, and did a year at the Chelsea School in London directly following. I got my undergraduate degree at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California (‘09), and I’m currently working towards an MFA in the UCLA painting program (‘14).

These paintings are very nostalgic, especially considering that you were -12 when Gram Parsons bit the dust. Country music, painting, and even mourning are fundamentally nostalgic acts. How does this emotion affect you, both as an artist and as a person?

The term nostalgia is rarely used in a positive light when describing artwork. It’s a phrase that I often have to reassess, as the notion of what qualifies as nostalgia has become increasingly diluted. Recently I revisited On Longing, a collection of essays by Susan Stewart. She describes the nostalgia of a souvenir object as being a sort of “failed magic”: “Because the souvenir is destined to be forgotten, it’s tragedy lies in the death of memory”. My experience of a painting, or a song, rarely redirects me to a memory of it at its inception (-12), but rather, the now of it, as it exists for me. I don’t think that it is necessary to experience something in real historical time, for it to be a real moment on your own terms, in your own life. Magic is every time the object in question can be experienced as new, and not as a surrogate. Not to entirely refute the sense of nostalgia that is present in these paintings… I just don’t think that it has the final word.

You have outlined two very different displays of bereavement: public mourning versus private mourning. I think that it can play out either way, neither one necessarily undermines the other, but, yes, I do see a clear cut difference. The facebook memorial is one that is shared with a community, on a social platform. To put flowers on a grave, or visit a death site, is to honor an individual, as well as console yourself and reflect on your own mortality. It’s a personal, and cathartic experience that happens to be tied to an ancient tradition.

Although the content of the paintings for Brand New Heartache were drawn from a musical history, I’d say that the role of painting, in this instance, is more closely linked to the tradition of still life painting, the memento mori, and the relationship between mourning and picture making/collecting.

Can you make me a Youtube classic rock mixtape?

Pictures by the great Gesi Schilling.

Just a quick note to say that Artlurker.com has just announced the 2012 Miami Writer’s Prize, and I’ll be judging it alongside Noah Becker (Whitehot Magazine), Paddy Johnson (Art Fag City), and Hrag Vartanian (Hyperallergic).

This is a great opportunity to win $800. Also, you can further a dialogue with art. Both noble pursuits, indeed.

Deadline is May 4th. Details below:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

EVENT: Miami Writer’s Prize 2012

DEADLINE: May 4^th, 2012                                    RECEPTION: May 24^th, 2012, 7pm til 9pm, Locust Projects

* * *

The Miami Writer’s Prize 2012 is open for submissions.

ARTLURKER, a Miami based online publication for the contemporary arts, is proud to announce it is accepting submissions for the third year of the Miami Writer’s Prize, an annual prize that aims to encourage residents of Miami to write about contemporary art and foster accountability for contemporary art discourse through reinforcement of the blogging format.

Eligible entrants may submit one original review of a recent art-related event. The winner, in addition to having their entry published on ARTLURKER.com, will receive an honorary stipend of $800 dollars in return for an eight-post placement as a Guest Blogger on ARTLURKER.com.

This year’s prize is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and artist Carlos Betancourt, sponsored by Locust Projects and judged by a panel of preeminent writers/web publishers – Hrag Vartanian (HYPERALLERGIC), Hunter Braithwaite (THEREISNOTHERE), Noah Becker (WHITEHOT MAGAZINE) and Paddy Johnson (ARTFAGCITY).

The Miami Writer’s Prize 2012 is now open for submissions.

Closing Date is May 4^th, 2012.

The winner will be announced via www.artlurker.com on May 18^th, 2012.

A soiree in their honor will be held at Locust Projects (3852 North Miami Avenue) on May 24^th, 2012.

PRIZE REQUIREMENTS:

To qualify, entrants must:                                   

•Be over 18 years of age and reside in Miami Dade county

•Have had no more than three pieces of their art writing published in a print publication (previous online publication, except for on ARTLURKER.com, is permitted)

•Email one previously unpublished review of a recent art related event, approximately 800 words in length to writersprize@artlurker.com

Entries must be submitted:                 

•As a Word (.doc) attachment

•In English (translations are accepted, but this must be acknowledged)

•Without images

GUEST BLOGGING REQUIREMENTS:

•Posts must be art related

•Author must have first hand experience if writing a review of a recent exhibition or event

ABOUT THE JUDGES:

NOAH BECKER lives and works in Victoria BC, Canada and New York. He is a contemporary artist, musician, curator, and editor-in-chief of Whitehot Magazine. In 2009, Becker was nominated for the Royal Bank of Canada Painting Prize, which toured his work to Musee D’Art De Montreal. Becker’s work has featured in successful solo and group exhibitions in New York, Switzerland, Canada, and Miami, and most recently included in the exhibitions Plank Road and Hunt & Chase at Salomon Contemporary, 6 Degrees of Separation at Claire Oliver Gallery, and Mie Portraits at Freight + Volume.

HUNTER BRAITHWAITE founded the Miami-based contemporary arts website thereisnothere.org in August 2011. In addition to running TINT, he is a regular contributor to artforum.com, Whitehot Magazine, and Asian Art News. Before moving to Miami, he lived in Shanghai and did basically the same thing.

PADDY JOHNSON is the founding editor of Art Fag City. In addition to her work on the blog, she has been published in New York Magazine, artreview.com, Art in America, The Daily, Print Magazine,Time Out NY, The Reeler, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, New York Press and writes a regular art column for The L Magazine. Paddy lectures widely about art and the Internet at venues including Yale University, Parsons, Rutgers, South by Southwest, and the Whitney Independent Study Program.

HRAG VARTANIAN is a Brooklyn-based writer, critic, editor and cultural worker. He is the co-founder and editor of Hyperallergic. He tweets a lot (@hragv), reads even more, likes to look at art, doesn’t call his parents enough and his biggest claim to fame is that he was gay married in Toronto to his publisher, which only goes to prove that sleeping with your boss gets you everywhere.

More info: www.artlurker.com/miamiwritersprize

Kevin Arrow lived in South Beach in the 1990s. On Wednesday, there will be a screening of his Gianni Versace Harry Pussy at the Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club. Here, we talk about murder, film and the dissolving cityscape.

As a teenager in Virginia, my first introduction to Versace was the media storm surrounding his death, as summed up by Eminem (“Hey, it’s me, Versace! Whoops, somebody shot me! / And I was just checking the mail, get it? Checking the ‘male’?”). So in a very specific way, my introduction was his finale. Gianni Versace Harry Pussy, with its wrecking ball footage, seems to be very much about endings, especially when you realize that Harry Pussy broke up in 1997, the same year that Versace was murdered. Do these two departures mark the end of an era for you? How was pre-1997 Miami Beach different from what it is today?

Andrew Cunanan may well have ushered in the most recent beginning of the end of South Beach’s Golden Glamour period. Gianni Versace was openly wandering the streets of South Beach like a free range fashion chicken. His routine was regularly publicized; morning coffee at the News Café, a stroll around the neighborhood with video camera in hand recording the local riff raff and the windows of the kitschy wig shops. It was a well known fact that his pool area was a decadent free zone with its high walls and private back door alley way entrance.

Harry Pussy was largely ignored in Miami Beach. They had to travel out of Florida in order to gain the recognition and acclaim that still resonates.  Their practice space was in the old Alliance Cinema which is now where Books & Books resides on Lincoln Road. That story is still waiting to be told. Everything seemed to be falling apart in 1996-97. A large chunk of South Florida was in a slow motion grand mal seizure and large segments of its creative community was leaving.

Endings always make way for new beginnings. I often ponder this cyclical nature of existence. I too left South Beach in 1998 for the greener pastures of North Beach, where everything seems to have been frozen in time.  Pre-1997 Miami Beach?  (As in Tubby Boots and Jake LaMotta?) My experience begins in the mid 80s when Scarface and Miami Vice was being filmed on the street of South Beach and the Amsterdam Palace on Ocean Drive was haunted by junkies and retired prostitutes.  The Mariel Boatlift was in full swing and South Beach seemed like a freakish William Burroughs lawless state.  It was a cheap alternative to life on the main land, renting abandoned store fronts on Washington Avenue or Lincoln Road and opening used book stores or thrift shop art galleries on a whim was common. It was in many ways like the Lower Lower East Side of New York City or like Alphabet City, pre Thompson Square Park riots, or like a homeless person’s Côte d’Azur.

Today it seems as if South Beach is again slipping back into a lawless space. No one is paying much attention, which is a good thing. The tanking economy was also a good thing for South Beach which in recent years was becoming over saturated and growing fat, like Elvis in the 80s. Perhaps now that the international attention has departed, South Beach will again fall into disrepair and the un-gentrification process can begin.

Tell me about filming this video. Super 8 film is a guilty pleasure for me, as it’s such a heavily coded medium. More than simply being “vintage,” I think that the film collapses time. It gets heavy play in movie prologues, be it Mean Streets with the Ronette’s “Be My Baby,” or Kevin Costner waving at the camera at the beginning of Field of Dreams. Why is this film so saturated with nostalgia and Americana?

Back in the day, my friends and I all ran around with cameras, the older the better. The day of the demolition I was out my bike when I happened upon this beautifully violent activity unfolding on a perfect Ocean Drive morning. The sunlight was glistening, the building was collapsing and dust was rising. I pedaled to my apartment, ran upstairs and grabbed my Super 8 camera which was already loaded with a film cartridge. Having studied photography, film and still cameras were like household appliances, similar to a blender or like a laptop or like the iPhone is now. The iPhone instagram photograph has been programmed to deliver instantaneous nostalgic saturation, for those who are impatient and unwilling to shoot and process film and file away photographic prints, only to be discovered years later at the bottom of a drawer or back of a closet. Thank the photography gods that E. J. Bellocq did not use an iPhone or digital camera.

Economic recession and unemployment are linked to rebellious punk culture during the early 1980s Reagan recession and the collapse of the Soviet Union which spawned Black Flag, Husker Du and the Minutemen. Recession-era music: low-budget and danceable, or in South Florida’s case indigestible, idiosyncratic, over-the-top , violent, humorous and dark. i.e. Scraping Teeth, Harry Pussy and to a lesser degree Marilyn Manson & the Spooky Kids.

Images and films depicting time, nature, mortality, disinvestment all existed prior to the websites like http://abandonedamerica.us. Take The Americans by Robert Frank which documents his trip through America in 1955 and 1956, or Cocksucker Blues, which documents his trip through America in 1972 with the Rolling Stones as they were in the process of imploding and disintegrating like human skyscrapers.

The joke which went viral at the time of the demolition: What type of Palms did Versace put around his Pool area? Greased Palms. (The palms of the City officials who were drunk on glamour and probably the gift of a Versace designed change purse). HP was most likely responding to its own inner psychic implosion; working in a void, I doubt the decadent club music of the time entered their mind streams. In fact, HP was more decadent than any club or rave sound track of the time.  In my mind they were an enormous sonic vacuum cleaner or the musical equivalent of an industrial wood chipper sending forth purifying shards of sound.

IMAGES

KEVIN ARROW
Gianni Versace, 1993-2010
Super 8 Film transferred to DVD
color/sound
00:02:32
Sound Track:HARRY PUSSY, Untitled (aka Nose Ring) (1993, Esync) 7″

LISTING INFORMATION

A one night only screening by Kevin Arrow at Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club  

9:00PM Wednesday March 14^th

235 12^th Street, Miami Beach, FL 33139 (across from the Clean Machine Laundromat)

305-538-5980 [http://formalistsidewalkpoetryclub.com/]

Natalya Laskis was raised in Miami and studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Shortness of Breath, an exhibition of her new paintings will open on Saturday, March 10th at the new Locust Projects space.

These are much bigger.

Yeah, at first it was more intimidating of course, but I decided that it was more about the image. I would pick an image and blow it up. I work from photographs, either my own or ones from the internet. With these large scale paintings, I’ve actually focused closer, so the edges don’t edge.

You’re totally swallowed up by the compositions, as opposed to your earlier work, which was primarily landscape, and from a distance.

Those were also centered. These are more portraits of myself.

You paint them with brooms?

I paint them with brooms, with mops…those sponge mops.

Like a swifter?

Haha, yeah, like a swifter. I’m using commercial materials. With the small paintings, I was using large brushes. So when I went bigger, the tools had to get bigger.

These paintings are flip between representation and abstraction.

I want to represent abstract feelings through situations, through objects. Through the process of painting. The painting of the Jawbreaker in the show was a breakthrough for me. I’ve always been involved in the academics of representation, but now I’m playing pretty heavily on the relationship between representation and nonobjectivity.

The jawbreaker is a nice painting. And how it’s placed in your studio makes it look like the eye of a storm, with all the more frenetic compositions radiating outwards. It also is the most non-representational painting in the set. Supposing that they are the two sides of the same coin. Which is more primary, representation or abstraction?

Oh my god…my interpretation of this is trying to get loose and capture the energy between those two things. I have to experience that flux.

Source Material, 2011

One of favorite things about your earlier work was how you took these super American themes of the outdoors, adventure, manifest destiny, whatever, and then painted them with Sargent’s bravado. But the actual content was totally pathetic. It’s not a yacht, it’s a jetski that people are having sex on. Do you see the same forces at work with the new paintings, which are more psychological?

I’m not rich. I talk about what I’ve experienced, and I’m familiar with the working class. I think this started when I was attacked by a mountain lion at age 5.

…Only in Florida

This crazy hippie friend of my dad’s had a mountain lion as a pet, and he was showing it off to us. The cat was chained in the front yard. My mother bends down, coaxing me to get closer to it. I end up dead center in front of this cat, eye to eye. Then suddenly the wind picks up my dress and the cat lunges for it. He locked on to my knee. Turns out they were playing with fabric earlier on. The next day I went to school with a huge bandage and nobody believed me.

Natalya Laskis, Ghost Date, Oil on Panel, 2012

How are these small paintings different from the larger ones?

The small ones are more about the narrative. With the smaller scale, I put more information in them. The larger ones are about the process of painting, the application of paint.

The big ones don’t really give away much. They arrest you the  second before you realize what’s happening. They have an apprehensive quality of…awkwardness.

Yeah, the one with the girl being fed. The viewer looks at the painting, but the viewer could also be the man feeding the girl.

Is this current style a resting point for you?

My next show is going to be called “What is Love?” There will be figures lost in translations of Americana. Nudes on La-z-boys.

What is the difference between a parade and traffic? What causes the two forms of procession to disregard their obvious similarities and retreat to opposite camps. Traffic is blocked so that a parade might run its course. In negative: everyday traffic blocks the potential for a parade. Similarity: people in the street. Difference: a parade is planned, traffic is not. Traffic can be predicted, and is often planned around, but rush hour is a lack of a plan. With appropriate planning, traffic would not exist. From this relationship, we arrive at two tensions central to the thoroughfare: displacement and spontaneity.

The Day Before the Parade, Paola Ferrario’s new series of photographs documenting a small town St Patrick’s Day parade, is a nimble reclamation of the man in the crowd, or at least his folding chair. The parade takes place in Holyoke, a western Massachusetts town of about 40,000. The historically Irish town has seen a large influx of Puerto Ricans over the past few years. As the Latino population grew, the Irish community split for South Hadley, a whiter town upriver. The parade has remained, a monument to this country’s constant flux of people and their saints.

These pictures visualize displacement via the simultaneous encroachment between the private and public realms. Similarly, spontaneity, and with that the individual, pushes against mass ornament. Who would have thought that the simple act of sitting requires this many types of chairs. Both of these arguments can be played out ontologically–what is a parade, and does it belong to a childhood memory, or to a dominant ideology? Or, they can be treated as photographs.

For pictures of industrially produced furniture, Ferrario’s methods don’t display any sentimentality. There is no fetish of the photographic edition. She shoots digital and nails the prints to the wall. That is not to say that the process is haphazard. Contrary to the subject matter’s incongruity, Ferrario throws out any print that is slightly, I mean slightly, discolored. “The hardest colors to capture are asphalt and skin,” she told me.

In the pop of her plastics and the bent perspective, Ferrario exists in the downgazed voyeurism of Eggleston or Martin Parr. In her continental patience, the encyclopedia building, one sees the Bechers. Ferrario is quick to shut that down. “I’m not interested in typologies, but in documenting the event.” (Again, the displacement of object). And, “I choose pleasure over formal rigor.” (Spontaneity). The photographs are at once studied and curiously accidental. By both denying and asserting the academy, the form matches the content: chairs that admit an emptiness but promise that it will be soon filled.

The following interview was conducted via email in advance of David Joselit’s lecture, “Beyond Repetition: Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades,” which will take place at Miami Art Museum on February 18 at 2pm.

René Morales: The current Duchamp display at Miami Art Museum was partly motivated by a desire to highlight the edition of Boîte-en-valise (Box in a Suitcase), Duchamp’s miniature retrospective exhibition of his own work, which is in MAM’s collection. How does this work speak to the subject of art institutions? What are your thoughts on the ways that Duchamp has been absorbed by the same institutional structures that his work was critical of?

David Joselit: I think Duchamp understood early on that there was no “outside” to art’s institutional structure.  Thus, rather than performing a critique of the museum, the Boîte concentrates and miniaturizes its operations in order to make them strange (and therefore visible in a different way).  One might say that it slows down the museum while simultaneously making it portable, and thus susceptible to different kinds of contemplation (of course, now that they are exhibited in museums this effect is watered down).  It’s important to note how Duchamp plays with scale and “installation” in this work, transforming objects and the relationships among them. The Boîte also expands the duration of mechanical reproduction by hand-coloring or hand-making representations that in the normal course of things might be instantaneously reproduced—through, for instance, the automatic procedures of photography.

RM: The point of departure for the display at MAM is the idea that the editions comprise a highly thematic area within Duchamp’s production, though they are often overlooked. It’s clear that he took advantage of the editioning process as a site for extending his questionings of authenticity, the original vs. the copy, the handmade vs. the machine-made and the mass-produced, and so on. What are your thoughts on Duchamp’s approach to the editioning of his work?

DJ: The readymade gesture loses its force through repetition—in other words, you can only be surprised or shocked once to see a urinal as a work of art.  Therefore, in order to keep the force and interest of the readymade alive, Duchamp needed to recontextualize, or re-locate the initial objects over and over again.  Editioning them is a good way to do so.  Duchamp was interested in opening out the act of reproduction and performing it as a process in which the artist could intervene.  This is why he often uses outdated hand processes within mechanical reproduction.  It is also important to acknowledge that the editions are, in effect, modes of representing artistic practices that are difficult to represent, or that are devoted to resisting representation.

RM: Looking back on your early research on Duchamp, can you say how it may have textured your later work, like your recent work on television or on current painting?

DJ: I have written elsewhere that the television system—as a network that depends upon objects (i.e. television sets) as receivers—is the mid-century inheritor of the readymade.  What Duchamp did with his readymades is to cause the viewer to think not about individual objects as autonomous units, but the whole system of values and meanings that authorize a work of art.  Therefore, Duchamp was already working with the relation between an object, and a network (specifically the network known as the “art world”).  The recent work I’ve done on painting focuses on practices that embed works on canvas in an external network—of performance, or of mechanical reproduction.  These framing networks are not understood as “context” but as integral parts of the painterly composition.  It is paradoxical to think of paintings as nodes in a network, but in fact, that is what they are.

RM: Would you describe some of your recent essays, such as “Painting Beside Itself” and “Signal Processing,” as an attempt to build the sort of critical armature that painting generally seems to lack today? That lack seems so conspicuous given the almost overbearing influence that criticism has had on painting in the past, and given the almost essayistic character of a lot of recent painting.

DJ: I think a lot of the problem lies in the persistent emphasis on medium as an explanatory structure in criticism—even if it remains in effect through its paradoxical antithesis, the “postmedium.”  In a forthcoming book called After Art, I argue that we need to think about art made under the dual conditions of globalization and digital technologies in terms of formats as opposed to mediums:  in other words the same quantum of “information” may be formatted in many different ways.  This is what Duchamp’s editions already taught us.  The use value of painting in a fast-paced informational economy is that it is slow:  it can slow down procedures of communication and capture them on canvas or board—in other words it can re-format information that is carried too fast to notice, or too fast to think about in other realms.  Paintings capture and reformat information.

David Joselit is a Professor of Art History at Yale University, as well as the author of books such as After Art (forthcoming), Feedback: Television Against Democracy (2007), and Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941 (1998). He is a frequent contributor, as writer and editor, to such journals as ArtForum, Art in America, October, and Grey Room.

René Morales is Associate Curator at Miami Art Museum and the organizer of Focus: Marcel Duchamp, on view at MAM until April 29.

De ou par Marcel Duchamp our Rrose Sélavy (Boîte-en-valise)

(From or by Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy [Box in a Suitcase]) Series D, 1941/1961

Box covered in linen containing miniature replicas and color reproductions of works by Duchamp (68 items)

Edition 1/30

Collection Miami Art Museum, museum purchase with funds from Lang Baumgarten as well as from Mimi Floback and Sally Ashton Story in memory of Jon Ashton

Photo Credit: Sid Hoeltzell

© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp

A Bruit Secret (With Hidden Noise), 1916

1964 edition

Twine and brass plates

Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Bequest of Mary Sisler

Photo Credit:  Courtesy of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

© 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Succession Marcel Duchamp