While teaching Surrealism these last two weeks, I found myself  repeating the phrase “1+1= 3” to explan what arises from juxtapositions of the unexpected and the unconscious. Of course for the Dadaists, it was all about the embrace of pure nonsense, but Wm Burroughs and Brion Gysin were my inspiration, their idea of the third mind via the cut-up, basically. I’ve also been enjoying the darker side of the random lately (big surprise, ha!) as employed by the Random Darknet Shopper,  the botnet project recently launched by the artist collective, !Mediengruppe Bitnik. It seems a ripe moment for such stealthy initiatives in art, and I love that it bought ten pills of ectasy, lol. Anyway, here’s my latest dump, er, I mean, image essay:) Get a cup of tea or a beer, its a loooong one, the longest yet, I think! And there’s weirdly a lot of art in it. ENJOY!

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I came across this 2001 interview I did with Monica Bonvicini in just that way, by accident, and it took me down memory lane. It was for Artforum online, and I came across it googling artists engaged with architecture and gender. Kind of a sweet surprise, as I’d completely forgotten about it (big surprise, ha)! It reminded me of my trip to LA that year, where I saw the show we discussed, though sadly I can’t remember where:(

Here it is as a link, the cut-and-paste below is easier to read, and includes better images, only one of which, sadly, represents the installation I saw. There weren’t anymore online. Its a great work, though, one that made me think again about Bonvicini’s intrepid use of gay S & M imagery at a time when it was still outre or at least before harnesses became a catwalk staple.

Consider it my version of throw back Thursday, and if you want to know more about her work, Phaidon did a great book on the artist, and I threw in a few more pics of other, later work. HAPPY FALL!

Monica Bonvicini talks to Jane Harris about architecture and the iconology of construction workers.

For several years now, Monica Bonvicini has been something of a heckler, taking aim at the granddaddy of all aesthetic boys clubs: architecture. In her 1999 Venice Biennale work, I Believe in the Skin of Things as in That of Women, the Italian-born artist turned Le Corbusier’s well-known comment on its head, vandalizing the facades of a boxlike room she had built and covering the broken walls with graffiti.

Quotations from other famous male architects, such as Auguste Perret and Adolf Loos, were juxtaposed with obscene words and caricatures of naked men holding square sets, masturbating, or gazing at bejeweled women. Eternmale, 2000, installed at the Kunsthaus Glarus, featured slick white chairs and tables designed by Willy Guhl (from bent panels of Eternit, a mixture of cement and cellulose), an electric-blue carpet, ambient music from porno films, a video monitor displaying a burning log, and Picasso’s Tête de Femme (Head of a woman), 1963. A parody of a playboy pad from the 1960s, the room offered the ultimate guy space for chilling out, seducing chicks, and refueling the testosterone.

Bonvicini’s sense of humor is incisive and often chilly, sort of like Bruce Nauman on dry ice. Her themes—the libidinous charge of architectural space and the often sexist presumptions that underlie its theory—are considered with critical distance but are tweaked empirically by her lifestyle. She has spent over a decade dividing her time between Los Angeles and Berlin, two cities very active in the promotion of new architecture, especially the latter, where the buzz about building a new Berlin has been as loud as the cement mixers and drills, not to mention the hoots and hollers of construction workers whom women cross the street to avoid.

These Days Only a Few Men Know What Work Really Means, 1999

For Bonvicini, construction workers are, on the one hand, laborers who toil with no glory; on the other, purveyors of aggressive masculinity. But it is precisely the complex class and gender issues they embody that make them interesting to her. In Fuckeduptimes, 1999, Bonvicini interviewed bricklayers, asking them questions like “What does your wife/girlfriend think of your rough and dry hands?” and hired them to build minimalist structures in limestone.

This past May and June, Bonvicini presented a number of works at the inaugural exhibition of The Project in Los Angeles. One of these, These days only a few men know what work really means, 1999, delved into the contradictory symbolism of construction workers. The piece explores the psychosocial dynamics of advertising billboards, which the artist has overlaid with images of gay sex and quotations taken from the simultaneously public and private world of Internet chat rooms.

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

Jane Harris: Tell me about your piece These days only a few men know what work really means.

Monica Bonvicini: I find it interesting that construction workers are so popular in gay erotica, but, at the same time, are well known for their extreme heterosexual behavior. There are other connotations in the piece as well. When I first showed it at the the Art Basel fair in 1999, I used portable aluminum walls that belonged to the fair, and kind of mocked the idea of an art-fair “statement.” The metaphor of a bunch of construction guys fucking each other (images I found in a gay porno magazine), and the misspelled quotations I took from the Internet, were hard to digest for quite a number of viewers. And then there are the two black-and-white pictures of Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves, both of whom are literally wearing their own architecture in the form of models. But as you say, I had been working with construction materials, on construction sites, and with construction workers for a while.

JH: You did a piece at the MIT List Center for which you made an impenetrable structure from chain link, cinder block, and Home Depot wood trellises. Aren’t you working with Home Depot fences for another work, Turning Walls, 2001?

MB: The piece at the MIT group show was Turning Walls—the same piece I am showing in Grenoble.

Monica Bonvicini, Built for Crime, 2006, SculptureCenter, New York, Broken safety glass, bulbs, 5 dimmer packs, lan box, 4′ x 40-1/2

JH: I really like BEDTIMESQUARE, 1999. It’s a realization of a drawing you did some time ago, isn’t it?

MB: Yes. BEDTIMESQUARE was based on a drawing from the series “Smart Quotations,” 1996. The work relates to a piece of Carl Andre’s. Because of the industrial materials and the inflatable mattress in the middle, it is, metaphorically speaking, like sleeping in a Minimal sculpture. The bed, along with the window and the wall, are classical representations of feminine space. You know, the history of the bed is very interesting.
JH: Especially in performance art. Chris Burden, Gina Pane, and Vito Acconci all used beds or bedlike structures to draw connections between the body and the institutional frameworks in which it operates. So did Valie Export. What are you working on now?

MB: I just opened the show at Le Magasin in Grenoble. I’m also preparing a public art project for the Aussendienst in Hamburg, which deals again with the language of commercialism and its relation to art. I’m going to produce billboards developed by Scholtz & Friends, one of the biggest advertising companies in Europe, for buses and subway stations in Hamburg.
JH: Will you use construction-worker imagery again?

MB: Maybe. Why not?

Both Ends, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, 2010

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Since I’ve worn “vintage” clothing since the early, mid-1980s, from high school on (mostly late 1960s to early-mid 1970s), I’ve got things that old I’ve hung on to. I’ve also always decorated/outfitted my apartments with period furniture, linens, dish ware, etc. first with Deco, then mid-century, then space-age Panton era stuff, too, so this stuff will find its way into the shop too. Hopefully, the recent passion for all things “vintage” – Gap adverts acknowledge its lure, promoting their “technologically advanced” fabrics as a way to counter the competition – has created enough of a competitive market for it that I’ll make some money:)            

People are certainly willing to pay a lot more than I ever did or do. Time will tell, and romanlovesgigi is still in its infancy, the process being quite tedious (I will never look at an online auction/individually owned business the same again), so vintage lovers check back often as I’ll be uploading new items every day.        

On a totally different note, I just finished reading John Edgar Wideman’s 1990 novel, Philadelphia Fire, a poetic, meta-narrative about the infamous MOVE organization, whose West Philly headquarters were infamously fire-bombed by the city in 1985, killing 10 people, and decimating many houses around them.

Its a rather elliptical rendering, with very minimal attention to the facts told through tertiary narratives that take the form of the narrator’s recollections of growing up in Philadelphia as an African-American, working-class kid who became a creative-class/academic. These quasi-biographical discursions nonetheless evoke the guts and heart of the people moving in and out of the shadows of this historic catastrophe, and Wideman writes them right after it happens, so it’s both very vivid and yet removed from linear time (not enough facts/reflection to draw from so soon?).

If you want to better understand the tensions leading up to the fire-bombing (imagine your city block suddenly attacked like that as a means of routing out the inhabitants of one house), and the cult nature of MOVE, they are very compellingly conveyed in this great 2013 documentary, Let the Fire Burn, which you can watch for free! Its comprised mostly of found footage, and is just as entrancing as Wideman’s book, which is its poetic corollary.
You really get a sense of how much John Africa, the very intelligent founder of MOVE, was able to marshall this rag-tag army of followers, and turn their refusal to live by social norms into a revolution of sorts. And the way the state responds. It got me thinking about Jim Baker, another guru/leader whose philosophy over time became distorted by power, evolving into its own incendiary form of anarchy, if not literally. There’s a 2013 doc on his cult (I use that word, btw, in its most neutral sense) , The Source Family, also free online.     Along with the renewed interest in vintage stuff, it seems the fascination for all things cult has also re-emerged, perhaps in relation to the populist trend for going off the grid, and forming self-sufficient communities anathema to corporate-consumer existence.

The whole 1970s cult phenomena, a time when there were over 3,000 such self-identified orgs, its link to spiritual, civil rights, and sexual revolutions of the time, is of course, perpetually fascinating to me. I did, after all, in a moment of naive embrace, consider joining the Hari Krishnas in college when they came recruiting on campus, and joined a coven for a brief time after grad school with a boyfriend.

Of course, I could never submit to an individual’s authority, esp. a man (I got enough of that growing up Catholic), but the desire for spiritual growth has and will always appeal, and not just to me. Thinking, as atheists do, that any such pursuit is simply fantasy-inducing escapism, a willing of your power away to some non-existent force, is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater imho. Though the dangers of leaders gone awry, of the inevitable corruption that comes with power, etc. are of course, inescapably real.

Probably why when I participated in a summer solstice ritual this weekend, which brought me back to my “new age” moment of the 1980s, I experienced pleasure/nostalgia with a smidgen of cynical doubt, the same irony from which this blog’s name derived. How to be authentic without the foundation and legacy of tradition, historical, cultural, and biographical? Does donning the clothes of another era beg the same question? Certainly when I watch 20-somethings parade around in their long hair and beards, shirtless in their birkenstocks, I do wonder. Food for thought….

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Setting aside music motivated by genocidal tendencies and bigotry, I couldn’t think of other music too disturbing for me to listen to. So I went on a Google search. Gangsta rap/horrorcore popped up most, the likes of Brotha Lynch Hung’s Rest in Piss, and  Three 6 Mafia evoking tall tales of hood life, the thuggery within hyperbolic by design. So not disturbing for moi, in fact I enjoy both (I’ve liked hip-hop since the 1980s). As for all the misogynist lyrics and videos out there in this genre and others, I can pick and choose, and while some of it might offend, I’m not creeped out. I couldn’t even press play on this live footage vid of Blood &Honour , a British neo-Nazi punk band — I leave that to the less fainthearted.

Of course death metal bands also came up a lot. After a graphic account of the gory lyrics in Cannibal Corpse’s “Evisceration Plague” by a fan I had high hopes, but even the official HD vid caused not a stir. Mostly just giggles, especially after learning they’re from my hometown of Buffalo.

And then circuitously, as these Google School reports often go, I wound up on The Autarch’s YouTube channel, listening to spooky-weird soundtracks from video games. A truly happy discovery! This is Disturbing Video Game Music 15: Zant at Lakebed, there are many more just as good. I noticed other people doing the same, gathering together scary video game music, a subcultural niche/trend I’d have otherwise never discovered! Most are homespun (I love the taste disclaimer in this vid, Top Ten Creepy Songs in Nintendo Games, though of course, commercial versions have already cropped up ala this comp by the game company, Level Up. ENJOY!

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And of course in a Google search, I find out people are breeding and selling them! Why? Because they can. Its like when I recently read that in traditional Chinese medicine the bile of black bears is extracted (after caging and painful process) for god knows what purported benefit. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the efficacy of that tradition. When I lived in Chinatown, I had a roommate whose friend was a Chinese herbalist, and he gave me a script (in Mandarin) for a recurrent upper respiratory infection that I took to an herbal pharmacist who only served Chinese. I just watched him read the note, and pull out of the battered odd-sized drawers of his old wooden dispensary various plants, bulbs, leaves, twigs, etc., which he then ground up into a tea.

(an approximation)

It was syrupy and woody in taste, a little nasty, but it did the trick! Sans the dizzy effects of most decongestants ala pseudoephedrin. So maybe there is some great tonic in bear bile, but it sounds pretty esoteric, and unnecessary. I mean if someone told me that an ingredient in my tea was obtained in this horrific way, I’d have said, thanks, but no thanks.

(red golden version)

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised when my curiosity to learn about a creature leads to: “www.efowl.com › Adult Pheasants‎ $114.99 Buy Lady Amherst Pheasants from eFowl.com. Have Lady Amherst Pheasants safely shipped directly to you. The Amherst Pheasant is an excellent aviary bird”. Though it does reinforce my general antipathy toward what I’m calling late-stage humanity. Wondering what that might be like, owning such a beautiful creature? I don’t know, but here’s a sense of how pleasant life for the pheasant looks . And of course there’s the impossible allure of the feathers, this pic from a fishing tackle/bait site. I guess we just can’t help ourselves.

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Love this vid of Harold Pinter recounting memories of Samuel Beckett and performing – in a maniacal rush – the last of ‘The Unnamable’, 1953. Its the third book in Beckett’s famous trilogy, which you can download here for free as I intend to! Have only read Molloy (ages ago) and part of Malone Dies, so looking forward to finding the time esp. after reading this 1958 NYT review.

Beckett is the kind of writer that makes one feel like a hack, he’s a visionary powerhouse. Pinter acknowledges this in a letter he wrote in early 1950s, which he reads from with great gusto as well. Bookended by the otherwise awkward anecodotal renderings, it makes for a strange ride ( I can imagine a Monty Python sketch of it).

“I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born in a cage and dead in a cage, born and then dead, born in a cage and then dead in a cage, in a word like a beast, in one of their words, like such a beast, and that I seek, like such a beast, with my little strength, such a beast, with nothing of its species left but fear and fury, no, the fury is past, nothing but fear, nothing of all its due but fear centupled, fear of its shadow, no, blind from birth, of sound then, if you like, we’ll have that, one must have something, it’s a pity, but there it is, fear of sound, fear of sounds, the sounds of beasts, the sounds of men, sounds in the daytime and sounds at night, that’s enough, fear of sounds all sounds, more or less, more or less fear, all sounds, there’s only one, continuous, day and night, what is it, it’s steps coming and going, it’s voices speaking for a moment, it’s bodies groping their way, it’s the air, it’s things, it’s the air among the things, that’s enough, that I seek, like it, no, not like it, like me, in my own way, what am I saying, after my fashion, that I seek, what do I seek now, what it is, it must be that, it can only be that, what it is, what it can be, what what can be, what I seek, no, what I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, they say I seek what it is I hear, I hear them, now it comes back to me, what it can possibly be, and where it can possibly come from, since all is silent here, and the walls thick, and how I manage, without feeling an ear on me, or a head, or a body, or a soul, how I manage, to do what, how I manage, it’s not clear, dear dear, you say it’s not clear, something is wanting to make it clear, I’ll seek, what is wanting, to make everything clear, I’m always seeking something, it’s tiring in the end, and it’s only the beginning.” ― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

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I remember being told that morning at school we had to go home early. It was a very sunny day. I stayed with my friend Beth because my mother was working, and watched the clouds herd angrily. We played and played in the days that followed while the adults panicked. I have so many wonderful memories of playing in snow.

My family lived on a court with a giant power plant behind it such that it was wide open fields. So we had all the snow inside the court piled up into a hill that we sled on, played king of the hill, or my favorite, dug tunnels through. And in the back, the fields turned to ice made for a perfect skating rink, place to play ice hockey, though the ski-mobiles, which my mom found obnoxious (along with pools), cut up the ice more and more as they became popular.

Its weird to think about that power plant now knowing its electromagnetic radiation may have contributed to my dad’s health/MS (multiple sclerosis). I picked wild strawberries out of those fields, grew pollywogs, and watched nests of baby rabbits thrive, and I’m mostly ok, lolz, but who knows.

Anyway, glittering and transient like the snow, the new year has arrived, and rather than ignore my citizens, I thought I’d share the random photos on my desktop at the moment before I file them away or delete. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. Consider them a visual stream-of-consciousness, a chance poem of the 21st century.

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Anyway, at the moment I’m applying for a teaching job, and in updating my CV came across this literary/writing resource I used when I taught a Critical Writing/Design Theory course at Parsons, should it be of help to anyone else.

Also, check out the work of artist-musician Larry Krone, who I’ve known for years and just did an interview with for Art in America on his amazing show at Pierogi, and upcoming one at Joe’s Pub (all info. included in either link). And before I forget here’s the latest in my Alternative Models series on Huffpo. It focuses on film/video orgs with programs I find radically smart AND community-based (my highest praise!) that I hope you will support!

OK, well I may weigh in tomorrow nite, not sure yet, but if I don’t, your mayor wishes you all a dazzling and dignified new year! (why dazzling and dignified? I’ve no idea…perhaps it’s my unconscious sayonara to Leigh Bowery, my chosen spirit guide of 2013?) And look good whatever you do, it always helps!

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