EXCERPT: Born to political refugees who fled Iran in the wake of the 1979 Revolution, Sheida Soleimani’s experience growing up Iranian-American was paradoxically shaped by nostalgia and trauma alike. Like many of her generation, she found herself caught between two Irans: the one her parents once knew and loved before the revolution; and the one that nearly killed them. The racist ignorance of an American society that could not distinguish between the two, which she also endured as a result of her heritage, added to her conflicted sense of identity and belonging….Hotbed, 2020, from which the show takes its name, invokes another form of effacement. The photograph is based on the now infamous televised address by Iran’s Deputy Health Minister, Iraj Harirchi, during which he assured Iranian folks he had COVID under control. In her inimitable way, Soleimani’s satirization of the minister’s ludicrous assertions, made as he wiped a sweaty brow, and the day before he tested positive himself, is a carnivalesque mix of the ironic and sinister. Submerging all but the plaid-suited arm, hand, and shoulder of the Minister - all of which she outlines in lime powder - beneath fragmented aerial shots of cemetery plots, she creates a chaotic architecture of death…Soliemani’s diptych-esque wallpaper works, 1/8/2020 and PS752, with their finger-pointing showdown, are a hyperbolic embodiment of that, and a commentary on the ensuing blame game that exacerbated the decline of US-Iranian relations. The nearly identical cropped gray-suited forearms of each leader centered in these respective works are made virtually indistinguishable. So too, the hawk and dove perched atop each respective finger are turned into useless, empty signifiers, as interchangeable as Trump and Khamenei’s swaggering threats.” CATALOGUE WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON THROUGH THE GALLERY: https://dennydimingallery.com/
I wrote a catalogue essay for Marc Verabioff's FORSAKEN STATES at M. LeBlanc Gallery
EXCERPT: “Subverting right wing conspiracy theories, pop culture memes, and cultural hierarchies of high versus low, Mark Verabioff’s latest exhibition, FORSAKEN STATES, is the perfect foil for our deeply troubled times. In the three large-scale collage paintings and floor decal on view, the artist’s signature mix of appropriated text and imagery concocts an absurdist, equivocal vision of America where “gouty Karens and Kens”, hunky models, white trash antiheroines, and queer patricians hold sway.….As always, these slippages - like the work itself - find a surreptitious appeal in their resolute defiance of logic. As we face a future in which the very notion of truth may become as obsolete as our latest devices, such derailments become harbingers and folly alike. The refusal to make meaning cohere serves as a clarion call as well, confronting us with the specter of what’s to come. In the end, Verabioff’s FORSAKEN STATES, with its absurdist theater of resistance, asks us to become our own insurgents, questioning the world around us, and the world within, even if we can’t make sense of either. “ CATALOGUE AVAILABLE SOON VIA GALLERY: https://mleblancchicago.com/exhibitions#/currentexhibition
I wrote about Karl-Heinz Weinberger for Frieze/October issue!
“The self-taught Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger took thousands of homoerotic photographs from the 1950s until his death in 2006 at the age of 86. His preferred subjects were working-class men – construction workers, wrestlers, bikers, car mechanics – whom he shot in their everyday surroundings and in his Zurich apartment. “ INTRO
https://www.frieze.com/article/karlheinz-weinbergers-working-men
My BOOKFORUM review of the photobook, "In The Limelight: The Visual Ecstasy of NYC Nightlife”
https://www.bookforum.com/print/2703/the-season-s-outstanding-art-books-24158
I interviewed Michelle Handelman on the 25th anniversary of her ground-breaking doc, BloodSisters
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/michelle-handelman-interviewed/
My interview with Jessica Stoller for Cultured Magazine
“Known for their excessive ornamentation and lavish detail, Jessica Stoller’s hand-built porcelain sculptures are labor-intensive spectacles. Until recently, these works recalled the Rococo-era fantasies of Marie Antoinette, their sumptuous trappings of beauty and refinement giving way to lurid displays of abject consumption. In Untitled (still life), 2014, and Untitled (sugar still life), 2018, for example, amid the confectionary opulence of ceramic tower cakes, petit fours, puddings and macarons—all arranged on doilies and Sèvres-style service ware—are piles of squashed breasts, severed hands, fly-covered skulls and maggots. Everything is pastel-colored, and heaped together in a porcelain feast guaranteed to rot (or break) your teeth.” EXCERPT
https://www.culturedmag.com/jessica-stoller-porcelain-sculptures/
I'm co-hosting Open Studios for the New York's International Studio & Curatorial Program
My recorded ZOOM talk with artist Hunter Reynolds for The Stonewall Museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Z54_ELrZI&feature=youtu.be
I've been awarded a 2020 Cultured Magazine/Parker Pen grant!
My essay in the catalogue, Karen Heagle: Invocations (Sargent's Daughters, 2020), is out!
“All eroticism has a sacramental character.” — George Bataille
“Karen Heagle grew up on a dairy farm in Tomah, Wisconsin where, amid rolling hills and green pastures, the brute proximity of sex and death was routinely manifest. In one story, she recalls the inexplicable sensation of reaching her child’s hand into a cow’s vagina as she assisted her father in an emergency birth. In another she talks about the allure of seeing a triumphant “girly-girl” with an 11-point buck featured in the local newspaper. Home to whitetail deer and wild turkey, the surrounding wilderness was a hunter’s paradise, and everywhere she went the gruesome art of taxidermy was on display….Like so many artists before her (Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, and Robert Gober, etc), she mines Catholicism’s psychosexual implications in a toggle of suffering and ecstasy. Nowhere is this more evident than in the predatory animals–hyenas, tigers, cheetahs, jackals, falcons, and bulls–who populate the pages of this catalogue with their otherwordly presence.”
Read moreMy feature/memorial on Genesis Breyer P-Orridge for FLASH ART
Summing up the iconic life of dear friend and legendary provocateur Genesis Breyer P-Orridge would be a daunting task in ordinary times. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and the recent death of my beloved father, it feels herculean. My grief over he/r passing on March 14, 2020, weeks after he/r seventieth birthday, was magnified by my inability to attend her eco-funeral due to coronavirus-related concerns. In the wilds of an Upstate New York hippy-dippy plot of land that allowed for such burials, s/he was to be finally reunited with her late wife Lady Jaye (née Jacqueline Breyer) in body and soul. In my place, I sent a double-headed Yoruba Shango staff that Gen had given me, and which had belonged to Jaye, who — in addition to being a nurse, dominatrix, and performance artist — was a Santeria practitioner.
https://flash---art.com/article/genesis-breyer-p-orridge/
My contribution to Brooklyn Rail's In Memoriam dedicated to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge
“I met Genesis in 2007 at the opening of a show I’d curated called Keeping Up With The Joneses. Along with work by Pope.L, Laurel Nakadate, LaToya Ruby Frazier (in her New York City debut), among others, it featured a photo of Lady Jaye in their Gates Avenue apartment dressed for work in one of her dominatrix outfits. Like a Vermeer by way of Pierre Molinier (one of Gen’s favorite artists), she stands gracefully in the tiny cluttered kitchen, her long slender body extended by stilettos, and her blonde pixie cut refracting light from the window behind her…Gen was of course an icon, a cult music figure, a “cultural engineer,” the founder of TOPY, COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, pandrogyne, etc., all of which I’ve written about and documented elsewhere, but s/he was also a vulnerable human being like the rest of us, one whose generosity and courage as such is just as mythic to me as the life s/he lived in the public eye.”
https://brooklynrail.org/2020/04/in-memoriam/Jane-Harris
I'm Curating a Project at SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2020, come visit - BOOTH #1007!
Featuring the work of Liz Collins! BOOTH #1007 http://www.springbreakartshow.com/sb-new-york-city/
The maximalist impulse is subversive by nature; excessive and decadent. Not only does it flout bourgeois notions of taste ala “less is more”, but it also flagrantly reconfigures them. Jean Genet brilliantly summed this up in The Thief’s Journal when he wrote: “To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.” With their electric, bombastic hues and dizzying, graphic patterns, Liz Collins textile works exemplify such harmony. Rejecting the virtues of minimalism for the excesses of pleasure, they refute and underscore the sexist and homophobic origins of the anti-decorative.
Tactile and energetic, the large-scale wall works proposed for Spring Break recall the geometric abstract weavings of the Bauhaus, and the “retinal titillations” of Op-art painting. As always, Collins queers these influences to create an erotically charged language of hot color and frenetic pattern. “When I think about my work related to Maximalism,” she shares, “it makes sense in relation to the dualities I’m preoccupied with like pleasure and pain, chaos and order, restraint and release - extremes that are interdependent.” Tightly woven areas are juxtaposed with luxurious swaths of loose, flowing threads, and allusions to the body erupt amidst the stricture of grids.
As a forerunner to the kind of textile-based practice the contemporary art world is currently obsessed with, Collins has long explored the porous boundaries between painting and sculpture, art and craft, object and performance. Hers is a decadent, maximalist statement on the power of color and form through a distinctly performative, sensual lens.
Jane Ursula Harris
Happy to share another feature in Flash Art (FEB-MAR 2020)!
EXCERPT: “Go to any major museum to see ancient Greek statuary and you’ll find wall labels that read “Roman copy.” It’s ironic given that modernism taught us that the hallmark of true genius is originality. Yet if the Romans hadn’t copied the Greeks, the Western canon as we know it wouldn’t exist. Many masterpieces bear their mark, as the famed Laocoön and His Sons (c. 42–20 BCE), now believed to a Roman copy — and a much-revised one — reveals. If it had been known as such, its restoration, overseen by none other than Raphael himself, would likely never have happened, nor would the many copies of it, commissioned afterward, exist. The same can be said of the Venus de Milo (c. 100 BCE), another Hellenistic sculpture, if not a Roman copy. Had the French clocked her as a Hellenistic statue and not a classical one when the armless beauty was discovered in 1820, it would’ve languished in the heap of ruins from which it came, given the much-maligned status of Hellenistic art at the time. Buried along with it would’ve been all the future art it inspired, by generations of artists including René Magritte, Arman, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, and Zhu Cheng, among others. As the oldest canonical work to be continually copied by artists, these appropriations remain as instrumental to the work’s iconic fate as its early misattribution, underscoring again the role of the copy in a canon that’s long denigrated it.”
https://flash---art.com/article/after-the-master-the-copy-as-origin-and-renewal/
Check out my BOMB Interview with Kim Gordon!
Excerpt: “Kim Gordon’s second solo exhibition at 303 Gallery, The Bonfire, brings together three provocative bodies of work that ruminate on the ever-sinister rise of surveillance culture and the erosion of privacy in our social media–obsessed age. A corporeal and intimate relationship to these issues is evident in the nuanced details and quiet resistance animating the work. If that sounds contrary to the raw, impassive aesthetic we’ve come to associate with the post-punk icon, it might be because we’ve gotten that assessment wrong all along.” https://bombmagazine.org/articles/eluding-the-brand-kim-gordon-interviewed/
http://bombmagazine.org/articles/eluding-the-brand-kim-gordon-interviewed/
My catalog essay for Hunter Reynolds' solo exhibition is now available at PPOW Gallery
Excerpt of 1st page….Thrilled to have my text paired with one by Gregg Bordowitz fro 1990
Anthropocene Blues, a show I juried got a lovely review in Ante Magazine →
Inspired by a poem written in 2012 by one of the last remaining Beat poets, the exhibition features reference to an elegiac view of nature – one foregrounded by our current climate crisis. The poem, written by Anne Waldman, refers to a “tragedy of the Anthropocene.”
https://antemag.com/2019/10/22/anthropocene-blues-wayfarers/?f
Inspired by a poem written in 2012 by one of the last remaining Beat poets, the exhibition features reference to an elegiac view of nature – one foregrounded by our current climate crisis. The poem, written by Anne Waldman, refers to a “tragedy of the Anthropocene.” - Audra Lambert
Read moreI curated a show for Visual AIDS, Queering Postminimalism: The Elegiac Body
“More than anything else, the artists in this exhibition trace the aesthetic and political impact of AIDS, and the queer body, on the legacy of post-minimalism. They reveal the possibility of finding transcendence in the provisional, beauty in the abject, and agency in sorrow. Like Feher, and the poet Melvin Dixon, who prophetically declared months before his death in 1992, “You, then, are charged by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us”, they summon the power of elegy through the simplest of means.”
Read moreMy feature in FLASH ART is out! →
“In her legendary 1991 essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway described a world that many of us then dismissed as science fiction. “Late twentieth-century machines,” she declared, “have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed.” Her conclusion that “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert”1 seemed particularly fantastical. And yet as the film- and sound-based works of Marianna Simnett eerily reveal, in the face of robotics, arti cial intelligence, and neurotechnology, that prescient diagnosis is now undeniable. Virtual reality and digital life have made embodied experience less and less relevant.
Merging the mythic structure of fables with the clinical aesthetics of medical documentaries, Simnett’s films
tell nonlinear tales of bodily dread in which themes of contamination, disease, and violation combine with those of sexuality, identity, and metamorphosis. “
My essay on Joep von Lieshout for The Believer →
https://believermag.com/logger/the-cryptofuturist-and-the-new-tribal-labyrinth/
“I always say I’m a primitivist at heart, but technological progress, as much as it’s wrought our planet’s ruin, remains inextricably tied to culture with a capital C—something I can’t imagine living without. When I try to imagine my over-developed brain being sated by the kind of tribal, low-tech existence that primitivism implies, it seems impossible. Yet I wonder if there’s even a choice; if it isn’t our destiny as a species to die out, and become part of the mass extinction we’ve initiated. Or does our future lie in the utopian possibilities of technology, and an embrace of transhumanism—an evolutionary phase many argue we’re already entered?
These are questions the artist-designer Joep van Lieshout, and Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL), have grappled with for decades. From van Lieshout’s ambitious, if short-lived “free state”, AVL Ville, created in 2001 along Rotterdam’s harbor, which had its own currency, farm, water-purification system, and field hospital, to the more ominous SlaveCity (2005-2008), a fictional metropolis based on the model of concentration camps, and designed around principles of efficiency and profit, AVL’s experiments in idyllic self-sufficiency manifest a perpetual ambivalence.”
Read more