Without You I am Nothing: voted top 5 of 2009
December 28, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
Newcity published its Best Of 2009 issues and a show curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore featuring print artists from Chicago and Providence was listed in the Top 5 Print Shows of 2009. You can see more of the top five list by going here.
Fireside Chat with Young Jook Kwak
December 27, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
Former Volunteer and super-rad-baddass Artist Young Joon Kwak had a conversation with an on-line literary journal, Monsters&Dust. In addition to developing a performative drag practive, Young Joon was also a finalist in the forthcoming reality TV show about emerging artists. In any case, M&D and YJK have a good chat–well worth checking out, both Young’s conversation and some of the other pieces. Contributors include Cass McCombs, Elijah Burger, Becca Mann and several others.
Young’s interview begins as follows:
“I first met Lil’ Elote on my birthday in April 2009, as she crossed the threshhold of my shabby, dark apartment on 17th Street in a candy-striped dress and shiny white pumps, bearing giant helium balloons shaped like butterflies. She was as remarkable for the ways she differed from the form of her alter-ego, my friend and colleague Young Joon Kwak, as she was for the ways she reflected his spirit – witty, generous, warm, sassy, and sincerely strange. What other queen would enter their first drag competition in a celestial jumpsuit, lipsyncing through cake-white makeup and platinum locks over the blaring synthetic beats of Björk’s “Declare Independence,” while audience members screamed their allegiance to the sparkling black pennant of Elotelandia?
“This summer, as Young began to delve deeper into drag, interweaving it with his artistic practice, he also happened upon an opportunity to audition for a new, as-yet-unnamed reality TV show in which artists vie for New York gallery stardom, in a scenario much like the designers on Project Runway. Young made it to the semi-finals, and while we in Chicago rooted for him all the way, we’re glad he is still here with us. Below is our conversation about this time.”
—Aay Preston-Myint for Monsters and Dust
You can read the rest of the link by going here.
Memoirs of a Suburban Shaman
December 24, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
what follows is an intermediary section of a larger project that links josef beuys to hipster-lost-boys shamanism that i’ve been thinking about
(*the craig smith character is very very loosely based on Maitreya Kali, whose album you can see below)
A sliver of Beuys’ spirit remained at large, having escaped the clutch of the shaman’s drum. That sliver has remained, observing without eyes or memory. A hungry ghost.
Truth be told it was that sliver Beuys’ wished to reclaim when he brought the coyote to the Motel 6 in 1963–twelve years before he would try again in public.
In April of 1963, Beuys brought with him a jar of reindeer piss, purchased on the Mongolian Steepe. The piss was collected from a reindeer, gone mad. Prior to pissing it had eaten a handful of mushrooms that grew wild. According to custom shamans drank the urine in to induce transcendental states. Occasionally, they sold it to foreigners.
Beuys gave the urine to the coyote. He ingested some himself.
He visited the coyote seven days a week for eight hours each day. Upon the shaman’s instruction, Beuys called to the part of himself that had been missing since the war. The part he lost when he crashed the plane–a piece of innocence he thought he could reclaim.
Through a series of incantantions, Bueys trapped the sliver of his spirit inside of the coyote. He found himself looking at himself, long lost.
Against expectation, the coyote retained the spirit. Refusing to bite Beuys and give his spirit a passage back to its source. Instead it became a wherecoyote. It broke free, sprung out the window, (because it was night it was a window–the light indoors reflected the indoors), the coyote escaped into the night and trotted off until it was forgotten, leaving Beuys to weep on a motel bed abandoned a second time.
(His second attempt to reclaim himself, tried again in 1974, under the auspices of art and “I heart America and America hearts me.”)
Years later the coyote bit a man and through the bite passed the spirit; the spirit did not want to die and the coyote was old and would die shortly. In this new body, the spirit lay quite still.
Like that fellow there:
Craig Smith left the city behind he left it he left it differently. He left the city because he tired of squares; he saw squares around him everywhere. He left the city by living in the city. He changed his name, that his mother would not recognize him. He forgot his name, that he could not be tricked.
He went to a man at the University, a man in a tweed coat. The man looked like a square but was not. The man in the tweed coat taught religion. He grew mushrooms in tupperwear boxes. The professor.
The professor sat his visitor on the chair in his office and they made a deal and they shook hands and the professor said he knew of other countries, countries no one had ever seen before, islands of gypsum dust and silence and possibility.
“It’s curious,” said the professor, “that such continents would have gone so long without ever having been discovered.”
“You’ll show me?” asked our friend.
The professor nodded. “You needn’t go far.”
Our friend: he wore dirty jeans. He had long hair. He had silver and turquoise jewelry on the fingers of his hands. He grew up with cowboys and Indians formed from plastic, he practiced their wildness, switching sides depending on the mood and who’s team he might prefer. He rode a yellow bus to school. He liked girls. He lived in fear of Russians and at school they had the children climb under desks during nuclear attack drills. He grew up in Pittsburgh when the city still hummed with steel, the river beds choked with barges carrying astronomically heavy loads; these he often studied growing up, marveling at their capacity to float. Craig moved to California when the city died.
As an adult, he had never before seen an image of earth from outerspace. He also wore cowboy boots and juju beads. He went to war protests wearing a poncho with a variety of buttons pinned to it.
Craig Smith went to the professor’s house. Because it was chilly out, he wore the poncho. They met by the professor’s garage door and the young man entered the professor’s house through the garage door and shook the professor’s hand; the professor wasn’t wearing a tweed coat anymore.
The professor wore moccassins and a corn meal sac for a shirt. He had war paint under his eyes. He did not say anything at all. He would not say anything. Only pressed the small of the young man’s back, bearing him through the darkness of a foreign room—labarynthian because it was unknown.
The young man lay down on a bed of blankets. He lay down as the professor sat down, and the professor crossed his legs. The professor sat in front of an altar—three cardboard boxes disguised by a tablecloth—five tea candles cast light on the alter. A large mirror behind the alter compounded the light by way of refraction. The room was otherwise dark.
The professor picked up a ball of sage. He lit the ball of sage with the candles and he poured the smoke on himself and blew the smoke over the young man’s body and sang an unecognizable song and then the professor picked a conch shell from the alter and blew sage smoke into the conch shell and sang a song again, a different song.
The professor put down the sage. He put it in an ashtray on the altar, then reached into the conch shell and pulled out the mushrooms and he placed the mushrooms in the young man’s mouth, “Chew these with your front teeth,” the professor said. “This is not food. Use your front teeth.”
The young man chewed. The taste was bitter and dry and he wished he had a bit of honey though he did not gag. When he finished chewing the professor put a mask over his eyes such that the young man could not tell whether his eyes were open or shut.
And then young man waited.
It began with a peculiar zinging sensation.
“Ahhh,” said the professor. “Las ninos. The little chimney sweeps.” It would be the last thing the young man remembered hearing for one hundred years: the duration through which the young man lay.
The zinging sensations persisted. Like electricity shot through the young man’s limbs, from the tips of his fingers the feeling travelled down along his spine, zinging, spitting electrons, little gasps of consciousness, sprung loose and shaking up his body, down to the base of his toes. Uncomfortable, disquieting. The young man was afraid.
Yet.
Too late too soon. He could not change his mind, could not go back to that faraway suburban drive outside the professor’s garage. The young man could only wait for this journey to pass through him and in the waiting he began to forget himself.
Sounds around him spun. He was in a boat on his back, a canoe in the jungle; he heard the crack of a parrot or a frog, he could not tell which; traveling down a river, passive, gazing up at foliage (imagined) when suddenly the vision would break entirely he would find himself self-concsious, bumping into a dream he’d had the night before but forgotten he wonders is it possible that he really had this dream, and yet surely for it has a substance; it occurs to him that there must exist a real space in his brain, physical compartments, rooms as in a house, where certain things are kept, like the dreams that one thinks they’ve forgotten where instead the dreams remain behind a closed door in one’s head. He knocks on the wall between himself and last night’s dream, playful, but this too is lost. He sees his brain like a doll’s house, a set with one side peeled back, his larger consciousness looking in, watching himself rap on the side of one wall at what he’d dreamt on the other side.
He experiences himself thinking in the present, a present self drawn from the sensation of a cumulative past—one in which the ‘I’ is persistent, continuous; similarly his present self exists with an imagined self projected into and through the future.
He is torn up again. He cannot follow a single thought. His body twitches with the uncomfortable spurs of electric goading that ride his body. He feels like he is falling down a tube. His body twitches involuntarily. Something goosing his insides.
Suddenly consumed with the sensations of his body he coughs, phlegm and spittle. He spits. He hears himself and the sound is ugly. He turns. He tosses. He sweats. He gasps. A monster choking inside of himself. It’s hard to breathe. I am dying, he thinks. This must mean that I am dying. The difference between breath and breathe, desert and dessert. He sees himself suddenly in a desert, walking beneath the sun, skin scorched, spluttering and mad with dehydration, pain.
He feels the professor next to him. He feels a hand on his forehead. The hand is cool and dry. He feels his skin draining the coolness. He splutters again. The professor’s hand pulls away and the young man cries out. He feels hands again, pulling down the covers, opening the buttons on his shirt; the young man helpless feels his bare chest exposed suddenly, he falls limp, cold, dead, certainly dead This is what it is at last at last at last.
Hands on his chest suddenly, over his heart he smells something—
“Craig,” the professor says gently. “Craig, I am about to put a balm on your chest. A powder. Chili and garlic and tobacco. I am opening your chest. Let the medecine ride through you.” The professor takes a bit of the powder, he rubs it in his hands, he rubs his hands very quickly together, he sounds not like the professor, but like a shaman, a psychic massoos and the young man’s heart has gone limp, “This is good,” the professor says, “as it should be. The death of the ego everyone must die.” The professor puts his hands on the young man’s heart and—
Craig Smith feels heat, at first soft and then stronger and stronger and more and more fierce, the young man gasps again he moans, yells, certainly alive certainly, the energy of the professor’s hands on his heart, the young man sees/feels his chest open, he feels his whole heart open up, spread wide, in two—almost painful—Craig gasps, wheezes, practically ecstatic—he feels the universe pouring into his chest, he feels himself connected. He would later describe it as something sexual. But it wasn’t quite like that at all.
And thereafter, the young man began to dream,
easily:
He rode a ship and on the ship he sat with his father on the rocking ship and his father gave him a small toy horse, a black one, and told the story of Bucephalus, and his father made him happy on the rocking ship where he happened to place cubes of sugar at the round window of a mouth
(visions are truncated–perplexed–repetitive–incomplete–out of order–happening at once)
When the ship struck an iceberg and the ship began to sink and the man felt himself a boy, for upon the death and drowning of his father he felt himself a boy, as one left alone, save for the horse—
—who drug dragged drug him to an island upon which he awoke with a spider on his face, a spider he could not see. He could not remember his name. The sand on the island was white. It was not gypsum it was still sand.
The boy lay on the beach on his back looking at the sky, every so often he tasted the sea for its tide pulled up and over and then off him like a perpetually moving blanket. He was not cold. Everything was very quiet.
He had surely died.
He never expected heaven to be like this: a lonely tropical island.
He stood up, unsteady. He wobbled. Like a colt learning to walk again.
He saw the black horse. It stomped its feet.
It stomped at the snake that tried to eat the sleeping boy.
Save for the horse, the boy was more or less alone on the island. Save for the rocks and the grass. And the boy learned to rub grass together very quickly. He learned to make fire from nothing. He fished using a stick and the pocket knife his father had left him. He explored the island. He found caves and crags. The boy went inside the caves, searching through the dark, using a torch he’d fashioned from hair stolen from the horse—collected from rocks and trees upon which the horse had rubbed himself. The boy took his torch into the darkest cave on the island and he climbed into the cave and he traveled for days through the darkness; there he found a room and under the dim light of his torch he saw ancient paintings. Paintings of horses, crude and elemental in the light.
He understood, somehow, Craig the young man understood these drawings. Completed by other young boys like himself. They were drawn along the pitch of a heros journey—the boy could see himself in the paintnigs left behind. They were never meant to be seen. The boy put his hand on one of the figures in the painting: a horse left in blood beside a handprint the size of his own. The boy closed his eyes with his hands on the horse and he saw into the past.
The boy who left the drawing there came here on a journey. He ate mushrooms grown in a tupperwear box and his teacher left him at the mouth of the cave and the boy traveled into the interior space of the cave and found his way, through a cloak of visions, to this very spot where the boy, apriori, drew the horse, before returning again to his teacher, a man.
Craig could remember, almost, if memory is like a sensory feeling of nearly grasping something palpable—Craig could almost remember hearing something about this on late tv. Was it? That cave paintings were created on shamanic visions, drawn in inaccessible places. Treacherous to achieve, possible only when one pierced reality with the second sight of lucid and psychadelic dreams.
He felt suddenly the intruder, suddenly not the boy at all, but another man in the same cave in the darkness, scaring the boy, stealing somethng from the boy, the boy looked at Craig with contempt the boy looked through Craig Smith and then Craig Smith lost his name and then he felt a sliver of an old man steal into his heart, caught in the cross fire of a prism, the man formerly known as Craig Smith swallowed Josef Beuys.
and woke up on a beach again.
and woke up on a ship again.
and saw the men grappling the black horse again. He felt nauseous. He vomited. He had an erection. He saw only darkness.
He saw, suddenly, a woman riding a horse off a diving board. She drove the horse through the air and into a very small glass of water. He turned away before they landed, but he heard the splash.
He looked at the sky which was smaller than the widness of the sky and he looked at the sky full of stars and realized that some stars could only be seen with his peripheral vision. He was confounded by the periphery of his vision.
He woke up, his hands wobbly to look at. He woke up and looked into the professor’s wobbly face.
“How are you?” asked the professor.
“I don’t know myself.”
“Here. Eat this fruit. And drink this water. And rest awhile.”
Following months: In order to better understand himself he had a spider tatooed on his face. He changed his name. He called himself Maitreya Kali. He was a new man a new man a new man a new man.
A man with a sliver of Beuys inside him, staring out his eyes.
Terri Griffith Clip on Youtube
December 21, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
You can hear an excerpt from Terri’s book, “So Much Better,” what was read at Women & Children First!
Ashley Donielle Murray on Youtube!
December 15, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
You can see Ashley reading a section of her book, Fascia, below–
Chicago Gallery Practice in Retrospect
December 14, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
This came out in last week’s NewCity. It’s a great article talking about the DIY practice here in Chicago, what it’s been up to these last weeks and all of that. In any case, it’s worth checking out, I think–
Go here to read the whole thing….
By Jason Foumberg
Jin Lee, “Ice 2,” 2008. Courtesy devening projects + editions, Chicago
Art is long, but institutional memory is short. In many ways, Chicago’s art history is written as it occurs, in situ, by the people who produce it. Artists toil in their studios, heads-down. Apartment galleries open and close as briskly as the seasons change. We consume one-night-only events by the half-dozen, like so many bottles of free Grolsch beer. Even as new art blogs proliferate, with more scenes being represented than ever before, the snapshot commentary and weekly content often feels dated by week’s end. And yet, paintings aren’t bubblegum summer jams; they’re codified slabs of culture, philosophy and style. We seek dialogue, inspiration and long-term change. In short, we seek longevity, with lasting importance for our work and our peers’—but who has time to write contemporary history while we’re in the midst of making it?
That said, Chicago loves its art history. Outsiders, Imagists, Modernists and firebrands—memorize their precepts and you’re halfway to an MFA degree (however, please don’t leave Chicago once you earn the other half). Our traditions always feel in danger of becoming tinder for the next great fire, so we hand-cobble our history and share the stories orally like a rite of passage. This is to our strength and our detriment. History is our bind. We don’t trash Paschke or cold-shoulder Mies because we’ve worked so hard to carry their legacies. In many global art centers, successive generations of artists break with the past like rebellious teenagers, but Chicagoans do not. Here, innovation comes from influence and education. Doing otherwise, it would feel as if the whole thing could unravel.
As we approach the end of the century’s first decade, it’s time to take census of our situation. Sure, it’s an arbitrary range of numbered years, but such evocative images transpire when we speak of eras, like the twenties or the sixties, and although it’s undecided how we’ll finally refer to this special decade (the naughts? the zeroes? the twenty-first century’s toilet-training years?), the task of reflection is at hand. Somehow we survived the Y2K catastrophe (perhaps belatedly realized on 9/11), and thankfully computer art didn’t take hold in the ways that it threatened (my avatar didn’t sell a single pixilated painting in his Second Life apartment gallery) so where are we now? Ten years older, who are we? Are we struggling with a new -ism? Does a collective yearning animate our desires?
Redeye Talks Apartment Gallery
December 13, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
This was published a few weeks ago in the weekend redeye…..Go here to read the whole thing.
Roommates turn Logan Square apartment into art gallery
Art Institute graduate students Katherine Pill, 26 (right), and Francesca Wilmott, 24, operate the Concertina Gallery out of their own apartment. Brian J. Morowczynski for RedEye
By Ryan Smith
For RedEye
Most curators don’t make a habit of sleeping next to their exhibits, but Katherine Pill and Francesca Wilmott wake up to their art every morning.
When the roommates take a few steps out of their bedrooms and beyond the kitchen of their second-floor apartment, they enter a living and dining room virtually devoid of furniture.
Where a table and chairs might normally sit, a few colorful, spherical objects are carefully arranged on the hardwood floor. And on the wall, where you might normally find framed family photos, there hang a volcano made of denim and a computer-generated image of faceless sheep floating in a dream world.
Essay on Apartment Galleries published on BAS
December 11, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
This essay, originally written for the ARC Digest boook and then used for FLAT’s publication about apartment spaces was posted on the BadatSports blog. You can read the whole thing by going here, though I’ve included the first paragraph/quote, what was written by one Sarah Stickney who used to live in the space….The quote was taken from a small publication created/curated by Young Joon Kwok and Rachel Shine called “It’s Your Turn.” Their silkscreened, small edition 7″-size publication was also about DIY exhibition practices and how they are important.
On the matter of public (1) space : or my apartment gallery is an arctic explorer
“‘Oh, you have a roommate?’
“ ‘Yeah, she’s actually here right now, but she’s sick….Don’t do that—she’s trying to sleep.’
“I heard them but pretended to remain asleep by keeping my eyes closed; [closing your eyes] is what passed for privacy then. My ‘room’ was in a corner of the kitchen on the other side of a folding screen. If you were tall enough, you could see me from either side at any time. The above exchange took place during the installation of a show when I happened to have a cold. I lived at the Green Lantern from 9/06 to 8/07. Recently out of college, I moved to Chicago to get my bearings. I had just spent two years living in the French countryside with no heat, no car, no Internet, no noise, no zines, no sushi, no shows, no jargon. When I moved in, I had never owned a computer. Suddenly I was in the middle of an art scene.
“Any Chicagoan who’s hip to the jive knows that an apartment gallery poses a unique set of problems. Someone actually lives there—sleeps and cooks and poos there—and yet the obligatory neutral space of the gallery must remain white-walled, spacious, antiseptic. At the GL in the earlier days, the gallery was clean, airy, spare, while on just the other side of a makeshift wall was a seething and barely-controlled chaos. A visiting friend once described the living space as ‘under a great deal of pressure,’ like the lack of density in the gallery half had to be balanced by ultra-density in the living half. This density consisted of, among other things, a large mounted buck complete with antlers, a five foot plaster statue of a fat man with an umbrella, a bong made out of steak shellacked to a milk carton, a taxidermied rooster, two large Chinese screens, many works of art in various stages of undress, two living cats…enough plates and stemware to host a diplomatic gala, a sink doubling as a bookshelf, a home-made up-ended ‘bar,’ an enormous vintage fridge, a miniature vintage stove, an easel, double-stacked books, innumerable trinkets ranging from delicate Eastern figurines to an ancient can of spam, an old-fashioned sandwich press, two Dictaphones, one enormous toaster (not in use) and a tiny one (in use). People liked throwing around comparisons to Alice in Wonderland, but that was legit. The fact that the two-foot high pepper mill was three times as tall as the delicate teapot, for instance, made me wonder if I’d accidentally swallowed a pill. And keep in mind that I’ve listed perhaps a sixteenth of the contents of those two or three improvised rooms. I haven’t even mentioned the huge quantities of building supplies, the aluminum ladder, the planks and tools and cans of paint…” (2)
Terri Griffith in Time Out Chicago!
December 9, 2009
posted by Caroline Picard
Jonathan Messinger wrote an awesome piece about Terri and her new book. I thought I’d post an excerpt here. And then of course, you can go here to read the entire thing!
Nothing feels good
A debut novel builds drama from doldrums.
By Jonathan Messinger
Someone forgot to tell Terri Griffith that all first novels are supposed to be autobiographical.
Liz, the protagonist of Griffith’s So Much Better (Green Lantern, $20), is defined by her detachment. She works at a credit union during the day and lives with her girlfriend whom she rarely sees at night, and as the book moves along, it’s clear she’s a loner. She wears her detachment as a badge to ward off potential friends.
But when we meet up with Griffith at a South Loop coffee shop to discuss the book, she’s anything but detached. In fact, she’s all smiles about the fact that her book is out in the world after nearly a decade of trying to place it. And she has the good grace to acknowledge the tiny victories that mark a new literary career.
“I sent it out, with I think tremendous success,” she says. “I probably sent 50 queries and got the book read 40 times. I’ve had agents read the book and call me, and I’ve had lovely letters from editors. It’s sad that I have to judge everything by the kindness of the rejection.”
