Y O U N G W O R L D CASMERE/DETROIT/USA

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FRANK HEATH

RED ROOM

JUN 24 - AUG 15

OPENING 6P-8P

6130 CASMERE

There is an idea of purpose, subject, and audience. “Pay attention, something is going to happen. Pay attention, something is going to happen.” There are simple devices to drive engagement. Some of it is just to focus on obsolete technology; pay phones, a nickle, the Chase kiosk deposit desk, the American voiced call center. Some of it is to indict the narrator.
 

The reliability of the narrator is always in question. But this narrator, like any narrator needs help and audience.
 

Help comes in the form of a call center. Audience comes in the form of a call center.
 

IT call centers are like suicide hotlines, they just keep you on the line as long as possible, that seems human, but under capitalism this simple device is a rudder to maintain a customer's lifespan AKA getting them to buy something AKA to get them to keep buying somethings AKA aggregate your money into their money. These are simple devices to drive engagement.
 

Step one is usually to get attention. Step two is to sustain attention. This is the customer service rep were talking about here. They’re trying to establish narrative or rather impose their narrative on you. There’s no way to sunset the narrative. And a sun doesn’t set or rise anyway. The sun is just there whether the call center is in Sri Lanka or Lawrence, Kansas. No matter what the call center has to be positioned in a postcolonial space AKA where they speak English assuming the caller, the complainant, is from the U.S. and speaks English. That is to say that the English language is it’s own imposed narrative.
 

Communication is the simple device to drive engagement.
 

When I call the call center it’s usually because something's fucked up, like someone's trying to steal my identity. Then I call India for example, where Chase lives, where they could be considered an occupying force, and talk to someone who's compulsorily taken accent neutralization courses. The goal isn’t for them, the operators, to sound like a self, but to sound unlike any accent. The operator has lost itself and I’ve lost my identity and all we have is voice. I’m reduced to storytelling and voice to communicate. I’m reduced to trying to produce intimacy to crack the code of the call centers drop down menu of rote answers, a memory palace of response mechanism.
 

There is no body here. Unless voice counts as body.
 

I have to communicate image and experience through description. We have to agree on what things are for me to describe; consensus on whether or not the world is flat or not. Each moment of consent is important to communicate. The body is the only compass for understanding but all we have is voice. It’s pre-Copernican model of exchange.
 

- Andrew Mehall
 

TOMAS VU

RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

GREEN GO HOME

OCT 1 - NOV 5

OPENING 6P-8P

121 OAKMAN BLVD HIGHLAND PARK

The story of Green Go Home is part myth and part folklore. It is also partially a misunderstanding and to some degree, an invention of the imagination. The term gringo—commonly used in Latin America to describe a Western foreigner—has been assumed by many to have etymologically originated with the phrase “Green go home!”
 

One story holds that the origin of gringo is derived from a rallying chant. During the Mexican-American War, according to legend, the American uniform frequently included green coats. Hence “Green go home!” became the recurring phrase of the population. Over time it was thought that “Green go home!” was shortened to “Green go!” and in turn became “gringo.” Detractors of the green coat theory have pointed out that U.S. troops wore blue during the Mexican Invasion, but the story remains compelling nonetheless. Another aspect of the folklore held that during the Mexican-American War, English-speaking American soldiers would sing the folk songs “Green Grow the Lilacs” or “Green Grow the Rushes, O”. In this case, the use of gringo was attributed to the song’s lyrics.
 

Another variant of this story focuses on the green stripes worn by the 3rd Cavalry— the only U.S. cavalry regiment to wear a green stripe on their uniform. Their regimental song also happened to be “Green Goes the Rushes, Ho.” In Brazil, gringo is also thought to be derived from the English words green and go, but with a different basis. Rather than originating from military interaction, this term came about from foreigners’ exploitation of nature. The Amazonian rainforest was the green that for them was ‘going’ – being stolen and destroyed by outsiders. Alternately, in Puerto Rico it is thought that the term gringo refers to the locals’ desire for the U.S. military, characterized by their green uniforms, to leave their island.
 

GREEN GO HOME by Tomas Vu and Rirkrit Tiravanija is inspired by the spirit of resistance that lies at the root of these origin stories. Whether or not these theories are true, the rebellious gesture that they represent resonates profoundly – not just in Latin America, but all over the world. The origin of the prints and text—graffiti over portraits—was a collaborative installation by Vu and Tiravanija at the Colombian-American library in Bogotá, Colombia. The provocation inherent in “Green Go Home” exposes the underlying subtext of U.S. interventions and colonialist attitudes towards its neighbors in Latin American: an antagonism that has cost many lives and much strife. In whatever country Green Go Home is installed, this spirit of resistance that is invoked – resistance against the invader, the colonial power, the repressive government. Each character represented by the portraits is a revolutionary—whether they be reveals itself to the viewer as addressing the condition of the graffiti text. “Green Go Home” is a wall of resisters, and of resistance.
 

BRIE RUAIS

ACCORDING TO THE BODY

AUG 7TH-AUG 31ST

If modernism is the user’s manual for contemporary life, then why is it so fucked up, complicated, incomprehensible, and illegible? Modernist design makes all the effort to remove the hand and introduce right angles. It implies that the human hand--because of its volatile, organic chemistry--is in opposition to the nature of contemporary life. The modernist ordering of counters, cubicles, cubes, and cubbies is all about the imposition of utopia, even though utopia is stagnant. The universe is an always swimming shark. The universe will flatten, whoop, and incapacitate utopia every time. The universe shark has an AmEx Black Card that has unlimited disorder to spend.
 

In comparison with steel, plastic, and glass, clay is the ultimate in anti-modernism. Extract it from the earth and form it. The attempt to modernize clay will always be confronted by the material’s limitations. The tile is as far as we got, and that was a long time ago. No one makes ceramic boxes for a reason. As much as people want to modernize the body from its malleable, troglodytic, golem-like self and syntheticize (this is a real word, i.e.,“to make something synthetic”) it, it can’t. It’s only an insertion or a pleat. To understand the effect of a body, use a person’s mass in clay to entertain the universe with an entropic performance of pummeling, kicking, scraping, and resisting the prescribed order of existence.
 

Clay captures its own transformation. The self perpetuates selfhood by moving into the future--like a lobster shedding against and away from utopia. Naturally, we all have to deal with the aftermath of transformation: a confused memory of where one thing ended and another began. All we remember is the in-between stage that can be described only as a decaying chrysalis. Metamorphosis is a terse act, one part street fight, one part birth. To make an indexical clay surrogate for the body is to do a Clark Kent presto change-o into spandex reality and to make that transformation a cinch by simply confronting the limits of the self in mass and volume.
 

Architecture’s insistence on 90-degree angles and its imposition of rectilinear space are a default version of reality. They close the window on one’s ability to exist outside oneself, and that’s the ultimate in individuation. You can see individuation as a tool to defy entropic forces, an act of survival plus. In the hierarchy of modern needs, self-actualization is way above survival. Our ability to grasp the idea of the self, personhood, or even a clay, non-lingual being (i.e., art) elevates us from our animal, fight-or-flight, prehistoric selves.
 

MATT TABER

I WANT YOU TO WANT ME

MAY 7TH-JUNE 4TH

OPENING 6P-8P

You never desire the thing; you always desire the context or qualities surrounding the thing. When you actually obtain the thing, it’s a failure of your projection of the thing. It’s a little bit like Midas. You want it to be gold right up until the moment you want a hamburger. Trinidad James seems to have worked this out just fine in his approximation, but Midas, for his part, projects his desire onto all objects he interacts with while his want/need/desire axis changes everything he interacts with to the point where he can no longer experience anything. His desire alienates him from the desired. It disallows intimacy. ALL-GOLD EVERYTHING (chain, ring, watch) is a curse. The only way to ameliorate the effects of the curse is by going to the bar. The bar doesn’t provide a cure. It simply allows you to attempt to take yourself out of the your location/desire by confusing your own psychological self. At the bar, you’re further away from yourself. Numb is probably the most known state to be found at the bar. You could drink cheaper alone.
 

Numbness suggests that one has achieved a wanted state. It reminds me of that line from A Picture of Dorian Gray, “You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” Wilde is kind of pregaming Deleuze. Deleuze is making it kind of binary by saying, “All desires are inherently unobtainable or distorted by our obtainment.” Wilde already realized that they aren’t a binary but that pleasure lies in desire, not in obtainment. It’s not either/or.
 

Desire is an opportunity for an ocean of disappointment.
 

We have a certain kind of relationship to objects, space, desire, and the way we interact with things. Architecture is the interface. Architecture – or installation, in this case – is an open system for the human user. In life, it’s proprietary but conditioned by the user. But there’s always a little sniff of fascism in all these blueprints and sometimes a rank stench. The Apple store, for instance, gives the impression of openness, but it is actually defined by complete material opacity.And even though it has a bar, everything in there is proprietary and unhackable, just like its OS. The operating system imposes itself on you as opposed to you on it. It’s material deteriminism. You can’t even know what powers it.
 

Different genres = Different desires
 

Genre asks very little of you and allows you to impose yourself onto it. Anybody can be the Cowboy, Veruca Salt, Cleopatra, Stoner. All the genres represented are flattened by the categories that contain them, but that’s what grants them their autonomy. The genre players exist in a computational world because of the failure of physical space. Any Brutalist car park reminds you of that failure. A parking garages failure – it’s numbness – allows it to be neutral and flat. It gains autonomy in its stark position of its only-this-thingness. It’s shallow desire has no need to be hacked. It’s flat, programmed, and unremarkable like us.
 

CHRISSY SCOLARO

ON THE BEACH, NOT IN A DRAWER

NOVEMBER 15TH-DECEMBER 15TH

OPENING 2P-5P

A kite is a victim you are sure of/You love it because it pulls

gentle enough to call you master/strong enough to call you fool

because it lives/like a desperate trained falcon/in the high sweet air

and you can always haul it down/to tame it in your drawer.

- L. Cohen

Found in such diverse objects as toothbrushes, water bottles, doorknobs, chewing gum, cellophane wrap, electronic and computer parts, acrylic paint, vinyl, Formica, and the ubiquitous polyurethane plastic bags received every time we buy anything, plastic has become so vernacular, we fail to recognize just how radically it has reconfigured the everyday. Plastics have also had enormous medical and technological benefits, insulating electric wires to allow electricity to flow quickly and safely, making blood transfusions safe and common through vinyl blood bags, and transforming dentistry’s use of hard rubber plates with lightweight pink ones. Plastics are also more flexible, easy to produce, and versatile than many other modern or natural substances. They are the essence of change and mutability, which is to say, the very definition of the modern.
 

Developed over the last century into an extended family of amazing objects with thousands of different uses and applications, plastics were hailed from the start as a panacea, a man-made alchemical wizardry transforming nature through rational chemistry. And yet in recent years it is no secret that plastics has come under the gun of environmental, biological, and health concerns.
 

Cellophane Aura
 

The fashion for plastics evolved with the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1880, George Eastman was manufacturing photographic film from celluloid, developed by John Wesley Hyatt in 1870. By 1909, New York-based chemist Leo Baekeland was using heat and compression to mix carbolic acid (phenol) with formaldehyde, producing a non-dissolvable and nonconductive material now known as “Bakelite.” Bakelite could mold itself into almost any desired shape or form and henceforth newer, cheaper, plastic facsimiles began replacing rare materials like ivory (used in billiard balls), tortoiseshell (used in hairbrushes), diamonds, silk, and furs.
 

Unlike rare or non-synthetic materials, plastics were stable yet alarmingly transformable, non-fragile (contra glass), easy to work with, and economically profitable for manufacturers. As the US trailblazed through its golden era of entrepreneurship, plastics were there, ready and eager to mold themselves to the ambitious dreams and visions of the zeitgeist.
 

This is one reason why plastics so “strongly reflect[s] its own era,” writes Thelma Newman. It is the most conducive “vehicle to express man’s soaring imagination.” The pivotal role of plastics in the construction of Hollywood glamour in the 1920s and ’30s thus comes as no surprise. Used in film stock and on film sets, plastic products provided a repertoire of new materials and metaphors in mirrors, shiny surfaces, lighting effects, smoke screens, and synthetic auras available to all who dared to look. Plastic glamour was disposable glamour, as Judith Brown puts it, quick and easy to deliver its media fix.
 

The military, for its part, requisitioned the production of new plastic items at the outset of World War II to replace metal and rubber items like standard-issue GI combs, mortar fuses, parachutes, turrets used on planes for gunners, and bugles. Plastic had proven themselves during the war, argued the American entrepreneur and inventor of Tupperware, Earl Tupper, but “like all young vets returning from the war,” plastic did not yet have “civilian adult experience.”
 

Postwar Prosaic Shine
 

By the 1940s, people were so enthralled with plastic, reports science writer Susan Freinkel, that the word “cellophane” was designated the “third most beautiful word in the English language, right behind ‘mother’ and ‘memory.’” And while contenders to plastics had emerged, the substance was still by and large celebrated as the pinnacle of change and innovation.
 

Museums of modern art responded with major exhibitions devoted to plastic, foregrounding the tensions between art and industry. In his New York Times review of the 1966 Whitney annual exhibition, Hilton Kramer simultaneously trashes and lauds the present “condition of sculpture in this country.” While he finds “youth in the saddle [full of] energies and aspirations that are cheerfully and militantly in pursuit of new modes of sensibility,” he also finds himself appalled with the “superficial glitter of oversized plastic toys and ersatz geometric monuments passing for serious sculptural statements.” A similar ambivalence colors his 1968 review of the Museum of Contemporary Craft’s ‘ Plastics as Plastics’ exhibition, “Faced with a slew of plastic accessories, architectural components, industrial designs, kitchenware, clothes, jewelry, and sundry, Kramer questions if the exhibition is even, “strictly speaking, an art exhibition.” That is, had art become the forearm of industrial commerce? (Had it ever not been?) plastics introduced a “Faustian freedom,” Kramer concludes, the “answer to an artist’s dream,” only if the artist is willing to pay the high price of “sharing the mechanism of creation with technical processes not always susceptible to the artist’s will.”
 

Cellophane Aura
 

Concerns about plastics grew beyond the art world. When industry began producing “schlocky kinds of things” like pink flamingos for lawns, or DuPont’s synthetic leather in the 1960s, seemed to lose its cutting edge. New links were made to environmental and health hazards. Though vinyl blood bags were once hailed as a miracle development, a 1970s experiment revealed rat livers wrapped in the began to get tumors. Researchers observed chemicals from the vinyl blood bags (called DEHP -------izers) leach into the fluids taken into the rats’ bodies—and so too into the medical patients who had received treatment with the bags.
 

Further investigations revealed people who had not even been medical patients retained trace levels of the --------izer (i.e., by using hoses in the garden). It was concluded at the time, however, that these levels were “not harmful.” Plastics were “fine for human health,” except under “very, very particular and rare circumstances.” Similar studies accumulated and by the late 1960s talking about plastics as anything utopian became a joke, as illustrated in the punch line to Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967). Playing the young Benjamin Braddock, Dustin Hoffman is perfunctorily informed, “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word … plastic… There’s a great future in plastics.” The comment was received at the time as offbeat, perhaps because it so accurately foreshadowed the darker shine of plastics to come.
 

Retrograde Sublime
 

While controversy over the causes and effects of disease, death, toxins, and environmental breakdown related to plastic continues, there is enough evidence to merit sustained concern. The Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), passed by the US Congress in 1976 and administered by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), regulates the chemical industry, but the policy treats chemicals as safe until proven dangerous. Because manufacturers in the US do not have to volunteer information about chemical development, the EPA is left without much-needed information.
 

One currently problematic plastic is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), used in soda and water bottles. Recent studies show that PET leaches a compound that stimulates and alters estrogenic activity, though specific impacts on health remain inconclusive.
 

Another controversial plastic is Bisphenol A (BPA), used in numerous consumer products including medical supplies, safety equipment, audiovisual parts, and food packaging. Suffice it to say that the once magical substance has fallen from grace while levels of production accelerate at alarming rates. Over the last sixty years the use of plastics has increased almost twentyfold, with an annual production reaching two hundred eighty million tons in 2011. According to Ellen Gamerman, one million plastic bags are used every minute while the US alone goes through one hundred billion plastic shopping bags annually.
 

Oceans that once supplied the fossil fuels to process natural oil, generating byproducts used to develop plastics, are now greeted with their perverse offspring: plastics that do not biodegrade (polyurethane takes one thousand years to break down) and contain toxic debris that contaminate soil, ocean life, and waterways. Much of the ocean’s plastic ends up in what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the Pacific Ocean strewn with floating debris twice the size of Texas. Ocean life and marine vertebrae—including birds, dolphins, fish, and turtles—often misinterpret colorful plastic debris (bags, lighters, toothbrushes, etc.) as food or prey. Extensive ingestion results in the obstruction and malfunction of the digestive tract and/or entanglement in plastic(called “ghost nests”). Both events cause starvation and eventual mortality. Each year, approximately one billion seabirds and mammals die from eating bags.
 

On the Midway Atoll, a cluster of islands in the patch more than two thousand miles from the nearest continent. The plastic detritus of consumer culture surfaces here inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses. Parents feed nesting chicks lethal quantities of plastics, having mistaken the floating trash for food during foraging. The appropriate response becomes one of utter shock followed by gut-wrenching grief and shame.
 

As new plastics continue to roll off the shelf, offering irresistible advantages in computing, cutting-edge sports gear, and household paraphernalia, how are we to deal with them, ethically and conscientiously? What people used to call community meant values of sharing, care, and fellowship, trumping vested interests in profit, prestige, or statistical assessment. A future generation of artists should take heed from László Moholy-Nagy, who argued over half a century ago that “new artists working with plastics inevitably have to take up scientific studies or else wait decades until knowledge about plastics becomes commonplace.”
 

JEN WANG

YOU CAN'T HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO

OCTOBER 24TH-NOVEMBER 10TH

OPENING 4P-7P

Sean:  Hey Gerry, in the 1960’s there was a young man that graduated from the University of Michigan, did some brilliant work in mathematics, specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was an assistant professor; showed amazing potential. Then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.

Gerry: Yeah, so who was he?

Sean:  Ted Kaczynski

Good Will Hunting, 1997, Gus Van Sant

Ted Kaczynski is alternately referred to as a serial killer and a terrorist. His demand to publish his manifesto in the Washington Post and New York Times to avoid “further violence” was met and considered to be “making the right choice between bad options." His brother, reading the manifesto at the suggestion of his wife, contacted the FBI after recognizing his tone and use of the phrase, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”

“With the wholly uncritical treatment — nay, giddy embrace — of high technology, even to such excrescences as machine "emotions" which you develop and promote, Psychology Today has at least made it publicly plain what's intended for social life. Your dehumanizing work is a prime contribution to high tech's accelerating motion toward an ever more artificial, de-individuated, empty landscape. I believe I am not alone in the opinion that vermin such as you will one day be considered among the worst criminals this century has produced.”

(Signed) In Revulsion, John Zerzan

Kaczynski was accepted to Harvard at 16, received his PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan and became an assistant professor at University of California Berkely in 1967, resigning after two years.

“The antitechnology Luddite movement will grow increasingly vocal and possibly resort to violence as these people become enraged over the emergence of new technologies that threaten traditional attitudes regarding the nature of human life (radical life extension, genetic engineering, cybernetics) and the supremacy of mankind (artificial intelligence). Though the Luddites might, at best, succeed in delaying the Singularity, the march of technology is irresistible and they will inevitably fail in keeping the world frozen at a fixed level of development.”

Ray Kurzweil predicting singularity in 2040.

Kaczynski currenty resides at the “Supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado with Zacarias Moussaoui, Terry Nichols, Robert Hanssen, and Larry Hoover. He lives in isolation 23.5 hours a day.

“If the system succeeds in acquiring sufficient control over human behavior quickly enough, it will probably survive. Otherwise it will break down. We think the issue will most likely be resolved within the next several decades, say 40 to 100 years.”  

Ted Kaczynski

ANDREW MEHALL

NEW IDEAS(REINFORCING SHITTY OLD IDEAS)

OCTOBER 10TH-NOVEMBER 10TH

OPENING 4P-10P

12056 ST AUBIN

She parked in the driveway, blocking my car in, and asked me to write down my goals. I waffled, and she suggested we meditate, “To loosen up the gray matter, and let’s get the head and the heart really yammering at each other!” We meditated. Then I wrote down my goals. One of my goals is to have more varieties of cars in Grand Theft Auto. Every time I see another SUV on screen, I know it’s just gonna be more SUVs, and I’m in a loop. It breaks immersion. She asked me what I want to be immersed in. She asked me about my favorite feelings. I was confused by this question and excused myself to the loo in order to check my email and to read what I had actually placed an ad for.
 

I came out, and she asked me to meditate again. I felt really great after both the visioning exercises and meditation, though I felt some body discomfort at the top of the sacrum, in my left trapezius, between my scapula and thorax 4, and in my fingertips (Parts l & ll). If there’s one thing I’ve learned about meditation—and I’ve done it twice now—it’s that it’s not comfortable.
 

I wasn’t sure I was going to get an artist statement out of this deal. She had been at my home for three hours already. Also we still hadn’t discussed money. I didn’t know what her rates were going to be, and I loathe discussions about money and dislike sharing my anxiety about money with others.
 

When I came back out, she asked me again about my feelings. I told her I had seen a lunar eclipse the other night—a blood moon! I described how I had been buying houses near the Atlanta airport and rehabbing them. I buy along the busiest flight paths, so the houses repeatedly experience plane shadows and darken. I call them Eclipse Houses and soundproof them for solitude and put in tons of skylights so you can really feel the shadow. I also feel like the ATL is a good bet to cash in on that Walking-Dead market when the plague hits. People are going to want to be close to the CDC unless, of course, they do like they did with AIDS and blame it on us.
 

I described much of my art to Gwen as “digital” and used the phrase “the technological sublime” to describe Wikipedia and IMDB as the God Head, the way earlier generations might refer back to Suetonius or Marlowe or Merlin and Percival. She asked me to describe a technological experience equal to sitting next to a bear eating salmon brain. I began to realize we weren’t discussing art.
 

We meditated again, and I realized I need to stretch more. My back still felt tight. But this time Gwen told me that when I begin to lose my breath, to pretend there’s a puppy leash on my thoughts and to gently puppy pull my thoughts back to my breath and look at the back of my eyes, which should remain visually static.
 

When we finished––I’ve now meditated four times today, four times more than I had in my life–Gwen asked me to describe an experience in the digital world that’s the same as meditation. I mentioned going down a Cockney rhyming slang K-Hole while on ketamine. Pretty meta. In fact, I’m pretty sure I was wearing a Metta World Peace jersey. (My World B. Free throwback was in the wash.) She said drugs don’t count and that “Our aim isn’t dissociation but experience. One promotes apathy, and one promotes empathy.” I jokingly said, “Yeah? Which is which?” Haha. She frowned and stared at me.
 

I feigned some GI problems, went into the bathroom, and cried a little bit. I ran the water to shield the sniffles. I felt guilty for running the water right down the drain. It made me feel the same way as when I use a straw and I know they made it and shipped it and packaged it and packaged it inside of a larger package, which was inside an even larger carton, which was on a pallet covered in plastic to hold it all together so that it could make it over from China, or wherever, in a container on a container ship. And now I’ve unwrapped it, and I’m going to use it once, and it will go right in the landfill after the busser clears it and the dishwasher takes it to the dumpster; the sanitation professional takes it to way station, where it then goes on to the landfill, where the polyethylene corn syrup suction device has a half life of about forty-eight years—or about as long as a mature male lake sturgeon lives. This made me cry more. I cleaned up, flushed, wiped my face, and turned off the water. I hadn’t cried since I found out my mom's dog died, and that was years and years ago.
 

Gwen suggested a walk. I think she knew I was crying, even though I had fake flushed twice––more water waste. As we walked, she named many trees in English and Latin. She pointed out what was edible: service berries, sedum, sorrel, purslane, sidewalk salad. She pointed out a bee and identified many birdcalls and could whistle some back. She didn’t do any of this in a show offy way. She asked if I had brought my phone. She had suggested I wouldn’t need it on the walk. I said yes, “I have it,” somewhat sheepish, somewhat defiant, and said I needed it for the time. I didn’t have a watch.
 

She asked me to read a QR code on a tree. I didn’t see any code, but I still looked for some hidden pattern that would show the alignment targets, those large outer squares. She took my phone. It also didn’t work for her, and she said, “Oh, right, because trees have 32 million times more information than a Toyota produced 2-D barcode.” She asked me if I had backed up my phone recently. I lied and said yes, and she dropped my phone down the sewer. Gwen said there was a QR code in the sewer and that the phone would likely swim home through the sewer up the toilet like a migrating, homesick, horny salmon. “If a bee or a butterfly or a dumb old Canadian goose can find its way home then certainly a $429 smart phone (two-year plan from Best Buy) with geo-located military grade mapping capabilities and intimate relationships with orbiting satellites should be able to.
 

LAN TUAZON

BAD GRASS NEVER DIES

SEPTEMBER 26TH-OCTOBER 17TH

OPENING 5P-7P

1. In Create Your Own Landfill!, author and behaviorist Hermann Eudecs claims the adult understanding of “material” and “objects” begins at age eight because, as he sees it, the child doesn’t typically “involve herself in purchasing that which produces waste. Those purchases tend to be in the general-store manner of purchasing the singular object from the larger container without wrapper or with a wrapper 3% to 7% of the purchased item’s size.” He suggests that children under eight maintain a primarily waste-free, pre-consumer use behavior, this behavior occurs before they are “subjected” to caring for money. He repeatedly refers to the idea of children working for an allowance not as a preparation for them to use money the way adults do (i.e., saving and prioritizing) but to preaffirm the punitive responsibility of work. Money used not to create discipline and reward completed work but as a disciplinary act to make a child share the same money related burden and anxiety the parent experiences.
 

Eudecs praises children younger than eight and argues that their lack of a “wide materialism” is to be encouraged because their consumption is based solely on the act of consumption itself or “having rather than wasting, obsolescence, or continuous replacement.” He advances a notion that the move away from buying a toy to buying the same toy in a box, “specifically for the purpose of wrapping, all those ugly right angles, producing even more GAR-BAGE! [sic]” was to lose understanding of the shape of an object, its objectness and also to not rely on the shopkeeper to maintain the integrity of the factory in his store—all this being central to the pre-suburban, pre-automotive, pre-freeway retail model. If you have a choice between two identically distanced stores with identical wares, it comes down not only to the customer's relationship with the shopkeeper but also to the shopkeeper’s “relationship to the object” and to the condition of the wares. This is where the imprimatur “Factory Sealed” comes into common usage.
 

As the retail object became fully wrapped, the shopkeeper’s only responsibility was to deliver a low price, and therefore the shopkeeper needn’t be located as part of a community. To define this behavior, Eudecs produces an extremely complicated equation in which time spent driving, mileage, gas price, car wear related to the durability and age of the car, the amortization of the car loan, wages, potential overtime, outside income, the potential to share driving, the potential to share driving/objects/wares with a neighbor(s), the consequences of that relationship going poorly… These and seventeen other variables go into deciding what the best use of time and resources is for the best return on time and money spent. He gets very deep on what it means to drive across town to grab a sale price and the effect that has on the community fabric, after which he states a qualifier, “That’s to say until the mega-general store, the super-super market, and the every-department department store can deliver directly to you from outer space.” There’s an illustration of a stork with a bicycle, in the book, after that sentence. It should be an illustration of a drone with a bike in an Amazon box. This guy saw the future, and the future was named Jeff Bezos.
 

His profound dissatisfaction with the then contemporary, consumerist, suburban life is also related to not using the body—an unrelation to self as body—and what it takes to make a thing, a chicken, a chicken coop, a grave, a hoed row. He proposes making a child dig a hole in the yard to bury every waste product for one year (excluding human waste, animal fat, grains, or any items that may increase “rodent pressure”). In his multi-valent, how-to-build-a-perfectly-happy-kid way, he says making a “personal landfill” describes what a volume (he refers to it as “space” or “the void”) is by filling it with all the artifacts and ecofacts of that child’s life. The point is to see what a year of trash looks like. “Not only will a child completely wear themselves out, digging a hole and burying their own trash, which is a healthy, responsible alternative to screen time [He’s talking TV here], but also a child will learn about the life of an object. This creation of the personal landfill will describe the life span of the organic and inorganic to a child and a child's basic understanding of an object's time will not only produce the conditions for a happier child but they will understand their own death and mortality in a similar manner, as a duration rather than a history.”
 

If you take Eudecs at his word, you can learn everything about what objects are if you’re responsible for it, not for it’s life span, but for your life span. The key is not thinking of objects only from the moment the customer lays down the cash until the customer/owner changes it to refuse and tosses it out the window on the freeway (camera pans to tearful Native American (assuming there’s one left)). There is a before and after of objects.
 

2. The pit disappears history. History itself is nothing but a duration reflected in the same way the drunk in the back of the haywagon looks not at the future coming towards him but at the trees passing into the past, lit by the light of a dying galaxy, though it’s dead by the time it lights our world. The mound is the reminder of history—the pile—and to bury is to forget. The headstone, marker, indicator, or shitty little monument is the only reminder that something is down there. But we don’t really know what’s down there as evidenced by Garden State or Lynyrd Skynrd and whether they may or may not be wearing Neil Young shirts in burial. The unmarked grave, the potter’s field, offends our sense of self and its need to exist. You can kill a zombie, but if you want to be sure it’s dead, you have to make a pyre. The mummy is made to live in the future, to be reborn by its unburial. The archeologist/academic grave robber reanimates the dead by naming and framing it. As John C. Reilly so eloquently puts it in his ESPY contract negotiation, “Dig ‘em up!”
 

3. Call for participation: A known philosopher called a living room a lie because it’s a scene of life with no living. Instead he called it a death room, the place where you do nothing. The scene is a bound space, a park, a store, the street—all are pictures waiting for you to enter it and complete the scene. The scene tames all of us to follow its pre-written rules of engagement, and one “makes a scene” when social rules are disturbed: an outburst in the office, crying in an airport, resting in the flow of traffic. These actions are obscene—outside the scenic picture. The prefix “ob” is an intensifier, meaning against and away from the scene; it is opposed to, hostile, and resistant. Anyone out of place ends up going elsewhere, searching out and into the open obscene. There in the obscene, they live to write their own story at will. Leave your death rooms and come out into the open obscene and experience the Pit of World. Bring things to bury, photographs, love letters, mementos. Banish them from your future in a ritual severing of the past.
 

Lan Tuazon, born in 1976, attended the Cooper Union and Yale and lives and works in Chicago, where she is a sculpture professor at SAIC. Her work has been shown WKV Kunstverein in Germany, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City.
 

CLAIRE ASHLEY

LANK LIMP LEMONS SUCK

AUGUST 29TH-SEPTEMBER 19TH

OPENING 5P-7P

There’s a tendency to think about this work—Is it pillows? Is it goiters? Are they extremely large drug mule balloons?—as painting, even though it was born as sculpture. But it’s surface and paint on canvas, so it’s like painting? But if it’s painting, then is the stretcher air rather than wood? Is it the ultimate in provisionality? Is it like a constantly inhaling lung, trying to take a deeper hit, ever so slightly deflating like that shitty air mattress in your sister-in-law’s extra bedroom? It’s more air mattress, more hot air balloon, more lung than sculpture. More like a ceramic vessel. If we define the major difference between painting and sculpture as flat and two-dimensional versus unflat and three-dimensional, then the difference between all of that and this work is that it’s never static. It’s constantly breathing in and deflating—a trompe-l'œil of plane and scale.
 

The work is containers. Not containers for ideas, that pretense towards pretense—a bit of hot air—but actual containers in the same way a hot air balloon is a holder that proposes motion, travel, observation. And in the nomenclature of the “hot air” business, the balloon itself is called an envelope, which is a definition that comes with a whole other saturated history (dating back to 3500 BCE) of the first known envelope. The first envelope was, of course, a clay apparatus used to hold financial documents. We have to look at this as a language apparatus, not just a linguistic game. This is a realization that the way we language objects creates an allowance for not new objects but new understanding of a thing that’s fundamentally, physically empty. So if we think about this work as an envelope, it implies that it carries something or has something to deliver.
 

In Richard Serra: Interviews Etc. 1970-1980, Serra mentions Barbara Rose’s claim that “the avoidance of concerns properly belonging to architecture and painting” creates “three dimensional painting” and “failed architecture.” There are natural affinities with soft sculpture here, but Serra is more interesting as a comparative because his work is neither sculpture nor architecture. And it’s not a slumped and dumped version of Barthian third, which mimics these lungs and which can’t be Venn cemented into a both/and of painting and sculpture. It refuses either/or.
 

The popular footnote of Serra making work that can kill seemingly holds no truth in these bulbous, wheezy pillows née quilts. However, and this is a big-ass however, the half life of PVC-coated canvas is every bit as dangerous as Cor-Ten. The amalgamation of infinite-life plastic here posits a more unknown, insidious evil than the occasional life-crushing Gagosian sale/placement, as can be attested to the Neil Young understanding of junkyard physics: “Rust Never Sleeps.” Plastic in landfills is forever, always and true.
 

A note on PVC, objects and sculptural value:
 

The initial recognition of the polymer itself was synthesized in 1872 by accidentally leaving it in sunlight. Its initial rigidity as a thermoplastic was updated to its current flexibility, used in this work, in 1926 by B.F. Goodrich.
 

To understand the value of PVC and the radical difference here between PVC as surface with air as stretcher versus canvas and stretcher, the Duck and the Decorated Shed as it were, we have to consider PVC in it’s most common American costume, as home waste pipe, though your debit and customer loyalty cards are also PVC. PVC as waste envelope can take on the entire human waste of a professional football stadium over the life of a football stadium (avg. 31 years) without failure. It is perfect in it’s ability to not breakdown in response to biochemical materials and thusly can only be destroyed by burning which produces chlorine gas, the lethal agent used in mustard gas in WWI by the German military and synthesized by IG Farben who later played the primary corporate role in WWII and the concentration camp experiments AKA genocide. If we are to consider the elemental, which Serra defines as volumetric, I think the smart money goes with chlorine derivatives when it comes to long term understanding of objects.
 

JEREMY COUILLARD

BELIEVES IN REINCARNATION HATES HUGS

JULY 25TH-AUGUST 26TH

OPENING 6P-8P

There’s an idea that mindfulness can promote a disconnect with the physical self and that such behavior is consequently the only way to look into the heart of reality. Disconnection is a MacGuffin because it points to contemporary understandings of dissociative behavior: gridless anti-consumerism, crust-punk squalor and squats, and the warm impermanence of Leary-esque, full-time, always-on-call, interminably Waiting-for-the-Man drug use.
 

You could make an argument that these behaviors, due specifically to the lack of normativity, are a disconnect, but none produces more refusal than someone living in a Catholic Worker House, performing the acts of mercy, forgoing the use of fossil fuels, and choosing not to eat sentient beings. These colloquially dissociative practices are linked to a refutation of capital and political systems and a social understanding of dissociative trauma produced by those systems, not to relinquishing the corporeal. Mindfulness is produced by detachment of the body and it’s want/needs, not by refusing to camp out in anticipation of Black Friday.
 

It’s hard to remember a time when Google or the simulated wasn’t a primary source material; however, simulation is bound to the lived experience going back to Plato’s the Cave. Disconnect, Detachment, and the Dissociative-- (also as a clinical term--) allows us to think there’s a tail-eating modality, ever present in all acts of refusal, and any refutation can stand in place for all refutation. A punk’s well-coiffed Mohawk; Is he a member of the Kahniakenhaka? Or even the Iroquois Confederacy? It’s doubtful. The appropriation is a specious refusal, forever linked to genocide. If refutation is a true, pure state, then is the only real state of refusal the mystical tradition of going naked into the desert to perform a Dasani-less, SPF 60-less, Google Maps-less slow burn immolation?
 

The Blue/Red, Reeves/Fishburne binary is constantly reified. It posits only participation and refusal; it’s either the sedated, slurred work/life/death Democracy, Levi’s, and In-N-Out life or the hyper-aware self, choosing to opt out. And yet all individuals are still consigned to wear clothes produced by Bangladeshi textile workers, who are mostly, women and children, destitute, and unable to access fresh water because the local water table has been destroyed by the chemical run-off produced by the newest run of Bart Simpson or Cleveland Cavaliers “2015 NBA Champs!” t-shirts. Used, second market, materials don’t escape capital and it’s inherent environmental terror, and this is evident in that a used t-shirt from Salvation Army still has sweatshop sweat and climate change (oil slicks and overseers), in it’s very warp and woof. Unlike your self and my self, all goods maintain a consequence of negative externality.
 

It’s long been the vogue for a certain class to knock the simulated as a third space between reality and unreality, a purgatorial, anti-Protestant disengagement with the present. It’s a binaristic understanding of the possibilities of being. The common misuse of Karma as, “What comes around goes around” is very similar to the misunderstanding of reincarnation as (a) second life. Reincarnation is not a third way but the ur state of a near endless, transitional, and provisional state of the world and the self.
 

To let go of reality and unreality is to acknowledge the choice to direct energy on the transcendence of the self rather than the named, identifiable, individual, credit-scored self. The benefit of reincarnation is it allows the self to be understood over millennia, which is what produces the easy buy-in for negation and detachment, whereas focus on the self—, the individual, the choice—, produces ongoing, real-time horror. Simulation produces a state of detachment, allowing neither acceptance of the present nor the future. The benefit of simulation is it produces the allowance for the maximized, multiple present tense. It consequently allows all histories and futures to be understood and felt without the presence of a body.
 

Jeremy Couillard is from Plymouth, Michigan and has exhibited at the Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Salon 94, NYC, and recently presented Out of Body Experience Clinic at Louis B. James, NYC.
 

SANDY SMITH

SIX SIDES

JUNE 13TH-JULY 18TH

The work mimics the thought and design of the planner, the professional, and the hard interactivity of the corporate. However, the work is that of the single producer, homemade, the work of the hobbyist. It is made in the manner of the mantra; repetitive but differing from the factory in that the \ corporate hierarchy exists inside one person, this singular producer.
 

The work encourages a design relationship with what we define as municipal: a state-sanctioned public space for use by the citizenry. The municipal is conditional, it concedes public space for revolutions doomed to fail by design. The human mic doesn’t work if you are being tear gassed. The planners rendering doesn’t include the armored vehicle.
 

The quadranglulated pyramidal form echoes anti-echoic sound proofing but of course it’s hand made. It also echoes anti-sitting nudging devices and anti-skateboarding devices that decurb the curb and unledge the planter and imagine a public space which can’t be defined or redefined by the public, reinforcing public space as void of public, the less likely a public be comfortable enough to assemble, organize, or protest there.
 

Our vision of the public disallows the visual interruption of the homeless or other congregational populations never proffered in the planners rendering. The planner hijacks public apathy for the plaza and the square, the public space. It reaffirms the municipal as the non-social and reifies the individual by offering free WiFi in the town green. The entirety of the language of the artist and the planner is versed in the anti whereas the state and the corporate promote a pro public position albeit opaque and conditional.
 

The renewal of public space as a place to use my screen encourages me to participate in the environment of the singular. The municipal as an externality will push me away from myself and into an uncontrollable world. The uncontrollable externality disallows my self-actualization. The denial of self-actualization doesn’t allow for the present tense to occur.
 

The screen allows for a constant renewal of the present tense, to bring the aggregate of everything into the public, the public becomes a hyperactive space of nothing. The planners rendering is an exuberant framing of nothing in many ways aped from film, there’re never enough extras to make Apocalypse Now look like actual War or the dance scene in the Matrix to look like an actual Rave. The rendering doesn’t show the single citizen facing off with the tank. The rendering doesn’t zoom out to show the tens of thousands protesting, it only reinforces the American idea of the individual.
 

Visual comparisons work in a pre-language way because they don’t have to rely on textual comparisons especially when all etymologies for all words in all languages over the course of all histories are now instantly available. The screen is my actual everything and defines how I think of saturation. The phone itself is only the physical, weighted pocket reminder nothing at all is happening.
 

Sculpture takes a privileged position right now. It doesn’t compete with the screen. It is slower than most everything. Slow in the way my skepticism slows everything down. Skepticism should not be confused with contrarianist philosophy. My offer is not contrarian because the contrarian has no position. My offer is physical density unimpregnated by the digital environment. My offer is not to present the monolith of disengagement proffered by soft interactivity. Soft interactivity thinks itself pro public. It allows for easy participatory acts that will ameliorate the public.
 

Sandy Smith is from Glasgow, Scotland and has exhibited at Infernoesque, Berlin, Sydhavn Station, Copenhagen, and Brett Wesley Gallery, Las Vegas.
 

ANDREW MEHALL  BEN HALL

ZOOKEEPERS 

DECEMBER 5TH-JANUARY 9TH

Otto: Don't call me stupid.

Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape?

Otto: Apes don't read philosophy.

Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

 

We’ve been thinking a whole bunch about how a serious joke is still built the same as a regular joke and how isn’t that true of all systems? The more they, those rascally systems, mirror existing modes of production—like a plant bearing a seed (natural/commodity/musical/sexual)—the more successful they are because the receiver doesn’t need to build a new digestive or registry strategy to understand the material. The receivership is about as ready as the average pit bull is for a little thumb of tartare—that’s to say accepting verging on grateful.

Rocky Raccoon has this signifyin’ presence, right? It’s the same basic form as the story of the St.Louis-Christmas murder of Billy Lyons in 1895. That’s the sort of pre-existing apparatus they’re humping or maybe just bumping into. So not to denigrate or discount the power of the Lenin/McCarthy axis (after all, they came together) but to say they straight up lift-n-ape earlier musical traditions reaching back hundreds of years into West African story telling tradition, and that’s in large part why it’s so goddam successful. It’s not like you go to the trading post to get a new mule, and some joker tries to sell you a baby hippo. You figure out where the very best mules are, and you just go get you a little mule puppy or pupa or kitten or whatever it’s called. Buying a hippo would be inappropriate. If we’re imprecise about characterizing the nature of that transaction and its composite parts, well, then, uh...

We’re trying not to do that old thing where you build a very shallow mythology and create a few of its recently dug up and discovered artifacts—or that thing where you give up some stock responses to aftermath. Art typically makes a series of demands, and often it doesn’t feel like there’s any specific investigation occurring. In the work or the language around the work, we make these decisions, but we never have to articulate the consequences of those decisions. And that kinda sucks, right? It’s not so genuine. It’s not that generous or particularly generative. We’d like to make a Ginuwine pun here, but we’re way toooo cool for that move.

So, borne out of these largely dramaturgical conversations Ben and Andrew had when Andrew was Ben’s gallerist, they decided to try and bring it to occasion, the aesthetics of their ongoing investigations into all the normal art stuff: regeneration in sealed ecosystems, non-gendered fucking, kids building forts, how much can you gift of your own holdings and still have a little left to move forward, and, naturally, Randy “Macho Man” Savage’s time in the Cardinals farm system and how Macho’s incredible costuming serves as a postulate for Riff Raff. We’re thinking less aping and more ape.

 

KAMBUI OLUJIMI

THE CONSPIRACY OF GOOD PEOPLE

OCTOBER 18TH-NOVEMBER 22ND

Young World is pleased to present new performance by Kambui Olujimi, ‘The Conspiracy of Good People.’

 

‘Conspiracy’ examines the rationale of interpersonal networks as a support for durational well-being and endurance. The qualifier, ‘We all know’ becomes a motivator for the movement or performance and an allowance, a predeterminer, assuming togetherness, wholeness, entirety and shared knowledge; kindness becomes a predeterminer for endurance, a condition for the possibility of going on, getting by, moving forward, surviving.

 

‘Conspiracy’ is a continuation of work Olujimi has done with platforms and durational performance, putting architectural obligations on sculpture i.e., architecture requiring regular action to exist as such. The objects creating the platforms in ‘Conspiracy’ are themselves abandoned, disused, unowned and stand as a direct inversion to church space which is church only because the interior objects are sanctified. Without those objects church space is only place, without ownership Olujimi’s future platforms are refuse.

 

In each case, performer, object and place are energized through recognition; all things abandoned are resanctified. Nods, hellos, tacit acknowledgment, high fives and bear hugs all produce the possibility for endurance in the everyday. The unacknowledged as a group produce no heroism in the everyday by virtue of having to endure the e’eryday, everyday but every moment of social interaction produces the possibility of a many-hands-makes-light-work, emotional barn-raising for an activated inner space and self.

 

The inability to maintain a series of interpersonal supports produces the view that an individual staying alive is nothing more than a run of good luck, taking a round in the Kevlar rather than the head. Each step Olujimi takes into literal empty space mirrors acknowledgment, the act of acknowledgement, and the support system acknowledgement produces, the nod, ‘the I see you of it all,’ the anti-Ellisonian uninvisibility of recognition produces the possibility of smoke taking form, recognition producing reality, and the warmth of human participation
 

Kambui Olujimi is from Bedford-Stuyvesant and has exhibited at BAM, MOCA LA, Studio Museum Harlem and Brooklyn Museum. His conversation with Mark Bradford on race and police brutality was published in Modern Painters in May, 2015.
 

VIRGINIA POUNDSTONE

THE WASTE LAND AND OTHER POEMS

AUGUST 30TH – OCTOBER 1ST

Young World is pleased to announce The Waste Land and Other Poems, an exhibition of new works by Virginia Poundstone

The Waste Land

1922
*
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish?Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 
(Come in under the shadow of the red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago
They called me the hyacinth girl.
– Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here said she, 
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes, Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur!–mon semblable, –mon frère!”
II. A GAME OF CHESS
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peered out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion; 
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense odours stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In flattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed 
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues, 
“Jug Jug” to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair,
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes bad. Stay with me.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones. 
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door. 
“What is the noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 
Nothing?”
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag– 
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
“What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow?
What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten.
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess, 
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. 
When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said,
I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself,
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. 
He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you
To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,
He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.
And no more can’t I, I said and think of poor Albert,
He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,
And if you don’t give it him, there’s other will, I said.
Oh is there, she said. Something o’that, I said. 
Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look.
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said,
Other can pick and choose if you can’t.
But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.
You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.
(And her only thirty-one.)
I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.
(She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)
The chemist said it would be alright, but I’ve never been the same.
You are a proper fool, I said. 
Well, if albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said,
What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight.
III. THE FIRE SERMON
The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights, The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept…
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse.
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck.
And on the king my father’s death before him.
White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.
But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.
O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water
Et, O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la couple!
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc’d.
Tereu
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at tea-time, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night in her bed)
Stokings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest–
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, 
A small house-agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage he in caresses
 

Virginia Poundstone is originally from Kentucky and has exhibited at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her son Zoby is a producer on Oh My Darling Don’t Die, Run the Jewels 2.
 

DANNY TITIRIGA

I HOPE NO ONE IS SQUANDERING THEIR DAY OFF

JULY 26TH – AUGUST 22ND, 2014

L.A. is a swamp covered with concrete, stilt houses and housing projects with palm trees. The central conceit of LA’s self-actualization, the pyramidion of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, is self reflection as perpetuated by "the industry".

 

To wit: Big Wednesday, Colors, Pulp Fiction, Mullholland Drive/Falls, Chinatown, Sunset Boulevard, Die Hard, Killer of Sheep, Training Day, Heat, The Long Goodbye, The Killing of a Chinese Wookie, The Dying Gaul, The Player, Minnie and Moskowitz, Terminator 2, The Graduate, Less Than Zero, Crash, Repo Man,Lebowski, American Juggalo, Who Framed Roger the Rabbi, Point Break/Blank, Star Maps, Fletch, Stand and Deliver, Down and Out in the Slums of Beverly Hills Chihuahua Cop, Gone in 60 Seconds, Mother, Jugs, & Speed, Gus, Heaven Can Wait, Up in Smoke, Karate Kid, Into the Night, Twins, Encino Mang, White Men Can’t Jump, Tales from the Hood, Bowfinger, Anniversary Party, Friends with Money, Lethal Weapon, Grease, Falling Down, Hancock, Demolition Man, Car Wash, Blue Thunder, Mildewed Pierce and White Heat.

 

I once went to Ben Harper’s apartment after his fourth album, just before he married Laura Dern. He was already famous but still living very Day of the Locust.

 

Danny Titiriga lives and works in the aforementioned Los Angeles. This is his first solo gallery exhibition.

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