Posts Tagged ‘Driller Killer’

New York On A Dozen Espressos A Day!

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The trip from JFK Airport to Hoboken is straight forward but time consuming. Air train to Howards Beach, change onto the subway and take the A train to 14th Street, walk the two blocks along 14th Street from 8th Avenue to the PATH train on 6th Avenue. From the Hoboken stop it only takes a couple of minutes to reach Washington Street. Tom McGlynn is in waiting for me when I arrive at about 11PM on Wednesday 18 January. Before crashing we talk for a couple of hours about art and how people interact on the web.

On thursday morning I take the PATH to 9th Street and walk around downtown Manhattan for a couple of hours. Among other things I check out the 5.99 DVD Funhouse on Broadway. Actually while a lot of their films are $5.99, they also have loads of $2.99 bargains (or 4 for $10). There wasn’t much in the horror department that interested me, but as always the DVD Funhouse had plenty of martial arts films to groove a discerning trash fan fanatic. I picked up a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga on the notorious Videoasia label (which specialises in public domain pan and scan reissues mastered from dodgy VHS tapes). I’d wanted a copy of Kung Fu Vs Yoga for a long time but wasn’t prepared to part with the tenner in sterling it would have cost me to buy the Videoasia edition online – I managed to miss picking up a copy of the UK Vengeance Video release of this title because it sold out before dropping to a price I’m willing to pay for DVD (£3 and under – and most of the Vengeance Videos I have were picked up for a quid from London retail outlets that were closing down as the credit crunch kicked in).

I’d arranged to meet up with Tom McGlynn and Bill Doherty at White Columns at lunchtime. I got to WC a little early so I could check in with Matthew Higgs, Amie Scally and Carolyn Lockhart. I’d also wanted to see the 6th White Columns annual show. The exhibition Looking Back was curated by Ken Okiishi and Nick Mauss. The idea behind the annual is for those making the selection to give a flavour of the art that was exhibited in New York over the past year. Sherrie Levine is the only artist included in Looking Back whose work I actually saw in NYC over the past 12 months, so overall the show was a fantastic catch up for me. It’s also great to see Levine’s sculpture just sitting on the floor, which gives it a really different vibe to the carefully considered installation of her retrospective at the Whitney last year…

Tom, Bill and I go to Snice for coffee, then take the subway to Long Island City in Queens. Our first port of call is PS1. We’ve just missed the big 9/11 show but there are still curiosities – in particular My Best Thing (2011) by Francis Stark (an animation about cybersex) and Rania Stephan’s tribute to Egytpian actress and suicide Soad Hosni. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011) is a scratch video featuring themed selections of scenes from 60 of this actress’s movies. While I’m at PS1 Tom introduces me to Robert Nickas. The 2010 annual at White Columns was curated by Nickas, and he’s just done an occasional publication with White Columns about disappeared artists. Nickas tells me that thanks to my Art Strike, I came up in discussion with his students when they were working on this project.

From PS1 we move on to Dorksy Project Space for a really strange show of artists who have both sculptural and video practices… Video<>Object was not to my taste but in case you’re interested it featured Nancy Davidson, Yasue Maetake, Halsey Rodman, Jeanne Silverthorne and Moira Williams – and was curated by Laurence Hegarty. After an overload of art, we decided coffee was needed, so we headed to some place Tom and Bill knew and this turned out to be a funky little bistro. Fortified with our drug of choice, we moved on to the Yace Gallery for the opening of Reenacting Sense – a group show and only the second ever exhibition at a space that is so new it isn’t listed in the Long Island City Cultural Alliance guide. We’re at the opening because Tom and Bill know Pinkney Herbert who is showing alongside Cecile Chong, Kyung Jeon, Dominic Mangila and Pierre Obando. The show isn’t so much walking a tightrope between eclecticism and incoherence as jumping headlong into the void. It might be amusing – albeit challenging – to create a theoretical discourse that is capable of drawing the work together. I think the curator is called Juri Kim Pang, and she didn’t appear to have any kind of argument to explain the selections she’d made…

Friday morning found me once again wandering around downtown alone – doing things like checking out the record stores on Bleeker Street. There was nothing worth buying in the bargain bins. At lunchtime I met up with Tom McGlynn and Kenny Goldsmith at White Columns. After saying high to Jeff Eaton, who’d been off work when I’d popped in the day before, we moved on to Snice for coffee. Over our brews we talked about sound poetry and pop music. Kenny walked with us to meet Lynne Tillman outside SVA on 21st Street, but headed off before Lynne appeared. With Lynne, Tom and I went to a nearby Italian restaurant – the food was great and the conversation even better. Tom was surprised by the opinions Lynne and I expressed about one well known American writer in particular – but unlike me, Lynne never voices her dislikes publicly, so I won’t name the guilty party here! After we ate, Lynne and Tom headed south, while I wandered north as I had a hotel room for one night.

I decided to walk to 92nd and Madison Avenue, mainly because I can’t recall ever going through Central Park in the dark and I wanted to see if it feels anything like the way it is depicted in the 1974 movie Death Wish. If you were able to ignore the joggers and the dog walkers – which is difficult – then just maybe the landscape is capable of evoking that long gone 1970s era of decline in NYC! I don’t spot anyone who looked the part of a potential mugger or murder victim in a Michael Winner movie. That said, I’ve loved Charles Bronson movies since I was a kid, so I overshoot my destination and go all the way to the north end of the park at 110th Street, then double back along Fifth Avenue and down 93rd Street (all this despite the fact I much prefer Bronson in movies like The Street Fighter AKA Hard Times to Death Wish). Earlier on I’d found it impossible to reconcile some of what were once New York’s sleazier areas – as depicted in films such as Abel Ferrara’a Driller Killer (1979) and Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case (1982) – with how they are today. On the subway over the previous couple of days I’d almost had flashes of the way the city appeared in Lucio Fulci’s New York Ripper (1982) – but in the end I had to conclude that NYC as I’d most liked it on thirty to forty year old celluloid had disappeared (assuming that is, this hadn’t always been a fiction).

Hotel Wales turned out to be a conversion. I tried opening what I thought was a cupboard and it turned out to be an unlocked connecting door to the next suite, and in doing so I seriously freaked out the married couple occupying the room. Once I’d settled in I sat on the bed and read most of Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus. After taking a shower I went to bed. In the morning I finished reading Video Green and checked out around 9.30am. I had planned to use the gym (but the hotel wanted to charge me $15 for that) and work online (but it was $12.95 for internet access), so I didn’t bother with either (the hotel was paid for by the Guggenheim, I had to cover the extras). It was snowing when I left the hotel and I enjoyed the way the city and my walking were transformed by the weather. I ambled down to 13th Street amazed by how little traffic was on the roads. I made use of the customer wi fi in Snice while eating soup. I was waiting for White Columns to open so that I could check in there for a final time this trip. The gallery is closed on Sunday. Neither Matthew nor Amie were around but I caught Jeff Eaton. Then it was the PATH from 14th and 6th to Hoboken. Tom wasn’t in when I arrived at his apartment, but he came up the stairs two minutes behind me. We headed out almost immediately to catch up with Bill Doherty in a nearby coffee shop.

I headed to the Guggenheim alone – Tom was coming later. I took the PATH to 33rd Street and walked the rest of the way to 89th. The Last Word event was mobbed. The queue went around the block and all the way back and along Madison Avenue. Even as a participant it took a while to get in, so despite turning up at six I missed the beginning. I’d have needed to get there early to catch it from the start. The Maurizio Cattelan show was pure spectacle and it was packed – making it even harder to get into the museum. Everything was hanging from the ceiling on ropes of many and varied lengths, and there were people milling on every level of the Guggenheim spiral. Like a lot of successful contemporary artists, Cattelan’s work is obviously difficult and expensive to fabricate, although the actual imagery is extremely populist and accessible. Cattelan had announced he was going to stop making art, which was why I was speaking at an evening of talks dedicated to endings and death – it was designed to accompany his farewell retrospective.

The set up for The Last Word is great: 7 hours with a wide range of speakers talking for just 10 minutes each. There’s a green room with fabulous food and everything is perfectly set up in the theatre. I natter to various people as I grab grub and drinks – including, of course, organisers Nancy Spector and Simon Critchley. It’s particularly nice to connect with M C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel from Baltimore, who know all about me through our mutual friend John Berndt. My talk about The Art Strike gets plenty of laughs, so I’m happy with that too. After I’ve spoken, Richard Kostelanetz grabs hold of me. We’ve been trying to meet for years but somehow it’s never happened, so we finally hooked up in 2012!

After I’ve chatted with Richard, Tom McGlynn grabbed hold of me. He’d turned up around eight and had been enjoying the event, but we decided to leave about 11.30PM. There are only so many talks you can take in during the course of a night! The next morning we hang out before I take the PATH to 14th Street. I buy a pair of Levi 501s from Dave’s on The Avenue of the Americas (just a couple of blocks up from the PATH stop). I still had some dollars burning a hole in my pocket so I got a copy of The Flying Guillotine (the pre-Wang Yu 1975 Shaw Brothers epic that inspired the superior spin offs) in Entertainment Outlet on 14th Street. Then I moved a few shops shops down the road and spent the rest of my money in 14 Street DVD Center, where I picked up a copy of Golden Needles (1974) starring Jim Kelly (I didn’t even know that film was on DVD!). I used my Metrocard to take the subway to JFK (actually it’s ten cents short of the fare – but I get through okay).

Virgin Atlantic tell me my flight is cancelled but I’m in time for an earlier plane if I’m prepared to pay for an upgrade from economy to premium economy. I tell them to stuff that and say insist I should get on the earlier flight without paying extra for it. They say tough basically because there are no economy seats left on the earlier departure. Now that’s what I call corporate generosity (not), since it would have actually cost them nothing to put me in premium economy and they cancelled my later flight… So I’m left to hang around the airport until it is time to board an even later departure for London… While I’m kicking my heels at JFK, I notice one of the dollar bills I was given in change at the 14 Street DVD Center is stamped with the slogan: “Track this bill at wwww.WheresGeorge.com”… This is a website that records the movements of currency but it relies on those who end up with the notes the project has marked logging in there. I haven’t registered my dollar bill. Does anyone know anything about the site and whether there are any good reasons for either registering or not registering with it?

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in counterculture, culture gossip & parties, deep topology aka psychogeography, dreams, exhibitions | 24 Comments »

Art critics on crack & their rock smokin’ sociologist friends…

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the Contemporary by Travis Jeppesen (Social Diseases, London 2008)

As a book Disorientations is very much a product of print-on-demand publishing, a technological advance that allows the tastes of tiny micro-audiences to be serviced. Jeppesen is a young American writer – based in recent years in the Czech Republic and Berlin – who has published a couple of novels and a book of poems on independent presses, while the present tome is a collection of his journalism mainly dating from the earlier part of this millennium. The content is not simply art, since we are also taken on detours through popular film and music. In terms of art, what is covered is what was on show in Prague (and to a much lesser extent Berlin) when Jeppesen was writing for magazines such as The Prague Pill and Umelec. Thus while many Czech cultural figures who aren’t much known outside Prague are covered, other names in these pages (Joseph Beuys or various yBas) will be overly familiar to anyone au fait with contemporary art.

Jeppesen’s tastes are very specific without being particularly highly developed: he is into a gay ‘transgressive’ punk aesthetic suffused with gothic elements.  No surprise then that Jeppesen would cover an exhibition of photographs of drug abusing Prague rent boys by Six. “The underground, for lack of a better term, is the terrain that British artist Six has inhabited his entire life. Known in a previous life as Simon Barker, a member of the Bromley Contingent (ak.a. the Sex Pistols’ inner circle), one of the teenage masterminds behind the late 70s punk explosion…” (pages 34-35). My own perception of the Bromley Contingent, and I’ve met a good number of them, is rather different: to me they are a bunch of suburban bores. These contrasting opinions reflect real theoretical differences that exist between Jeppesen and myself, since I view the idea that any small group of people ‘masterminded’ the late 70s punk explosion as unnecessarily reductive. Disorientations contains many ridiculously simplistic statements. To give another example: “Like most great artists of the past century, Kolar was both an anarchist and a reactionary.” (page 107).

The portrait of Jeppesen that emerges from Disorientations is of a young writer who responds to looming deadlines by dashing off the first thing that comes into his head. While a slap-dash approach is evident in many of the reviews collected here, it is particularly blatant in coverage of a 2005 Eva and Jan Svankmajer retrospective at Prague Castle: “I could only jot down my first impressions, read back over them later, and wonder about what I actually saw. Here they are for someone else to fathom. Eva’s manic swirl of colors forming the cunt allegory, sweeping virtues informed by prosaic maladies, deformed by the strongest intention to otherwise forget the harsh coldness of every waking nightmare. Jan and his creatures, they haunt him like a melody…” (page 352). And so it goes on, worthless as art criticism, it might be of interest to fans of Gothic fiction, although they’d do better reading Ann Radcliffe, or even one of Jeppesen’s novels.

One doesn’t have to read much of Disorientations to discover Jepppesen suffers from the usual adolescent illusions about art, genius and ‘transcendence’: “In an aesthetic universe, vision alone takes precedence over everything else, transcending all the conflicts and traumas imposed on the psyche by the meat we carry around inside us – the very meat that unites us with nature and guides us in our efforts to destroy this nature as loudly as possible. For it is in those desultory orgiastic explosions of violence – the ultimate desecration of the sacred body – that truth subsides on this lowly earthly plane.” (Page 188). Likewise, Jeppesen could be speaking about his own writing when he notes: “A typical Jiri David text reads like a philosophical manifesto fuelled by adolescent rage instead of a central, unambiguous argument…” (page 115).

The following provides just one example of Jeppesen’s ‘adolescent rage’: “At a party I was once fortunate enough to meet a sociologist whose research focused extensively on serial killers. We ended up talking at length about the psychopathology of every day life, and although we were freebasing cocaine at the time, her answers nevertheless shone some interesting light on the subject. For instance, the myth of pornography. Shortly before Ted Bundy was executed, he made some statement along the lines ‘pornography is what made me savagely rape and butcher to death dozens of girls’. Of course, pornography doesn’t cause psychopathic behaviour; in fact, according to my crack-smoking sociologist friend, the common thread that links most of history’s more brutal serial killers isn’t porn but horror films…” (pages 186-187). This despite the fact that neither cinema nor the cinematic genre of horror films had been invented when, for example, Gilles de Rais murdered dozens (and possibly hundreds) of children in fifteenth-century France. Ditto Vlad The Impaler, Jack The Ripper, Elizabeth Báthory etc. etc. etc.

Jeppesen appears to know little about anything that that pre-dates his own birth. Reading Disorientations I was left with the impression that if something happened before the 1980s, then as far as Jeppesen was concerned, it is either connected to an artist he is profiling or else the serial killer Ed Gein. So, for example, he writes in a piece dating from 2003: “The police are obviously an integral part of the world television culture of the last twenty years…” (page 243). True as far as it goes, but cop shows were an integral part of television programming way before the 1980s too; viz Dragnet, Fabian of the Yard,, Dixon of Dock Green, The Untouchables, Z-Cars, The New Breed, The F.B.I., Dan August, The Streets of San Francisco, Softly Softly, Barlow at Large, Second Verdict, The Sweeney, Kojak, Starsky & Hutch, Hawaii 5-0, Homicide, Division 4, The Long Arm, The Link Men, Matlock Police, Solo One etc. Reading Jeppesen’s reviews I was constantly astounded by his historical amnesia about almost anything that happened before 1980.

Moving on, much of the material in this anthology suffers from a lack of editing. Reviewing a group exhibition, Jeppesen writes: “…maybe the most interesting work in Impresse is sculpture. Milan Cais’s Space Fantasy is Czech pessimist humor at its finest – perhaps a reaction to the sort of escapist fantasies that are so prevalent in the work of younger artists – while Lukas Rittstein reveals his mastery of the sublime in several brain-scrambling works.” (page 51). Jeppesen neither describes the sculptures nor gives an outline of the basic characteristics of what Czech pessimist humour might be, thereby leaving most readers from outside the Czech Republic – myself included – with little idea of what he is talking about. Professional art critics do not on the whole assume their readers will have seen the work they are writing about, which is why the standard procedure is to describe it as well as provide an opinion about it. I find it incredible that neither the magazines that first published Jeppesen’s pieces, nor the London publisher who asked him to gather them together in book form, failed to correct basic faults of this type.

Jeppesen is about as far removed from the art world as it is possible to get while still regularly visiting galleries, and this has some advantages. Not being immersed in the gallery world or worried about maintaining particular art scene relationships, Jeppesen is on the whole less willing to go along with hype than many otherwise more accomplished critics. Reviewing a Prague show of contemporary British art, he accurately describes Wolfgang Tillmans as ‘terribly over-rated’ (page 206). That said, he is led astray by his own attraction to gothic and gay imagery when he says: “The best work on display here belongs to Sam Taylor-Wood. Check out the three large-scale photographic works from her Soliloquy series. In the second one a bunch of mutts laze around some shirtless dude, who stands in the middle of a gravel path with a cross hanging around his neck. In the bottom panel, a scene from a sauna with men and women splayed out in various sexual positions. On her video A Little Death, a sped-up document of a dead hare being eaten by flies or maggots (it’s hard to tell), until it’s reduced to a skeletal fragment of its former self. Decomposition has never before been so mesmerizing.” (page 207). Sam Taylor-Wood is possibly the most one-dimensional artist of the entire yBa crowd, and while I can sympathise with Jeppesen’s criticisms of Jeremy Deller, nonetheless even Deller’s worst work stands head and shoulders above Taylor-Wood at her best. Incidentally, the top and far larger panel in Soliloquy II (1998) features not just any ‘dude’ but one of Taylor-Wood’s fellow White Cube artists, Harland Miller, in a very camp pose; and I’d say that six, or arguably seven, of the dogs in the photograph are in a state of repose, there are nine or ten (i.e. the majority of dogs in the picture) to which Jeppesen’s appellation ‘laze’ does not apply. And as for A Little Death, that is so tedious I’d rather watch paint dry!

While none of Jeppesen’s aesthetic judgements can be trusted, they do prove slightly more reliable when he’s dealing with film rather than the art world. That said, do you want or need to read another short overview of Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit On Your Grave or Driller Killer? These three titles will be over familiar to any UK reader interested in exploitation film due to the central role they played in the 1980s video nasties ‘debate’. Similarly, Jeppesen uses Dawn of the Dead to illustrate his thoughts on anti-consumerism and the horror film: would it have taken that much imagination to choose something very slightly less obvious but also set in a shopping mall – such as Chopping Mall or Sorority Babes In The Slime Ball Bowl-O-Rama – to make this point? Jeppesen seems to cover only whatever is right in front of his nose. Once he moves away from the Czech art that was all around him when he was living in Prague – but which is something that, beyond internationally famous figures such as Svankmajer and Kolar, I am unfamiliar with – I find his choices of material horribly predictable. That said, Jeppesen is still young and as he matures his cultural and historical horizons will hopefully broaden.  Disorientations reads more like a blog by a precocious teenager than a book, and the only people I can see it appealing to are die-hard fans of Jeppesen’s prose fiction.

This was originally posted a week ago at 3AM Magazine but since not everyone who comes here goes there and vice versa, I thought it was worth putting it here too.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ – you know it makes (no) sense!

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Posted in art criticism, books | 31 Comments »