Obsessive (and Introspective) Art: Simon Evans

Everything I Have, 2008

Found this posted on the Radiolab blog recently and I flashed back to seeing the original, in person, in Chelsea sometime when I was in college... probably in 2008. It must have been at James Cohan Gallery, which the internet tells me represents Evans in New York.

Home Country, 2008-9

I don't remember if Evans had other pieces hanging at the time, which probably means he didn't because upon looking at all his work, it is CRAZY up my alley. I remember LOVING Everything I Own, perhaps partly because I was feeling material-possessions-poor at time, having had to throw away three boxes of clothes, bags and shoes that had gone moldy in a friend's basement while I was abroad in Argentina.

Dear Diary, 2008

But it was those last two years of college that I really figured out exactly what was up my alley, and then proceeded to try and make art like that and found out that I might not be obsessive enough, introspective enough, or some combination of the two. While there are definitely other types of art that I am drawn to, the following is list of characteristics of art that I will almost 100% guaranteed love:

• a catalogue of things
• map-based (real, imaginary, edited, etc.)
• introspective text
• patterns based on an external system of composition
• obsessive repetition
• diagrams

Maybe Simon Evans was the beginning of this for me.

One Hundred Mix CDs for New York, 2008

(via Radiolab, images via James Cohan Gallery)

Let us go then, you and I

Found out about the wonderful comic book artist Julian Peters. He turns classic poetry into comic books and has recently begun to tackle one of my favorite T.S. Eliot poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.  It seems that he is going to turn the whole thing into a published book, and I cannot wait to get a copy, whenever that might be.

For your reading pleasure, the first 9 pages:

I've loved this poem since I was introduced to Eliot by one of my English teachers in high school. Now, I'm no artist, but back in college when I fancied that I might be, I made my own Prufrock art. Here he is:

I think I was going for:

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, and afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

  So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all --

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulate, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

   And how should I presume?

(via The Rumpus)

the sky is something beautiful

I just wanted to see something beautiful this morning.

(via The Awl, and here and here too)

More Truth from Alex Balk

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. In my opinion, there's no better person writing about regret and the general malaise and ennui of life on the internet than Alex Balk, over at The Awl. He hit me with another one this morning:

"Maybe the best bit about life—and I am setting an admittedly low bar here, but look what we have to deal with—is that although we are always tempted to pinpoint specific instances where the decisions we made had irrevocable effects on our trajectory from that moment forward, if we are honest with ourselves we can admit that, for the most part, we were going to wind up exactly where we did no matter what. We are who we are and the choices we make are the results of those immutable traits that add up to the person who, for better or worse and usually worse, stares back at us in the mirror each morning with a mixture of pity and astonishment. If we could turn back time we would mostly make the same mistakes, maybe at different moments but always moving us in the same direction. You've fucked up your life through an accretion of small details, not by one or two enormous errors. It is pointless to pine for a do-over; you would just do it over badly. That is who you are and at some point you will have to make peace with it." - Alex Balk making a long winded point about how it's Daylight Savings time this Sunday, November 3rd at 3 am. 

Old Love / New Love... Grand Theft Auto 5?

I knew that one day there would be a reason that I cared about video games, or rather, that I wished I cared about video games because in not caring, I am missing out on something. That day has finally come and it was today. Twin Shadow released a new song on (with? through?) Grand Theft Auto 5 and it is SO GOOD. I didn't even know that Grand Theft had music - like how is it incorporated into the game? Is it just background? Is it like bumping out of the speakers as you cruise around running old ladies over? Is that even what you do in the game? That is 100% my perception and understanding of the game. But I digress... I love this jam.

Bravado FFFRRANNNO Remix

Getting into remixes is a downward spiral, you guys. There are SO MANY. Also, thanks to Stereogum for writing an article about the new (maybe not so new...) synthetic sound and what I have been noticing more and more in my own Spotify listening preferences, as evidenced here and here.

But, I do love this remix of Lorde's Bravado. It's got a real Purity Ring vibe to it that I would like to sprinkle all over everything right now. Also, can her whole album come out now yet?

You choose yr sink-hole.

There's a whirling in yr brain, but inside every; whirling is a quiet, after the howl undoes itself. You can keep sliding down its spirals or you can sniff out the still spot and put yr toe in it & let it suck you in. Either one, loving or not; loving is a sucking in,. You choose yr sink-hole. knowing that always there will be more Whirlings & more absences stuck to those fragrant ribs.

- Baba Yaga

Ah, no nostalgia hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed

From #I am just living to be dying by your side, Darren Bader's most recent show at Franco Noero in Torino, Italy:

(via Contemporary Art Daily)

Shades of Eternal Night

When you're laying in bed at 4 o'clock in the morning waiting for the sun to rise, you can really see the shades of night - and eternity is real. Last night the shades didn't look like Mr. Cy Twombly's, but to each his or her own. These are beautiful anyway. Of course, the sun did finally come up and it turned the mountains all bruised and bluish-purple and the sky glowed pink and I let my body run with my mind and we all calmed down slightly. 

Fifty Days at Iliam: Shades of Eternal Night, 1978 

Fifty Days at Iliam: The Fire that Consumes All before It, 1978 

contemporary poetry

Ladies be writing poetry, you guys! And I am feeling it. Just two little snippets that I've run across in the past few months that, at the moment, spoke to me.

They spoke to me enough in the first case to take a screenshot of the poem on my phone because it was posted on facebook without a link (but really what is the world coming to - screenshots?), and in the second case, after absentmindedly reading it on my Feedly (RIP Google Reader) and then realizing hours later it was still floating around in my brain, I had to do random Google searches (like I said, RIP Reader: Feedly does not have a search function?!?!?!?) with key words that I remembered, like "Gonzalez poetry beautiful Rumpus" or maybe I tried Paris Review because it could have been that too? Honestly don't know how I found it again, but that's the magic of the Google machine.

Reading them right now, it's not like, HEY I AM FEELING THESE SAME FEELINGS AHORA MISMA, but more like: Hey, I have felt these feelings, and way to get them totally right.

I had been sad for so long that it shocked me,
by Ruth L. Schwartz


the enormous yellow moon
balanced like a honeydew

on the hill's knife-edge,
fat and implacable.

It wavered there as long as it could,
then started - and who can blame it - 

its slow slide.
As if it meant to show me what was missing.

As if the world were asking, Will you learn
to stand beside this pain?

No, I said,
I wish it dead.

I said no. But the world
said yes. 

(via The Sun)


untitled 5
by Mira Gonzalez

I am looking at people who are dancing and touching each other
I am drinking vodka with ice and feeling incredibly fucked
I wonder if anyone feels more lonely now than they felt an hour ago
when they were alone in their rooms looking at things on the internet

(via The Rumpus)