Disparition

I’m curating an exhibition in Portland, ME. Here are the details and a statement I wrote for it:

Disparition

An exhibition of contemporary artists influenced by collage.

Works by Aimee Belanger, Jacob Bluestone, Amelia Bywater, Derek Jackson, Conor Kelly, Nicolas Party, Anya Pover, and John Skibo.

Curated by A. D. Jacobson.

June 5th-July 11th (Wed-Sat)

Preview Thursday June 4th 5-7pm

Zero Station

222 Anderson St.

Portland, ME

www.zerostation.com

La Disparition was published in 1969 by Georges Perec. The English translation is titled A Void. The novel follows a group of friends as they search for a missing companion. It was written entirely without the letter e.

We are in a constant struggle to regress into the past, back to the muted colors and clear skies of yesteryear. At the same time we are bound by the conveniences and contrivances of the day. We are endlessly pulled apart at the seams; we fissure and crack. Collage produces meaning though disconnection, disparate cut-outs pieced together with stick-glue and twine. In this two step process, first is the removal, the dissolution of context from the appropriated excerpts. Then, inevitably, we look back and make sense of the erratic bits and bobs, fashion a new image out of the null set of meaning.

This aesthetic of entropy invades our daily consciousness: app stores and Wikipedia, $1 used book trolleys on the sidewalk, grotesque murals and graffiti on the side of department stores. We are harangued in the crosswalk by towering billboards. We are engulfed by indecisiveness borne out of the accumulation of technologies, of styles, of structures. Collage as art form seeks to capture this everythingness and distill it into decisive indecision, to reason the unreasonable. Here are presented works that are to varying degrees assemblages of form, media, conception, and installational practices. This is an exhibition of collage. This is not an exhibition of collage.

A. D. Jacobson

Love and vice versa

the mandolin next door played into

dusk; a hymn, a forgetful lullaby.

you two, with your touching hands.

the rosewood tree in the back garden

blossomed only once this year.

its petalled pink uncertain

it languished with the chilly march lions

and late april which stole its pussies.

archetypical lonelyboy

wanting the sex and the love

settles for a job and a ten-cent whore.

you

a saturated mediateque of

brightflashinglights—the yellows elapsing,

oh, oh, the blues try to rescue…

bright flashing lights and the bulbs

and the quickpulsed notes that blink.

they come up on you so.

played well into dusk; a harp joins in.

this song has no last note.

Thoughts on Shepard Fairey

Its been a couple weeks since I saw the Shepard Fairey show at the ICA Boston, and I’ve spoken with several people about it and come up with the following critique in a nutshell:

Its not clear who Shepard Fairey wants to be.  Is he a graphic designer (a very good one in my opinion)?  A transgressive street artist spouting “fuck the world”?  or an artist (see the ICA show with everything in nice neat frames and “do not touch” stickers everywhere)? I’m going to go out on a limb and said that if I asked the Shepster himself, he would say “all three (duh?)”  Now that’s cool, but the problem is when you posit yourself as different things to different people, it affects those other things that you’re trying to accomplish.  For example: this exhibition, and its uber-clean curation, showed me that he really was a lot more interested in improving his “brand” and his reputation in the proper art world and the GD world and not so much interested in maintaining his “edge” (which, if you ask me was gone a while ago).  Now he can still go out and make his stencils and his hollow psuedo-anarchist mantras, but any discerning viewer will inevitably see the inherent contradictions and hypocrisy oozing from within.

I couldn’t help think, while walking through the PACKED (on a thursday!) show that the ICA really scored on this one.  They got this guy who represented liberal/progressives/Obamaphiles to suck the fawning masses to the Art Museum.  Nice One ICA, bravo.  As Jon Stewart said, most eloquently, “there’s a market for cocaine and hookers too”.  Now I’m all for art for the people, but at the expense of conceptual integrity, that’s a little below the belt.  The entire show felt like a set-up.  Not even getting into the fact that the BPD arrested the guy on the way to the show.  Yeah, what a way to boost the rebellious cred than getting arrested.  Brilliant!!  The images were great and all, production value of the highest quality, but even he will tell you, this aint art.  It used to be art, but it aint no mo’.  Not when you’re doing avatar stencils for Joey Rammone and saying things like “I’m not a musician, but I’m still gonna rock it hard as nails.”  I mean, that was actually written on one of the gallery walls.  Some one had to fish through Shepard Fairey quotes and say, yeah, that’s what we want to use.  Puh-lease.

Shepard Fairey wants to be our Warhol.  But there are some very big distinctions:  Warhol loved consumerism (read The Philosophy of Andy Warhol) and his abuse of everyday graphic design and pop culture images was a response to its ubiquitousness and the joy he got out of everyday Americana.  Shepard Fairey tries to play this game where he pretends to be Warhol and Rage against the machine all at the same time.  He is at once using, benefiting from, and supporting consumer culture (see his hand bags and Nike posters) as he is trying to slash away at it with withering criticisms.  Someone needs to explain to him that you cant have it all.  Sometimes moderation is a trait to be desired.

I’ve got lots more thoughts on the matter, but I’ll save those for later (or if anyone wants to discuss this further).

Words

Laying elegance into adjectives.

A pudding of lemongrass and marmalade.

A workedup young singer, fresh from the stage.

Non-artists eating their words.

Laziness.

Leftfielder.

Erroneous nincompoop.

A whisk of sanity, of inanity.

Words denoting null.

Of a soothing caress.

Of a teapot.

Recognized actions forming an identity.

That One.

Him, over there, with the uzi in his hand.

Shotgun weddings and divorcees.

Hullabaloos.

And armynationalguardsmen.

Ineptitude.

A signifier; past participles.

Garish beasts of twisted hair and destructive breath tearing into the flesh of the living.

Beatitude-stroke-beaming-stroke-unbecoming.

Images from November/December

My photographing has gone into a bit of a hibernation.  I made some photos in Nov/Dec on my little trip round the US.  Here are a few:

Back in Boston

I’m back home again for an as yet undetirmined length of time.

A bit more from the writing piece I’m working on:

V

Looking back in time at the stars.

The biggest being the closest.

Venus rising over the southeast in summer.

Bigbears and hunters.

Moonman singing.

Moonman getting drunk.

Dipper pointing north.

Tubman running the railroad.

Religious parables passed down.

Of Abraham and the goat.

Of three subservient wisemen headed north.

Of a power greater than.

Of belief.

The astute discovery of love and passion.

Sipping red wine with moths.

VI

A fiery hell burning holes in retinas and irises.

Estuaries of the Everglades.

Long storks stalking.

The slow trudge to the centre of the earth.

Lethargic snails sleeping in the brackish muck.

VII

An illusion of the cerebellum.

Waking in the middle of the night, alone and in a cold sweat, looking out the window to see the bright lights of freedom hovering in the dense fog.

i Publications

My new Baby:

My Exhibiton at Olive Cafe

I’m showing some photos in a galley nearby my flat.  Please come!!

more

from the opus.  Its a rambling sort of thing.  Hills and valleys.

XI

A merchant in the street hawking skip-dived wares.

Let macroeconomics work its course, must not disturb the gears.

A Rube Goldberg machine of sorts.

Yellow canary flying away to trip the switch.

Darwinian specimen.

We shall for evermore praise our Smithian brethren for bringing us these gems of gold and rubies.

Greenspan rebuking himself.

XII

A laughing, indelibly caring pygmy swan.

XIII

Glibness as a sign of respect.

Argumentativeness being a treasured trait.

(Recycled machine-guns and semi-automatics.)

A soft sigh before intercourse.

A pitchfork in the hay.

Millais as a man of the people.

XIV

An illustrative gesture:  Lifting his arm, the sunken fellow motioned to a pair of neatly preserved patrolmen.  The officers, conferring, played hard of hearing, letting the old man struggle on the pavement.  Again, the drunkard lifted, almost flailed, his arm to motion at them and when, again, no assistance was offered, he began with a slew of half-cocked somewhat derogatory remarks, encoded by his inebriated state.

Long time coming

Sorry for the extended delay.  I’m back in Glasgow for the moment to write among other things.  Here’s an excerpt of a little thing I’m working on.  Keep checking back as I’ll be updating this regularly again.  I promise.

IV

The decrepit linguist making faces at the kindergardeners walking by his window.

Pig-face.

Lion-face.

The faces they rejoinder with.

Shock-horror.

Bewilderment crossed with appreciation.

The spitting rain, ever-present, laughing along.

The joke, funny enough; tiresome comedy that tugs at your skirt and tears holes in your pantyhose.

A stumbled laugh. Evocative.

Antelope-face.