Alexis McCrimmon interviewed me about ROY G BIV Gallery and ImageOhio 13 for TTR Online Video Magazine.
Other News:
* Maximum Rock and Roll published a guest column, "So You Want to Name Your Punk House?," by me in their January 2013 issue.
* I'm available for studio visits during the lead-up to ROY's 2014 exhibition season call-for-entries. Email me at James@roygbivgallery.org.
* ROY G BIV Gallery is now on Instagram.
* The Lantern's Shelby Lum wrote about Sara Drake and Dina Kelberman's ROY exhibition; the Dispatch's Chris Yates coveredImageOhio 13.
* Madeline Roth wrote about the Monster House on her blog.
* I'm speaking at the Urban Arts Space on February 23rd about Mark Beyer's reverse plexi paintings.
* My birthday party is tomorrow (2/7/2013) at Skylab. DJs Alexis Speier and Jackie Speier will be spinning iPhones.
I am deep in the fog of applying to graduate school. As part of that triathlon I've been constructing the list of my publications and the list of things people have said about me and my publications (or that just include a quote by me). For 'fun' I made both lists as complete as possible, just for my historical record. I'll be purging these for my actual applications as I doubt NYU cares if Razorcake felt Amelia's demo tape could have been recorded with higher fidelity. Read the lists after the jump, ifayousawanna.
Michael D. Hall's new monograph published by Scala.
My last story for the Lantern is a preview of a book presentation by Michael D. Hall, the Columbus Museum of Art's adjunct curator of folk art. Hall has spent the last ten years developing a book on Emerson Burkhart, an odd local/regional figure who didn't "fit" into the larger themes of the art world of his time. By all accounts he was flagrantly egotistical, arrogant, and stubborn. Also, a 20 year-old prostitute was the last person to talk to him before he fell into a coma and died in 1969. So, apparently, a personable gent. This info is a little annoying to know - I used to revel in Burkhart's paintings while in high school. He painted obnoxiously thick, something I was obsessed with at the time. His palette centered on hyper pastels, another tic I cultivated without regard for my teachers' eyesight. I stopped searching his work out when I stopped painting in oils but a recent visit to the Convention Center renewed my interest. His mural there, "Music," is really beautiful - though Hall and a few other commentators online seem to dismiss it as derivative - which it is - but so is his whole oeuvre. After all, he was a Columbus artist.
"Music" at the Convention Center. History of the piece here.
An MP3 of my interview with Hall here.
My story plus more of Burkhart's paintings after "the jump."
A Cassavetes film Green's students wrote about for their class blog.
I recently wrote this story - my second to last for the Lantern - about Ron Green's partnership with the Wexner Center to develop a public blogging mechanism for his seminar class devoted to the Wexner's Media Arts programming. Set ups like this are sort of a no-brainer to me yet they seem to not be a widespread practice at OSU. Of course, that's OSU. So kudos to Green and the Wexner for attempting something out of the norm.
An interview with Chris Stults, the Wexner Center's assistant curator of film/video - here.
An interview with Dan Guarnieri, a student in the class - here.
The story is after "the jump." So is my interview with Green.
I recently wrote a profile of the Ohio State university press for the Lantern. It's located somewhere out in the Siberia of west campus and diligently and unassumedly goes about its business of publishing fine fare for the literary critics of the world. The books above are departures for the lit-based press: "The Freshwater Mussels of Ohio" and a book of William S. Burroughs' unpublished papers straight out of OSU's special collections. My sister used to work at the press about a decade ago and from all accounts enjoyed it. I found the staff to be insightful, gregarious, hilarious, etc. The MP3 of our conversation is here. I speak with Malcolm Litchfield - the Director, Jennifer Forsythe - the Production Manager, Jason Gray - the Journals Manager, and Laurie Avery the Marketing Director.
The story is after "the jump." It begins with a "Hey, doesn't reading suck?" lead to properly connect with the OSU community.
ROY G BIV recently celebrated its 20th anniversary, staying alive through a period of time which saw the Short North go from child prostitution central to "used to be cool five years ago" affluence. ROY saw it all and showed everyone in the process. It remains exciting and incredibly valuable to Columbus due to its actual openness to showing actually new artists. The next season's lineup - top secret of course - piqued my interest. Surprises abound. And Cassie has a show there in February with Daniel Hoffman. Here is what my show there looked like in July.
Interview MP3 with Daniel Work, a founding member of ROY and former director, here.
Interview MP3 with Justin Luna, the current director of ROY here.
I wrote the story below for The Lantern (Lantern version here. Somehow gentrification becomes "Arts District" - just like the real world!) It's after "the jump."
Mike Olenick's SPACEBOY is a glammed up rendition of a 1970s short by Renate Druks. It's a kaleidoscopic fantasia on an outer space siren and the boystronaut who falls for her. It's good!
I wrote a story about it for The Lantern below. It's not too great - my interview with Olenick was accidentally erased before I could write it.
Candygram is a new literary journal in Columbus. Here is an mp3 of my interview with the editor, Shannon Byers, and below is a news story I wrote about it for The Lantern.
Major museum retrospectives usually occur in the last years of an artist’s life or the first years there after. To be the subject of one as a “mid-career” artist is a rare, honorable distinction. But for Luc Tuymans, it seems overdue.
Tuymans, born in 1958 in Belgium, is a pre-eminent European painter informed by post-war politics, the language of cinema and the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter. His work demands high prices on the international art market and high regard in critical journals.
Over 70 works of his are on display, filling up each gallery of the Wexner Center for the Arts on campus.
In a reductive sense, Tuymans’ work drives to undercut the authority of the image. His paintings aim to make clear the tangle of ideology underneath the innocent façade of a skier or a rabbit, a wax seal or an empty room.
But once one realizes the empty room is a gas chamber or that the blank skier is the Third Reich’s favorite architect, the inner logic of the show is unlocked and each subsequent piece becomes less surprising. Around the third gallery listless apprehension sets in; no longer can you comfortably rest in the nook of an intriguing color scheme or contemplate a minimal composition. These paintings become impossible to process aesthetically since the question of what they actually represent is continually brought to the surface.
This discomfort is due to Tuymans' success in raising difficult questions about how we negotiate the meaning of Western civilization’s baggage. What isn’t questioned is the life of these paintings outside of his concept and aesthetic: Is producing a representation of an atrocity to sell for millions of dollars ethical? Is it still ethical if one’s buying audience is of the same ruling classes that initiated the colonial and genocidal policies he seems to condemn?
These objects, if they are regarded with the skeptical eye Tuymans asks us to put to his blank rooms and skiers, become like trading cards or postage stamps of humanity’s worst moments made to be exchanged among the affluent.
Artistically, Tuymans only runs into problems when his references are too obvious. His portrait of Condoleezza Rice is too direct to lead the American viewer into a dialogue. Likewise, when he introduces collage or text to his muted oils an element of mystery is lost, it becomes too clearly connected to the outside world.
He is at his best in a series concerning the colonial past of the Belgian Congo. Dueling portraits of rival leaders, one ruling on behalf of Belgian interests and the other a symbol of anti-colonial independence, set off a room of incendiary associations that plays like the visceral imagery of a film trailer.
Following soon after crowd pleasing exhibitions of Andy Warhol’s Marilyns and William Wegman’s Weimaraners might lead to a perception of this show as being inaccessible or severe. But with a little patience, a little context and some discussion, the rewards of Tuymans are likely to be more nourishing.
Co-curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth, the Wexner Center’s former chief curator of exhibitions, the show will travel to San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, and Brussels, Belgium at the end of its run here January 3rd.
This is the pre-editor edition of my Lantern review of Times New Viking's 4th lp, Born Again Revisited.
On the back cover of their new album for Matador Records, Times New Viking provides a chart that claims their physical state has consistently deteriorated since their first album, while their spiritual state has consistently elevated.
While the entirety of the record seems to belie that sentiment, that overtone of career summation fills this album, fittingly titled Born Again Revisited. The title is a mix of oblique references to Charles "Chuck" Colson’s memoir Born Again, Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, and, possibly, the “B.A.R” on North Campus that has been at the center of their evolution, Café Bourbon Street.
The record design also revisits the past; there's the horse from their first seven-inch for Columbus Discount Records as well as the cursive font and the Don’t Look Back Dylan from Dig Yourself. The childlike peace signs on last year’s Rip It Off reappear on a burning flag from Woodstock 1999. These icons return Xeroxed out of recognition, darkened, sullied, or as photo negatives. They are no longer pure and fresh - they are revisited, recapitulated, and looked back at from an older age.
TNV has a history of playing with the motifs of the hippie counterculture with song titles like “Let Your Hair Grow Long” or drummer Adam Elliott’s insistent peace sign he waves to the audience while playing. Their co-optation of these signifiers has never been without a certain detachment – the knowledge that the optimism and political convictions of that time are nowhere to be found in today’s hip youth who seem content with commodified indie culture and establishment politics.
The generational difference between these two youth cultures, and the current impossibility and displacement of those past ideas, is the album's base metaphor. This is made explicit in “2/11 Don’t Forget” where Elliott and singer Beth Murphy lethargically intone, “It’s not that I don’t like what you do, it’s just been done through and through.”
Born Again Revisited’s lead single is the mournful “Move to California,” a song whose halfhearted chorus, “move to California, hear you’ll have a better time,” is the world weary opposite of other California songs like “California Dreaming” by The Mamas and Papas, “California Girls” by The Beach Boys, or more current fare by Phantom Planet. For TNV, the California that usually stands for optimism and possibility is both Haight-Ashbury and Altamont, both Mario Savio and Sirhan Sirhan.
Musically, TNV is still a noisy Beat Happening with all that entails: boy/girl vocals, pop melodies, and short songs that are deceptively simple. And yes, the production is still their fourth member. They wisely dodged the overwhelming sentiment that they should record cleaner by delivering the master recording for the album to their label on a videotape. As a joke or not, TNV claims the record to have 25% more fidelity. But with the double meaning of 'fidelity' this could either mean they have 25% cleaner production or that they held onto their original concept even tighter.
Why tape fuzz has been the overriding preoccupation in their critical reception is mystifying but it underscores how adrift sites like Pitchfork are from independent recording and the context of do-it-yourself punk rock. Unfortunately for Times New Viking, their interjection of blown out recording into the mainstream indie rock world has launched a parade of disciples from California's Wavves to New York’s Vivian Girls, which has made TNV’s tape hiss ubiquitous.
This trend has put TNV in an impossible situation: keep making records in the same style of the crowd or drastically change by cleaning up their recordings and be berated for bowing to critical pressure. This is why the theme of Born Again Revisited is so strange, since it is a summation of a career too young to sum up. It leads one to wonder if they are saying this is their last album in this style or if they will, as they say in “High Hopes” - do it again.
I made some new ones, including a series of famous dicks.
I have a predicament with these buttons. I want to start selling them at more venues besides the Wexner Center Store and the Columbus Museum of Art. To do that though, I need some sort of name to call them, a "brand." And unlike my really good band names (I Wish I Was Dead) I can't think of anything to call it. I used to call them "Jimi Baby Buttons" as a pun on Jimmy Buttons proper but that would be unseemly and overly confusing if I started selling them in a variety of places. This is especially important since literally anyone can do what I do - all you need is a button maker and some spare time. The difference, I guess, comes from the type of references you highlight - most of mine are a lot like my "artwork," lots of politics, art history references, recontextualization of visual ephemera, etc. But if you put those in a bowl next to some others, it's admittedly hard to tell the difference. My plan is to get little circle stickers with the name of the "company" and attach them to the pin backs. It makes sense too since each of these pins are one of a kind to attach them to a bigger concept. IDEAS? Also, if you want some of these, let me know. You can see more on the Deviant Art page I actually have.
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