"Presents 2012" Art Bong Exhibition Documentation

Find pictures of "Presents 2012" after the jump.

Presents 2012

Presents 2012, an exhibition by the Art Bong collective, opens February 20th at the Acock Gallery of the Columbus College of Art & Design. Presents 2012's closing reception is followed by an after party at Skylab Gallery. Find pictures of the last Art Bong show after the jump.

Other News:

* I'm reading poetry at the Monster House on February 11th with Cuddle Magic, Jordan Castro, Moon High, and Saintseneca.

* The cover I made for Delay's Rushing Ceremony gets NSFW-ed.

* Black Cloud reviews Slave Labia's first zine. 

* I like this Shoppers band that recently played at the Monster House. Choice lyric: "After all, what's the point of being young and dumb when you're always too drunk to come?"

Jack Rammuni - 666etwood Mac

                                                 Jack Rammuni.

Jack Rammuni, my next-door neighbor, posted pictures to accompany my poem "666etwood Mac," the title of which I shamelessly lifted from something he wrote in the Monster House's kitchen last year. 

Lynda Barry at SAIC

Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry, of Ernie Pook's Comeek and One! Hundred! Demons!, graced the stage of SAIC's Columbus building in Chicago, Illinois, on November 15th. She spoke and joked about her working process, her desire to reclaim art-making for everyone and her new book, Picture This. It was the one artist lecture I've attended that could properly be described as 'rollicking.'

Or download: MP3

Poem In September's Short North Gazette

The Short North Gazette recently published an excerpt of my poem, Recollections Of How I Smelled On I-90, which is really quite a long poem as I tend to smell like many things. It has some local interest as its content.

I'm fond of the Short North Gazette for reasons outside of their publishing my poem. I like the James Thurber coverage, I like the odd gag cartoons, the poetry, the magazine-length articles on Columbus history, and, most of all, I like the semi-recent addition of Jared Gardner to their stable of columnists. Gardner is an Associate Professor of English at Ohio State and heads the pop-culture minor there. (He also writes for The Comics Journal.) He was not only my Personalized Study Program advisor but also the advisor for the independent study project that "Punk Zine" came out of. So I'm doubly happy to see my poem published across from his moving eulogy of Harvey Pekar, who I first saw IRL at The Mershon Auditorium during a discussion that Gardner moderated.

The Gazette is free and available seemingly anywhere in The Short North.

THIS PIECE OF WORK IS PART OF A LARGER PROJECT THAT IS INDICATIVE OF MY PRACTICE

This piece of work is part of a larger project that is indicative of my practice

For most artists who go to art school to study art and produce what the outside world calls “art” it doesn’t suffice to say “this is my art” or “I am an artist.” Clearly, those wordings are just too clear.

Some straw men would say those phrases smack of pomposity and they would go on to repeat “I am an artist” using the French “artiste” to make everyone aware of the pretentiousness it entails. But if avoiding pretentiousness is the goal of avoiding the word “art” one would think the term “maker,” as it is one step away from the godly “creator,” would seem a bit inflated. But no, “maker” is trending toward ubiquity on art school campuses and “a creative” is already mainstream terminology. It seems anything – as long as it is not “art” and “artist” – is fine to call art and artists.

For those in the unlucky position of having to talk to the products of the artist-intellectual complex, those unwashed masses “looking for funding” because they are “working on a project,” you will be all too familiar with the following terms, which are usually preceded by a “my.”

  “piece”            “practice”          “work”          “project”

ARTY PARTY

Arty Party is out!

Arty Party is a collection of cartoon ha-has about contemporary artists like Lynda Benglis, Joseph Beuys, Chris Burden, Jenny Holzer and Gordon Matta-Clark. Cornballs like William Wegman and Dale Chihuly are in the mix as well. Arty Party is 8.5 x 5.5 inches with a card stock cover and is completely hand drawn by the talented, farcical, slapstick Sara Drake. It also contains an essay I wrote on the art world, seriousness and class dispositions that ends with the line, "I'd rather a Jacques Tati than a Jacques David."

Arty Party started when Sara was having trouble writing one panel gags for her comics class. The easiest answer to this was, of course, to make fun of artists. I posted the initial three we made together here. We were tonally and visually inspired by The New Yorker cartoons but also by the over-the-top stupidity of Johnny Ryan's Angry Youth Comix and Ivan Brunetti's Haw!. The material came directly from the History of Art 541 course taught by Kris Paulsen that I took last fall. The class was based on David Joselit's book American Art Since 1945.

This is a blogger who wrote about Sara and Arty Party.

This is Bad at Sports which blurbed Arty Party.

Order Arty Party online here.

Arty Party is available at the following stores:

Quimby's (Chicago, IL)
Boxcar Books (Bloomington, IN)
The Curiodrome (Bloomington, IN)
Mahan Gallery (Columbus, OH)
Used Kids Records (Columbus, OH)
Wexner Center for the Arts Store (Columbus, OH)
Wholly Craft (Columbus, OH)

Arty Party is also available in person from Sara and I for $3.00.

Lori Waxman Reviews my Work as Part of 60 WRD/MIN

"Glitter and Xerox make an odd couple at first but not second glance. In James Payne’s Money Isn’t the Everything that Not Having It Is, 2009, conceptual and formal parallels abound between the two decidedly plebian mediums. Glitter, after all, is nothing if not cheap, accessible glamour. Xerox, after all, is nothing if not cheap, accessible printing. Money isn’t the anything of either of them, and in case the viewer doesn’t quite cotton to thinking about content through material, Payne provides the classic expression, “class war,” right smack in the middle of his print. Class party might have been a more apt turn of phrase, however, given the glitter and the Sex Pistols-esque aesthetic of collaged, black-and-white copied text. And what a party it is, down to the correspondence between rectangular pieces of silver glitter and the image fragmentation that results from blowing any image up over and over again on a photostat machine. It’s a getting at the heart of the matter old school style, not with digital pixilation but the flash of the copier. But why blow things up? To look closer at it, hoping that what gets lost in the expansion and repetition is replaced by revelation. If not, there’s always the pretty flash of glitter to make the emptiness of truisms ring anew."

                                                                                         —Lori Waxman

Full array of Waxman's Columbus reviews.

PICS FROM 2012

Below are pictures and a video from a panel discussion on 2012 & Apocalypse Culture I was a part of at ROY G BIV gallery in Columbus, Ohio. Aarthi Suguness was my proxy/harbinger as I was in Chicago and could not deliver my speech. The speech is about the right-wing hijacking subjectivity and creating a conservative disbelief of "Truth" in America. Cassandra Troyan organized the panel as part of her month-long spree of outrageous, "wild" actions, drunken/high Nietzsche rooftop antics and seedy erotica reading/touching. 

Read my statement.
See my flyer for the event.
Pictures and video after "The Jump/Rapture."

2012 Statement

I wrote the statement below to be read, by Aarthi Suguness, as part of the 2012 panel at Cassandra Troyan's ROY G BIV show. It's about a lot of things, mostly the impotence of the American left to do anything outside of the realm of satire. There are a few blurbs after the statement about things I "felt" regarding 2012 as a phenomenon.

ARTY PARTY

Sara Drake and I have a new line of gag strips, "Arty Party." We are going to get fabulously rich off of The New Yorker's cartoon coffers. See us in the bougie pages. Also, watch for a blog devoted to them to drop on the world wide web. More below.