It seems to me like it’s been around forever, but today is actually the seventh anniversary of this blog.
For those of us who follow these things, this is also the anniversary of what turned out to be the most important event in my life, the night Barry and I met, eighteen years ago.
And, making the day even more perfect, . . . it’s also Paddy Johnson‘s birthday!
I just checked on what I had written one year ago. Today I may be more upbeat about the world outside the circle of our friends, but only a bit.
[the image is of one the three metal street numbers mounted on a metal service door belonging to a building down the street from our own]
Category: Queer
Alex Rose with Envoy at VOLTA
I don’t really have enough time to explain why I think the art of Alex Rose is something no one should miss seeing this week, but I thought these few poor images might do almost as well.
Envoy is showing this Irish artist’s work in their space at VOLTA, and I can’t say enough about it – on virtually every level. This is a breathtaking body of work, and it has been curated with an artistry and sensitivity worthy of both its exceptional beauty and the unique story of its creation – and destruction.
Rose, who lives in a cottage in Cork, has been and remains a shy young recluse who has created art obsessively for most of his life. He did have some experience with art school, reportedly graduating in the end at the bottom of his class, but he seems to be more of an autodidact. He works compulsively with found materials, reworking them until they are fully invested with his own soul. He burns or buries the art he has created, documenting its destruction; the documents themselves may then be reworked and turn up in other work. Images are uploaded for a brief time on his blog, but they are ultimately removed, so that nothing survives in the end.
Fortunately he was persuaded by the gallery’s director, the artist Jimi Dams, that letting go of some pieces, letting them be seen, would help other artists, and that is the only reason that we may see some of them here. But even this fragile window, a reluctant concession to visibility, was won only on the artist’s understanding that the work which survives the ordinary terms of his practice (that is, always ending with its disappearance) no longer has anything to do with him.
When Envoy began to sell work during and after a solo show last June and Dams tried to send to the artist the money he was owed, it learned that he didn’t want it. The physical objects no longer existed for him, and besides, he told them, he already had a secure, though very modest job and didn’t need the money. Dams suggested, and Rose agreed, that his share of any sales could be left in a fund which would help artists who needed it to mount their shows in the gallery.
A most peculiar and wonderful artist.
confirmed: men go into heat (but no one really notices)
Maybe hold the Speed Stick. [Robert Mapplethorpe Untitled (self-portrait) 1973-1975 Polaroid photograph]
Scientists have very recently discovered that when men become aroused there’s a verifiable shift in their body odor, and that women can tell the difference between sexual sweat and workaday smells by processing the odors in different parts of the brain, although they don’t consciously realize it.
The headline in the New York Times article reads: “Varying Sweat Scents Are Noted by Women [my emphasis]”. The new scientific study which announced this, as reported in the January issue of The Journal of Neuroscience”, was made exclusively with a group of heterosexual men and heterosexual women, but I think that the results would be duplicated were the test conducted among homosexual men.
We’re all communicating with smell, even though we don’t consciously know it.
Before eager queers jump up and down with optimistic hopes, I have to add that it seems neither “gaydar” nor any of our other talents would help at all in advancing the usefulness of this newly-confirmed tool in our sophisticated evolutionary mating kit: One psychologist who was not involved with the study, Adam K. Anderson, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, has cautioned that in spite of the conclusions of the report we shouldn’t conclude that men now know what it is that pleases women [or homosexual men, I would add]. “[the scientists] didn’t find activations of typical reward centers or regions associated with pleasure,” Anderson said. “It’s just as likely that [these women’s] brains are picking up a man in heat that they are not particularly attracted to.”
Oh.
So we can’t know if we appear to the beloved as anything other than smelly. The latest scientific news doesn’t offer any scientific shortcut to mating. Whether we’re het or homo, it seems that our guy-pheromones can’t do it all for us; we’re still going to remain pretty dependent on our more culturally-developed contrivances, like conversation and social graces, if we want to know what square we’re on when we’re thinking of hitting on an an unfamiliar her or him.
[image from “Mapplethorpe: Polaroids“, via The Morning News]
Nayland Blake at Location One
Nayland Blake Companion 2006 t-shirt, bubble wrap, trunk 48″ x 50″ x 9.5″ [installation view]
Just about as inscrutable as Matt Mullican, but different. Very different.
Soho’s Location One is hosting what the gallery describes as a 25-year survey of Nayland Blake‘s work in almost every medium. Curated by Maura Reilly, the show is titled “Behavior“. Even for a visitor familiar, even comfortable with the transgressive, it seems Blake doesn’t really care whether you get much of what he’s doing. But then he’s something of a virtuoso in this field. You can get lost in this installation, but you won’t get out unaffected by some of the images.
Oh, the printed text on the soiled shirt in the image above reads, “GNOME FONDLER”.
Nayland Blake Bunnyhole II 1997 steel, nylon, wood and stuffed animal 40″ x 7″ x 8.5″ [installation view]
Michael Mahalchick here and there
I have little idea what this is about, but it’s the piece I remember best from all the work I saw in a very interesting show of sculpture, “Without Walls“, at Museum 52. I don’t know if it tells us anything about the artist himself; maybe Michael just found this stack somewhere on the street, with or without the needle lying on top, and decided to mark it with his signature. And then maybe not.
For me the important thing is that I’m preternaturally attracted to it, and would be even if Roman Ragazzi were not staring up from the floor. It also reminds me of the happy happenstance that Mahalchick has another solo show opening at CANADA on Friday, titled, “For What It’s Worth“.
going to be a little grumpy here: about all that god talk
1917 poster* by J.C. Leyendecker, successful, closeted [homo] designed to sell war bonds
Although I took huge delight yesterday in Rev. Joseph Lowery‘s contribution, because of his own history and the fact that its grace transcended religion, my experience of the joy of yesterday’s inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by the number of genuine sour notes, all related, that piled up all day long and even into the night at the inaugural balls: Watching the glorious events of the day being soaked in all that god talk made me very, very uncomfortable. You probably know what I’m taking about.
By the way, after all the uproar over Obama giving the nod to Rick Warren’s to deliver that, whatyamacallit, “invocation“, I thought it was some “revelation” to hear the fat gentleman finally speak yesterday. As he rambled on like a Sunday school teenager in “church-speak” mode, Barry and I looked at each other, dumbfounded. Just then Barry saw on his feed that at 11:49 EST justinph had tweeted:
Wow, Rick Warren prays like shit.
I say, amen.
And I want to interrupt myself here with a point of information: In spite of what we have been led to believe, and contrary to the [Justice Roberts-flubbed] administration of the oath of office we witnessed yesterday, the Constitution includes a precisely-worded, prescribed text which absolutely does not include the phrase, “so help me god”. Also, our founders made it very clear that you don’t have to swear an oath, but merely affirm. [Article II, Section 1.]
As a part of all mankind I share the joy of people of every color in the triumph of Barack Husein Obama, but, as an American who knows and serves no god, today I probably feel more excluded than ever before. A black man can become President; we had already discovered that we can have and probably soon will have a woman as President; we can expect some day to find that it isn’t necessary to be a Christian to become President; if absolutely nobody else shows up at the hustings, we might eventually elect a queer; The office is now open to every citizen [if natural-born, at least 35 years of age, and 14 years a resident in the U.S.], yet from where I’m standing it looks pretty certain that, if faking belief isn’t an option, an atheist can never become President of these United States. She or he is more likely to be stoned in the public square.
When I look at the historic talent pool represented by that distinguished class of skeptics, I find that truth to be quite tragic, and I’m very sad for all of us.
*
When I first saw this image, on the About.com site, the medallion at the bottom had been altered to read “For a Christian America”, and the sword was edited to bear the inscription, “Bigotry, Discrimination”. I put at the top of this post before I realized that as originally published and as shown here the picture doesn’t have anything overtly connected to a deity, but I’ve decided to keep it at the top, for the Boy Scouts of America’s connection to god, country and straight-acting-boys – and men.
[image, in which the artist’s male lover {they were to live together 48 years} modeled for “Liberty”, from Library of Congress]
baby Jesus with eye shadow
This is a seasonal post – but with a twist.
Although I’m a refugee from a Roman Catholic youth, a steadfast atheist for almost 50 years, I suppose I may still be somewhat conflicted about the baby Jesus.
For some reason, when I saw this delicate little ceramic infant a number of years ago inside the gift shop at New Mexico’s ancient El Santuario de Chimayo, I couldn’t resist snapping it up. At first the priest didn’t want to part with the pale-skinned hand-made figure, even though it was on the merchandise table, but he eventually agreed to sell it. It turned out to be the last one in stock, and he wasn’t sure they’d ever get another. Maybe he had fallen in love with it himself, and maybe he sensed I wasn’t going to use it for conventional devotion.
Okay, it was the eyes that got me.
I lay him down carefully in some raffia on the cherry tea table every December 24th; it’s always the most Christmas-y thing in our apartment. We’re actually both pretty devoted to this child, even though our own convention is that he gets packed away in a few days until his return appearance next year.
When the kid looks up at us through that fantastic eyeshadow, I like to think he’s trying to tell us something we already know.
the Obama/Warren mutual annointing thing: total wack
Hieronymus Bosch The Mountebank 1475-80 oil on panel 21″ x 29.5″
I’m going to close my eyes and count to ten, and when I open them I want to find that fat mountebank gone.
I’m very much in and of this country, but I’m not a member of Rick Warren’s wacky faith-based syndicate of dupes. I’m not a Christian of any description, and I’m also not a Jew and not a Muslem or Bah�’ist. I’m not Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Buddist, Confucian, Taoist, Shinto, Zoroastrian, Druze, Shamanist, Unitarian or Yoruban. I’m also not a part of the Prince Philip Movement.
In fact I’m not a member of any magic cult, and I’m not a part of any other kind of club. I like to believe that I can think for myself. It’s a competence I continue to hope I might share with every American adult, in spite of all the sad evidence to the contrary. At the very least I’d like to think that the person chosen to occupy the office of President of the United States of America can and does think for himself. Yet it now seems pretty clear, as he’s about to be anointed on the steps of the Capitol, that even our latest almighty one doesn’t think for himself, or at least that he doesn’t want us to think that he thinks for himself.
It’s not only that I am appalled by Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to deliver an “invocation” at his, no, . . . our truly-epochal January 20th inauguration ceremony. No, it’s much bigger than that: I object to the fact that even in the twenty-first century, in order to get a proper send-off into the most important secular office a nation can award to one of its citizens, the President-elect of my country feels he has to enlist the public help of any crazy sky pilot to formally summon the private imaginary friend the two of them share.
NOTE: If I were to object only to the specific choice of Warren as the next American high priest, I would hope I could come up with more reasons than those connected with his vocal opposition to gay marriage, comparing it to incest, pedophilia and polygamy. This seems to be all that most people find appalling about Warren.
I would add, and this is just for starters, that he does not believe in evolution; that he would deny women the right to their own bodies, comparing abortion to the Holocaust and those who defend a woman’s right to choice as no better than Nazis; that he has said that women should submit to their husbands; that he believes that Jews who do not convert will surely roast in hell; that he has advocated the assassination of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; that he has said that Christians who advance a social gospel (the religious crusade against poverty and inequality) are Marxists; and that he opposes stem-cell research.
But enough. �crasez l’inf�me!
[image from Web Gallery of Art]
Van Johnson: still hidden in the New York Times closet
I know it from the very personal relationships the man enjoyed with good friends of mine who regularly hosted this sweet man in their homes. Van Johnson was quite queer, even if he didn’t seem to want it broadcast everywhere.
It’s too bad the obituaries in the NYTimes and other MSM outlets I’ve just looked at on line still seem to think that queer is, well, . . . too disgusting to talk about in public, thus perpetuating the climate of fear and loathing in which Johnson grew up and which continues to waste and destroy lives even today.
ADDENDUM: By way of media corroboration, I just found this copy of a 2004 obituary of Evie Wynn Johnson, the woman the star married in 1947, It appeared in the The Independent.
[image from ioffer]
“Signs of Change” at EXIT ART
“No Border Camps” members dramatize how goods cross borders freely, people don’t (1998)
Queen Mother Moore radicalizing much younger Green Haven Prison inmates in 1973
Barry and I spent almost two hours at the current Exit Art show, “Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now“, on what may have been our last beautiful late fall Saturday afternoon. Let me just explain that it was several times more compelling than even this old activist had expected. I’ll add this caution: It closes at the end of the week, on December 6th.
There are colorful posters, photographs, broadsheets, banners, sound documentations and videos. In addition to the two images above I can show captures of a small selection of some of the more provocative posters below. I’m including only minimal captions since a proper context for the posters generally requires more information than I can supply here.
The single greatest thing about the show may be less its lavish size than its enormous geographical compass. It covers modern social movements just about everywhere on the planet. The video documentaries are particularly intense.
So I hope this short tease works. If you read this blog with any frequency you probably should see this exhibition, especially if you’re the sort who is inclined to muck about in the street, or maybe especially if you’re not yet that sort. Tell your friends, in any event.
I suppose it was not part of the project’s scope, but I noticed that there were virtually no artifacts in the exhibition which were not printed, that is, there were no hand-made “signs of change”. And I’m sure that anyone looking for specific content could find something to say about the curatorial choices, but after I left this rather dense survey of the use of art in social movements I recalled that I had seen very little material devoted to AIDS or homosexuality. That really surprised me, as it’s not as if these two issues, AIDS in particular, did not attract artists of all kinds, or that their response had no aesthetic resonance.
anonymous poster from the 1970s
poster using cover from 1980s UK newspaper, Class War
poster from Chicago feminist collective, “SisterSerpents” (1989) [blue is a reflection on plexi]
poster from “Dirty Linen Corp” (1969)
1970 poster from Amsterdam absurdist theatrical party, “Kabouterbeweging” [gnome movement]