BOMB Issue 114, Winter 2010 Preview by BOMB Magazine

$7.95 US / $7.95 Canada File under Art and Culture Display until march 15, 2011

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bomb CONTENTS n u m b e r 114 / w i nte r 2 0 10 E d i t o r ’ s C h o i ce

BOMB S P E C I F I C David Herbert and Thordis Adalsteinsdottir

A r t i sts o n A r t i sts John O’Connor by Bruce Pearson Claudia Joskowicz by Omer Fast JJ Peet by Sabine Russ The Wick Peter Blegvad

32 73 76 96

Inte r v i e w s A r t— R o c h e l l e F e i nste i n 24 by Justin Lieberman Feinstein talks with fellow painter Lieberman about The Estate of Rochelle F., a pre-posthumous, post-humorous painting project for which she utilized only materials already present in her studio. Even former works were repurposed. L i te r at u r e—T r i stan G a r c i a 34 by Sandra Laugier Paris-based novelist Tristan Garcia, a philosopher by training, speaks with another philosopher, Sandra Laugier, about how ideas, ethics, and sex get entangled through the vivid characters in his first novel, Hate: A Romance. F i l m — A p i c h atp o ng 40 Wee r aset h a k u l by Lawrence Chua Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the 2010 Palme d’Or at Cannes and will be released in the US next spring. With writer Lawrence Chua, the filmmaker speaks in a Bangkok café about Thai history and its ghosts.

on the cover: Adam Pendleton, System of Display, T (Not/Godard Made in the U.S.A., 1966), 2010, silkscreen on glass and mirror, 48 7/8 × 48 7/8 × 3 inches.

A r t— G l a d y s N i l ss o n / 50 j i m n u tt by Richard Hull Painter Richard Hull, friends with Chicago artists Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson for 30 years, interviews the legendary couple at their home. They talk shop about the Hairy Who and Chicago Imagism, Bruegel, and El Greco. M u s i c —T h e BU G 60 by Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture The Bug is Kevin Martin, a key member of King Midas Sound and the influential Londonbased musician/producer who, under the spell of the voices and rhythms of Jamaican dancehall, helped spawn a new era of dance-floor experimentation—as told to New York’s Jace Clayton. A r t— A d a m P en d l et o n 66 by Thom Donovan Adam Pendleton’s large-scale video installation BAND is a milestone in the artist’s ongoing

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research on how to display the experience of history. With poet Thom Donovan he discusses the connection between civil protest and live art.

ONE y e a r / F OUR i ss u e S US: $22.0 0 I n t e r n at i o n a l : $ 4 2 . 0 0 B OM B S I T E . c o m / S U B S CRIb e

78 L i t e r at u r e— Rae Armantrout by Ben Lerner Pulitzer Prize–winner Rae Armantrout on her new book of poetry, Money Shot, and its dealings with value—in life, porn, and capitalism—through an email exchange with poet Ben Lerner.

First Proof is sponsored in part by the Bertha and Isaac Liberman Foundation.

88 D a n c e— S a r a h M i c h e ls o n by Ralph Lemon While rehearsing her upcoming production, Devotion, opening at The Kitchen in NYC this January, Sarah Michelson contemplates, with fellow choreographer Ralph Lemon, the gaze, the “naive body,” and the juxtaposition of seasoned dancers with young girls.

Supporters include the Andy Warhol Arts Writing Initiative, the Thanksgiving Fund, and BOMB’s Trustees.

This issue is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency; and by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

F i r st P r o o f : b o m b ’ s l i t e r a r y s u ppl e m e n t Marina Adams & Norma Cole Ben Ristow Poetry Prize Winner: Matt Reeck Ben Lerner Armando Suárez Cobián Robert Seydel Chiara Barzini

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T h e O r igi n al S ocial Netwo r k L ette r f r om B O M B Friend. Follow. Like. Share. There’s been a lot of talk lately about social networks, what they mean, how they function, their impact on our culture. What’s been most interesting to hear over the din is the emergence of a vernacular that is familiar, if not reassuring, to the ears of us independent publishers. Powered by language that would otherwise seem innocuous if not for its viral potency, social networks thrive on peer-to-peer interaction, word-of-mouth recommendation, and a grassroots spirit of collaboration, which is exactly how indy magazines have always operated. Ever-evolving and self-informing, social networks are like eco-systems, each one an enormous conversation that is constantly updating—and upgrading—itself. That is to say, they are just like BOMB. Conceived of by a group of friends and launched on a shoestring budget, BOMB is the original social network—for artists, by artists—a platform where peers could share ideas and creative processes, through dialogues that were always in development. Delivering the artist’s voice and making it available to the public, this was the magazine’s original mission in 1981. And it remains its organizational mandate today, 30 years later. Like Wikipedia, that great social media experiment, BOMB has no single author, but rather thousands and thousands of them, all of whom participate in a collective act of refinement that unfolds in real time. If you’ve read BOMB over the course of several years, you’ve witnessed a type of crowd-sourcing that has changed the nature of cultural discourse. Today, with institutions such as the New York Times and the New Yorker, to name a few, regularly quoting BOMB’s interviews, we are reminded of just how far BOMB’s influence really extends, like bits of shrapnel embedded across our cultural landscape.

Issue No. 1, BOMB Magazine, May 1981. Cover art by Sarah Charlesworth.

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David Bowie as Celliers and Ryuichi Sakamoto as Yonoi in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Courtesy of the Criterion Collection. be brutal, and that the expression of the erotic often emerges, through the constraints of what Cassavettes would call “society,” as violence. In a 1983 interview (included in the exemplary extras of Criterion’s DVD release) he states, “That thing we call eroticism results from human beings wanting to somehow connect with each other [. . .] eroticism is proof that we are alive.” In Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Oshima furthers his critique of nationality, of borders, as restrictive of this connection. All to the accompaniment of a layered, and incredibly ‘80s, synth score. —Clinton Krute teaches English at a community college in downtown Brooklyn and is BOMB’s web editor.

20 Ye ars Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith VHF Records, 2010 Is 20 years a long time? Does 20 years feel like a long time? What about 2 hours, 57 minutes? Is progress demonstrated, either aesthetically or technologically, by recording a song on cassette in your first practice session with a friend, in your father’s house in a small English town, and then revisiting it 20 years later, using it as source material for digital electronic manipulations that

result in an album of experimental instrumental music? What would have happened if you two had released the original tape in 1987? If you and this friend record three full-length albums in the space of a year and then wait 15 years before making them public, is it because you decided you didn’t like them or thought they would sound even better in 15 years, or because you have short-term memory loss? Is 15 years a long time? If you release a double album stuffed into a white, single-pocket sleeve with LAKE laconically inscribed on the cover and then, 20 years later, release a single album/three-CD set (of the aforementioned unreleased records) in a double-pocket sleeve (also white, and barren save for four small “photobooth snaps”), it’s still a two-to-one media-to-sleeve ratio, right? Isn’t it

nice to have a record in 2010 whose idiosyncratic multi-CD/LP presentation makes it seem like simply downloading it would be missing out completely on a very worthwhile tactile experience, even though the packaging itself (liner notes and interview booklet aside) is little more than functional? Twenty years ago there was no such thing as downloading, or CD/LP sets, was there? If you’re a multi-instrumentalist (like both Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith) who writes and performs songs but also works with noise and long-form Minimalistinspired structures, does that make you a singer-songwriter, or a noisician, or a composer, or what? What is a “professional musician”? If you’ve played music only occasionally and recorded for tiny labels after 20 years, does that make you a hobbyist? Or is your practice actually more interesting than that of most full-time music makers, especially if the music you’re creating 15 or 20 years after you started is consistently good and maybe even superior to what you’ve done before? Is 20 Years the most outsized, outlandish collection by a sonic duo since 1/2 Gentlemen/Not Beasts (1980), Half Japanese’s life-affirming, three-disc box set of monomaniacal electronics and spasmodic songtantrums, or Godley & Creme’s Consequences (1977), an infamous symphonic-rock, triple-LP concept album about man versus nature? Did I already ask if 20 years is a long time? —Alan Licht is a musician, writer, and curator based in New York.

Correspondence Course: An Epistol ary History of Carolee Sch n e e m a n n and Her Circle Edited by Kristine Stiles Duke University Press, 2010 Correspondence Course collects the expansive and borderless epistolary world of Carolee Schneemann, visual and performance artist,

15 filmmaker, and poet, whose multiform work—from the erotically charged, color-saturated film Fuses to the classic feminist performance piece Interior Scroll—has fearlessly engaged mind and body for over 50 years. The first letter here, from Schneemann to Stan Brakhage, written in February of 1956, when she was just 16, exhibits her confidence and acuity. Her extensive correspondences with composer James Tenney, Schneemann’s lover and partner from the mid-’50s to the late ’60s, includes a missive they cowrote to Charles Olson in the fall of 1960 in hopes of visiting him “to talk of perhaps / projective verse syllable line breath energy, projective.” The openness of their letters to each other attest to the best of youthful passion; one cannot help but think how lucky they both were to have met each other while they were both engaged in the process of becoming who they wanted to be. She writes Tenney during the development of her major performance piece Meat Joy in Paris in 1964: “Cat like (that consistency, paste—) not really at work yet: Every Thing is chopped up here in delicious bits. That is, I am still utterly unable to find my way home (my usually strong feeling for directions shows no promise).” A couple of months later she reports that “the impossible French audience I’d come to know & fear so well, hypnotized into a silence which no one ever has experienced before!” In addressing diverse figures such as Joseph Cornell and Jonas Mekas or Kate Millett and Yvonne Rainer, Schneemann offers descriptions of proposed performances, engaging polemics on aesthetics, loving details of her cat Kitch’s movements, and her harrowing experiences seeking out illegal abortions. She resists the patriarchal assumptions of her male peers as well as the often limiting terms with which curators hastily label her work, their skepticism about its long-term value and concerns over the nudity in her art. One realizes in reading this hefty collection just how stealthily she has made her way through the culture of her times, how she has maintained a brilliant dwelling for

editor’s choice her creative process and psychic space, and steered a course based entirely on her unique direction. Correspondence Course offers an ingenious view into a cultural life that does not fit neatly into the history books, if it’s there at all. —Stephen Motika is the editor of Tiresias: The Collected Poems of Leland Hickman and the author of the chapbook Arrival and At Mono. He is a 2010–2011 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace resident.

Carolee Schneemann, detail of Correspondence Course, 1980, self-shot silver prints mounted on silk-screened text, 32 × 30 inches.

Lynd Ward, woodcut from Vertigo. Courtesy of The Library of America.

LY ND WARD: Six Novels In Woodcu ts Edited by Art Spiegelman The Library of America, 2010 Will Eisner, who coined the term “graphic novel” in 1978, credits Lynd Ward and his woodcut novels as direct influences. Yet, outside the world of graphic artists, Ward’s work has been largely forgotten. The Library of America, doing what it does best, offers six of Ward’s woodcut novels from the 1930s— Gods’ Man, Madman’s Drum, Wild Pilgrimage, Prelude to a Million Years, Song Without Words, and Vertigo—in a beautifully printed two-volume set. In his admiring introduction to this new collection, Art Spiegelman writes that silent film is a “direct catalyst for the wordless book.” Indeed, encountering Ward’s woodcuts for the first time, it is striking how much imagery they share with films by German expressionists like F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. However, Ward’s novels, by their nature, lack a score or intertitles, leaving one in the truly silent world of the woodcut novel. While the plot point is immediately clear on many pages, other pages reveal a figure and its import only upon closer study. It might seem odd to call woodcuts ambiguous, given their intensely sharp contrasts. The appearance of gray can only be achieved by crosshatching—both black and white being present side by side, as negative and positive. Ward’s themes, which are rooted in the disparities of the Depression era in which he lived and worked, are mirrored in the stark contrasts inherent to his chosen form. Ward deftly exploits the unexpected ambiguity on the concluding page of Vertigo: at first glance, it appears to be an image of a solitary man, stooped with age, on a roller coaster, implying an unstoppable track toward death, but with careful parsing the image of a couple emerges, reunited at the site where their romance began. The old man’s beard is revealed to be the young woman’s hair as she buries her face in the young man’s

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John O’Connor by Bruce Pearson

above: Turing, 2010, colored pencil and graphite on paper, 78 × 50 inches. right: Hairy and Bald, 2005, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 52 × 62 inches.

I was hooked on the pop-psychedelic appearance of John O’Connor’s drawings, all of which are generated by an array of different systems that are mind-boggling in their eccentricity and range. Wanting to know more about the work, I visited his studio in Long Island City, talked to him at length, took numerous notes, and then, upon leaving, realized that, despite his intricate explanations, the works still resisted my understanding. It’s as if the descriptions of the overlapping systems guiding the drawings’ composition opened up multiple pathways into them, none of them fully explaining their wonderfully strange manifestations. Take this: for Turing (2010) O’Connor drew from a 1950 paper on artificial intelligence in which the British mathematician Alan Turing posed the question, “Can machines think?” Through a computer, a human judge engaged in a “conversation” with a human and a machine—both of which were

ARTists on artists / john o’connor

trying to appear human. More often than not the judge could not tell the machine apart from the human. For the drawing, O’Connor imagined he’d fool a machine into thinking that the human was actually one of its own. Free-associating on the notion of predestiny and free will, he wrote down a list of words. He then treated these words through various processes. He reversed the order of letters, turned letters into numbers, or used coding systems to transform them, and, ultimately, came up with a new, random list of words that emulated the computer-generated logic of, say, spam. Through an elaborate procedure, O’Connor then retranslated the random list into numbers and added them up to find a word in the dictionary. He reports that this process churned up a disparaging term that encapsulated an element of Turing’s biography as a prosecuted homosexual. Ultimately, in Turing, the human reasserts itself by defeating the machine.

above: Cardiff Giant, 2009, ink and colored pencil on paper, 14 × 9.5 inches. right: Lies!, 2009, acrylic, graphite, and colored pencil on paper, 52 × 44 inches. Images courtesy of the artist and Pierogi.

Or take another example: for the drawing Hairy and Bald (2005), on “the irony and tragedy of hair loss,” O’Connor chose a number between one and 100 at random: 83. In the center of the piece he drew 83 different versions of hair-loss patterns he found in an illustrated book. At the bottom he created a geometric figure with the words Lorenz attractor by translating the words into numbers. (A cryptic yet accessible Wikipedia entry will tell you that the Lorenz attractor is “a fractal structure corresponding to the behavior of the Lorenz oscillator” which, in turn, is “a three-dimensional dynamical system that exhibits chaotic flow . . .”) Many more steps went into connecting the figures at the drawing’s center and bottom edge, but you get the idea. In an O’Connor drawing you’re likely to find transcriptions of words the artist spoke in his sleep, allusions to studies on the most offensive words on television, or predictions by Nostradamus. A drawing he’s

currently working on, Secrets of the State, culls from military patches for secret, real, or fictitious operations, the names of people throughout history who’ve died of mysterious causes (and the dates), and logos of corporations with direct connections to intelligence operations. It all makes total sense when O’Connor tells me about it, but the closer I look at the work, the more it becomes an impossible riddle, a Zen koan of sorts. Raymond Queneau, cofounder of Oulipo, once described the cult writer Raymond Roussel, renowned for his perplexing compositional methods, as one who “joins the mathematician’s delirium to the poet’s logic.” I could say the same about John O’Connor. It’s as if Roussel, channeled by O’Connor, had discovered the Internet and decided to make illuminated pages from his findings. —Bruce Pearson is an artist living in New York City.

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film / Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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Marina Adams & Norma Cole New Alphabet

Marina Adams & Norma Cole

The Dre am I Had Ended “Now I ’ m f r e e o f l o v e a n d o f p o s t e r s ”

—Mayakovsky 6.VI.1924

going back to an absent source, between object and score brushing away flies with my thoughts the size of postcards burning “three beautiful women from Prague”— I thought he said “burning” talking about the picture realism:—war is kind is the title of a poem the guy told me, a shell in the kernel, those fluttering flags at the top of the tower, shadow of an arc against the wall, sunspots on shadow wars a woman looks at the toe of her boot inventing the present and presuming a kind of accuracy or at least theatricality, tensions between elements almost implausible, a fugue, a kind of authorial sampling, funnels of forms of violence “evidence- based”—

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M at t R e e c k Two Poems Winner of BOMB’s 2010 Poetry Prize, Judged by Susan Howe

I n t e r c e p t e d T e l e g r a ms o f a M a n i n a Ta r ta n S h a l w a r K a m e e z telegram #1 sent from Rawalpindi from the furthest margins of British no friends or relatives in after fifty years India was the home becomes disputed when every community has rules implicit & explicit a homeland is telegram #2 sent from Bhopal like a seal of tendency each new place provides grounds for what you choose to identify with khoyals in the trees & sing during the monsoons in the parochial community telegram #3 sent from Shimla was to marry a native woman though he’d become too Rajput to deal effectively with knowledge of history tames the visceral reaction to Hindu values of purity & communal ritual telegram #4 sent from Mathura create the world’s largest “working” democracy 1.1 billion people & a third the size of the US place names are of a separate past Pottawatomie & Konza & Topeka & Wichita & telegram #5 sent from Hyderabad Khair-un-Nissa married James Achilles Fitzpatrick in a country of dispersal & wander, community (a) bow slightly your head (b) wiggle your head (c) say thank without religion humans telegram #6 sent from Chennai would have remained strictly tribal attitude of obedience to a non-natural prohibition outward markers dilate the sense of a literature of escape allows Hindu women cleaned more telegram #7 sent from Gandhinagar regularly than the British chicken tikka masala is the national dish of you cannot become Hindu immigrants hovel in American ghetto boarding houses with each new language, the foreign opens

matt reeck

telegram #8 sent from Hubli living in the vice grip of how a guy treats his mother is a better way to know The Rolling Stones as cultural capital or Schubert or Vilayat Ochterlony strolled Delhi in the evenings with his 13 nautch telegram #9 sent from Lucknow girls on river called the Indus & beyond people called the Hindus Dravidians most likely comprised 12 Japanese tourists, a Chinese massage parlor in Quetta where I enjoy speaking out of my self & into telegram #10 sent from Raipur your canon does not acknowledge . . . a new name—Saleem, as in Prince Saleem of he had to be circumcised to marry the moor but he bled Satya Sai Baba & the Chishti shrine in Ajmer & Charles II issued telegram #11 sent from Delhi an order for all absconded servicemen to the purplish tinge to her gums & nipples on November 7, 1801, under conditions of greatest secrecy identities turned the curtain gently moving & my fate was

The Other Side Written in erasable ink this is an erasable poem, each word has been erased from . . . Only from above is anything whole, nothing makes sense on first reading, of all this poem expresses, the mistake gets taken for what it is, erase this & you get, erase that & yet again, constantly on the verge of . . . listen to the hours of the world through the window, automatic-response syndrome—what you never notice in the routine of day, nothing unexpected, nothing seen. This is the part you don’t mind, too many moving parts & you escape to the roof . . .

This is possible only when not concerned with lying, likewise the truth, when alone in your ruined anagram, the body in peril of disappearing, the circle fading away . . . Like all degrees of remove, the pathology rises just millimeters, spread to the mind from the page it cannot project, now any morning you wish you replace the irritant— you’re a man, you become a woman, you’re a woman, you become a man . . . Turn the sign around, it doesn’t say stop, you’re a note to yourself, a pole, an octagon, where you start from . . .

Matt Reeck has published poetry and translations in a variety of magazines. Coyote Pursues, his marionette-theater collaboration with the visual artist Deborah Simon, was performed at St. Ann’s Warehouse Labapalooza! Festival this past June.

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Robert Se ydel Formulas & Flowers from Book of Ruth The mind runs poorly but is still sweet.

Walking to Utopia Parkway is like shipping out to sea.

Self-ignorance is my house. A shell.

Where the horizon lifts, a girl’s skirt also. Motions on the edge of sleep. Fluttering eyelids in the place between.

To wear masks put them off.

A dictionary will follow me, leaping like a hare.

My work never comes quite to be.

Schmutz is my sign.

As I get fatter I will sing more.

I rearrange time. It’s confused in me.

Your head resides in the constellations, Mary-blue. All is sublimation with you.

I believe in error, an aesthetics of error. Error is Arrow I’ve sd.

This envelope contains stars. Hoops & diadems; heads.

Dreams of a houseboat, a stolen letter, a manuscript in a puddle.

Maybe the bow tie swims in curled water.

As my hair dries my mind goes.

Failures surround us, Joseph. Sol is their sign.

I found in the flats my face.

I’m perverse & green in my middle days.

There’s an occult meaning in initials.

If a bird can use the wind I can use the brown Queens smut.

I’d walk a mile in a canary blue bathing suit just to get a Coke for you.

The impossible air of feathers. But I am a selfish woman.

What happens is not what matters. What matters is what’s here.

Maybe simply because the air is fair, my eye is not. The smell of the lindens in spring.

Art is a mannered & cold thing. Mind’s a warble but by no stretch a bird.

The planet is a hummingbird. Reveal amber, the color of time, & the happiness of glue. Sad men fail art relentlessly.

In a quiet nudist dream, marks of apropos. But white ripostes, not art, come to me at noon.

Then again as needles go, still a book, the full. I walk with a library at my ear. A peach cream soda fountain pleasure.

Space brighter even than Queens—I sit in the center of it like a rabbit smelling the grass. Don’t write my house a bird sd in the water. The eye steams in a beautiful flower.

I woke from a dream with the word “pledge” on my tongue. A whole day recognizes the day. A picture organizes itself in the same way. A pox on the familyless.

What goes by not me.

& the brittle girls on Flatbush Ave. & the boys with holes in their heads. The galleries are made for fashion. Nothing I make is. Only Imagination counts. I pretend I understand the sky.

Radiant therapy, my foot! We are an 18 plus a 19. (1819 was a “Panic Year.”) Ruth sees Saints, Sol sd.

Mine is a wisdom that limps. Imagination is foolish. Mine hops like a rabbit.

I like animals & dirt. I’ll invent who I am, against what is. My name & time: a Queens of the mind.

I suck my finger after tea like a pasha in his robe. The mind practicing a strange, white cloud.

& when I bleed the world goes brown. It looks like something in my dirty pictures. Now in the water perhaps a little floating vellum sheet. Very little as the mind goes holds. I’m both spry & limping, beautiful

robert seydel

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BOMB 114

Gl adys Nilsson and Jim Nut t by Richard Hull

Gladys Nilsson, Steady Bears, 1970, watercolor, 15 3/16 × 11 7/8 inches. All Nilsson images courtesy of the artist, Luise Ross Gallery in New York, and Jean Albano Gallery in Chicago.

Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilsson are often described as “Chicago artists,” and it’s true that their work formed during a particular moment when Chicago Imagism appeared in the mid ’60s with the three Hairy Who shows at the Hyde Park Art Center. But I would argue that for the last 40 years Jim and Gladys, who met as students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and have been living together ever since, could have been living anywhere. With fierce independence and a nonchalant attitude toward reigning trends in contemporary art, they create paintings and drawings that root from an intense need to make things, and to make them right. For several years, Jim and I have been team-teaching a class about looking at and discussing paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection. A scrupulously detailed conversation about a Bruegel painting is fairly typical (we continued one in several emails), and though there are times we disagree about certain aspects of what a painting might do—much to the amusement of the students—we agree that there is always something new to discover. It is Gladys and Jim’s intense curiosity and connoisseurship of painting—and also opera and golf, among other things—that draws me to them. Of course, I admire the work, which, as Gladys put it regarding Jim’s work, has “a great deal of wonderful, masterful subtlety going on now.” Jim and Gladys and I became friends 30 years ago, when the Phyllis Kind Gallery invited me to join them as a gallery artist. It was 1979; I was attending graduate school at SAIC. The first day I brought my work to the gallery, Jim and Gladys—whom I barely knew—were hosting a party for Roger Brown after his opening. Viewing their house and the unusual amalgamation of paintings and objects in it, and meeting some of the most interesting artists in Chicago, I felt lucky. Driving up to the house for this interview, I remembered that evening. After all these years, I still feel lucky to be in the presence of their wonderful home and great company. —Richard Hull

ART / Gladys Nilsson and jim nutt

Richard Hull: As I was coming up here I was thinking about your collection of works by self-taught artists, contemporary art, and ethnographic objects—especially with the Ray Yoshida show coming up at SAIC. As a teacher at the school he had a lot of influence on people collecting things. When did you start collecting? Gladys Nilsson: We bought a small painting by a Sunday painter who couldn’t quite get it right at a junk shop in the early ’60s because, I don’t know, it seemed like the thing to do. We didn’t start out acquiring things with the idea that we must form a collection. Jim Nutt: The False Image people [Christina Ramberg, Phil Hanson, Eleanor Dube, Roger Brown] and other students became aware that Ray was going to flea markets, and they started going as a group. It became almost a weekend ritual, but it also had something to do with his idea of going out and collecting images that you see in your eye. It wasn’t unlike his instructing students to cut out images from wherever and organize/paste them in sketchbooks, based on formal relationships. The idea was to recognize the potential of a form or shape beyond the literal reference. GN: When all of this flea market and Maxwell Street shopping was going on, we were in California. Even earlier on, before the Hairy Who shows started up, people were ripping out ads from backs of magazines or odd photos from newspapers, or picking up junk found on the street, and surrounding themselves with this curious mix in their studios. JN: People acquired things just because they liked to have them. It’s the kind of stuff that artists for years have had in their studios. They see something that interests them, quite often it’s a postcard of a well-known painting, but it’s also something from the vernacular or popular, easily acquired in the everyday world. RH: Does what you collect influence you directly? Say, the African pieces or the works by self-trained artists in your home; do they have an effect on the way you use color or make shapes or images?

Jim Nutt, Miss T. Garmint (she pants a lot), 1966–67, acrylic on plexiglass, enamel on wood frame, 72 × 48 inches. © MCA Chicago.

GN: That’s been foisted on us and others of our ilk: that we were heavily influenced by our collections. I mean, I would be more prone to go to a museum, find an arm in a painting and use it as a source, than to say, “Oh, my God! Look how Joseph Yoakum draws a tree in a work in our collection. I must use that.” RH: So what you were making probably

influenced what you collected more than your collection influenced you? JN: It’s a normal way of acquiring things. You see something that you like and, if you can afford it, you buy it. Although Ray Yoshida often talked about literally taking shapes from objects that he had bought and using them in his paintings, so there was a direct connection between a painting

BOMB 114

the bug by Jace Clayton

I met Kevin Martin in 2002, right before my first London gig. I played Steely and Clevie’s dancehall riddim “The Street Sweeper”—a militant, brilliant instrumental with cut-up guitars that had over a dozen versions voiced by top Jamaican MCs and singers. After my set, he told me that the track was a favorite for him as well. Before we parted ways, he gave me a promo 12-inch of his single as The Bug, “Politicians and Paedophiles,” featuring Daddy Freddy. It stepped inside dancehall reggae—also called ragga or, in the UK, bashment—and reimagined the sound from the inside out. The Bug’s sound world proved that the lyrical fire and propulsive waist wind of dancehall could cohabitate with the bruised sonics that made the 12-inch seem loud even when played quietly. It stayed—fresh—in my record crate for the next few years. In person, Martin is soft-spoken, articulate, and generous. But when you see him perform you realize that he’s a hardcore motherfucker who has dedicated his life to furthering the possibilities of music: from running the late-‘80s, early-‘90s label Pathological Records to his ever-evolving, perfectionist studio approach, which brings out the best in his collaborators. His dedication to craft gets deconstructed and then rebuilt, dubwise, in the live arena. On a proper sound system, The Bug becomes a monster, reminding us of the sensual possibilities of sound. It’s a heavy party and you can feel it.

Photo by Niall O’Brien. Courtesy of Ninja Tune.

music / the bug Gravity meets momentum in The Bug. Martin’s oeuvre both anticipates and creates musical climate changes, whether in the form of his influential ’90s-compilation series for Virgin Records (Macro Dub Infection, Isolationism); the saxophone-led noise squalls of his early work; or the spacious, subdued intensity of his latest project, King Midas Sound, a trio featuring intimate vocals from Roger Robinson (often crooning in a ghostly falsetto) and Hitomi. His paths remind me that freedom in music is closely related to structural violence. It’s not enough to follow others; there are easier ways to earn a living. A life in music is hard. Throwing out the rule books is only gonna help if you then have enough conviction to explore the space you’ve opened. The Bug lives out on a limb, humble and brave, no safety net, no easy fall backs. —Jace Clayton aka DJ /rupture Jace Clayton: Can you tell me a bit more about the Soul Jazz compilation you’re curating, in the BOMB interview mode? The Bug: Yeah, well, Soul Jazz is Stuart Baker, the guy who runs the label. As soon as I heard that he was putting together a dancehall compilation my ears pricked up, because it was basically dancehall that made me begin The Bug. I was trying to find an original area and I’d become obsessed with dancehall. It’s quite illogical in the scheme of things, since I didn’t know anyone else who was heavily into that scene until I hooked up with DJ Scud. He was about the only person I could talk even vaguely about dancehall with. If you live in London it’s impossible to avoid Jamaican music. I was already smitten with it from hearing Prince Far I tunes or King Tubby tracks before I moved to London. Dub was my entry point to reggae. I think I used to be a bit of a reggae asshole. A stupid white snob who thought that dub was the only cool reggae and certain things were crap just by definition. It took me a while to sync my ears up to ragga and digital dancehall. I came from a radically different textural idea; I was into free jazz and noise rock. JC: When did you move to London, just to get a chronology going?

BOMB 114

ART / adam pendleton

Adam Pendleton by Thom Donovan

Abolition of Alienated Labor, 2010, various works, installation view, MoMA PS1, Long Island City.

I first encountered Adam Pendleton’s work in the fall of 2007. What immediately captured my attention was Pendleton’s virtuosity as a performer, and how he foregrounds problems of language, specifically poetic language, with regard to the history of live art and African-American aesthetic discourse. In his 2007 work The Revival (commissioned by Performa), he uses the format of the Baptist revival to involve his audience in a scene of witness. Fittingly, during the performance, Pendleton included testimonies by contemporary artists and poets, who spoke of histories of sociopolitical struggle and dissent. Last winter, Pendleton met with me for coffee before his performance of the Black Dada manifesto in the East Village. After our conversation we decided that we should continue, possibly building toward an interview. The following spring, I visited Pendleton at his studio in Germantown, New York, where we spoke about his thenupcoming installation in MoMA PS1’s Greater New York exhibition. After a lot of conversation, we finally turned a recording device on. Our attempt to engage BOMB’s process through conversation, interview, and subsequent transcription and development seemed appropriate, given Pendleton’s consistent commitment to process. In his performance works, but also through his printing projects and his pictorial-letterist installations such as System of Display, he reflects on social movements and questions of historical representation through procedural methods. Pendleton is a rare artist in his ability to synthesize disciplines and mediums, and to steer with collaborators toward “total works,” which yet remain drafts of a larger essayistic practice. His works—like those of his many avant-garde forebears— are experimental in the truest sense. He sets up a laboratory in which our social and political desires can appear, however fleetingly. Historical materials (images, sounds, and printed language) become a point of departure for making present what cannot be grasped by representations of history (narratives, archives): the emergence of events and situations, which can only become known

bomb specific / David Herbert

bomb specific / THORDIS ADALSTEINSDOTTIR

the wicK / peter blegvad

Drawn for The Spectator Magazine, London, 1993.

Visit BOMBsite.com for more illustrated book reviews and an interview with the artist Peter Blegvad.

the original handheld device

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