Intercourse Magazine Issue 3 by Pioneer Works Press

INTERCOURSE

Dan Asher, C-print, 1990â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s, courtesy of Dan Asher Estate.

WINTER 2014

INTERCOURSE Issue 3

PUBLISHED BIANNUALLY BY PIONEER WORKS CENTER FOR ART AND INNOVATION IN BROOKLYN, NY

Editor-In-Chief Dustin Yellin Managing Editor Catherine Despont Editors Joey Frank, Randy Lee Maitland Associate Editor Gabriel Florenz Contributing Editor Ed Steck Design This is our work Assistant Editor Austin Turner Intern Michelle Lin

Special Thanks Darla Anderson, Brendan Baker, Julia Bator, Lisa Berger, Lisa Benger, Zoe le Ber, Ben Berlow, Carol Bove, Benjamin Bronfman, David Brooks, Perry Chen, Thomas Clapp, Bob Colacello, Camille Zumwalt Coppola, Thierry Despont, Katie Dixon, Lacey Dorn, Beth Fiore, David Gruber, Jason Grunwald, Lara Holliday, Elyse Harary, Robyn Hasty, Alana Heiss, Melinda Hunt, Chanel Inc, Michael Joo, Jacob Keith, Andrew Kern, Wilmot Kidd, Charlotte Kidd, Johnathan Lewis, Toby Lewis, Kweku Mandela, Ella Marder, Jonas Mekas, Kristian Nammack, Graham Nash, Coke O'Neal, Shirin Neshat, Marco Orozco, Pascal Perich, Matthew Putman, Kori Rae, Moon Ribas, Paul Roosin, Caroline Rupert, Andres Santo Domingo, Lauren Santo Domingo, Sloan SchaďŹ&#x20AC;er, Lola Schnabel, David Sheinkopf, Justin Stanwix, Mickalene Thomas, Laura Tiffin, Laura TiďŹ&#x192;n, Sam Trimble, Andrew Vanwyngarden, Jed Walentas, Douglas Walla, David Weinstein, Danae Winger, Jackie Yellin, Chris Young, Evan Yurman, and to many others who lend love and support.

Cover: Marcel Dzama, Hey Cow, can you tell me how you sing that song?, 2013. Ink, gouache, and graphite on paper. 17" x 14"

CONTRIBUTORS

A ARON WINSLOW

KR AY DIOBELLY

Aaron Winslow is a writer and archivist living in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of Four Gashes: Tales of the Great Misery (Make Now).

Kray Dio Belly writes raps, pamphlets, introductions, forewords, and prefaces and is a DeeJay on the longrunning i n t e r n e t radio program Chances With Wolves.

ANDREW DURBIN

Andrew Durbin is the author of Mature Themes (Nightboat Books 2014). He is a contributing editor of Mousse, co-edits Wonder, and lives in New York.

LEONARD E. JONES

Leonard E. Jones is a Chicago-born musician/bassplayer residing in Germany and AACM member since 1965.

ANTHONY OPAL

LINGLING YANG

Anthony Opal is the author of ACTION (forthcoming from Punctum/Peanut Books). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. He lives near Chicago with his wife and daughter.

Writes and lives in Brooklyn. LILLI CARRÉ

Lilli Carré is an artist who currently lives, works, and paces in Chicago.

BR ADLEY PITTS

Brooklyn-based artist Bradley Pitts repurposes his background in architecture and aerospace engineering to explore line, volume, and form.

LIZ FLYNTZ

Liz Flyntz is a curator focusing on the intersection of contemporary and historical media art. She’s working on a project about the architecture/media group Ant Farm.

COKE O’NE AL

Born, raised in New York; dying in Brooklyn. Highest paid staﬀ photographer on record.

MARCEL DZ AMA

Marcel Dzama is Canadian artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

COLIN OULIGHAN

Colin Oulighan lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. DANIEL KENT Daniel Kent absolutely feels so sexxy right now. DAVID BEHL

Renowned jewelry photographer David Behl has been based in TriBeCa for 45 years, shot jewelry books for Lalique and Zadora, his clients include Yoko Ono, Christies, Sotheby's and Verdura.

MARK HOGANCAMP

A carpenter, ex-navyman, and former showroom designer, Mark Hogancamp is an artist based in Kingston, NY. He is the subject of the award-winning documentary Marwencol (2010). MARTA PIA

Marta Pia is a Spanish designer and educator who spends most of her time experimenting with metal, clay, paper and color.

DAVID HORVITZ

MATT GR ANICK

David Horvitz is a half Japanese American artist from Los Angeles, California who currently lives in Brooklyn. His practice is non-disciplined.

Matt Granick is a woodworker and fabricator trained in traditional European furniture-making. Matt specializes in a number of handmade, construction processes that combine classic technique with contemporary tastes and technology.

DAVID SHEINKOPF

David Sheinkopf builds and teaches electronics and makes electronic art. He is the Director of Education at Pioneer Works. ELIOT KRIMSK Y

Eliot Krimsky is a musician, co-founder of the band Glass Ghost, film composer, and new media artist. FAB 5 FREDDY

MICHAEL CR AWFORD

1B, TNY Softball Team. Painter,Cartoonist, Father of Miles and Farley, Madcap E.Hollywood Artists. Lives with Cartoonist Carolita Johnson. MICHAEL CAPUTO

Shadow Boxer.

Fab 5 Freddy, born Fred Brathwaite in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, helped invent the hip hop explosion and street art phenomenon. While doing that he directed and produced a bunch of stuﬀ for film and television.

Monica McClure’s debut poetry collection, Tender Data, will be published by Birds, LLC in 2015.

JAKE NUSSBAUM Jake Nussbaum is an artist and writer from New Jersey and the radio host of Expandable Sound.

Named “the #1 Agent of Change” by Vogue Magazine, Nancy Donenfeld, M.A. is a New York based hypnotherapist and psychotherapist.

MONICA MCCLURE

NANCY DONENFELD

JOHN REED

NEIL BENDER

John Reed is the author of Snowball's Chance, All The World's A Grave, Ten Days that Shook the World, and others.

Neil Bender lives in Florida, is an MC in the hip-hop band Suave Prospects, and a co-founder of Quaid Gallery.

Marcel Dzama, The archers are blind, 2013. Ink, gouache, and graphite on paper. 17" x 14"

A wise man once told me, “If you’re feeling sick, look off into the distance.” I read the other day that different people look off in different directions for different kinds of cerebration. Now I’m thinking how long it takes for bones to decompose once they’re buried. I google, and in a nanosecond, I know: hundreds of years. Hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, social and technological development, summarized, in one sentence, in one nanosecond. Diagenesis, meaning two origins. Origins of what? Lithification. Lithos—meaning rock. Meaning what? Am I a rock? Has data overload made the world more incomprehensible— has the smartphone shrunk my skull to the size of a teacup? Can you drink an entire ocean one teacup at a time? Outside, I take pictures on my phone, replacing the sky and clouds with miniature rectangles sandwiched together on my screen. I make duplicates in case my data burns up in a fire. But memories aren’t fireproof. As bone tissue dies, the bones and joints begin to disintegrate. This disintegrated matter is then packed back together as rock. The concern, of course, is that I’m already buried, already disintegrated into millions of pixels, now being formed, like a stone, into an amalgam of compressed data: digital sedimentation, but on a completely new time scale. Press a button. The body recomposes itself with a thousand digital prints as proof of its existence and sends them through satellites from New York to Hong Kong in a heartbeat. What will I have to say for myself when it’s my turn to lithify? Maybe my gravestone will say, “the app chose it for me.” Now I’m thinking about Baudelaire watching the clouds while updating my library. The wise man said, “if you’re feeling sick, look off into the distance.” I’ve begun to confuse the edge of the screen with the ends of my eyes. Really I’m just happy I’m not dead; or am I? — DUSTIN YELLIN

Photographs culled from the Internet by Andrew Durbin

CONTENTS

LONG FORM 10

Future is a Texture of the Present:

SHORT FORM 84

Everyone Likes Everyone:

Nobodies Buried on Hart Island

Liz Flyntz 94

Ecstatic Ensemble:

100

Original Music and the Birth of the AACM Catherine Despont and Jake Nussbaum 58

Extreme Curvature: A Roundtable with Dorothea Rockburne, Ron Gorchov and Trueman MacHenry

106

134

114

Relational Athletics Andrew Durbin

120

Internet Altar Monica McClure

123

74 (charge my card) John Reed

127

Sonnet Anthony Opal

On Paper Marbling and Hydromancy Marta Pia

136

On Doing it by Hand Matt Granick

138

On True Self in the Information Age Eliot Krimsky

Drop Kick to the Head: or How I Came to Do an Underground Street Art Exhibit in China with MC Yan. A memory, of course, in 2 parts. Fab 5 Freddy

31 (sorry R.) John Reed

The Eggplant Isn't Waves or Orange:

On 3D Printing During the Civil War David Sheinkopf

A Conversation with Matthew Putman and Neil Harbisson

A Marble on a Hill: A Conversation About Time Travel with Janna Levin and James Gleick

132

Fiction An excerpt from Murders of the Great Misery Aaron Winslow

Randy Lee Maitland 50

Send Blank Tape:

On Shifting Perception Bradley Pitts

Radical Software and the Advent of Media-Sharing Networks

A Conversation with Adam Green and Natalie Mering 34

130

A Conversation with Paul Roossin, Asi Wind and Bill Kalush

A Conversation with Ben Lerner 20

Sleights of Hands:

COURSE WORKS

PORTFOLIOS 144

Rachel Sussman: Harsh Realities

152

Paul Laffoley: Organizing Providence

166

Dan Asher: Wonder Wheel

180

Kenan Juska: Daily Operations

Long Form

Fiction & Future Green Blood Hart Island Improvisation Art & Numbers Time Travel 8

Future Is a Texture of the Present:

A ROUNDTABLE WITH DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE, RON GORCHOV, AND TRUEMAN MACHENRY

A CONVERSATION WITH BEN LERNER

Longtime friends and colleagues discuss the influence of mathematics on their lives and work; what it was like to attend Black Mountain College in the 40s; what you see when you count; topography; and lawn mowing. Is there such a thing as a new idea? Maybe the sexuality of knots.

Over a main course of duck steak, Ben Lerner discusses the dearth of good contemporary fiction, the promise of multiculturalism in Picard's Star Trek, Buckminster Fuller's theory of language, fiction as the proper setting for art criticism, and Wallace Steven's concept of “reality as poverty.” 70 20

Everyone Likes Everyone: A CONVERSATION WITH ADAM GREEN AND NATALIE MERING

The two musicians discuss generational diﬀerences in the music scene, why people don't wear color anymore, and if the East Village has become incontrovertibly boring.

Extreme Curvature:

A Marble on a Hill: A CONVERSATION ABOUT TIME TRAVEL WITH JANNA LEVIN AND JAMES GLEICK

Astrophysicist Janna Levin and science writer James Gleick argue the possibility of time travel, consider walking through slices of bread, and whether the past is like a carpet or a hill.

Nobodies Buried on Hart Island Randy Lee Maitland writes about Melinda Hunt and her Hart Island Project and takes a ferry ride to the potter's field in the Long Island Sound. Fragments of abandoned histories. Angel statuettes. Baby coﬃns.

Ecstatic Ensemble: ORIGINAL MUSIC AND THE BIRTH OF THE AACM

Catherine Despont and Jake Nussbaum consider the lasting influence of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Chicago music scene in the 60s, costumes and body paint, civil rights, American models of success, and improvisation as a means of transcendence.

Future Is a Texture of the Present: A Conversation with Ben Lerner and Catherine Despont

IN THIS CONVERSATION

BEN LERNER is an author of

criticism, poetry, and fiction. His debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the Believer Book Award and was on many year-end “best of” lists. His newest book, 10:04 reads like a meta-extension of the first. The narrator, a young(ish) white male writer/teacher living in New York, is enjoying a string of recent successes: a well-reviewed debut novel and a story published in The New Yorker, on the strength of which his agent secures him a large advance to write a second novel. Book-ended by hurricanes Irene and Sandy, 10:04 proceeds forward and backward in time as a series of encounters with persons, art, and language. But instead of describing the novel as a mechanism of its plot, it seems more apt to state the questions 10:04 elicits: how do our projections of the future affect the present? And how do we compose our reality through language? CATHERINE DESPONT, RANDY LEE MAITLAND

Intercourse editors.

CATHERINE DESPONT

There are a lot of similarities between 10:04 and your last novel, Leaving the Atocha Station. Both have anxious first-person narrators working on books. In Atocha the narrator is writing a poetry collection while on a Fulbright in Spain, and in this one the narrator is contemplating a book of fabricated letters to himself from famous interlocutors. For both narrators the projects are catalysts for self-reflection that elevate the personal to narrative and make cultural experience feel intimate. Which brings me to the way you discuss art in the book. At one point your character goes to see Christian Markley’s Clock; at another, he goes on a residency in Marfa and discusses Judd’s work; he goes to the Museum of Natural History; he analyzes Walt Whitman and various other real or semi-real art projects, and it all feels totally incorporated in the narrator's reality. It was so refreshing to find descriptions of art that seem like a natural part of thinking of the world, instead of hovering to make some conceptual point. The thing that most interests me about fiction is to think about it as a curatorial form, where you can stage encounters with works of art. Instead of situating them in a professionalized critical discourse, you can situate them as a critic, you can situate them in these characters' lives. You can curate every aspect of the encounter. You can talk about not only all the contingences that go into a moment of viewing—what were you talking about right before you entered a museum, right before you entered the theater—but also, what are the more general psychic concerns that frame the encounter? I actually don't know a word for that kind of criticism that wouldn't be fiction. If you write diaristically, the idea is that it's merely you. And the most interesting moment for me about imagining other minds is imagining other minds interacting with artworks—that of echo between subject and object, which comes from a sustained moment of viewing. I still write some academic criticism, and some art

criticism, but it all tends to get tipped into a larger fictional frame so that I don’t just feel beholden to a specialized literature. CD

There was a generation of critics, like Fairfield Porter and Lionel Trilling, born at the turn of the last century, who embodied a persona-of-the-critic, who were much more comfortable making connections to a personal world view. So much of your fiction deals with authorial distance, couching between reality and fiction. Your narrators draw closely from events in your own life, but the critique made in the book of diﬀerent cultural events, natural disasters, news etc. is embedded in a narrative that resists generalization. I wonder if you have any feeling for why we've lost, or resist, that older authorial posture?

Well, Clement Greenberg is using visual art to write a novel about all of history. It's like Hegel and Kant told through painting, and it has a kind of confidence about getting the truth right, which I don't have. And doesn't interest me, in a certain way. The great thing about art criticism, unlike literary criticism, is that people tend to write out of the white heat of the first experience. People say, “I see this thing,” as though there's this present tense nature about writing about painting, even if it's artificial. Criticism tends to be about bracketing all of the noise of experience. Criticism doesn't tend to begin by saying, “This is what I passed on the street on the way to the museum,” or, “This is how I was feeling,” or, “This is what I ate.” Even the most ambitious professional criticism starts by bracketing everything that can't be easily assimilated to the moment of the encounter with the artwork. That T.J. Clark book, The Sight of Death— which I have some mixed feelings about, but which ultimately won me over—where he looked at a Poussin painting over and over again—the amazing thing about that book was that it had never been done before. No art critic had ever talked about looking at the same thing over time. Art critics tend to act like you're looking at one artwork in a vacuum, as if every thought occurred to them in the same way, in the same moment.

Or as though the judgment of the work is passed at its first appearance.

BEN LERNER

Ben Lerner enjoying a duck steak dinner. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal

THE MOST INTERESTING MOMENT FOR ME ABOUT IMAGINING OTHER MINDS IS IMAGINING OTHER MINDS INTERACTING WITH ARTWORKS

LONG FORM

cultural diﬀerence into the federation.” In the novel Star Trek is the '90s, it's Clinton, and Back to the Future is Reagan, but they're both about this idea that America is deified by its projection into this future.

[In my book] the encounters with the Judd boxes in Marfa are a good example of what I think fiction can do as a vehicle for criticism: everything external to that encounter that’s narrated in the book comes back: the narrator’s thinking about Whitman and being in a residency, his thinking about Creeley, who died in Marfa, and so on. The novel is the way to work all of that into the phenomenology of the encounter with the work, and I don't know any other mode of criticism that can do that that isn't fiction.

There's this whole Left aesthetics thing that says, the role of art is to stretch the language so that we can conceive of the future, and sci-fi does this in this really funny, direct way where you'll have Geordie La Forge say, “Our double-inverted ion reactor has suﬀered a plasma fail…” It's this gibberish that you feel you can understand because it obeys the syntax of the contemporary. But it's this way of feeling yourself pulled into a future. You can nod your head at the rhythm of speech with this faith in a technological future. Like, “This is comprehensible to me not because I understand the specific technology, but because I understand technology will solve all of our problems.”

On some level the kind of criticism you’re describing—that doesn’t bracket the encounter with the work—has actually been around for a long time. It just isn’t professional or published in the “right” places—but it has been happening online, in UseNet groups, in geek culture and its object wasn’t Donald Judd, but Star Trek, or the X-Files.

RANDY LEE MAITLAND

Or Back To The Future. I talk about it a lot in this novel. This way of talking about how you built a life around an artistic object, or how it influenced your life. That's true. The non-professional criticism is more like a novel in that way. I watched all of Star Trek; The Next Generation when I was writing this novel. It's so great because it's this 90s fantasy about multiculturalism. Basically every time you confront an alien civilization it's like, “what's the framework that's going to allow us to respect diﬀerence but also get along?” They are always letting Warf, the Klingon on the ship, take a personal day to go participate in Klingon rituals. There are many episodes that are organized around respecting Warf's diﬀerence while also somehow making sure he can be assimilated into their federation.

RLM

So the question is, Captain Kirk or Captain Picard—your favorite?

They're just diﬀerent moments for me in the empire. Kirk is about the kind of universalism of bravado, but a reckless, American, air force type, and Picard—he has sex with aliens, but it's about a liberal paternalism as opposed to the heady days of the 1950's. It's not about, “I'm attractive enough that I can transcend culture,” but more like, “I'm sensitive enough that I can incorporate

HE HAS SEX WITH ALIENS, BUT IT'S ABOUT A LIBERAL PATERNALISM

This idea of future in the book also feels like it’s about where the future of novels can go. Where what is actually “future” is a diﬀerent understanding of the day-to-day, instead of descriptions of technology or whatever other details tip us off to the fact that we are inhabiting some narrative future.

Right; the future is something that only shows up as present, or that your experience of the present is shot through with how you imagine the future. The future is a texture of the present. If you imagine that the future is endless capitalism in a way that's humane, you imagine the future as Star Trek and it influences the way that you feel about getting an MRI. And if you think that in the future there is going to be a collapse, that it’s going to enter a kind of warlord-ism, then that changes the way you see the shop window. You measure the future in terms of the phenomenology of the present. If you live in a moment where your conception of the future is changing all the time, how does that aﬀect your experience of the present? That's a question for novelists, and not just sci-fi novelists who are trying to imagine a future. That's a contemporary novelistic question, even if it’s not what most novelists are addressing.

Bucky Fuller said all these things about how, in order to move into the future, we would

January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle, Challenger, broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, leading to the deaths of its seven crew members. Image courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center Scan of Ben Lerner's book 10.04

LONG FORM

have to use different words to describe the very ordinary parts of our experience. Like, why do we call the sky “up” when we know that we live on a spherical world and there is no direction? We should stop talking about the sky as “up,” and we should stop talking about what seem like tiny, inconsequential descriptions in ordinary life but actually add up to this fake reality. Buckminster's idea was that eventually our technological and scientific understanding of the universe would finally bleed into our daily consciousness and that would change the way we interacted and the way we understood each other. BL

We’ve lost this great utopian faith in the technological. I know all these people who were caught up in medical contexts in which they basically don't trust the medical discourse at all, but it's the only discourse we have. They neither have religion nor medicine. They're just like, “Well, the

doctor says this, but I don't believe it.” In my lifetime there was a faith in scientific objectivity that didn't have a limit, and now there's a sense that western medicine has one vocabulary and homeopathy is another vocabulary, and they have moments of truth and moments of falsehood, but there isn’t one overarching framework of truth. But part of what's funny about technological dominance now is that you've got financial derivatives trading; you've got the Internet, but what makes that possible is a burning factory of Bangladeshi workers. In the 90s the idea was labor would de-materialize. If you think about the whole Star Trek replicator thing, there's this way to make food that doesn't require a Columbian proletariat. But this idea that you can just produce the commodity without a social history—it's not just that the social history has been made to disappear, it's that it doesn't exist. It's very unclear how money

INTERCOURSE 3 William Shatner as Kirk, in a publicity photograph for the original Star Trek 14

WHY DO WE CALL THE SKY “UP” WHEN WE KNOW THAT WE LIVE ON A SPHERICAL WORLD AND THERE IS NO DIRECTION?

FUTURE IS A TEXTURE OF THE PRESENT: LERNER & DESPONT

Or if you're thinking about the fact that you're going to die, or you're feeling healthy, or you're indiﬀerent, or you're annoyed about something—all those contingent aspects of the way you experience the brute reality. Fiction is about an intense attention to sensorial experience and the physical experience of the world. It's about the process by which those facts are re-described as meaningful by a consciousness, or whatever.

functions [in Star Trek]. But the interesting thing about the Ferengi latinum thing is they have this vaguely anti-Semitic, vaguely antiMiddle Eastern stereotype—the crafty Jew. It’s an interesting ideological problem that when Star Trek tries to actually represent the money form, it regresses into this 19th century anti-Semitic parody. They couldn't figure that out.

FICTION & FUTURE

What’s so refreshing for me about this book is its loyalty to a description of materiality. You resist metaphor in favor of images that emerge directly from physical details. So often what I resist in fiction is a sense that the reality I'm presented with is adhering to fictional mores. Your narrator has a whole thing about not being able to describe faces, and the truth is, we only notice a face if there's a feature that stands out, but we don't spend ten minutes saying, “This person had grey eyes and this nose and so on,” but it's so expected of fiction. The thing for me about fiction, which comes from Wallace Stevens more than it comes from novelists, is this idea that you have this brute fact of reality.

You have dead animals on a plate; you've got bodies in a room—what makes it feel like a restaurant as opposed to slaughter? What are all the cultural ways of organizing brute reality into some significant system that makes experience meaningful, and not just contingent and random? And that might well be an example of the bad form of imagination—ideology—because it conceals the violence. Stevens always returns to the imagination as the site for fiction-making. Mere reality is poverty, and the poetic function is about the way that the imagination can organize the brute facts into a significant form. How do you experience the same material fact differently when price is added or subtracted? How do you experience walking past Greenwood Cemetery and seeing the lorikeets and the spires if you're thinking about having a child or not having a child? MERE REALITY IS POVERTY

But I feel like in your description there's this real loyalty to the materiality. Often you describe things in terms of a dead duck on a plate and not in terms of an entree. Sometimes it is sort of dissociative and funny, but often the newness of the atmosphere coming through this disjointed sense of reality actually emerges from very plain description, rather than naming things as we normally would.

Right. David Harvey, the crotchetiest Marxist in all of CUNY, has this exercise where he says, “Where did your breakfast come from?” It’s a wonderful way of restoring wonder and complexity to breakfast. “The Styrofoam came from this place, the coﬀee came from this place, the eggs, amazingly, have been flown in an airplane.” Capital has organized things as such that your McDonalds breakfast is this amazing feat of coordination, but it's also totally insane. Spending all this fuel requires people who are basically enslaved. But the point is, you stop thinking of your breakfast as just coming from McDonalds in a simple way; you restore this wonder—even if wonder involves horror—at all the massive coordination that produces that stuﬀ.

Fiction is a way of slowing things down so that wine seems strange again—to have a wonder before labor restored through de-familiarization. That's also about the future and the past. Again, in the Star Trek replicator you press a button and the food is there, and there's no history. Technology is about the erasure of history, and fiction is about a thicker description of the personal and political histories. 15

LONG FORM

Fiction is usually a very conservative way of saying that your assumptions about individual psychology are correct. You can identify with one of the characters we're presenting to you, and you can basically feel like your life is meaningfully ordered. As opposed to fiction being a place that restores your sense of the meaning of reality as being up for grabs. I don't mean to exaggerate what fiction can do, but that's just a question of what art can do. What art can do, which may or may not have any redemptive eﬀect at this point, is to basically say, “the meaning is up for grabs.” Reality is one thing and your experience of reality is shot through with an imagined futurity, and that futurity is up for grabs. Or an imagined past, and that's up for grabs. It’s a site of contestation. Yeah, that's up for grabs, but I do think there's something we can say about the present that arises out of a fidelity to material, to description, to the immediate. Sometimes I feel like giving up this idea of capital-T Truth has actually pushed us much more into the present than at any other time, and that if we're faithful to the present we actually come closer to the thing we were trying to achieve when we were forcing our authority on the world. When you say the future is up for grabs, to me the upside of the lack of authority is a deeper sense of interconnectedness. It means taking more seriously this idea of malleability, or changeable-ness in our reality. And that makes a whole other set of possibilities available to you. I feel

THE WORST FUNCTION OF FICTION IS IDENTIFICATION

like fiction has been sitting in this dank spot because its answer to the lack of authority is a kind of obsessive anxiety. BL

And fiction is fucking horrible. I mean most of it is so bad. It's almost interestingly bad. It's like inefficient television. It's bad in a way that’s purely affirmative. It's, like, “yes, I'm affirming the clichéd perspectives you hold on reality in order to make you feel okay about that.” One way to think about it is through the trope of likability. Likability is an interesting question because it basically reveals all these reader-ly assumptions, like, “I want to read a book, if I like the person who is presented to me as a character, and I want to reject a book if I don't identify.” Most fiction, mainstream fiction, still invites identification. “Think of yourself as this narrator, and feel good about thinking of yourself as this narrator who's had some struggles, but has also bounced back from challenges in order to basically be affirmative about the culture and the world.” The worst function of fiction is identification.

False transformation.

Transformation in which no transformation actually takes place, because the whole point is that you identify with a conventional perspective in order to feel successfully interpolated into an existent reality.

But then there's the whole trope of the dislikable narrator, which is kind of the same thing.

Well, but I feel like the antihero is more important now than it was in the 19th century in a certain way. If somebody wrote Notes from the Underground today there would be 5,000 Goodreads reviews like, “I really tried to identify with this guy. Why is he so upset?” “I get upset sometimes… but relax!” They experience a narrator or a perspective in fiction with which they can't identify as a kind of threat to their own position in society. It's a dying industry, so there are all these people trying to figure out what the formula is to sell a million books. It's like, “How do we make Sex in the City? How do make that franchise in fiction?” It makes a lot of bad fiction when people try to speak for everyone. They want to do a 21st century Dickens thing, and they want to say, “I'm going to speak on behalf of the poor kid in

INTERCOURSE 3

Yes exactly. But I can see lots of writers talking about that and arriving at something diﬀerent, something more like an imposed reality based on the point of view of the character, where a walk past Greenwood Cemetery is the opportunity to have a pithy observation about cemeteries that ends up with some metaphor that relates directly back to the central narrative. In most mainstream fiction I feel like I could highlight the places in a paragraph where a meaningful thing will be delivered to me. In the same way you hear about classes for making blockbuster films, where at minute 12 you introduce this part of the story, and at minute 35 there's this... To me a lot of fiction feels like it's caught in a kind of projection rather than an engagement with the world.

Unpublished table of contents from 10:04

LONG FORM

the street and also the wife and the husband and the grandfather.” There are all these multiple perspectives that have a Disney eﬀect. Everyone has to be united, ultimately, by a tone. I felt like 10:04 is really optimistic in the way that a lot of books aren’t, or that I've read recently. The narrator is dealing with a number of issues—a health scare, hurricane Sandy, the question of whether to have a baby with his best friend—but he doesn’t come away with clear answers, but he also seems careful to describe things in a way that makes progress seem possible.

I decided in advance that this book had to move in a zone of sincerity—or a loving inhabitation of its relative perspective—or I shouldn't write the book. There’s this desire that literature have this trans-personal possibility, this capacity for wonder before the world; even if what you’re doing is necessarily caught up in the damaged life, you should oﬀer something beyond stylized despair. You don't want to be somebody who just thinks maximizing profit is what's of value, but you also don't want to be somebody who makes art about the impossibility of art, and then congratulates themselves on the despair as though that’s what makes them an authentic revolutionary.

RLM

The kind of wonder that you're talking about is so much work. It really is.

But see, that’s a good way to think about it, because part of the Left's suspicion about wonder is that it’s just this knee-jerk uncritical response, when in fact wonder is often a really critical, patiently-earned response. In a way, that's how Wittgenstein matters. Wittgenstein is so ruthless about what can be said. The Tractatus is all about the limits of what can be said or learned in this life. But the thing about that book is that it makes this argument for this vast area of experience that can't be reduced to what can be said.

I loved Leaving the Atocha Station, but remember feeling frustrated by a sense of pessimism. You had this fluid structure, this incredible ease moving through many diﬀerent levels of time and truth and fiction, but the character's own unwillingness to take charge for himself seemed a little convenient. I wonder if you could talk

No, no. You're being very gentle about it. I agree with you. But I really believe in irony. Even in an old Socratic sense that one way to pursue authenticity is through a ruthless account of all the modes of dissimulation. I really like the kid who's the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station because he's so honest about his dishonesty that it's a kind of authenticity. But I didn't want to write another book that was that deep in one anxious head. I wanted the novel to be more choral, and more multitudinous, and to be thinking about how other voices can circulate. When I wrote the thing that became The New Yorker story, both in the novel and in reality, I was thinking that I could write a novel about fabricating an archive, but then decided I really didn't want to write a second novel about fraudulence. So the novel became figuring out a way to imagine an expansion of that story in some other kind of un-ironic mode. Which isn't about foreswearing irony, but irony isn't the mode with which you can imagine getting your friend pregnant. It's not an eﬀective mode for imagining a future. It's an effective mode for breaking down a particular view of the future, or a particular mode of representation. There was a desire to imagine a more constructive mode—both in the vernacular sense of useful—but also in the aesthetic sense of trying to build a world. But it wasn't really a decision. I wanted to figure out a way to write from a position of all the contradictions that I experience that could be something other than ironic. They could be something other than the kind of self-congratulation that attends loathing yourself. Because that's also a kind of selfcelebration, and a kind of conventional, male self-celebration at this point, where it's like, “I can prove that I'm feeling and honest by talking about how unfeeling and dishonest I am,” and that the reader should be the person who says, “actually there’s a sweet heart under that rough exterior.”

A sweet heart and also, brilliant.

So part of that is also the Whitman nurse thing that comes up in the book—as in what is your responsibility if you're trying to imagine the future when you're dealing with

YOU ALSO DON'T WANT TO BE SOMEONE WHO MAKES ART ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ART

INTERCOURSE 3

about whether something changed for you in writing 10:04, or what your thinking was? Maybe you completely disagree.

The cover of Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station

FUTURE IS A TEXTURE OF THE PRESENT: LERNER & DESPONT

a kid or the wounded? If you're Whitman, do you tell the kid that he's going to die? Or do you tell him that he's going to make it home? And even though [the narrator] describes it as a parody of the Whitmannurse, it's a real thing. When he's imagining himself as a parent, do you share your worst-case scenarios and your belief in the planet's fragility, or do you try to tell other kinds of stories? There's a point where [the narrator] is trying to tell a story to his nephew and he gets tripped up by his tenses. Writ small, it’s the problem of the entire novel: can fiction help imagine a way of going on, even if it’s a necessary fiction? Can fiction be a form of care, a collaborative attempt to imagine a space for possibility? There are all these different ways in which this guy who's kind of a kid himself still, at 33, has to imagine some relationship of care. Care for an Occupy Wall St. protestor he invites to his house, care for a kid he’s tutoring, care for the students at the college where he teaches…Do you honor a kid's statement about global warming, or do you try to make a future more imaginable to him even if it requires dissimulation? The book has no answer to that, but that's the classic war nurse thing.

RELATED READING

A Marble on a Hill, A Conversation with Janna Levin and James Gleick PG.70

Paul Laﬀoley

FICTION & FUTURE

PG.152

There's the re-description of facts that are bothering a person, but there's also the description of the situation in which you acknowledge the situation. You know, and that is sort of…

That's an intimacy.

Yeah, there's an intimacy in empathy, which allows you to go where that person is going, while negotiating with a sense of reality or adulthood, or whatever structure we find ourselves in that says, “we can only go so far because there's something on this side of the equation that we want to preserve.”

It's also why metaphor is so powerful. The experience of the material facts is utterly changed. It’s what good therapy is supposed to do. If you think of your interactions with your partner as a war, that's the structuring metaphor, and the therapist must help

you think of it—they never do this, but they should—be able to help you think of it as a dance. I think this is one of Lakoff ’s famous examples. Love is this way of looking. Like when someone you love is in a crisis because they're looking at the facts in the worst possible way, and you try to re-describe it. It's a delicate game because you have to honor the reality that they acknowledge, but you have to say,

“But there's this equally real way of organizing the facts and it tells a different story.” It's about possibility versus the foreclosure of possibility. CD

And I don't think fiction in the last twenty years has really thought about the collective that much, if at all.

No, fiction is about idiosyncratic individuals, supposedly. But it's also about everyone wanting to feel like an idiosyncratic individual that's basically assimilated.

Yeah, and that the reader’s own experience is also individual, and idiosyncratic.

Well, it sells, right? It's a really effective business model of being diﬀerent in a way that should make you conform. The novel is a very conservative kind of televisual form in the hands of most people. But if you're a poet, right, everybody asks you, “How do you feel about the marginalization of poetry?” As though there's no way to be a poet when poetry's dead or whatever.” Everybody laments the death of the book, but I'm excited about the way that people who read, care about reading. It's not the default way of consuming information. Part of the marginalization I guess is lamentable, but I also feel like, “What isn't marginal that I care about?” If you imagine subtracting everything that's marginal from the world, it's just you and whatever the non-marginal is—you're in a lot of fucking trouble.

THE NOVEL IS A VERY CONSERVATIVE KIND OF TELEVISUAL FORM IN THE HANDS OF MOST PEOPLE

Everyone Likes Everyone: A Conversation with Adam Green and Natalie Mering

EVERYONE LIKES EVERYONE: MERING & GREEN

NATALIE MERING

IN THIS CONVERSATION

I would like to talk to you about the difference between our music generations.

Musician, filmmaker, and artist ADAM GREEN played a pivotal role in the early 2000s indie rock music scene as one half of The Moldy Peaches. NATALIE MERING of Weyes Blood, and Jackie O Motherfucker played one of her earliest shows with Adam Green’s first band mate, Kimya Dawson. Here she talks to Green about generational differences in music and culture and what the stakes are for music going forward in an increasingly self-aware and homogeneous zeitgeist.

There's this very powerful propaganda technique that David Berman from the Silver Jews wrote about. The trick of the propagandist is to make it really obvious for you to hate something. Now, you don't hate anything, you have to like things a little bit or a lot, and that's the only option. We used to be identified by the things that we chose not to like. But then everyone became a Belieber or something...

Do you think we're in a diﬀerent generation? I'm 33 now.

Intercourse editor

GREEN BLOOD

Yeah, exactly...

ADAM GREEN

JOEY FRANK

An electric chair from the set of Adam Green's Aladdin. Photo Credit: Coke O’Neal

I’m 26, and I do think there's a pretty big diﬀerence between Gen Y and Millennials. Kids that are six years younger than me grew up with the Internet. They don't remember grunge, or Nirvana, or anything antiestablishment. They were fed Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears—they're, like, the establishment generation.

JOEY FRANK

I can see that. In 2001 when my old band The Moldy Peaches broke out, we thought we were very late on the grunge bandwagon. And I think that we ended up being the start of a different group. The first tour that we did of the UK, with The Strokes, was very anticipated, because The Strokes had blown huge. We were like their kid brother band. And we hit our stride in 2001. But the fact is that I went out to Washington State in 1999, looking for the ashes of the grunge scene.

I’ve really noticed that, too. I used to hang out with a lot of people that were into a lot of diﬀerent music, and there definitely was less of a bridge between the folky people and the noise people, and the electronic pop people, and the indie rock people. And now it's just all one big, kind of watereddown soup.

When I first started getting into noise music when I was younger, I had some drug experiences where I felt the sounds of music as diﬀerent textures, and I associated them with the look of certain kinds of lines. And I think that bridge interested me and made me think of sounds as being very fibrous. In a way, it's context—it’s a music that's pure context, whereas something like The Strokes is actually almost pure formalism in the sense that they pared down their music so that their production was just in the actual arrangement. This stuﬀ is recorded almost dry. You can hear every single note they played, and it was presented and mixed so that it was all out there with no context. And then the noise music was all context. It's kind of funny, because formalism sometimes is never quite enough for people. And the context is a noise that people don't know what to do with. But yet, people need all these noises around them to enjoy things. The same way they need their jeans distressed, and your tables well worn, and your Cy Twombly paintings all messed up. Well, that's what made me come to the conclusion that noise is an actual spice that we pepper our lives with, you know? You just throw it on.

Well, harmonically, it is, because a lot of those frequencies are blown out, and you're

Exactly. I moved to Portland...

And I came back to New York, because I didn't find it.

Yeah, yeah. I moved to Portland, and it was a very similar thing. I was into K Record stuff, and Marriage Records, and the weird indie stuﬀ that was hanging on. I played some of my first shows with Kimya Dawson. I was really into Phil Elverum, and Thanksgiving, and early Dirty Projectors. And that was why I chose to do music. In some ways it informed me, but in other ways, I found that it was not where a lot of the energy was by the time I got out there.

In Portland?

Yeah. That it had already become kind of an institution that no longer was about reaching out…

Yeah. I think it did sort of implode. There was room for growth, and somewhere along the line all of these different subcultures kind of fused or something...

That's interesting, because there's no “not like” or “dislike” button.

THERE WAS ROOM FOR GROWTH, AND SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT SUBCULTURES KIND OF FUSED

LONG FORM

getting extra harmonics. When everything is so distorted, you're blown out. It's like you're getting into another realm. It's the same with color. When noise really hit me, I was like, “Okay, this is an answer to rock and roll.” It's like the power of The Stooges but deconstructed to just the context. And the first thing I noticed was what was going on harmonically. And I think that richness is why so many people love analog recordings—it's why so many people like psych rock. The Strokes are totally simple, and totally clean, but there's still a fair amount of fuzz. AG

Did The Strokes prefigure Instagram with the eﬀects on their voice, those filters?

I remember the first time I saw distressed jeans, I thought, “This is so stupid.” I was a kid, and I heard on a Kodak commercial that there was a tryout. And I went to a tryout. I was like 17 years old, and I tried out for the nerd part in a Kodak commercial. The lady who was doing the casting, she had these jeans, and the more I looked at them, I realized that they were fake faded and I remember thinking that they weren't corresponding with her legs. I was puzzled by the way they were distressed. And then I realized that it was synthetic. I just had never seen it before. Now it’s ubiquitous.

It’s a capitalist ploy to take something— like a nostalgia associated with a good, worn pair of jeans, and try to manufacture that nostalgia—like a simulacra of comfortable jeans. This vintage, distressed thing ultimately results in a gray, huddled mass—the way you'd picture Warsaw or something like that. Sometimes I feel like you walk down the street in Manhattan, and people are dressed as if they live in East Germany. Why does everyone have to wear gray or Army green? Everyone's so tasteful, I guess. No one will even dress loud anymore. Like, why even ruﬄe feathers?

If I had my way, everyone would be wearing Medieval king type shit.

Leather belts with pockets and water bladders, and stuﬀ like that.

That would be great.

I'm a total Renn punk. That's what I am.

To come back to this idea of filters, like The Strokes voice, or whatever. What are the filters? How do you modulate your voice when you sing? What are your influences? I remember one of your early albums sounded very Scott Walker-y.

Scott Walker, yes, I was into that. And you know, it's like the mask becomes the face, because I thought I couldn't get away with that at all, and I just was, like, singing in the shower, basically. And then I started to make up songs where I was singing like that, and started coming up with the kind of words that a guy who was singing like that would say—at some point, you just end up becoming this sort of crooner, singer guy. I didn't think that that was an option until I started to do it, you know?

That's beautiful...

What about you?

Well, I sang in choirs a lot, and I was classically trained for a minute. And basically, just taking that kind of purityhoned tone and then adding color to it, without making false color—which is something a lot of female musicians do that drives me crazy. They talk totally normal, and then they sing like this [sings] and it makes no sense.

Yeah, yeah. Kind of a blues thing...

I mean, I love Eddie Vedder, so I'm not about to diss anybody that has that kind of voice. But it took me a really long time to find the resonance where I could croon.

The new avant-garde is making your children sandwiches in the morning, and

THE NEW AVANT-GARDE IS MAKING YOUR CHILDREN SANDWICHES IN THE MORNING

INTERCOURSE 3

It is true. In a way, this formalist quality is one of the really important aspects of what they communicated to people. But it's true that they have their own version of noise...

painting trees, because the loudness has become normal, in a way. Norm Core is going on, there's also this crazy, Nicki Minaj, Katie Perry, punk–borrowing of cult symbols, and witchcraft symbols, and neon colors, and almost like Fort Thunder making it into the mainstream.

EVERYONE LIKES EVERYONE: MERING & GREEN

GREEN BLOOD

I love Scott Walker; I'm especially a huge fan of Harry Nilsson, because I feel like our voices are actually very similar. He has a high voice for a man, and I have a really low voice for a woman. Once I started singing with Harry I found that I could do soulful trills, and scat, and it didn't sound like false color. It’s just finding a way to be soulful that is your own without borrowing. AG

I think there's even more pressure with female singer-songwriters to do that Amy Winehouse-type thing.

Yeah. Or even just rip oﬀ Chan Marshall, Cat Power. That's huge.

But I guess there's this really special quality when somebody can sing in a way that they sound like a “lady,” or they sound like they're really intelligent, and I really like that as a vehicle to deliver lyrics and stuﬀ. If you can give a sort of more cerebral voice that sounds feminine, it sounds so beautiful. I was originally really drawn to Kimya for that reason.

I want to switch gears and talk lyrics. For example, Adam, you claim that there's “no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs.” Is that true?

Well, it's a real thing that happened to my friend. My friend told this story about how he went on a picnic with a girl and ended up having sex with her against a tree—a girl with no legs. He ended up having sex with her against a tree. And I said, there's no wrong way to fuck a girl with no legs. And then he said I should write a song about it. But that was it.

Did they have a fruitful relationship?

No. It wasn't meant to be.

I feel like the levels of concentration have gone down to a point where lyrics have suﬀered a little bit.

I think about this and look at people from ten years ago and feel, “Oh god, these guys actually really had their act together.” And harking back to like the Beatnik period, where people like Jack Kerouac maybe like took acid—but also knew how to build a house before he did it? Whenever Yves Klein was tripping out, he would try to invent a new society, or whatever

THERE'S NO WRONG WAY TO FUCK A GIRL WITH NO LEGS

it was. And I feel like people were more scholarly before they'd trip out and become “degenerates”... NM

Now it's just straight to degenerate. It's like nobody sharpened the knives.

Cy Twombly's art is based to some degree on his exposure to the Palmer Method of writing. People had to do so many writing exercises, and so a lot of his aesthetics are blackboards and diﬀerent types of repetitive motions like children’s calligraphy. Even with The Strokes, for example—those guys are actually pretty refined. They were educated, some of them, in Europe. In manner, and in different ways they were a cultured band. They were the first band that I was exposed to that actually had their shit together to be great. You know?

How did you feel in relationship with The Strokes?

I was a bit younger than them. I was working at a clothes store, Rags-A-Gogo, and Albert came in, and we started talking. We ended up playing a show together. That's how we really met. I saw them play at this place called the The Grand Saloon, and remember looking at Albert's chords, and being like, “Holy shit, these are, like, Chinese chords or something.” I had no idea how to play this on guitar. I was so impressed, because people usually tell you to see their band, and it always sucks.

I know...

When they started playing Mercury Lounge, they had such a crazy thing, like a hysteria element in the room.

Noticing that is always really exciting.

As a female musician, it's always kind of strange, because I've always wanted to be a part of that hysteria. Like, I need that thing. But I think it tends to be more exclusive to masculine bands. AG

Because the guys' premise is like, “I'm coming to your town to have sex with you.”

Yeah. And there's something about the boy-pack energy. I was obsessed with Wolf 23

Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, driving an Adam Green "Ferarri" outside of Pioneer Works. Photo Credit: Gabriel Florenz 25

LONG FORM

EVERYONE LIKES EVERYONE: MERING & GREEN

Eyes as a teenager. I wanted so badly to be a part of that kind of primal energy. It's hypnotizing everybody, driving them crazy, making them punch walls, and just flip out. AG

GREEN BLOOD

Between takes, Adam Green wearing his winged Hermes Hat, stands besides his crouched cinematographer Dima Dubson. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal

meaning, but like, basically we want to live in a feminist society. NM

I have noticed this as a thematic thing a lot of my female friends that grew up with that as an inspiration—like some kind of male rock star idea—wanted to integrate it into their own beings. I’d like to hear you talk a little bit about that. What you could do, and what you couldn't do? I think my first step was: I wanted to be the support in the band. Like, with Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth, and Kim Gordon, and all the women in the support roles. I feel that there's a level in male support and male friendships that can create that hysteria and create that pack. But in terms of just all women —women usually operate with long goals, can be incredibly competitive, and sometimes there's less of that act to happen, for there to be an all-girl group that creates hysteria. Unless it's like – “This is Riot grrrl, and this is what we do.” You know? The Riot grrrl movement is so great, though... It's actually really underrated. Bikini Kill is something that rocks as hard as The Stooges. I'm actually having a daughter soon, so I want to make sure that she can do anything that she wants. Finding out that I was having a daughter instantly got me obsessed with the concept of any kind of inequality that you could possibly experience, and I just want to try to eliminate from her life, you know?

I think the best advice, if she does become interested in something that's a predominantly masculine subject, like music, is: don't assimilate. I had two older brothers, so I was already kind of a tomboy. But I assimilated and became more masculine and adopted the way that men think just so I could be a part of the crew, and tour with their bands, and be in that zone; as opposed to seeking out, or trying a little harder to seek out females, and trying to cultivate that kind of a sisterly pact.

Right. I feel like ultimately the society we want to live in is basically a feminist society. That word that has gotten a bastardized

There's still more things to be done. There’s been this weird stamp like, “Okay, feminism happened. It's done. Females are liberated.”

And now there's also a masculinity crisis due to the amount of estrogen in the environment, and also just the role that men feel like they should play, and the lack of outlets for them to express their masculinity, you know? AG

Yeah, true, true.

And I think that's why there are so many school shootings and things going on. So amidst all that, it's pretty hard to say, “Oh, there's still more work to be done for women,” when all of a sudden there is this other gender crisis happening with men simultaneously.

Yeah, I can see that. Definitely growing up as a guy, if you're not interested in guy stuﬀ, it's pretty traumatic.

Yeah.

That was actually one of the subjects of a movie I made, The Wrong Ferarri. When I was growing up, I had been called “faggot” so much in my life that I decided to appropriate it in the movie. It was like, me and my “faggot” friends from back home are now a subculture called faggots, and it's good, and we welcome the word into our lives. We reverse the psychic pain. The faggots are just like hippies, or punks, or something, and it's just our culture. And so, for a second I thought, “Oh, well, you know, it's great. Because how many guys have been called a faggot in their whole life?” You know, maybe they'd like to reverse it. I'm sure people that were gay that were called a faggot probably don't even care if somebody else takes the word. So this would be a good chance for us to just take the word. We like to be faggots. We're the faggots. And I thought it would

I FEEL LIKE ULTIMATELY THE SOCIETY WE WANT TO LIVE IN IS BASICALLY A FEMINIST SOCIETY

The Princess and the Genie in silent contemplation on the set of Aladdin with a minor and some townsfolk looking on. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal 28

LONG FORM

be great—the whole East Village could be faggots by the end of the year. I have to say something now that I haven't said before.

What?

I once talked to you in 2003. I never brought this up...

Oh, what…?

I saw you in Washington, D.C., at a Moldy Peaches show.

Oh, at the Black Cat?

At the Black Cat. I came up after, and you were wearing an Elvis outfit.

Yeah.

I came up afterwards, and was like, “Oh man, the show was so good. My parents' house is nearby, do you want to come and hang out?” To have a drink or whatever, like, just to celebrate after the show.

Yeah, yeah?

And you said, “Thanks man, but I'm not a faggot.” That's what you actually said.

Are you—That's what I said?

Yeah. And you gave me a hug. You gave me a hug, but you were like, “Thanks man, but I'm not a faggot.”

That's hilarious... And then ten years later I became one?

And ten years later, we're sitting here, I just never mentioned it, because it was such a weird story to have known from before. But after all this faggot conversation... And then ten years later, I'm the king of the faggots? That's hilarious, man.

I never got called a faggot. But I have been called “homely.”

Homely?

For dressing kind of masculine, and not being a hot girl, and wearing eyeliner.

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Sleights of Hands PG.84

An excerpt from Murders of the Great Misery PG.94

Nobody ever shouts, “homely”...

No, it would be like, you know, I'm hanging out with my guy friends, and they'd be talking about some hot girl, and they'd be like, “Oh don't worry Natalie, you're cool; you're homely.”

Really? That's like a...

Not realizing it was an insult. Thinking just like…

It's kind of a five-dollar word for a little kid to call you.

Yeah.

“Homely.” I mean, you could give a kid five dollars for that.

INTERCOURSE 3

Francesco Clemente as the Genie. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal 30

WE LIKE TO BE FAGGOTS. WE'RE THE FAGGOTS

EVERYONE LIKES EVERYONE: MERING & GREEN

MISC.

Excerpt from an essay by hypnotherapist and psychotherapist, Nancy Donenfeld.

Nobodies Buried at Hart Island by Randy Lee Maitland

LONG FORM

There isn't a single pixel of blue in the sky. The seagulls winging above the ship are nearly indistinguishable from the haze. The ferry captain, Mark, stands at the railing, pointing out things of interest to a couple from Queens. They're the only other civilians with me on this boat to Hart Island, the city's potter's field. The man and woman are dressed plainly, like middle class people. Mark has freckles and a shaved head protected from the mist by a camo boonie hat with a string tied under his chin. He points out a missile silo, a crumbling building, the water itself—where some boys drowned last winter, or the one before that. He's not quite sure.

If you think about it, the inmates on the burial detail are actually pretty lucky. During the summer especially. About 15 or so low level oﬀenders get to spend the day outside, near the sound, the smell of grass and soil—away from all the nonsense that comes with being inside, in the yard, in general population. Really, it's not so bad. That's how the Cpt. Tompkins sees it, the head corrections oﬃcer on the island, when I ask what it's like for guys to bury babies. There's one way to see it, and there's another way. They're just putting boxes in the ground. You don't necessarily have to think about what's inside the box.

Until 2007, the DOC made it next to impossible for civilians to visit the island, and even now, all but fifty paces of it are inaccessible. It's all very tightly regulated because of the presence of prisoners on the island. A typical visit—like the one I’m on—happens one Thursday a month. It entails a ferry ride with Mark, a short walk to a “reflection area,” and a ferry ride back. There's no looking at gravesites, or finding out who is buried where. You sit in a gazebo and stare at a field, imagining all those millions of bodies in there somewhere, no names or people to claim them. On the ferry ride back, the blue DOC bus parks on the deck of the ferry. The bus windows are tinted so you can't see the convict's faces. You know though they can see you. It is mid-morning now, still gray-scale. The couple is staring at the field from the “reflection area.” I am sitting on a bench in the gazebo, taking notes. In the distance, there's the sound of something like firecrackers, and there's a green tractor in the field, cutting the grass.

INTERCOURSE 3

Hart Island lies at the west end of the Long Island Sound, about 15 minutes by ferry from City Island, Queens. Purchased by the city in 1869, it's the largest publically run cemetery in the US, with over 1,000,000 bodies buried in mass graves, and for reasons due to the mercurial evolution of bureaucracies, the municipal department whose responsibility it is to maintain the island, to perform burials and oversee visitations, is the Department of Corrections. That means the guy who shows you to the Hart Island reflection area has a gun in a gun holster on his belt and polished black boots and convicts in white shirts and blue dickies unload pine boxes from the back of the city’s morgue-wagon. The boxes go in a trench one on top of the other, like shoeboxes in a warehouse. With two guys lifting, they're not that heavy. It's like there's nothing in them. And with the baby coﬃns, it really is like stacking shoeboxes.

If a useless or very old Arunta aborigine dies the tribe does not perform any “elaborate ceremonies.” The death of the old or the useless does not cause sorrow—or is not worthy of sorrow. When a “useful” man dies, his widow must “remain silent until a certain ceremony called the Aralkilima is performed.” She is also relocated and told to cease with her normal day-to-day routine.

I hadn't ever considered what the city does with a person who dies living on the street or can't be identified until Catherine told me about the artist Melinda Hunt and her Hart Island Project. I had no idea there was a Hart Island, and I guess I'd always just assumed maybe a charity took care of their bodies, a shelter, or maybe they were cremated in a hospital basement. Or maybe I really didn't even think about it. But now I'm staring at what is basically a landfill of the poor and dead babies. I had no idea there were so many babies buried here. The couple from Queens takes a seat across from me on a wooden bench. Husband puts a hand on Wife's thigh. Are you looking for someone? Maybe I was but it's not the way I'm writing it. I'm here now to work through some ideas. I mention

YOU SIT IN A GAZEBO AND STARE AT A FIELD, IMAGINING ALL THOSE MILLIONS OF BODIES IN THERE

Photo © Joel Sternfeld from Melinda Hunt's book, Hart Island.

HART ISLAND

NOBODIES BURIED ON HART ISLAND: MAITLAND

Melinda Hunt. I tell them to go to the Hart Island Project website and share their story. The one that the Woman from Queens tells me goes like this: Her mother and father—almost 50 years ago— were losing their first-born son (her brother) to kidney cancer. To make up for the loss, they were counseled to have another child. So they did. They were eight months into the latest pregnancy when the son died. When that happened Dad had a heart attack, and when that happened, Mom gave birth to a stillborn girl. It was a whole chain of awfulness. Mom and Dad were most likely insane with grief and sickness. When the nurse or social services came in with paperwork they didn't know what it meant when they agreed to a city burial for the stillborn girl. They just signed papers. They had no idea the remains would be buried in a mass grave they wouldn't later be able to visit. 90 years old now, her mother is slipping into dementia. In moments of random lucidity, she’s begun asking where the body of her still-born baby is. She keeps talking about it. She wants to know. It's not right not to know.

Ledgers that the Department of Corrections keep for Hart Island were made public in 2007 thanks to Hunt's project.

The Woman from Queens thought maybe this could be the thing that anchors her mind to this

world, the one they share, so she started looking to find out what the city did with the remains of a stillborn sister, nearly 50 years ago. It proved diﬃcult. For one, hospitals don't issue birth certificates for stillborn babies so there's no proof what you're looking for had actually existed. It wasn't until she found the death certificate—by luck she says—that she was able to start piecing things together. The death certificate led her to a burial receipt, which led her to the Department of City Records and finally to Hart Island. Somewhere on Hart Island. That's where most of these records end. Hart Island is a potter's field, a graveyard for paupers and “strangers.” Its name is taken from Matthew 27:7—the scene with Judas and the Jewish priests, where Judas gives back the silver he was paid for betraying Christ and then goes and hangs himself. When they cut Judas down from the hanging tree, the priests say bury this “stranger-to-Jerusalem” and his 30 pieces of silver in a “potter's field”—meaning, in soil that has too much clay content and is worthless for farming. In New York, you qualify for the potter's field if you die and you don't leave enough money for burial costs, and your friends and relatives aren't legally required or themselves don't have enough money to pay your burial costs. Or if your body

IT WASN'T UNTIL SHE FOUND THE DEATH CERTIFICATE—BY LUCK SHE SAYS—THAT SHE WAS ABLE TO START PIECING THINGS TOGETHER

LONG FORM

NAME: CYRIL FERRICK AGE: 53 DATE OF DEATH: 7.17.1978 PERMIT: 13021 38

TOPIC

ARTICLE NAME: AUTHUR

NAME: ANTOINETTE RUBIN AGE: 45 DATE OF DEATH: 06.28.1988 PERMIT: 12119 39

LONG FORM

NAME: LEONARD MELFI AGE: 68 DATE OF DEATH: 10.28.2001 PERMIT: 55037 40

ARTICLE NAME: AUTHUR

NAME: JESSICA KIJAK AGE: 28 DATE OF DEATH: 01.03.2008 PERMIT: 03854 41

LONG FORM

goes 30 days unclaimed in the city morgue and you can’t be identified, and therefore assessed of your worth. Or if you're an infant and you die in a city hospital and social services oﬀers your mother a piece of paper to sign that says the city will take care of you—and at that moment that’s the last thing your mother wants to think about. Taking care of you means burying your body. Sure. Take care of you. Once you're dead, assessed of your worthlessness, your body is given a number, a pinewood coﬃn, and you're shipped with other bodies to be stacked in a mass grave. It's at this point the city of New York has fulfilled its obligations. It has taken care of you.

Melinda Hunt’s work the last 30 years—what she calls the Hart Island Project—has been about investigating what taking care of someone actually means. For her, finding a form for stories like the one the Caucasian Woman from Queens tells is her way of taking care of those can't and would not be able to speak for themselves, in this life or after it. Through collective story telling, archiving, and the presentation of “fragments of abandoned history,” she’s been trying to make Hart Island’s bodies visible to the public. But it's more than just making those anonymous people and stillborn babies and everyone else on Hart Island visible: Hunt is making us “visible” to ourselves by asking us to really consider whether we want to own the brute facts of Hart Island's public function. This means seeing “Hart Island” for what it is—and asking—is it okay? instead of drifting through our days with the screen, the phone, the feed. Uninterested, inattentive, hypocritical, self-absorbed.

ONLY THOSE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING WERE REFUSED PROPER BURIAL OUTRIGHT

In talking about the early work, you get the sense she doesn't see it with the seriousness she may have felt at the time she was making it, and she seems pretty fed up with the art world and its overweening self-seriousness as well. Her work doesn't quite line up with contemporary fashions, but is rooted in something like literary materialism—or (though she doesn’t use the term) social practice art. Dante and Eliot are key influences, spiritually, but so is Chicago, where she spent her formative artistic years. Otherness, concrete, alienation, immigration, dirt, and institutions in decline inform a worldview—but not her personality. She laughs a lot, shakes her head in baﬄement. Why do people simply assent to the way things are? In her oﬃce in Peekskill, NY she points across the street to a row of parking meters. “People care more about where they're going to park their cars. Why would they want to open up Hart Island and make it available to anyone? It means more work for them!” For the Hart Island Project, Hunt has made use of pretty much every medium available: a book co-authored with photographer Joel Sternfeld; publishing and repurposing burial documentation; publishing letters from Riker’s inmates who have buried the dead; emails from those

INTERCOURSE 3

In ancient Greece anyone who neglected the care of the dead (any dead) suﬀered insult and stigmatization; anyone who neglected the care of a parent's corpse was “deemed an outcast and unfit to live with the rest of the community.” Solon's laws forbade any spoken disparagement of the dead. For such offenses you could be deposed of your office or property. Coins set either on the eyes or stuﬀed into the mouth were payment to Charon for conveyance over the river of Styx and into the underworld. Suicides were allowed sepulcher, but the hand that committed the act was amputated and buried apart from the body. Traitors were buried apart from the land they'd betrayed. Only those struck by lightning were refused proper burial outright.

An artist before she's an activist, Hunt, a trained sculptor (Yale MFA), began her career making large deconstructed pieces that usually featured broken or abandoned playground equipment, flying concrete, fire and dust. Much of it was heavy, serious, and slow-moving. Though the Hart Island Project is radically diﬀerent from her “material” or “object-oriented” work, it’s nevertheless there in the early work, with its material and physical concerns, as well as her tendency to impede or block the phenomenal experience of her forms. In one early work from the 80s, she bisects a teeter-totter with a slab of concrete so you can't see the person on the other seat. You have to trust that the other person on this plaything will play according to the teeter-totter rules. If they get oﬀ and you're up in the air, you'll wind up on your ass. This maybe has something to do with politics, she says laughing. In another early work, she stages a performance of Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare using water nymphs, a princess, a ring of fire, and adult suitors in wet suits flopping around in a fountain. The broken work of art reflects a broken set of social relations happening in real time.

Above: Screenshot from The Traveling Cloud Museum. This "virtual graveyard" keeps track of the time a person has been buried on Hart Island in anonymity with symbolic clocks. Only information supplied about the person—someone who knew them, sought them out etc.—can stop the clock and right the name. Right: Melinda Hunt receives photographs from people looking for loved ones who have ended up buried on Hart Island. This material becomes part of her artistic practice.

NOBODIES BURIED ON HART ISLAND: MAITLAND

LONG FORM

NOBODIES BURIED ON HART ISLAND: MAITLAND

HART ISLAND

looking to find someone who may or may not be on Hart Island. She’s made a documentary film; she’s constructed photographic sculptures; she’s made drawings and paintings; she’s had various museum and gallery shows. She’s arranged baby coﬃns in rows with their names on cards before each box. She speaks at conferences, writes letters. Her practice is part advocacy group, part historical society, a forum and ongoing wake and burial service all at the same time. She helps people actually step foot on Hart Island—going through all the bureaucratic hassle some people just aren't equipped to handle. Throughout this, she's become known to the system. It was her work—with a team of lawyers—that eventually got the DOC to release its burial records. “Imagine that—for some reason, the city didn't want people to know where people were buried on Hart Island. Why?” Currently, she’s at work on legislation that will transfer control of the island from the DOC to Parks and Recreation as well, the implementation of an online Hart Island cemetery. Hunt calls this online project The Traveling Cloud Museum, which makes available not only the oﬃcial public record (name, date of death, location of death, date of burial, location of burial) but the stories, anecdotes, pictures and other ephemera related to the lives of those buried on Hart Island. For Hunt, story telling is an important part of the grieving process. The Traveling Cloud Museum provides people an opportunity to commemorate and re-enter into history those dispossessed masses who had been cast out of life as we live it. To emphasize this, The Traveling Cloud Museum keeps track of the time a body has been buried on Hart Island without any information about that person's life. This is symbolized by a clock, ticking away. Beneath the clock is the person's name, rendered upside down. When a story is added to someone’s clock and name—the clock stops ticking, and Time is returned to the Real. The name is made right side up.

Antoinette Rubin and Kazimierz Szymanski are two of the people buried at Hart Island who have become part of Melinda Hunt's project.

The ferry slaps across the water and seagulls slap the sky above me. Mark indicates buildings now coming into sight behind a thicket of trees. “Most of these are condemned. They don't want people coming around here like a lot of the kids do. They sneak onto the island. They burn the buildings down.”

STORY TELLING IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE GRIEVING PROCESS

The Woman from Queens squints at where he's pointing. She twists a piece of tissue she's had in her hand this whole time as the ferry bangs into the slip. Two men pull chains connected to a wooden headworks that looks like a pair of gallows towers. Cpt. Thompson stands at the end of the dock near a jeep painted with the DOC insignia. He checks our IDs before we're allowed to go any further. The Woman casts glances. “Are the prisoners here?” Two white shirts move across a field where a tractor is mowing. Cpt. Thompson’s dismissive grin reveals a large gap tooth. The cut grass smell is pungent and sweet. On the way to the “reflection area,” Cpt. Thompson tells us the ferry guys bought the angel statuettes—depicted as bent on one knee, head bowed and hands together—and put them there, out of respect. That’s good. Also, we did not know that the first baby to die of AIDS is buried right here on Hart Island. That’s sad. It's the only body that has its own grave and marker. Which is nice. It’s over there behind that clump of trees at the east end of the island. Which is restricted too. At the “reflection area,” there's a single marker, of pale pink granite, and on it the inscription, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” They’ve planted pink carnations along the picket fence but the surrounding trees are all dead looking. Cpt. Thompson's favorite tree is dead and the fence and the gazebo look beat up. Husband has removed hand from Wife's thigh and is standing now next to Cpt. Thompson. The trees beyond the field where the tractor mower is mowing are thick with leaves. Hunt seems to suggest Hart Island isn't commemorated because the public prefers grand monuments and sweeping gestures, which avoid 45

LONG FORM

NOBODIES BURIED ON HART ISLAND: MAITLAND

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the mess of “deconstructing into individual stories.” For Hunt, those individual stories are the art; they're the compelling and moving aspect of The Hart Island Project. “It's not about grief. It's more a creative inquiry into who we are. Are we just a bunch of people with no real connections to one another sharing space?”

HART ISLAND

In the cemeteries we normally visit, grave markers tell you the names of the dead, the date of birth and death, and sometimes a pithy quote to chew on. The marker speaks to the dead person’s importance. The most important people get the most important monuments, the bigger the more important the person was. It’s the same as in life. The most important people get to live in the most important houses—with important views and amenities. The most important companies have the most important skyscrapers and so on. When we visit the graveyard we are entering an exclusive or closed off space, hidden behind shrubs or wrought iron gates. Here, we encounter a different way of being in time; we count it differently, and we reflect on personhood and its mutability in relation to time and the psychological components of memory. Hunt's distinction that the stories in the Traveling Cloud Museum are art is important for a reason. The online graveyard or the accessed database cannot evoke the sensation of different space, nor is there the experience of a transition to different temporalities. You don’t physically pass from streets and houses to the land of the dead and then back. To die of grief means to stay where the dead are. There’s no emotional transition back. The hope is that the graveyard physically imposes the metaphorical return to the living upon those aggrieved, that one is, in a sense, able to leave one’s dead behind. But in the case of the Cloud, there's no leaving it. It is everywhere.

In this sense—maybe the DOC and the city have it right—by estranging you from the body and the body from personhood and cultural norms of burial so wildly, by emptying out any vestige of humanity from the burial process, by making you jump through so many hoops, to travel by ferry over water to an island of the dead and the convicted—itself like something out of mythology—getting to Hart Island, standing there, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, it’s the equivalent of stopping your clock. You're freed from your self, and its corollary self-estrangement and alienation and you're returned, closer to the impossible Real, your name flipped right side up, the label for the bag of bones you are. Both the Woman and myself are fascinated by the behavior of the island birds. They fly in a loop around the mower, going where it goes, hovering and diving at the tractor’s blades. They come close to getting ripped apart but dart in and out. It's like how gnats are attracted to light? No. When you cut the grass, the grasshoppers have nowhere to hide.“For the birds it's easy pickings,” our Captain says. Hart Island is probably the most honest place in the city I've been. There are no lies, no sentimental or religious posturings here. It tells it like it is, and it is everything. Now we recognize the Statue of Liberty winking her eyes like pronouns unguarded by clouds: everyone has their vote and every voice matters and all men are created equal.

Melinda Hunt exhibition of stillborn, baby coffins in Stadhaus Ulm, 1998. Inside each of the coffins, Hunt has placed blankets embroidered with the names of the babies, the dates of their births and the dates of their deaths. TO DIE OF GRIEF MEANS TO STAY WHERE THE DEAD ARE

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Ecstatic Ensemble: Original Music and the Birth of the AACM by Catherine Despont and Jake Nussbaum

ECSTATIC ENSEMBLE: DESPONT & NUSSBAUM

“I don’t stand to benefit when everybody is just trying to be like everyone else. All of us are highly individualized beings, different.” –ROSCOE MITCHELL

IMPROVISATION

What makes music original? We often use “original” to mean unique, but it also refers to the first, the root, the pattern. For the past five decades the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians has sought to answer this question and produced music that resists category. Reluctantly labeled jazz, avant-garde, classical, electronic—the sonic universe of the AACM is built on a philosophy of inclusiveness.

Roscoe Mitchell, Gymnasium concert, University of Chicago, 1968. All photos courtesy of Leonard E. Jones

Known for having produced some of Chicago’s most renowned musicians and composers such as Roscoe Mitchell, George Lewis, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill, the AACM has a reputation for innovation that exceeds any one particular sound. Its members have created 50-piece operas, graphic scores, alternative tunings, and software that responds to improvisation. Costumes, body paint, incense, dancing, computers, and homemade instruments have all turned up at their concerts. Performances have filled entire gymnasiums and taken place among the crowd. Children have paraded down the aisles performing alongside professionals. The AACM's quest for original music has been for something unlimited and universal. The Association was an outgrowth of pianist and composer Muhal Richard Abrams's Experimental Band—a rehearsal group of black musicians that met in Abrams's south-side Chicago basement in the early 60s. Experimental Band meetings resembled a jam session only in format— instead of encouraging virtuosic one-upmanship, musicians presented compositions to the group and worked ideas out collectively. The focus was on creative development rather than classical or technical ability. From the beginning, the purposes outlined in the AACM's charter were as much social as musical: “to create an atmosphere conducive to artistic endeavors,” “to stimulate spiritual growth in creative artists through participation in programs,” and “to provide a source of employment for worthy creative

musicians.” Their Chicago headquarters moved frequently, but the format remained constant: members paid dues to support rentals for venues, shared maintenance and promotional duties, and professional musicians were required to teach at the AACM School. At the time of the AACM's founding in May 1965, Chicago was heavily segregated and its black neighborhoods criminally underserved. There were virtually no opportunities for black composers, and it was rare for black musicians to teach at high levels, join orchestras, or be fairly compensated by local venues and record labels. High school teaching jobs were often the only opportunities open to trained musicians, and even those who had achieved widespread success struggled to maintain creative freedom and fair compensation. “We looked at the lives of great musicians that were just out there on their own, like Charlie Parker,” remembered Roscoe Mitchell, an original member and widely acclaimed saxophonist. “Many musicians left the States and had to go to Europe. It was not a good network.” As the 60s wore on, social movements like the Black Panthers and the Black Arts Movement found ways to improve the condition of black Americans through community and creative action. The Association, though not directly aﬃliated with either, envisioned a similar model of success—a space that could exist outside of mainstream institutional ideology and allow black artists to experiment without risking their livelihood. “The thing we wanted with the AACM was a place where we could all come together with a common interest,” said Mitchell. “We wanted to have control over our destinies. We didn't want to just be blown in the wind.” To that end, the AACM started a community school, open on Saturdays to students of all ages. Everyone learned composition and percussion, and were encouraged to try a variety of instruments. Association founder Muhal Richard Abrams emphasized original composition as a way to ensure students had all the tools necessary to decipher or reproduce the sounds they wanted. It was an implicit counter to the limited freedom black Americans faced at the time. “Being a composer, you knew what that was; that was an old white guy,” explained member George Lewis, who chronicled the AACM in his book, A Power Stronger Than Itself. “The basic idea throughout the entire thing was that you

WE WANTED TO HAVE CONTROL OVER OUR DESTINIES. WE DIDN'T WANT TO JUST BE BLOWN IN THE WIND

LONG FORM

Art Ensemble of Chicago, Paris, summer 1970. 52

LONG FORM

had agency for what you were going to do with your own life, and that you could do what you wanted to do. You were living an alternative model, counter to what people were saying you could be doing, or the kind of possibilities you could have.” Students were given pencil and paper and shown the basics of major scales and diatonic modules. Those with previous knowledge shared the same class under the assumption they would eventually come to something they didn’t understand. At the end of their very first three-hour class, students were expected to go home and compose. “That was it,” recalled Lewis, “you were a composer immediately.” This approach left little separation between learning and creating.

“I think the assumption was that everyone was wiser than you,” Lewis recalled. “If you were a person in some sort of pedagogical authority or prominence, and you went in with the attitude that you had a worm and were going to bring it to a bunch of open beaks, that’s not it. Your beak should be just as open as everybody else’s. So that way everybody was sort of feeding each other.” Ann Ward, who directed the school from 1983 to 2008, described an environment in which music was explored openly, with accessible language. “I insisted that my children learn the qualities of each sound in the musical alphabet. Each letter could be flat or sharp, obtuse or narrow, which to me means augmented or diminished. We’d say, ‘Is it tight? Is it wide? Is it thick? Is it thin? Is it low and deep?’” The descriptions encouraged a personal connection to the sound that carried through in the way Ward taught musical notation. “When I was taught piano, I was taught, 54

The original composition “A Jackson in Your House,” recorded by the Art Ensemble of Chicago (with members Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman) in 1969, captures the diverse and encompassing style of professional AACM musicians at the time. The piece opens with a whimsical theme stated in heraldic fanfare, then quickly disintegrates to a squawking bike horn, and eventually silence. A soft vibraphone fills the space, accentuated by clinks and chimes, as though drifting in off the street through an open window. The quiet atmosphere builds back into the theme, which is again interrupted by clanging, drums, shouting, and exaggerated laughing. A slurry voice chants, “1, 2, 3, there's Jacksons in your house,” before blurring nonsensically. A clearer voice responds, “Jackson, that cat is somethin!” Suddenly a trumpet and clarinet launch into old-style bebop solos, and a vocal argument breaks out between old men. “You gotta play the blues, man,” one shouts, and the instruments become slow and lazy as the men banter on. The soloists state a completely new theme, and the piece fades out after just five and a half minutes. By turns playful, silly, and as biting as a Shakespearean fool, the patchwork nature of the song seems to mock the restraint of past musical traditions, while pointedly evoking the complicated legacy of black minstrelsy. The Art Ensemble covers a wide range of sound with their unique instrumentation (toys, sound effects, little instruments) and performance style (it's never quite clear who's playing what), but also in their investigation of entire musical idioms (secondline from New Orleans, early bebop, “the blues”). Black musical traditions— even stereotypical ones—are re-purposed freely, seen not as limiting forms but doors to something original.

IF I GIVE YOU A WIGGLY LINE, AND I GIVE YOU A POINT TO START, YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO

INTERCOURSE 3

There was no preliminary exercise. With basic knowledge and tools, students could engage directly with the creative practice. Abrams envisioned this learning space as a meeting between “so-called teachers and so-called students,” where learning and doing happened together.

‘this is middle C and this was a quarter note,’ but there were no connections. So I make sure that things connect. When I teach theory, we’re just looking at what symbols can mean. Symbols are simply a shortcut, which you can apply to sound. If I give you a wiggly line and I give you a point to start, you figure out what to do. That’s how we got the students to read our notation. The AACM notation was as far-flung as the sounds we made. We taught them traditional notation too of course, but we did it through patterns and logic.”

ECSTATIC ENSEMBLE: DESPONT & NUSSBAUM

IMPROVISATION

Like Jackson, much of the AACM's music at the time provided a context for members to aﬃrm their legacy as black musicians, reclaiming idioms and instruments that had previously been appropriated by white audiences or labeled as “primitive.” African and Asian melodies and instruments played a large role in compositions and performances, as did black-American musical traditions like the blues, jazz, ragtime, funk, and R + B. Equally rooted in this tradition was the way the AACM pursued improvisation, an approach which traces its roots back through jazz to field songs, and further still to African music carried over during the slave trade. Many of the first AACM members began improvising in more conventional settings—marching bands, churches, jazz combos—where improvisation was limited to solos over chord changes and evaluated by technical skill. But within the AACM improvisation increasingly became a group act. The band Air, with members Henry Threadgill, Fred Hopkins and Steve McCall, might start a piece with a standard jazz theme, but it was often only a jumping-oﬀ point for extended sonic explorations of melody and rhythm. Tunes from church, marching bands, etc., would resurface in new and unpredictable ways, and improvisation became an access point to musical heritage as well as its unknown future. For Mitchell, “improvisation is a speeded up form of composition.” In this sense, it is always original music, born of the moment. But it's more than high-speed composition; it is also a context in which musicians are free to accesses all their creative knowledge in service of an instant without adhering to a specific compositional framework. In short, it is liberating, and when undertaken collectively it fosters mutual support perhaps more than any other model.

Without a script to follow, musicians must rely on each other for creative direction, transcending the boundaries of what they know and think is possible, creating something that exists outside the imagination of any one person. IMPROVISATION IS A SPEEDED UP FORM OF COMPOSITION

“It's not just about improvisational music,” explains Lewis, “but about improvisation as a general condition of being in the world that you have to articulate and that you can learn from and make connections through—a sort of microcosm.” Such collective creative action enabled the AACM to transcend what was perceived as possible at the time for black artists and provided a flexibility that was key to its longevity. An absence of hierarchy between young and old, amateur and professional, meant everyone was both learner and teacher. New members could learn directly from founders while also placing value on their own contributions. Concerts from AACM professionals often included moments for the students to perform or join, establishing a generational throughline that naturally grew the AACM’s audience to include families and friends of the students. Small percussive instruments such as shakers, rattles and bells allowed children from an early age to play along with adult musicians. Ann Ward described the feeling of reverence between students and teachers: “Joseph Jarman would be brought to tears listening because these children could play just as well with the masters. The true percussionists would play the “other side” of the rhythm, and we’d say, ‘go ahead, because we got this side!’ Even if they didn’t keep the beat we’d call those ‘funny notes,’ and they were acceptable. They might create a little diversion for someone to move on to something else.”

American models of success have traditionally favored the individual over the group. Participation in groups is often seen as adherence to convention, or interference to individual impetus, as though the benefits of belonging, i.e. patronage and protection, come only at a cost to freedom, i.e. limited resources, conformity. But this description fails to acknowledge the potential for reciprocity between the group and the individual, in which support is not just material or emotional, but also creative and de55

LONG FORM

Clockwise from top Malachi Favors Maghostut, bassist of extraordinary talents, Art Ensemble of Chicago Concert, 1968. Danny Riperton, actually a pianist and brother of Minnie Riperton, the singer, AACM summer concert at the 63rd Street Beachhouse, Chicago, August 1968. Others in photo John Stubblefield, John Jackson, trp., and Wadada Leo Smith, right of Jackson Henry Threadgill in the studio of Q Jan Telting, Surinamese painter Amsterdam, Holland, 1971. 56

ECSTATIC ENSEMBLE: DESPONT & NUSSBAUM

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through interaction in an artistic environment; what kinds of literature you’re driven to read, or the languages you learn or the kinds of people you meet, or the sorts of awareness or enlightenment that music has to oﬀer you.”

The AACM envisions music’s impact far beyond performance or the lives of professional musicians. “I say it all the time: I’m not turning out musicians, I’m turning out well-rounded people,” explained Ward. “When you come out of here knowing that you can do this, what else can’t you do?” As a creative discipline, the music fostered self-discipline and confidence alongside a communal awareness of heritage, community, and collaboration. In its capacity as a collective project, music and music-making provide ongoing direction and metaphor for social renewal. “It is the total experience,” as Lewis says, “not just the playing part, or the composing part. It’s what music brings you in contact with; what kind of social worlds become revealed to you

When we talk about art’s relevance to society the discussion inevitably seems to center on individual experience, or final products. The AACM suggests an alternative—one where the creative context is in direct relationship with society, where the act of imagination itself is one that creates opportunities that didn’t previously exist. The AACM brought their music to the world, first through exchanges with similar collectives in Detroit and St. Louis like the Black Artists' Group, then through a long stint overseas in Paris and Europe, and then finally to New York, where a second chapter was established in 1983. Both the Chicago and New York chapters are active and thriving still.

IMPROVISATION

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velopmental. By connecting creative and social development, the AACM oﬀered the advantages of collectivity—education, opportunity, creative community—without neglecting the needs of the individual creator.

IT’S WHAT MUSIC BRINGS YOU IN CONTACT WITH

Extreme Curvature: A Roundtable with Dorothea Rockburne, Ron Gorchov and Trueman MacHenry

Black Mountain College was small, rural, and under-funded, yet many of the post-war avant garde movements in the humanities can be traced back to it. A cursory inspection of the notable alumni and faculty sections on its Wikipedia no doubt confirms this. Started in 1933 at the beginnings of the progressive education movement in the states, the college meant to depart from the usual rigid manner of education and to encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration and student self-determination. Though well known for its notable alumni in the arts, its academic rigor is rarely discussed.

EXTREME CURVATURE: ROCKBURNE, GORCHOV, MACHENRY

IN THIS CONVERSATION

TRUEMAN MACHENRY

People all have their own personal interests in the history of Black Mountain.

Two artists and a mathematician discuss the mysterious influence of numbers in their lives and work. DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

most recently had a retrospective at MOMA and is known for her paintings, mix-media works and installations.

I have my own personal interests. So if somebody's going to interview me and ask me about Black Mountain, I'll talk about what I did there, the things that were important to me. But if you just think of the names that were there, the names in art and music and dance, those are the things that get advertised. It certainly gets used more from a journalistic standpoint and it makes very good copy—because who goes around talking about good anthropologists? Or a good physical chemist? You don't hear too much about that except in private circles

TRUEMAN MACHENRY is BMC’s

first PhD in mathematics and a professor at York University.

RON GORCHOV is best known for his saddle-shaped paintings.

I’ve always wondered why the academic aspect of Black Mountain is never discussed, because it was superb. I received a very good academic education, and I thrived on it. I found many of the fall session art classes really boring, however. Everybody was trying to behave like Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, or Franz Kline, and to make paintings somewhat like them. It was very masculine in those days, or what was thought to be masculine. Throwing paint around. I was just bored to tears in those classes, because I thought they were indulgent in a way that didn’t interest me. Of course, there were artists at Black Mountain that I loved. Rauschenberg and Twombly, Jim Bishop, and many more. But they didn’t take those classes either. Anybody that was any good didn't take the art classes in the winter semesters—only in the summer semester. So, I veered towards Max Dehn's class. In the summer, both the artists and musicians took Dehn’s math classes. They were innovative and creative. John Cage was in Dehn's class, as was Charles Olsen, and others. [turning to Ron Gorchov] You would have been in heaven there.

DOROTHEA ROCKBURNE

I was in Chicago when that was happening.

RON GORCHOV Truman MacHenry having his portrait taken on the day of the roundtable. All portraits from the day of the roundtable discussion photographed by Catherine Despont.

I know.

And I didn't get to New York until 1953.

I came in '54, straight from Black Mountain.

I HAD A BOOK ON DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS AT BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

We've known each other a very long time. One way or another. RG

I don't know when we actually first met.

In the late ‘60s or early '70s, sometime. Did the two of you ever connect over geometry or math?

INTERCOURSE RG

I'm not really good with numbers.

That’s what Max Dehn always said about himself.

I've always felt that our actual kinship in painting was a love of the idea of space.

Yes, that’s right. We also share the love of paint, painting, and art history.

[turning to Trueman] Does your mathematics deal with issues of space?

I started out with topology first. That was Dehn's influence, especially algebraic topology.

Did you ever figure out what three dimensions is?

That's a good question.

It drives me crazy. The Cubists hit that wall but tried to figure it out.

So what is your connection with numbers?

You know, I use a saddle shape in my work. The surface is a saddle shape.

I had a book on diﬀerential equations at Black Mountain College. At the time, Black Mountain was rural, and I worked on the farm there—they’d hired me out as a plowboy, haying and all kinds of things. Black Mountain is very mountainous, so I was driving this tractor on these marvelous surfaces, and I was thinking of this book at the time—of course, I almost tipped the tractor over, doing that. But it was interesting to think of the way these surfaces are modeled, you know, when you're on hillsides.

The curve I use, I can describe it, but I don't think I'm describing it mathematically. It starts at zero curvature. And as it continues, the curvature becomes more extreme. Then when it reaches the point where it intersects with the side, which is concave and meets the side that is convex at a point of extreme-most curvature. The feeling is, if

LONG FORM

it went on, it would still never turn around. It would go to infinity without turning around. So, I don't know what that curve is mathematically, but when I tell the people carving my stretchers, they get it; they come out right. The way I look at my idea is that it's an argument to the rectangle. I love rectangles. They're fine. I just thought that they're used as a given. People just say, “Oh, well, paint in a rectangle.” I think rectangles should be chosen carefully for what the work is going to be. I think artists in the past did that. DR

The aspect of Ron's work that interests me most is that he's such a maverick. You can't categorize his work. It definitely doesn't fall into a system. These are all things that I adore—that make it very difficult to commodify. Within the saddle shape structure, Ron paints a shape. He sets up a visual situation. It’s something that is counter to the saddle shape. It’s a painted shape. Then there's usually something within that shape which changes ones usual perception from a to z. It sets up a conundrum, to have those two diﬀerent surfaces relating and not relating to each other. For me, Trueman, the nexus of change in art—as Ron started to say—is that the changes in art throughout history reflect the way in which cultures, and artists in particular, changed the perceivable space in which their artworks take place throughout time. Pictorial subject matter remains the same, a visual constant consisting of people, animals, still lifes, constructions, and geometry. The aspect of art that changes through time, though, is that of a visual space perception and invention. From Egypt through Greece, from Byzantine painting through the Italian Renaissance, from French impressionism to cubism, and then there’s a wrench, Matisse’s unique return to a kind of Byzantine space. Then “space” travels across to America, to American modernism. The structures of painting and sculpture constantly reinvent themselves, spatially. Therein lies the challenge. And then there is “oblique geometry” to consider, which isn’t talked about very much, but existed in Persia, in Pompeii, and was all throughout the Renaissance before Alberti invented perspective. Because they

NUMBERS HAVE A MAGIC COMPONENT TO THEM

had to draw a table in a kind of perspective that doesn’t have vanishing lines, so they could do measurements, a system of oblique geometry was used. Ronald Bladen (19181988) employed a form of oblique geometry in his sculpture. That reminds me of something I read in an interview of yours, Ron. You were talking about how certain concepts have always existed, and that progress is actually just a diﬀerent perspective on those concepts. It reminded me very much of the way Dorothea connects diﬀerent ideas across history, and mathematics, and space, and color. It's something that I see translating very strongly in both of your work. And certainly mathematics has this notion of discoveries, or new ways of describing information, rather than intention. I wonder if you could talk about that in relation to your work?

INTERCOURSE

I don't know that there is any such thing as “ancient thought.” I think everything exists on the same plane. If it has managed to become viable throughout the history of human thought, then somehow it's encapsulated in the same time frame now.

Don't we manufacture the present out of the past? Isn't that how it goes?

A lot of my forms are taken from really old things that I've looked at.

For me, it’s numbers. They just resonate. They have my whole life. Coming here this afternoon, the car driver couldn't find this address; I had spotted the number on the door just as we drove by. Numbers just have a special place in my life.

Do you think there's an element of synesthesia? For instance, many people that have perfect pitch, every half-tone or whatever has a color.

I don't see numbers in color. It’s not that simple. Numbers have a magic component to them. They can form and re-form themselves diﬀerently depending on how they are manipulated. The Egyptians did not use zero. When the Arabs added zero to their numeric system, it caused a whole number revolution.

When you count, you go, “1, 2, 3, 4 ,” and when you go up, what do you see? What goes on in your mind when you count?

1 Ron Gorchov, Passacaglia, 2013 Oil on linen. 35 x 45 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist 2 Ron Gorchov, Serapis, 2008 Oil on canvas. Four parts, 156 x 156 x 24 inches overall. Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel 3 Ron Gorchov, Untitled, 1974. Oil on linen. 34.5 x 24.5 inches. Private Collection, Courtesy Vito Schnabel

EXTREME CURVATURE: ROCKBURNE, GORCHOV, MACHENRY

I don't.

You don't? They don't do anything? You don't have...

They don't for me, either.

Ah, that's interesting. For me, they go in a great huge spiral. So, “100” is in a very special place, and the thousands are way out there, someplace else. If they get too big, then I get lost, of course. If I work with numbers a lot, I get very fast at it. You would, too. Anybody would. And then you start to see all kinds of things.

In mathematics, do you see images in your mind?

I do, yes. I do.

What kind of images?

Geometrical.

Geometric? And you see them?

Yeah, in full color. Technicolor.

Right. That's interesting.

But diﬀerent people work diﬀerent ways, and, you know, at four o'clock when people have tea in the afternoon, they sit and they talk about things like that. It turns out that some report one way and some report the other. Some people don't think visually at all. There's quite a range of the way people think. But I'm very visual, very geometrical. I started out in geometry so I feel very comfortable in geometry. And even when I'm doing sort of algebraic things, which are not necessarily interpretable geometrically, I still think in terms of images. My numbers move around. [Laughs] They play games.

When you work, do you work by hand or do you work on the computer?

Oh, I think in general what mathematicians use the computer for is to test out hypotheses and cases that are too diﬃcult by hand. You know exactly what to do, but you don't want to bother to make the calculation. That's the only thing I ever use the computer for. I can do, in principal, what they're doing. But I work by hand, either in my head, sometimes with pencil and paper.

One of the things that numbers do and which appeals to me, is that all my life I've never been involved with super-big numbers of money. But very often, I've suddenly

2 Dorothea Rockburne, Mapping the Ancient Origins of Light, 2013, Colored pencil on paper, 10" x 7”. © 2014 Dorothea Rockburne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 3 Dorothea Rockburne, Secrets of the Mysterious Perigee Moon as I Saw it on June 19, 2 013 , 2 013. Colored pencil on paper, 10" x 7". © 2014 Dorothea Rockburne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

I BEGAN TO HAVE A FEELING ABOUT THE COLOR OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY

had more money than I was used to seeing, and it was just as shocking as losing money. Because you don't know what to do with it, and you have to figure it out. So, I began to have a feeling about the color of large amounts of money, and what was needed to keep going, and stuﬀ like that. So, I have a kind of synesthesia about large amounts of money. And I love the scale involved, because sometimes we barely had enough money to buy food to cook. DR

Most artists, when they have an exhibition, have spent so much money, on the stretchers, on the linen, on preparing just to work—and on the paint—that even if they sell half of the paintings, they don't come out ahead.

In the middle years, the struggle was, you'd have a show, and there'd be a few sales. And then you'd be oﬀered opportunities to have another show, and you really couldn't produce it.

I don't think of numbers like that, exactly. I experience them in a more multifaceted manner. I mean, I know the way it's thought of in America—2 and 2 equals 4. But my question has always been, “Four what?” In my work I have been able to visualize abstract mathematical concepts and make those concepts materialze.

Right.

I don't think of numbers as being quantitative in relation to my life. To me it's another reality. Numbers are really exquisite. Discovering Euclid at Black Mountain was an eye-opener. Girls in my generation were never taught geometry, believe me. I went into Max's class with hardly basic algebra. But Max’s teaching just—it made me feel as though I was a part of something bigger. I can't relate practical numbers to my life at all, because I never know financially where I am. I hang by my teeth all the time financially. But I don't care. I made that decision to be a painter all those years ago, and never to compromise. But again, this teacher, Max Dehn, he was so modest, and not superficially so. He was really modest. Everything he said stuck. He talked, and taught, a lot about knot theory.

Physicists are still interested in it, actually.

The interesting thing about knots is that they encompass every possible energy. I’ve 61

Dorothea Rockburn sitting for a tintype portrait on the day of the roundtable. 63

LONG FORM

started to do some work based on knot theory. Drawings. I mean, I think with my hands. I have the very beginning of the very first, very early drawing. I’m manipulating copper wire to recreate the form of a knot. I'm interested in the way knots relate to people. The invisible energy. In India, for instance, mathematicians think of love-making positions as a possible knot. When you start working with an idea like this, especially something energetic, do you start with a feeling of what it will be? Or does it evolve out of creating the physical object as physical object?

an amazing teacher, the information that he embedded in my young brain formed a basis for my art, and my life, but Trueman was his star, of course. RG

He's written books, right?

He wrote an article in the German encyclopedia on mathematics. He wrote a book with Schönfleiss on mathematics and topology and he wrote a few papers. All of which are very much in the limelight these days.

INTERCOURSE

I start with a picture in my head. My feelings are always fully there. I never have an aim. I don't care what the outcome is, or if there is an outcome. Usually, I've been mulling something over for a very long time. Max Dehn was talking about knot theory in 1950, and drawing these pictures on the board. I think these things went into my mental file somehow. All these years I've been thinking, “what do you do with this?” I was enthralled by the scope of his thinking and teaching. Whatever Max did, I did, and I think you did too, Trueman. One just fell in love with the guy, he was so fantastic, the way he presented his knowledge, the gentleness with which he presented information, but it also had this kind of expansion-through-time quality. I think I've been thinking about knot theory all these years. There is a photograph in my work diary from 1991, when I was in Rome. I took a photograph of a Renaissance grating made of knots. I see now there have been knots throughout all of my thinking, and I just didn't know how to go from the theoretical to the concrete and turn theory into an art object. That takes a very long time, and I'm not there yet by any means.

With the copper wire you're weaving it?

Not exactly weaving, because knots are continuous. There's always a technical aspect to materials. How do you weld the ends of copper wire together to form a continuous line? In the between time, I fiddle around with equations. I’m always fiddling mathematically, but I'm not doing mathematics. I'm making drawings.

Great.

Well, it's great because, again, Max was such

Very much so right now.

Everything he did was important. He never did any unimportant mathematics.

And other mathematicians said to him, “Why are you at Black Mountain College?” And he would state, “because of the creativity.” In the 50s, how did you hear about Black Mountain? It just blows my mind, to come from all over and there's this niche—

INTERCOURSE

Well, I had some very good teachers at Ecole des Beaux-Arts. I attended on Saturdays. By the time I was, maybe eleven, something like that, several teachers said to me—and I loved being in Montreal. It was fantastic. They said, “You must leave Montreal as soon as you can.” I said “I’m a little kid.” And then I said, “And go where?” And they answered, “Black Mountain College.” That was the first I’d heard of it. Later, I attended the Montreal Museum School when the children’s program at Beaux Arts ended. I had a teacher named Gordon Webber who had studied with Moholy-Nagy in Chicago at the Institute of Design, and no sooner was I in the class, and he said, “As soon as you’re old enough you’ve got to leave Montreal,” and I said, “And go where?” And he said, “Black Mountain College.” I actually started planning my escape when I was thirteen, or so. I took all kinds of jobs, and had a secret bank account, and started saving money. By the time I was through high school, I had some savings. I had an older, conspiratorial, sister who wrote letters for me. I had to get a passport and my sister was good at faking my mother’s signature. I told [my parents] two weeks before I was to leave, and... [Laughs] It was an adventure.

INTERCOURSE

And Trueman, from Wyoming?

IN INDIA, FOR INSTANCE, MATHEMATICIANS THINK OF LOVE-MAKING POSITIONS AS A POSSIBLE KNOT

All images of Trueman MacHenry at Black Mountain and his studio courtesy of Heather South and Western Regional Archives, State Archives of North Carolina.

EXTREME ARTICLE CURVATURE: NAME: AUTHUR ROCKBURNE, GORCHOV, MACHENRY

Dorothea Rockburne, Cayley Tree, 2014. Arches 300 lb. hard pressed watercolor paper, Permanent Blue Lascaux Aquacryl co-polymer paint, 20 gauge and 38 gauge copper wire. Protected by Golden MSA varnish with Ultra Violet filters. 21 1/2" x 14 1/4". ÂŠ 2014 Dorothea Rockburne/ Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. 65

Ron Gorchov looking dapper as always. 66

LONG FORM

RG TM

INTERCOURSE DR

Oh!

Wow.

Macho guys?

And about that time Black Mountain had one of its explosions, and Ilya Bolotowsky went to University of Wyoming, which is the only place he could get a job, and I had a very close friend there who wrote to me in Alaska that he had heard about this wonderful place. We had quite a correspondence from the side of the volcano.

See, I didn't notice that at all.

Insecure...The surprise to me was—and I've just thought about this recently; when I was a kid growing up, my brother was a very good skier. He taught the Canadian Olympic ski team, and he started teaching me jumping when I was four, and I jumped a lot. And the reason I thought about this recently was, I never competed against girls. There were no girls skiing; I was the only one. I competed against little boys, so I didn't understand this prejudice thing. I won prizes competing against them. There was no prejudice. And then when I started going to art school on a regular basis, suddenly I was supposed to dress a different way, and I was treated a different way, and it's been pretty standard all the way through. I've never liked being part of carping about being a woman. I don't feel that way. But, I mean, I have to say at 81, there's been a difference. And I too thought I had a history there [at Black Mountain]—you know, Franz Kline asked to exchange a student work with me for one of his works, and he did. I had a history there, so then to get treated with this abysmal sexism was shocking and hurtful.

sexism like that.

What was it like at Black Mountain College? I think we have such an idealistic view of it. Speaking with Trueman last night, I think he gave me a little insight into the cliques, but I’m just curious to hear more about the cultural politics of that place.

INTERCOURSE

There was all kinds of tension all the time.

Black Mountain was really a collection of small cliques. But nobody could be isolated.

The group was too small.

Yeah. We ate together; we slept together.

There was all kinds of monkey business going on. Black Mountain was in a dry state, and shortly after I arrived, some students took two of the studios, set up a still, and somehow I was part of that.

Oh, really? I didn’t know about that.

[Laughs]

There were possibilities there I didn’t know about.

They were making moonshine?

Yes, and when visitors came to the college, they were maneuvered away from those two studios.

Good.

See, I missed out on some education.

I was young and naïve. I learned a great deal pretty quickly. I painted. I have to say I found Black Mountain was very sexist. Extremely sexist. I had never experienced

THERE WAS ALL KINDS OF MONKEY BUSINESS GOING ON

It was?

How do you think the situation could be changed? I mean, we're talking about thousands of years of male craziness. Men are a little crazy.

I know.

I mean, I'm with someone for twelve years now, and I'm really—it's an experiment of seeing—it's an experiment in power. The issue is, who has to change the most? You know, if you have power it means you're not changing but someone else is, and to me, to make it even-steven, you have to figure out a way that you both make changes where it can work. But it's very hard, and very few people are ready to make changes.

RELATED READING

A Marble on a Hill PG. 70

Sorry R. PG. 81

The Eggplant isn't Waves or Orange PG. 100

INTERCOURSE 3

Yeah, well I was out of Wyoming then. I was working for some surveyor for the government at that time. I was camped on the side of a volcano in Alaska.

EXTREME CURVATURE: ROCKBURNE, GORCHOV, MACHENRY

Ron Gorchov, Zenobia, 2006. Oil on canvas. 80 x 72 x 12 inches. Collection of Julian Schnabel 69

A Marble on a Hill: A Conversation About Time Travel with Janna Levin and James Gleick

Our consciousness is expanding along with the universe. The proof is in the work of science writer JAMES GLEICK , and astrophysicist/ writer JANNA LEVIN. Both routinely ponder concepts at the very edge of comprehension and find ways to translate them into compelling narratives for the rest of us. Here the two discuss the nature of time travel as part of a lecture series on science controversies held at Pioneer Works in Fall 2014.

A MARBLE ON A HILL: LEVIN & GLEICK

IN THIS CONVERSATION

JANNA LEVIN

astronomy and physics at Barnard College, and has contributed to an understanding of black holes, extra dimensions and the shape of space-time, and, to the shame of fiction writers everywhere, she has also authored A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.

I'm thinking about time because I'm writing a history of time travel. Some people think, “Oh, time travel!” I’ve written about science before; I must be writing about the science of time travel or the technology and why don’t I have a time machine yet? And then I'm sad because I realized that I don’t believe in time travel, and so my book is going to be a big disappointment.

JAMES GLEICK

JAMES GLEICK is the best-

selling author of popular science books on chaos theory, genius, and most recently The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, on the ways information technologies change the very nature of human consciousness.

You're going to be a downer.

I'm just raining on the parade. The more I immerse myself in the history of the culture of time-travel since H.G. Wells, the more I think the clear-headed people— the people who never for a second believe in time-travel—are the science fiction writers. More and more, as the century goes on, the physicists—the smartest physicists in the world—are willing to entertain the idea. I don’t know where you stand, Janna, but we’ll find out.

Well, I'm agnostic on certain things.

Okay. So I want to have the conversation where I am the man on the street, and you are the modern physicist who understands, as you texted me moments ago, that time is an illusion.

Penrose diagrams by Janna Levin

could be that kind of a juncture. Maybe not; maybe it’s just a tiny philosophical crisis. But maybe it’s huge and when we pick it apart, it’ll be the same kind of thing. It’ll be like, “Boom. Now we understand quantum gravity. We understand emergence and all this stuﬀ.”

I thought we should talk about time because I know you're thinking about it a lot.

JANNA LEVIN teaches

I would say that the problems posed by time, both understanding its reality, and also the arrow of time, and things like determinism—these kinds of questions are totally crucial to how we’ll eventually understand the next step in physics. I think it’s subtly overlooked. It might be as big a revolution as when Einstein first looked at Newton’s idea of permanent time existing out there as a stage, space existing out there as a stage. Einstein came along and did a subtle analysis of this, in some ways, obvious assumption, and overturned everything. Nobody, including Einstein, predicted that from relativity comes the big bang and black holes and an expanding universe. He didn’t foresee the revolution in some sense. This

Do you mean this question about time? Or do you mean the foundational question?

I mean the questions about time. So let’s lay out what the questions about time are. One theory is that time is like a hill that exists, and that we are like little marbles rolling down the hill. We only experience falling down a hill. We never go back up the hill, and our path of least resistance down the hill is determined. Our experience is that we move through time, we never go back, and we never recover it, and that it’s asymmetric. But, from a bird’s eye view, the whole hill exists. And I would say that’s an Einsteinian way of thinking—that space and time exist even if they're relative, and that we move through them. The past is there even if I can't access it.

To clarify, and correct me if I'm wrong, it’s not that space and time exist, it's that spacetime exists.

That’s right.

And a combination of the two. And you can't tease them apart.

That’s right.

You have to put them all together into a fourdimensional block.

That’s right. So there's a space-time, and that’s one way of looking at time. The contrary way of looking at it is to say, “Nonsense. There is no hill. It’s a carpet rolling up behind you. You walk and it’s gone. It’s rolling up as you're moving forward in time, and beyond the instant, time doesn’t exist.” And that’s very interesting. I can't quite land personally on either of those two conversations. I want to hear more about what people say who think about it all the time. Maybe there is somebody who’s going to sway me. But so far, neither perspective defeats the other. Maybe it’s just two diﬀerent ways of looking at the same thing. Maybe it’s unresolvable.

IT MIGHT BE AS BIG A REVOLUTION AS WHEN EINSTEIN FIRST LOOKED AT NEWTON’S IDEA OF PERMANENT TIME

LONG FORM

But I was going to add that the arrow of time says, “Why can I only roll down a hill? Why can't I turn around and go back up if time is there? If I can turn left and right, why can't I go forward and backward?” And that’s a separate issue, in some sense, although they're folded together.

But some things are fully deterministic.

What’s fully deterministic?

Well, the wave function, which determines the probabilities, is completely determined in the same way that the marble rolling down the hill is determined.

And then, the third thing is whether the future is determined, or whether, at this moment, there are things that could happen that are not forced to happen from the set of initial conditions.

But the wave function isn't real. The wave function is an abstract concept.

Who is to say it isn't real? Before quantum mechanics, you would say, “Here is a marble. It’s rolling down a hill. Here is its position. And here is how fast it’s going.” And those are real things, and those are completely determined. Meaning, once I tell you how I kicked the marble, it’s just an inevitable fact how it will roll down the hill. So there we have two things, determinism and the reality, in some sense, of the marble.

I feel that the future is open. That’s not a very scientific to say. It’s a caveat to everything I'm saying. I am well aware that it was intuitively obvious for most of human history that up and down were absolute directions. It is built into us. I mean with my eyes closed, if I'm waking up from sleep, I can point up, and I can point down, which is more than I can do for east and west.

Except I can take you some place where up and down are reversed. Why can't I take you some place where past and future are reversed?

We’re not there yet.

Well, even that’s interesting. Why is it so resistant? If it’s possible, why is it so hard? That seems to say time is special in some way. Like you said, I have knowledge of the past, and for some reason don’t have knowledge of the future.

Okay. Let me challenge that. Why shouldn’t I say, “The marble is real. The marble was always real, and it’s still real. The moon is real. The wave function is a better description of what the marble is going to do. It is a probabilistic description. It’s a better, more useful, more efficient description than the Newtonians had. It works better. But it’s an abstraction. The marble is real. The wave function is an idea.

Probably neither of us wants to get into the philosophical nomenclature of Real. I think we exploded right into the most diﬃcult, abstract questions, and I want to take a step back to one of the more manageable aspects

Right, that was my caveat: I think the future is open. The laws of physics are not deterministic.

If we’ve learned anything from quantum mechanics, we have learned that the future is open, because quantum mechanics is entirely in terms of probabilities. 72

This wave function, which sets the probability, was discovered in the history of quantum mechanics as the thing that is deterministic. You put it into an equation. You grind the crank, you get one determined result.

WHY CAN I ONLY ROLL DOWN A HILL? WHY CAN'T I TURN AROUND AND GO BACK UP?

INTERCOURSE 3

Then quantum mechanics comes along and says, “Well, the marble is not real. What's real is the probability of the marble to be someplace.” The marble might be a little wiggly in the left or the right or it might be moving at different speeds. Those things aren't real. They don’t exist. What exists is the probability of finding the marble at some location and some speed. And that probability, the probability is mathematically the wave function squared.

But physics has told us, astronomy told us, that that’s an illusion— those directions are arbitrary and earthbound and have to do with our sensation of gravitational fields. So I should be open, one would think, to the notion that my feeling about past and future is the same kind of illusion. But I'm not.

A MARBLE ON A HILL: LEVIN & GLEICK

survives this but, because of the bullet in his head, he makes some bad decisions in his life, and you're a little wonky. As a result, you're the kind of person to go back in time and shoot your grandfather in the head. So it gets very subtle.

of this, which is time travel. When you say you do not believe in time travel, what do you think about the fact that people have found possibilities in a hypothetical space-time for time travel? It's not the universe that we live in, but a universe that is consistent with the laws of physics as we currently understand them, in which you could make a loop in time? Do you think that those will somehow prove to be impossible to construct? That no such universe could be made?

Of course. [laughter]

Why?

Well, I want to turn this back on you, Janna, and make the following argument: I believe that it’s the scientists who have been influenced by the sci-fi writers, because scientists’ arguments and their imaginations have been freed, in a good way, to explore possibilities that the imaginations of people in the 19th century could not extend to these imaginary universes where there was closed time like curves. The reason we know that that’s impossible in our universe is, first of all, because of the notorious paradoxes, if you could go back in time, you could kill your grandfather. But you're doing that before your father has conceived you. And so, where are you now in this picture?

1. Penrose diagram of a space time with a black hole in the past and a black hole in the future. It also shows two regions of the universe forever separated by black hole event horizons. 2. Penrose diagram of a black hole evaporating through the Hawking process and thereby disappearing in the future.

Okay. Here is a way in which it might not be impossible to construct without getting into the paradox. I spoke to David Albert about this recently, and he gave me a very nice version. I always had a dumb version. The dumb version is: you would not have been free to make the choice to kill your grandfather if you were on a closed path that went back in time creating a paradox. Our assumption that our free will transcends the laws of physics is silly. If you were to go back in time, you would be a person who doesn’t kill his grandfather, because you're a person who was born from your grandfather. So, when you went back in time, you would be a person who didn’t kill his grandfather, because on and on, right.

If we trace those consistent possibilities literally as trajectories in this infinite spacetime picture, the one in which you actually kill him dead is just not possible. You can't reach it, any more than I can stretch my arms to the ceiling or will myself to speed faster than light. JG

That’s magic. What kind of adjustments do you have to make to the laws of physics to rule out the particular exercise of will that involves pulling that trigger on that particular day? It’s so ad hoc.

No, but who says I had that free will in the first place?

You're saying we grant that the paradoxes can't happen. We don’t know exactly why they can't happen. Maybe they can't happen because free will was an illusion all along…

I'm saying that’s an alternative to saying that the ability to go into the past is impossible. The alternative is to say, “No, the trajectory that takes you into the past is one that’s inconsistent with you exercising a choice, inconsistent with that path.”

But all of this assumes a kind of deterministic universe. And I still think that your people have made it clear that we’re not in that universe.

Let me try it this way. A classic physicist’s response to the weather would be to say, “The universe was created a certain way and in some sense, the laws of physics are like a computer code that crunches the numbers that specify the conditions of the birth of the universe. And it inevitably crunches those numbers. And so whatever happens on that day—whether or not the weatherman can predict it—was going to happen as soon as the universe was created.”

So the smarter version of this is, let’s say you go back with a gun. And you shoot your grandfather in the head. It turns out that he

Diagrams by Daniel Kent OUR ASSUMPTION THAT OUR WILL TRANSCENDS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS IS SILLY

Then everything that happens is determined, whether it be the wave function or the actual positions or locations is 73

LONG FORM

kind of irrelevant at that level.

a diﬀerence between them, because if you note the initial conditions, the position of every particle, the laws of physics, all of the motion, then, a supreme intelligence, great enough to comprehend all that, would know—he used the word formula—would know the formula. And he may or may not have been thinking about God.

It’s just the idea that things are launched. And I think you're recoiling against that argument. JG

I'm saying that was naïve. And didn’t we learn that? Didn’t not just Heisenberg, but also Gödel, tell us that that’s naïve?

Gödel showed that there are some numbers so complex, that in some sense, the computer code that crunches them is every bit as complex as the number itself. And, in that sense, the next digit is like a toss of a coin. If the code I write is every bit as complex as the number, I have no predictive power. And I think to some extent, yes, there's something there. I don’t quite have a handle on what's there, but things like uncomputability are intriguing. I don’t know where they leave us, because I can still imagine the code crunching them.

That’s the code in that imaginary computer. And the world of mathematics that Gödel was living in—that’s an abstract world. We’re living in a real world. The abstract world is something we create to help us make predictions about the real world. And, as long as we always remember that it’s not perfect, we’re fine. But, as soon as we fall into the trap of thinking, because this abstract world is determined, the wave function is perfectly determined; therefore, the marble must be determined—that’s our mistake. I have a crazier way of re-stating something like this, which I'm kind of excited about. If we think about the initial conditions of the entire universe there's no way for the initial conditions to be specified, they don’t exist at some numerical level, then the code that crunches them starts to eat into the randomness of the details of the universe. I don’t know what to say about that, but I tried to once to do a formal project where there was a universe that creates its own initial conditions. And I got nowhere. So I don’t know what to tell you. That’s exactly what I'm getting at. Look. All of determinism boils down to this famous statement of Laplace1. And he starts by saying, the past and the future, they are the same. It’s an illusion to think that there is

In modern interpretations everybody thinks you just need a computer that is powerful enough to do the computation, but if you just do the math, simple math, you discover that a computer powerful enough to do even an infinitesimal part of what you need to do is bigger than the entire universe. JL

Well wait. The computer doesn’t have to be bigger if all it’s doing is crunching the data and throwing it away, unless we’re in the area where the code is as complex as the number. If I can crunch the numbers and throw them away, your laptop computer can be the one that’s crunching the universe.

1 “We may regard the present state of the universe as the eﬀect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

— Pierre-Simon Laplace expressing his belief in causal determinism Introduction to Oeuvres vol. VII, Theorie Analytique de Probabilites (1812-1820)

Given infinite time. But we don’t have infinite time.

Physicists are very well aware that there are all kinds of things in nature that don’t make sense without an arrow of time. The ink in a swimming pool doesn’t separate itself, the egg doesn’t unscramble, you know, all the things with the film running backwards. And physicists understand, very well, that all of those things have something in common. They have to do with complexity, with masses of particles, not individual particles. They have to do with probabilities. They have to do with group behavior. All the things you would say are emergent. I understand that they are emergent, but then, some physicists seem to say, “Well, the stuﬀ that’s genuine, the stuﬀ that’s real, are the fundamental laws, the microscopic laws. And there is no time in those things.” And so, we are left with a mystery of where the arrow of time comes from. And so, I want to say, “Wait a second. You know that there

WHATEVER HAPPENS ON THAT DAY, WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AS SOON AS THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED

Colin Oulighan, Marble Idea (teal), 2014. Glass Marble, Drywall. Photo Credit: David Deng

LONG FORM

is an arrow of time, and you know where it comes from—it comes from stuﬀ like the second law of thermodynamics.” JL

But some people say, “If the microscopic laws don’t distinguish between past and future, but the second law of thermodynamics emerges from complex systems and does, then the arrow of time has an explanation only for complex systems.” The universe for some reason began in an ordered state. All we have to do is answer that simple question, why the universe began in an ordered state. And that might not be hard. Then it evolves to a state of greater disorder. And that sets the arrow of time. When we watch a movie and things get disordered, that's our familiar experience of the forward arrow of time. Glasses smash into disordered shards. Disordered pieces don't spontaneously reassemble into glasses. And that sets the arrow of time. So most people who invoke disorder as an explanation of the arrow of time consider the arrow of time a cosmological process. They consider it to be rooted in the fact that the universe was created in a pretty ordered state.

Why do we have to care about how the universe was created? Why can't we just talk about—

Because if it was in a state of total disorder, there would be nowhere to budge, and we’d have no experience of the passage of time. If we were in a state of maximal disorder, according to the second law, nothing much happens.

Oh, so you're saying, “where did the order come from in the first place?”

That’s the only question we have to answer. And that might not be that hard. Because, after all, chickens give birth to eggs, not

WHEN WE’RE AT THE FRONTIER WE DON’T KNOW WHICH PATH IS RIGHT

scrambled eggs. So they might be able to imagine, for some reason, why universes are born in an ordered state.

RELATED READING

It feels to me as though, when physicists talk about the possibility that the universe is deterministic, and that, in reality

PG. 10

we are living in a block universe where the past and the future are essentially the same, it’s just that our puny consciousnesses are not able to see it. When physicists talk that way, they are temporarily forgetting about all of this stuﬀ. They're forgetting about the second law of thermodynamics. They're forgetting everything they know about the behavior of complex systems, because they know very well that as soon as you start to talk about complex systems, and ensembles of things, time does have a direction. JL

Well I would say not all physicists subscribe to the view that you just described. There is that sort of space-time that works in a certain domain. But when pressed, I think a lot of physicists would sort of say, “Damn, there's something really complex there. We don’t really understand it. What’s going on with this?” I think physicists understand this works in this domain, this works in that domain. We don’t really get what's going on in the process. When we’re at the frontier, we don’t know which path is right. And even the wrong idea contributes to the success, ultimately, by pushing the right idea forward. So I love that we’re in a place we don’t understand.

Future is a Texture of the Present Extreme Curvature PG. 58

MISC.

Ebecho Muslimova, Wormhole (Fat Ebe), 2014. Ink on paper.

â&#x2014;&#x201E;

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INDEX

Future is a Texture of the Present 10

Everyone Likes Everyone 20

Nobodies Buried on Hart Island

LONG FORM

Nobodies Buried on Hart Island (continued) 44

Ecstatic Ensemble 50

VISUAL INDEX

Extreme Curvature

A Marble on a Hill 70

MISC.

Neil Bender. Carpaccioface, 2013. Oil and collage on canvas, 22” x 17”.

31 (sorry R) Sorry R. I am so so sorry R. Immodest me, modest of modesty, giving you so so nothing, and so knotted a so so-not de nada denial. By whiches bewitched and witches beshrewed, so so not the case for the trial. Sorry R, you know who you are. How rude that the heavens would offend a child. So so a pear and a skirt disregarded. How so do I creep in my prosody? So so sorry R, you know who you are. Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m just one drink at a martini bar. So sorry R, this crying old, and far. â&#x20AC;&#x201D; John Reed

Short Form

Magicians Gathering Blank VHS Tape Gelatinous Sacs Cyborgs Kung Fu Hip Hop “The Bro” Internet Mourning 82

Sleights of Hands The devil does not jest. Apprenticeship. Christ was an early magician. What's real? Belief. Wonder. Cellphone technology.

Send Blank Tape A look into the first mass media sharing outlet, Radical Software, the pre-cursor to Youtube and video-on-demand services. Personal televisual stimulation. Black Panthers.

Fiction An excerpt from Aaron Winslow's Murders of the Great Misery, doctors, gelatinous sacs, Meat Punk, Vital Wet-Board Control Membrane-Stem Unit

100

The Eggplant Isn't Waves or Orange Physicist Matthew Putman and humancyborg Neil Harbisson discuss skull implants, the sound of color, and making jazz in the dark.

106

Drop Kick to the Head Hip-hop pioneer Fab Five Freddy writes about the influence of Kung-Fu films on breakdancing. He also details a trip to China for a joint art exhibit with underground hip-hop figure, MC Yan.

114

Relational Athletics Andrew Durbin deconstructs the young, athletic male. Obama and war. Powerade. Clinton. Axe deodorant. Vomiting.

120

Internet Altar Your friends are dead. Your friends are still online. Monica McClure talks about what it means to lose people to the Cloud.

83 83

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SLEIGHTS OF HANDS: WIND & KALUSH

Sleights of Hands: Painting of Houdini from the Conjuring Arts Research Center. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal

A Conversation with Paul Roossin, Asi Wind and Bill Kalush

INTERCOURSE 3

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IN THIS CONVERSATION

BILL KALUSH is a foremost

magic scholar, a Houdini expert, and founder of the Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York City. ASI WIND is a popular

mentalist and mind reader, best known for tricks that incorporate the effects of contemporary technology.

MAGICIANS GATHERING

PAUL ROOSSIN is a neurobiologist and creator of the most accurate machine translation system for French into English text.

Magic brings into focus certain dynamics we don't normally consider—what's real and what's trickery, and what's so pleasurable about being tricked?

SLEIGHTS OF HANDS: WIND & KALUSH

circumstances, it could have done that. But I don’t think that’s really what it was all about in the beginning. PR

When was the first time that people gathered for 100 percent entertainment value to watch magical happenings?

It was certainly happening in Ancient Greece. So before that, I'm guessing. There were absolutely performances of pure magic that were understood to be sleight of hand or performance magic in ancient times.

I think the diﬀerence between the entertainment today and back then is that they knew that they could persuade people to believe that it was real whereas today, when someone says, “I'm a magician,” he’s already announced that he’s going to use trickery. He’s going to use deception, illusion. Those terms became more embedded with the word “magician” than back then. Am I right? I mean people used it to sell medicine, to do diﬀerent things, because they knew that once they did those tricks, people would believe the other powers were real.

Well, it’s a theory. I don’t necessarily believe it. I don’t think people are any smarter today than they were 2,000 years ago. I think that we have access to a diﬀerent amount of information, but I don’t think physically or intellectually, we’ve gained much in those 2,000 years. We’ve had better tools: mathematics and sciences and things that are more sophisticated, which we’ve built on. And we have a feeling, because of our communication skills, that we know more. But emotionally, I think we think the same kinds of things they did. I think a good performer from 2,000 years ago would fool people the same way and for the same reasons today as he did then.

You think they knew it was trickery?

Yes.

But what's interesting Asi, is that you do things that clearly can't be tricks, such as memorizing 150 people’s name in the audience night after night, or every page of a book.

That’s because it’s not a trick. [laughter]

Right. So you have the opposite problem, in some sense, where you're saying, this is, in

Do you actually have to think the cigarette is passing through the quarter to enjoy the performance, or does the illusion itself tickle our vitreous humors? PR

Bill, the history of magic is interesting. And you’ve been collecting books and ephemera for a while. Can you see where magic transitioned from something that was powered by the devil and evil spirits to something that became more of an artful entertainment for the masses? When did that happen? How did that transition take place?

I actually think that it was never considered in the domain of the devil. I think from prehistoric times, it was the shaman, the leader of small groups of people, preliterate people. The one who did little clever things that looked mysterious had more power than the other in the group. These things became a form of entertainment. If you think about what Robert-Houdin said, a magician is not a trickster, he’s an actor playing the part of someone with real power. Magic is, therefore, the beginning of drama itself. But, instead of having a broad ability to be diﬀerent characters, magicians were playing the part of somebody with real power. And it’s been that way in different forms since the beginning of time. Now, of course, sometimes, for political reasons, people will accuse others of being in link with the devil, and point at various feats that they’ve done. Sometimes it’s crazy old ladies. Sometimes it’s performers doing marvelous feats.

So you feel that, from the beginning of time, it was always an entertainment and not a way of gaining power by fearful methods? I think, at the very beginning, it was probably a quasi-religious form of entertainment, a way of gaining power over the group by having a secret that the others don’t know. And I don’t think it was necessarily meant to create fear, although certainly, in some

I DON’T THINK PEOPLE ARE ANY SMARTER TODAY THAN THEY WERE 2,000 YEARS AGO

SHORT FORM

SLEIGHTS OF HANDS: WIND & KALUSH

Photo of the library at the Conjuring Arts Research Center, 11 West 30th St. NY, NY 10001. Photo Credit: Coke O'Neal

essence, an evening of magic. But it’s really extreme human eﬀorts that are taking place. AW

With magic, I think it’s always been the case where people go back and forth on is it real or not? I think part of the appeal is people want to believe there's something more. I’ve always said that if we had six senses, we’d be looking for the seventh, because we’re always looking for something else, something more.

Right. But when one watches Copperfield fly, nobody thinks that he’s actually--

I will not use the word nobody.

There are certainly people who believe it. Anyway, when David Copperfield flies, which is an absolutely beautiful illusion, it’s a metaphor. We all fantasize, either on the surface or deep down, about the ability to free yourself. And I think that what Asi was saying about the senses, about paintings being an illusion of reality, well in fact, everything, there is no reality in that sense. Everything that you see around you today is all a chemical process happening

Right. But where does the pleasure come in when you're used to seeing something one way, and then the magician shows you something completely diﬀerent? There's something inherently curious, pleasurable about that.

Well, I think human beings are always looking for novelty. Magic is a way of showing that the universe isn't what we think it is. And, even if you think you know everything about the latest technology, the latest gadgets, magicians, since the beginning of time, have been able to show you, in real time, things that you thought couldn’t happen.

So Asi, when you design a trick or routine, an entire performance, are these the kinds of things you keep in mind?

Absolutely. I mean I agree with everything Bill said. I think that a magician reminds people of how much we don’t know. Because even if you strip magic from the equation, people don’t know how their cell phones work. People don’t know how their refrigerator works. They just put it under the umbrella of technology, and that's enough to satisfy their knowledge. So when a magician comes and shows them something they have no idea how it’s done, the magician is reminding them that everything else is just as

MAGIC IS A WAY OF SHOWING THAT THE UNIVERSE ISN'T WHAT WE THINK IT IS

INTERCOURSE 3

Well, on a personal level, and not just as a magician, but as an artist, I am fascinated with the relationship between what’s real and what's not. It’s funny, I picked up painting in the last seven years, and started to learn magic through painting. I mean the idea that you can look at a canvas and just see a bunch of brush strokes, or you can choose to see a motion, a person, a situation, a feeling, an idea, a concept—it’s another form of illusion.

inside your brain. Things are here. But how we see and perceive them is all a construct of what our brains can do. And then, there's no way for me to know if you're seeing the same thing I'm seeing.

SHORT FORM

impossible, just as impressive. And we can't know everything. BK

There's something else that’s critically important. I can only think of Houdini that has worked in the same way, but I've written a show with Asi and produced it.

One of the things that we are doing in that show is starting from a position of, “what is the emotional content for the audience?” Not, are they fooled, are they amazed, are they in awe of us, only about what their emotional feelings are during and after the show. And most magicians don’t think this way. Maybe good playwrights, maybe good actors, maybe good painters think this way. But magicians are more caught up in, is it deceptive? Everything gives way to the deceptiveness of a piece of magic. And in our case, we removed the deception, and we created things that Asi could do that were real, so that we could get right down to the emotion. And the audience is a critical component. It’s a very, very diﬃcult show to rehearse, because without an audience, you cannot rehearse the show. You sit in the room and go over the lines, but the lines don’t even matter because they don’t really happen. And I can't think of any musical performance, any theatre performance, or even any other magical performance where it’s not even rehearsable without an audience. AW

A book from the library at the Conjuring Arts Research Center

One of the pieces Bill encouraged me to do— which is still one of the most diﬃcult things I try to do—is memorize the entire audience by name. I know everybody’s name in the first 30 or 40 minutes of the show.

How many people in the audience typically?

Well, because I'm rehearsing it, I do it everywhere. So I have gone to 500.

Wow.

I believe I can stretch the limit to 1,000 or 2,000. But I don’t know what the limit is as a matter of fact.

SLEIGHTS OF HANDS: WIND & KALUSH

I know the limit. The limit is the tolerance of the audience to hear you recite that many names.

I know, which is true. [laughter]

So 200 is probably the actual limit, even if he could remember many, many more.

Right. So this is getting back to your idea of the emotional impact. You want to maximize that.

We’re not just entertaining them. We’re also building up their feelings and connecting to them. One of the reasons Houdini was so enormously popular, and something that’s been missed by all the magicians, as far as I'm concerned, is that his performances mattered to his audience. There was a potential outcome that was indeterminate. It wasn’t a sure thing. He put the audience in a position of rooting for him, of having emotional skin in the game.

One of the things that you're an expert in is the bullet catch. In fact, you shot the rifle at David Blaine when he did the bullet catch. Is it the same principle there, that you know that there's risk involved? And everybody is rooting for success in that, but you don’t know what the outcome is?

Right. That’s why we chose to do it the way we did it. Because to do it as a trick, it could be done beautifully. There are great performers that do a beautiful job of it that way. But all of David’s stunts are real. People are confused by the juxtaposition of a magician who clearly is doing magic eﬀects with methods, and then doing real things like standing on a pillar, or standing in a block of ice, or catching a bullet in his mouth, or holding his breath for 20 minutes. But to me, there's no confusion, because what the audience sees as real is what he constructs it to be. He has to decide what’s real for him. And if the world says that 17 minutes is the record for holding your breath, and he holds it for 18, then he’s gone beyond the real. And to me, this is very interesting. I think this is part of why David has become so enormously popular, is because people know, for a fact, when he’s standing up there, that he’s really doing it.

87 ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT THINGS I TRY TO DO—IS MEMORIZE THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE BY NAME

SHORT FORM

that magic is lacking because we do not have an organized structure. You can become a great baseball batter because you have a batting coach who can see things you can't see. Magicians, more than necessary, teach themselves in a bubble, which is not always a strength. But you could be the greatest batting coach in the world, and only one of your students will become a star batter.

Are you just born with that desire to be a magician? Or is there a way that you can actually transform somebody who’s curious into wanting to do this the way somebody showing up at a symphony might say, “I want to become a violinist?” Well the thing is you can have a masters degree in music, in theatre, in almost any field, with the exception of magic. A magician needs to be self-taught. He needs to find his mentors. He needs to win those people over so that they will sit down with him and share their knowledge. It’s still, in a way, kept in this primitive form, even though we have Internet, and YouTube and other downloads, it’s still not the kind of knowledge you can really pass from mentor to apprentice through books. You need to be able to teach yourself how to do this. I would take it a step further. I think, in a way,

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT THE REAL SECRETS IN THE BOOKS

Everyone Likes Everyone PG. 20

The basics are there, even the details. But, unless you're a master, you can read right past the details and not understand. And, even if you're a master, you pick up the other guy’s details through practice and thinking. The real work, which must exist in every field, whether it’s the violin or baseball or chess or sleight of hand comes from real experience, going out in the world and doing it every night, and paying attention to the audience, and changing your performance by tiny details. PR

Well Asi, you're also an accomplished painter. So how would you compare your learning and apprenticeship in magic with how you became a painter?

It’s funny. Now I have something to compare it with. I consider myself a student of magic. And I'm also a student of art. And I think they're so related. At the end of the day, when you finish school or whatever, you actually need to find your way again. You need to unlearn everything you’ve learned. You need to kill all of your mentors. And you need to find your own voice. If you want to relate to somebody, you need first to check with yourself. You need to learn who you are. And I thought, what would I want to get from a show? And it was very clear to me that the best shows I've ever seen are shows that made me want to do more, inspired me to be a better artist, a better human, or something of that sort.

INTERCOURSE 3

RELATED READING

There is real work in doing. The star batter learned something on his own that even the batting coach couldn’t teach him through practice and thinking and work. And magicians emphasize that maybe a little too much, but there are thousands and thousands of magic books and the truth is, the real secrets are never ever in those books. I would say it’s impossible to put the real secrets in the books.

Right. As I was saying, when Asi recites everybody’s name, or solves two Rubik’s cubes simultaneously, there is obvious skill there, more than trickery. But in your show, you might also mix up trickery. And you like the ambiguity that people just sit there and go, “Wow, this is all just mind-blowing.” And it doesn’t even matter what's the trick and what’s the— The whole purpose of the show is really to inspire people, to make people realize how much we can do with this machine we have, the human mind. If it’s real or not, I think is irrelevant at this point, because if you think about it, a lot of technology today is based on science fiction written hundreds of years ago, because somebody had a vision of how the world could be.

Right. As I was saying, when Asi recites everybody’s name, or solves two Rubik’s cubes simultaneously, there is obvious skill there, more than trickery. But in your show, you might also mix up trickery. And you like the ambiguity that people just sit there and go, “Wow, this is all just mind-blowing.” And it doesn’t even matter what's the trick and what’s real. And to me, this is very interesting. I think this is part of why David has become so enormously popular, is because people know, for a fact, when he’s standing up there, that he’s really doing it.

SLEIGHTS OF HANDS: WIND & KALUSH

2. A microscopic photograph of a fleck of rose stem. While inside the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last week, I struck up a conversation with a volunteer who was trimming the roses in hopes she would give me a cutting that I might try to root a rose plant in my studio. She noted visitors were not allowed to remove things from the garden, but ended up giving me two snips. At one time, my interest in the rose had to do with Duchamp’s “nom de bloom” Rose Selavey, but now I have become more interested in how many varieties have been trademarked and wondered if making a new plant from the snippings in my bag was a form of copyright infringement. While inside the garden, I didn’t consider whether or not my bicycle had been properly locked.

MISC.

1. The surveillance picture taken outside of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last week. The man walking the dog is also stealing my bicycle.

Security Camera footage at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens of a man walking a dog and stealing a bicycle. Courtesy of David Horvitz

Bicycle Thief

—David Horvitz

20x microscope picture of the rose stem that David Horvitz is attempting to grow in his studio. Courtesy of Jacob Keith and Nanotronics.

SHORT FORM

SEND BLANK TAPE: FLYNTZ

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org

Send Blank Tape: Radical Software and the Advent of Media-Sharing Networks by Liz Flyntz

—PAUL RYAN, “INFOMORPHONE: ORGANIZATION OF IGNORANCE”RADICAL SOFTWARE 1(3)

“Software to me, was always programming— what was on the tapes. Hardware was the equipment. It was a radical break with television, creating a new kind of programming.” —BERYL KOROT, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR JULY 4, 2014

The first issue of Radical Software was published in New York City in 1970 by two women: Phyllis Gershuny and Beryl Korot. It was the very first publication to deal with the then-new technology of video. The magazine was published more or less quarterly until 1974, providing a

growing video-maker community with a mix of content that included reviews of new video technology and DIY guides to equipment, interviews with makers, discussions of philosophy and schematics for various video-based projects. Activism Radical Software was the publishing arm of the Raindance Corporation—a collective think tank of media theorists and makers coalesced by artists and activists Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Ira Schneider and Paul Ryan. Participants included media/art collectives like Videofreex and Ant Farm, representatives of institutions like Antioch and Goddard colleges, and individual artists like Dan Graham and Woody and Steina Vasulka. This network provided an intimate one-to-one system of distribution. Each of the “nodes” in the network structure functioned as sites for archiving information, disseminating content, and collecting hardware. Participants were “users” and “viewers” rather than audience members or mass producers. The first issue of the magazine included a questionnaire, intended by the editors to solicit feedback from everyone then working in the field. An afterwards in each issue included a listing of participants in the video network, that

IT WAS THE VERY FIRST PUBLICATION TO DEAL WITH THE THEN-NEW TECHNOLOGY OF VIDEO

INTERCOURSE 3

“Since only the user is in a position to know what is relevant for him and how he wants to access relevance and information, exchange must include the user from the beginning.”

This stacked delay/display piece, entitled Track/ Trace has three television cameras recording and transmitting the activity in the gallery space to the stack of monitors. The top monitor presents real-time feedback of the viewer, while each descending row transmits with an increasing delay. "The viewer becomes the information, which he receives both in real time and in four layers of delayed time, so that he experiences "self" at five different periods of time, simultaneously." (Frank Gillette, Volume 2, Number 5, page 26.) Frank Gillette is a founding member of the video art collective Raindance.

SHORT FORM

featured the individual or group’s current base of operations, the gear they were holding, and what kind of work they were making. Revolutionary Engineering and the Living Room

“Portable video is a new, major medium. It is a high access form of our culture's dominant communications mode and precisely the opposite of product television which can accept only artificial behavior because it is based on a scarcity of time and equipment access.”

BLANK VHS TAPE

— RAINDANCE ESSAY, RADICAL SOFTWARE VOL.1, NO.3

In 1965, Sony introduced the very first portable consumer video recording device—the Portapak. Nam June Paik, widely considered the first video artist, and an early contributor to Radical Software, was often credited with using the first Portapak in the US. The Portapak consisted of a camera attached by cable to a bulky reel-to-reel recorder that could be slung over the shoulder. Previous consumer 16mm and 8mm reels had a maximum shooting time of approximately 10 minutes, but video made it possible and aﬀordable to do long takes, allowing unscripted action to unfold in real-time. After the Portapak, the film camera became reminiscent of a cash register, with every frame of film clicking away like ringing up of endless small purchases. Video, a medium that allowed for immediate review and editing of footage, extinguished the cost of film, processing, and printing from the production budget. In the loft where Radical Software was published, new technology bred a new screening modality. Instead of the projection-based, arthouse screening model that had been the historical precedent for artist filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Jack Smith, the collective presented videos on several television sets distributed throughout the space. Audiences gathered around several small screens in an atmosphere that created an intimate counter-culture inversion of family home television viewing. “In those days it was hard to get your stuﬀ seen because there just weren’t that many places to play tapes. Videofreex had an

SEND BLANK TAPE: FLYNTZ

unpublicized screening on Friday nights at our loft. Sometimes there would be five people there and sometimes there would be 150 people. So we would just rack up all the tapes -sometimes we’d have a passive switcher and we’d go back and forth - we’d have several black and white monitors on the floor, stereo sound because we had big speakers - and we’d be behind in the control room.

People would be sitting on chairs and mattresses and beanbag chairs. We would put a camera on the floor and people could see themselves—that was amazing because people hadn’t seen themselves on TV before. It felt very powerful to hold this potential mass medium in your hands. The home made video experience felt powerful because it was television.” —SKIP BLUMBERG, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR JULY 1, 2014

Early video also mirrored TV in the formatting of the image—close-ups and closely cropped heads were favored, and subjects tended toward newsreel-style unscripted documentation, interviews, and unrehearsed, impromptu performance. Even the best exposed images on the early tapes look vaguely as though they were shot with black pantyhose stretched over the lens of the camera, very diﬀerent from the tonality of film. Networks and Other Natural Systems

Radical Software was only published for five years, but in that time video grew up as a medium and greatly expanded its reach. More individuals were using video technology for various aims, and a greater number of universities and other institutions were investing in equipment and video-specific programs. The publishers began to farm out editorial control

AUDIENCES GATHERED AROUND SEVERAL SMALL SCREENS IN AN...INVERSION OF FAMILY HOME TELEVISION VIEWING

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of subsequent issues to video-making compatriots all over the country, allowing for them to focus on diﬀerent aspects of media theory and video making. Later issues of the magazine give insight into what was going on at the time. In diﬀerent parts of the world and in various sectors of the media environment people used video for social documentary practice, cable access TV, institutional critique, radical pedagogical tool, and as medium for formal artistic experimentation.

At Antioch College in Ohio, the Media and Communication Center ran a free tape duplication program, collecting and archiving tapes that they would then compile and mail out to participants.

“The exchange was simple: Find a title you want in our catalogue, send us a program of your own and postage. Antioch Video would (a) incorporate the program sent to us into our catalogue, and (b) send the requester the program they desired. Our catalogue had gone out to a number of lists, through people we met on our various excursions, through educational networks, through alumni (a large number of whom worked in media), through cable access channels (some of which had been started by Antiochians), and a variety of other lists. We were copying tapes for Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panther Party, for the Brown Berets in Texas, for senior citizen groups in George Stoney's interactive network, from environmental groups, and any number of educational institutions. It’s important to remember that we had videos of some of the most innovative dancers working at the time, as well as poets and writers whose work was not very accessible.” —BOB DEVINE, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR JULY 4, 2014

Ant Farm, a California-based collective of architects-cum-media-makers, devised their own methods of radical decentralization and distribution. They created a “Media Van”—a Chevy retrofitted with sleeping berths and a video-editing

INTERCOURSE 3

Readers could send blank tapes and cash and have their tape filled up with selected programming. Titles ranged from interviews with Black Panther Bobby Seale, to instructional videos on canning and geodesic dome making, or free form experimentation with editing techniques and analog processing tools.

SEND BLANK TAPE: FLYNTZ

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org This illustration, by Ann Arlen,is from an article entitled "Public Access: The Second Coming of Television?" about the struggles of the early cable access movement in NYC.

READERS COULD SEND BLANK TAPES AND CASH AND HAVE THEIR TAPE FILLED UP WITH SELECTED PROGRAMMING

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Ecstatic Ensemble: Original music and the Birth of the AACM PG. 50

Image courtesy of Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider via RadicalSoftware.org

RELATED READING

desk that allowed for a fully mobile, on-the-road production and presentation studio. “We spent three months building the Media Van and the life support system, now we have been on the road for two months. We are on the road back. We have only one Portapak but it has been adequate. At first we developed a style of editing-in-process—that is, making judgment on tape we had already shot and recording over slow parts. In the south and Midwest there were no support systems. Indeed the process was alien to almost everyone. …

This image is from a 1973 video per formance by Juan Downey called Plato Now, which was presented for the first time at the groundbreaking video exhibition Circuit: A Video Invitational at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, NY. Plato Now was "Nine performers in meditation attempt to produce alphawaves. Their brain activity controls the recurrence of pre-recorded quotations from Plato's dialogues. 9 per formers / 9 videochannels / alpha-wave detectors / 9 audio recordings / public's shadows."

SEND BLANK TAPE: FLYNTZ

Our tapes are a mix of our own bus trip; weird shit along the side of the road; survival mode stuﬀ such as building Yurts, unknown talent and rural American commercial television. We are looking for people who had taken control of their immediate environment, especially older enviro-weirdos.” The VideoFreex, a collective who started out in NYC, moved upstate to an abandoned boarding house in Lanesville, NY, where they created a “Media Bus,” which they used to travel around New York State, shooting video to broadcast on their pirate TV station. Dean and Dudley Evenson of Raindance travelled all over the

country in their own mobile video studio and living quarters, the “Mobile Muck Truck.” “Hardware meant nightmares and frequent trips to Chicago to get stuﬀ fixed. Software was a term that Shamberg had borrowed from Gene Youngblood and others, and meant the dimension of human interaction.” —BOB DEVINE, INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR JULY 4, 2014

Radical Software and the network of communities and movements it represented laid the groundwork for the movement away from uni-directional broadcast media exemplified by 1960s network television, and toward the rhizomatic, decentralized communication model presented by the early internet. Video itself as a medium led the way to non-linear editing, breaking away from the concept of time as straightforward, directed, and progressive. The early video movements saw decentralization of means of production and decentralized distribution of content. Our current media ecology in which media is produced for, and almost simultaneously consumed by, self-selecting social groups, is the direct result. Note: In the early 2000s, Davidson Gigliotti and Ira Schneider, members of Raindance, worked with the Daniel Langolois Inst. in Montreal to create a history and searchable index of all of the issues of Radical Software magazine, which can be found at: http://www.radicalsoftware.org/

ANT FARM COLLECTIVE'S MOBILE “MEDIA VAN” ALLOWED THE ARTISTS TO PRODUCE AND PRESENT THEIR VIDEOS ON-THE-ROAD

Detail of Coitus Interruptus, 2011 ÂŠ Sue Williams. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

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Fiction Excerpt from Murders of the Great Misery by Aaron Winslow

GELATINOUS SACS

As Dr. Face led him across the vast stretch of the chamber, Schmitt saw the floor turn from pure blasted concrete to a gentle carpet of slime-mold growing thicker the further into the chamber they went. “A word of caution,” the flesh physician said with a flick of his wrist and a toss of his putrid hair, “The Meat Punks you are about to see have been highly modified, quite likely well-beyond anything you’ve yet seen—and I know you to be the proverbial man-of-the-world—but don’t be too alarmed, I can assure you they are most sublime.” Schmitt’s sub-phallus twitched as their stink now engulfed him totally, and completely. A set of holo-lights blasted on, displaying row upon row of Meat Punks, their oblong pearshaped bodies standing stock still, eyes glassy and non-attentive to their presence. On the ankles of each of their short, squat legs grew a gnarled mound of hardened skin, and from this mound sprouted a thick, calloused flesh-cord that attached securely to the slime-mold covered floor—an ingenious growth binding the Meat Punk securely and, for all intents and purposes, permanently to the building itself. Their forehead-based penile protrusions jutted boldly out, fully erect yet attached at the tip to a nozzle-orifice, hung from a ceiling-mounted flesh-cord, which bulged and swayed with a constant output-flow of thick, semi-coagulated grease for which the Meat Punks were known. “Don’t feel too bad for these Meat Punks, lad,“ said Dr. Face, “Their natural inclinations have been most adequately suppressed—those flesh cords aren’t simply restrictive, but pump a slow

DON’T FEEL TOO BAD FOR THESE MEAT PUNKS

MURDERS OF THE GREAT MISERY: WINSLOW

yet steady supply of nutrient-rich control substance directly into a pair of articulated inputsphincters hidden beneath the flesh-mounds around the ankles. Their life is one of pure pleasure input, a soothing serum well-coordinate to repress any memories they might still retain, and to gently stimulate their more, uh, controllable desires, so to speak.” Schmitt saw then the pairs of limp, empty sacs hanging, one under another, on the Meat Punks’ left flanks. “Renewable sacs, my boy, designed precisely to burst upon extreme inflation, triggering a secondary autonomic growth stimuli in some unknown region of the Meat Punk itself. You see, lad, there’s an ecology at work here, the Meat Punks being the vital link in the chain of production, their bodies naturally distilling the control serum emitted from the necro-growth slime mold that covers this floor, organically fusing it at a molecular level with their natural pheromoneladen grey-grease.” “And the results?” Schmitt asked, curiosity now piqued. “Too extensive to fully recount,” Face said thoughtfully, “Though suﬃce it to say the results are both satisfactory and innumerable.” Face walked to a small vat standing in the corner of the room, opened the lid, and reached inside. “Here’s a small sampling, one mere nugget of evidence if you will, of the various applications of the distillation process.” He held out his palm, within which sat a gelatinous sac, small, quivering, covered in beads of pure green-grease, evidently released from the interior of the sac itself. Face gave a gentle squeeze, and the ball shuddered, releasing a thin trickle of green-grease that soon filled his cupped palm and spilled out over and through his fingers and wrist, spattering onto the floor. “Place this in your input-sphincter,” Face said: an invitation, a request, a command. Schmitt took the gelatin sac delicately in his fingertips, not wanting to break its thin membranous walls prematurely. Unzipping the accessflap of his dry-skin suit, he felt the powerful eﬀect

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MURDERS OF THE GREAT MISERY: WINSLOW

of the neuro-pheromones coursing through him, his ganglia-sac fully blossoming into a spiral of tendrils sprouting from its sponge-like spherebulb, surface throbbing with a rapid accumulation of black curdle-fluid. He rubbed his fingers about the rim of his input sphincter, a chestbased unit, felt the bristle of hair as the thin fold of flesh that hid the unit pulled away upon digital stimulation, revealing the slick, gritty nub of the orifice. Fully primed, he pushed the gelatin sac into the fully dilated orifice, felt the deep bulge as it entered into the input-chamber and, securely inside the unit, burst asunder, hard jets of neuro-grease penetrated him almost instantaneously, sending his body into violent shakes and contortions and causing immediate deployment of the sub-phallus and lower ganglia sac, which blossomed from his side amid a torrent of mucous and blood.

out, puncturing the power-membrane, and the vital grey-grease neuro-synthetic oils flowed freely and powerfully out, rendering the unit completely useless.

Schmitt clambered up a stainless dry-steel stepladder and plugged his sub-phallus directly into the slick and quivering neck-sphincter of a nearby Meat Punk, sending it into a fury of twisting articulations, sprays of fluid flying from its body. “A true whirling dervish, wouldn’t you say?” Face laughed. But Schmitt heard nothing, lost completely to the autonomic insertion operation encoded into all wetware-based organ component modifications. In his frenzy, he kicked over the stainless dry-steel stepladder, sending it clattering forcefully into an overfilled vat of neuro-electrical mucal-fluid, teetered for several moments. Face’s flesh paled, then became red with a true purity of anger, alarm, and dismay, flailing his arms out with unknown futility to grasp the vat even as it crashed onto its side, the neuro-fluidic contents flooding across the floor in a brackish, milky typhoon that careened directly into the Vital Wet-Board Control Membrane-Stem Unit, seeping deeply into the porous crevices of the gnarled organo-machine with alarming speed. A shower of sparks spurted up from the bioelectrical vein-wiring as the wet-board shorted

Filled now with a renewed vigor, the Meat Punks, singular of mind, pulled at the flesh-cords binding them to the floor, tearing them out from their legs at the very roots, the frayed ends dripping the noxious control-fluid uselessly back upon the slime mold floor, which sucked it up greedily, then instantly seized up as the control-fluid spread through its interlinked maximally-decentralized networked non-core synapse-brainlet, a victim of its own infallible yet nefarious design, now the hypersite of an accelerated bio-control feedback loop, drying and cracking, splitting into burnt-out dull grey-green wafers of brittle mold-dust. “Schmitt!” Face cried, attempting to pull him from his position atop the Meat Punk, “The control-fluid’s spreading through the rest of the slime-mold power unit! The whole structure could come down! We’ve got to get out of here, man!” With a great ball of enervated fury powered by the purity of his singular desire, Schmitt threw Face’s hands from his person, sending the flesh physician sprawling onto the ground while he continued the powerful autonomic thrusting of his self-regulating sub-phallus, great spurts of grey-grease erupting into, and overflowing from, the Meat Punk partner’s gaping neck sphincter. One of the creature’s side-sacs had long since burst, now mere empty and torn balloons of flaccid flesh dangling futilely, stray streams of curdled grease dropping from them. The secondary side-sac, however, continued to expand beyond all known capacity, swelling tautly, the thin

LOWER GANGLIA, NEURO-FLUIDIC, SUB-PHALLUS, FLESH-CORDS, SYNAPSE BRAINLET, PENILE PROTRUSIONS, INPUT SPHINCTER

INTERCOURSE 3

The neck-sphincter of a nearby Meat Punk had been triggered by the release of Schmitt’s subphallus, and orifice gaping widely.

Alarms blasted through the control chamber, and with a terrible grinding of the hyper-charged ionic gears, the neurolocks holding the Meat Punks in place unclamped from around their penile protrusions and swayed limply from the ceiling. The Meat Punks, sleepers now awakened, blinked weak eyes slowly, their penile protrusions twitching and input-sphincter beginning to pulse and dilate once more, releasing streams of grey-grease down their necks and into the thick skin-folds of their chests.

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MURDERS OF THE GREAT MISERY: WINSLOW

veins that thread through its surface now bulging ominously. Face gave a short helpless cry of pain and winced reflexively as the body of the Meat Punk itself burst asunder, covering the surgeon in chunks of rot-flesh, jelly-muscle tendons, greygrease, and blood. His head throbbed from the explosion as he stumbled about the area, looking for any trace of Schmitt. Around him, the other Meat Punks had regained full consciousness, their penile protrusions fully extended and shooting grey-grease with an energy so long denied them as they encircled their former tormentor, finally as a single chaotic jumble, his shrill horrified screams rising weakly above the mass of slick, greased flesh that overtook him.

RELATED READING

31( sorry R)

MISC.

GELATINOUS SACS

PG. 81

Ebecho Muslimova. Bubble Maker (Fat Ebe), 2014. Ink on paper.

THEY LEAPT AT THE FLESH PHYSICIAN, FIRST SINGLY, THEN IN PAIRS

MISC.

Whom Does the Cup Serve? An excerpt from an essay by Michael Jude Caputo The clown prince first appears as a hyperbolic humanoid Mork, from the planet Ork, in the late seventies sitcom, Mork & Mindy. Robin in hood —a caput, or rather— sheathed in a helmet and ill-fitting scarlet red comic book onesie, worn with a cadence more akin to that of an overgrown 6 year-old in Underoos than a superhero. The makeshift space-suit, Hermetic metallic-silver helmet, gloves, boots and that of an inverted triangle embroidered on his chest. Is it an accident that our young grail king should brandish a symbol of an inverted pyramid/cup, specifically a silver cup—a chalice—on that of his breast? Or that the crest itself should be enveloped by a blood-red, like that of the Rothschild, (Red-shield), supposed once reigning heirs to that of the coveted Holy Grail? Mork has traversed long distances, in a Percivalian quest; in the opening sequence of each episode, Mork hatches from a cocoon and the audience is reminded of his alien arrival and then again in the final meditative moments of each episode. In a transition from manic to mantric, the camera slowly zooms into Mork’s frontal lobe and the vignette is accompanied by a repetitive prayer-like, CB radio, summoning of an unseen entity addressed as Orson. “Mork to Orson, come in Orson... Mork to Orson, come in Orson...” A phrasing pattern rhythmically reminiscent of the dreamy mantra that Dorothy recites wearing her ruby red slippers; “there’s no place like home...there’s no place like home...”. The dissolve of Mork’s brow fades to black, followed by floating semi-translucent kaleidoscopic prisms oscillating into view. Mork is transposed into the void and reconstituted in full red regalia, against the vacuous backdrop, in what could be perceived as outer-space or that of a cavernous destination achieved through astro travel, into an inner-space. Engulfed in Mork’s Cartesian theater, the voice of the director Orson, possibly a deified Orson Welles; retired raconteur of radio waves, appears as a tether to Mork’s native planet. If Mork’s singularity represents the one whom bears the cup, neatly sealed in a Suit of Cups, then Orson’s omnipotence is certainly that of Welles’, “Well(e)s of Wisdom” and of comparatively unseen, immeasurable abundance. Entranced, Mork thoughtfully confides in Orson; a weekly catharsis at the end of each episode in which his blood/life force, freely flows from that of the cup/body and beyond, into that of the astral plane. The cup or the grail or any arbitrary vessel for that matter, are but mere (mirror) metaphor and idols for that of the body, that bears the blood/wine or for lack of a better word, that of the soul/psyche.

This pin symbolizes Mork’s outer-space origins, but the crescent also literally results from the moon being largely in shadow. If observed through a Jungian lens, that of the “shadow-self,” what the ancient Egyptians referred to as “Ka,” The prismatic hallucinations and elastic rainbow bands may make for crude illustrations of the in-tangential beams of the man begging to have his celestial dots connected. Mork’s rainbow braces and not Orion’s Belt both suspend our judgment and disbelief as well as his trousers.

1978 Topps Mork & Mindy Trading Cards from the collection of Joey Frank, on indefinite loan to Michael Jude Caputo.

Down on the planet earth, Mork’s primitivism is palpable when we see him literally hatched from an egg, unsheathed from the caul and innately buzzing in a stream of unconscious play. Having broken through the veil of non-existence or beyond recalling his prior existence, he enters into human-infantilism. Mork’s displays and outbursts are consistent with Freudian pre-latent stages of development, such as anal/oral fixations and semantic language gaps. Grounded and guised to interact with humans, Mork dresses the part of an overgrown toddler, though he could also be a court jester or a mime. This uniform for interacting with earthlings consists of a tight leotard with a low-neckline tucked into ballooning trousers. His trousers are held up by signature over-the-rainbow suspenders, curiously adorned with a pin on each rainbow strap. Just above his breast, is a pin of a white-gloved hand, a Mickey Mouse mime hand, points an index finger perpendicularly somewhere over the rainbow on the adjacent left strap, next to his heart, to a crescent moon. “Home is where the heart is,” or rather “there’s no place like home.”

THE EGGPLANT ISN'T WAVES OR ORANGE: PUTMAN & HARBISSON

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Neil Harbisson, even with an antenna implanted in his skull, still uses a cellular phone to make calls. Photo Credit: Gabriel Florenz

The Eggplant Isn't Waves or Orange: A Conversation with Matthew Putman and Neil Harbisson

-MATTHEW PUTMAN MATTHEW PUTMAN

100

Would you say that that

device you’ve inserted into your skull represents a certain type of audio frequency? It really doesn't have anything to do with color other than you're defining a color to represent a certain vibration. But it doesn't actually have to do with the electromagnetic vibration. Well, it does because it is related to the frequency of the light.

NEIL HARBISSON

Explain that to me mathematically.

There's a line to scale the music. One is the sonogrammatic scale, which is based on human perception, which is logarithmic. The other one is—

But wait; stop. So the human perception is logarithmic?

That we feel that there's the same distance between F and G regardless of the octave. That's like our perception of sound is like this, but—

Right, but our perception of light is not like that.

Exactly. So we did one scale that does this in relation to sound because then this would mean that we would have a color for each

THAT DEVICE YOU'VE INSERTED INTO YOUR SKULL REPRESENTS A CERTAIN TYPE OF AUDIO

Catalan-raised, Britishborn contemporary artist and cyborg activist best known for creating the first cyborg antenna and for being the first person in the world to have an antenna implanted in his skull. MATTHEW PUTMAN is a scientist, educator, musician and film/stage producer. He is best known for his work in nanotechnology, the science of working in dimensions smaller than 100 nanometers.

INTERCOURSE 3

I met Neil for the first time when we had this discussion. I was asking questions as fast as I could. It was my near-manic desire to figure out how the technology Neil had made a part of himself manifested in the black box of the brain. As scientists, we have tools that are increasingly sophisticated for measuring genes, neurons, and even the basis of thought. How we all uniquely perceive reality remains a mystery and invokes not only the work of scientists, but also psychologists and philosophers. I am a physicist who is interested in reducing experience to measurable things. In a short conversation with Neil I wanted to figure out whether by understanding some of his subjective experience, a path towards that reduction was even possible. Why does this all matter? I think that the most valuable things about humanity are locked in the privacy of our own consciousness. Neil may very well be a connection to understanding why and how we experience very critical sensory information.

IN THIS CONVERSATION

NEIL HARBISSON is a

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THE EGGPLANT ISN'T WAVES OR ORANGE: PUTMAN & HARBISSON

CYBORGS

Painted record by Neil Harbisson, 2014

note. Because when you transport purely to sound, F is invisible because F is infrared. So that's why there are two scales. The scale that I'm using now is the pure one. It’s picking up the frequencies of the light and then scaling them, in my case, 39 octaves so that I can hear it in the middle of the scale. MP

If it were completely dark and it were black, but you know there's IR in the atmosphere and you were able to define how much IR is in the atmosphere at any given time when something is completely black, you should be able to resonate that if you were to run the same transform?

Well, now I can detect only in total darkness near infrared, if there is near-infrared. That's the only one I can detect now, but in theory, if you use better lenses, which the

aim is to keep upgrading the lens, then it should be able to detect any other type of electromagnetic activity. The technical part has been designed by four diﬀerent people in four diﬀerent times, and all the information of this is all open source as well. MP

It's an amazingly cool idea; the idea that if you were to go blind tomorrow, you would have a better perception of the world and color and what exists than anybody else would because you've now built up memories based on association of frequencies and conduction than somebody who would just go blind and not have that experience.

Well, at the beginning of 2003, the aim was because I was born completely colorblind. I've only seen gray scale; I've never seen

WE MADE IT MORE SPECIFIC TO UP TO 360 MICROTONES SO I COULD DIFFERENTIATE SUBTLE DIFFERENCES OF REDS

101

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THE EGGPLANT ISN'T WAVES OR ORANGE: PUTMAN & HARBISSON

Harbisson's depiction of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

102

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THE EGGPLANT ISN'T WAVES OR ORANGE: PUTMAN & HARBISSON

Harbisson's depiction of John Cage's 4'33 103

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color. At the beginning, the aim was to perceive visual colors. But then I worked for three, four years and after that I became able to differentiate all visual colors like other people, so then I didn't see why I should stop there. So we made it more specific to up to 360 microtones so I could differentiate subtle differences of reds. And then we added different volume levels for saturation so I could have this as well. And then we added infrareds and ultraviolets. And now there's Bluetooth so I can connect to mobile, mobile people. With mobile, you can send me colors directly to my head, which is new— MP

104

Well, there's an app we developed as well, so people are using their mobile phone. They put their mobile phone in their pocket and then they use headphones to listen to the colors during a whole day, or two, or three, and this has a psychedelic effect on them. And then on the other side, there's blind people that are also using it and then blind people who were able to see color when they were children. It actually activates their memory and they visualize the color even if they don’t see it. But if they remember red and they learned that that sound is red, so they see red. So it has different effects depending on the person.

So what's a color you can't see naturally that you know by name?

I can't see any color. I see black and white.

So it’s grayscale. So you're completely grayscale. So I say “purple”; now you have a sense of that. Does your memory relate to a vibration or have you now recruited something that then ties your grayscale memory to that so it’s visual?

RELATED READING

I see an eggplant. You said purple, I saw a specific eggplant that I perceived once and then I also hear the sound of purple. And I feel a feeling as well because purple is—it actually—

PG. 20

Have you had an fMRI?

Yeah, I have. They scanned my head to see what was happening.

What did they see when you were using this? Did they see a big change?

Yeah, the visual cortex and the audio cortex are always active, both—whenever there's an image or whenever there's a sound as well. Because if I hear music, I also feel colors depending on the notes. So it has eﬀect the other way as well.

I play jazz piano and when I play with other musicians we have to do the opposite, where we try to get rid of all of our visual sense as much as possible. So the best jazz sessions are started in dark rooms with your eyes closed and just listening to each other play for a while so that you can start recruiting the visual from, you start using the auditory to recruit from your visual cortex so that your auditory cortex starts to grow in intensity.

So then, when I have a memory of a session, I'm filling in colors later, or I start to fill in landscapes later. During that initial moment, it was completely an auditory experience because I was trying to eliminate my visual. It’s really interesting how memory plays into it, right? NH

Yeah.

So your memory of purple, you're saying, as an eggplant, is because that was your first experience with it where it vibrated this way, and that must now be purple. Now you've got me thinking.

THE BEST JAZZ SESSIONS ARE STARTED IN DARK ROOMS WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED

Ecstatic Ensemble: Original Music and the birth of the AACM PG. 50

Everyone Likes Everyone

INTERCOURSE 3

I love that. This is so unbelievable because I think about this all the time. If people talk about consciousness, I have this experience of the world and I'm seeing all of these diﬀerent things. But if I would just give you input enough, why is a colorblind person, or somebody without sight not able to recruit other areas of the cortex in order to be able to have an equivalent experience? This is such a direct example to actually deal with conduction, it’s brilliant. Have you put it on other people—people with a hypersensitivity to color?

THE EGGPLANT ISN'T WAVES OR ORANGE: PUTMAN & HARBISSON

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Neil Harbisson listens to a Domino Sugar box. Photo by Gabriel Florenz

105

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Drop Kick to the Head: or How I Came to Do an Underground Street Art Exhibit in China with MC Yan. A memory, of course, in 2 parts. by Fab 5 Freddy

1. Drop Kicks to the Heads and Hustlers:

The 70s were simply a great time for American cinema; Cotton Comes To Harlem, Shaft, Superfly and the great Melvin Van Peebles seminal film, Sweet Sweet Backs Baaadaass Song also came out, ushering in the Blaxploitation era. These films, and dozens more, would have black men and women in leading roles, often putting a stylish platform shoe up the Man's ass. And this was unprecedented, seeing folks on the screen that looked like me, black men and women winning big on the screen. Along with the Kung Fu genre, which showed us a world we hadn’t seen before, people of color doing amazing things on the screen was indeed empowering considering Blacks and Asians usually played stereotyped, subservient and miniscule roles, if any at all in American cinema. The Hip Hop Kung Fu culture formulated and grew in popularity in the mid 1970s around the same time NY street gang culture began to wane, especially the Bronx street gang beefs and disagreements often settled with fists, knives, sticks and sometimes guns. Then Africa Bambaata famously dissolved the large Bronx gang, The Black Spades, he led and turned turned them into a hip hop cultural group called The Zulu Nation inspired by a film on the Zulu’s fight for independence against the British in Southern Africa in the 1950s. He encouraged

The effect these films had on American pop culture was pervasive. One of the first signs

106

THE BEST PLACE TO SEE KUNG FU FILMS WAS ON FORTY DEUCE, A.K.A 42ND STREET

Kung Fu Film posters from the 70s

Back in 1970s New York City, the best place to see Kung Fu films was on Forty Deuce, a.k.a. 42nd Street between 8th Ave and Broadway in the Times Square area. That entire block was lined end-to-end on both sides of the street with movie theatres showing horror, porn, Grindhouse action films and the latest Kung Fu features. Usually, the price of admission included two to three films. That street was heaven to me, and I still miss it since it was sadly sanitized and mall-ified in the 90s under Giuliani. People would be so worked up from the nonstop Kung Fu action that if you bumped into someone leaving the theatre and got into an altercation, people would act like they had 4th degree black belts and the kicks and punches would start to fly.

was a hit disco / funk record released in 1974 by Carl Douglas called “Kung Fu Fighting”, which perfectly captured the essence of this new cinematic genre and went on to sell 11 million records world wide making it one of the best selling singles of all time. And James Browns #1 classic in that same period “The Payback” had the unforgettable line, “I don’t know karate, but I know ka-razor.”

INTERCOURSE 3

In the early 70s, I spent several weeks in Barbados with family as my mom wanted me oﬀ the then mean and sweltering streets of Bed Stuy, Brooklyn. That’s a summer I’ll never forget because the hottest thing happening for me in Barbados was going to see Kung Fu sword fighting movies. When I returned to Brooklyn the end of that summer, I had my pals captivated with tales of what I’d seen in those films. About a year later in 1973 it happened—the Shaw Bros film, 5 Fingers Of Death was released. The Kung Fu cinema era had arrived with a drop kick to the head of millions of young moviegoers.

DROP KICK TO THE HEAD: FAB 5 FREDDY

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DROP KICK TO THE HEAD: FAB 5 FREDDY

KUNG FU HIP HOP

Fab 5 Freddy, Triple Green Bruce Fab 5, 2012

any and all creative expression as opposed to the senseless violence that had claimed far too many. Charlie Ahearn and I, while putting our film Wild Style together, had discussed doing a Kung Fu break dancing sequence that ended up being a bit too ambitious for our ultra low budget. It was clear and obvious to us at the time that martial arts had played a key role in the development of breakdancing and the various crews that would challenge and battle each other. The originators of breakdancing, like most NYC Kids back then, were big fans of Kung Fu movies and formed small crews, instead of gangs consisting of 5 to 10 members or more that would challenge other crews to dance-oﬀ battles similar to the way various masters of diﬀerent types and styles of Kung Fu would clash in the films. The

wild acrobatic flips, floor work and foot maneuvers of Kung Fu masters became fundamental in the development of breakdancing. As this spread rapidly through the city, it became a much cooler way of settling beefs and more importantly deciding who were the best dancers and hence the coolest kids in the area. Breakdancing had in fact started to wane in NYC when we went into production of Wild Style in 1981. The Rock Steady Crew of breakers featured in the film re-ignited this form of dance as thousands could now see it on the screen. All this of course can be traced back to Kung Fu. 2. Being Underground in China An old friend, Sean “Cavo” Dinsmore called me a couple years ago. Cavo was a part of our Downtown 500—500 because it was literally that

MARTIAL ARTS HAD PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF BREAKDANCING

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DROP KICK TO THE HEAD: FAB 5 FREDDY

many of us, artists, musicians, photographers and every other creative type. We’d see each other regularly at spots like, Danceteria, The Roxy, Save the Robots, art openings at the Fun Gallery, and all the other places on our cultural circuit back then. He was in a cool downtown New York ska band called the Toasters in the mid-80s. He eventually split oﬀ with a Haitian kid also in that group from Brooklyn named Lionel and they formed a rap/ska/reggae styled duo which they called Unity Two, and was signed to Warner Brothers Records.

Hong Kong and a student of moves I’ve made; and a counterpart as a cultural ground breaker. MC Yan is as an activist, rapper, painter, and also known infamously for writing graﬃti on China’s Great Wall.

Cavo grew restless with the New York scene and decided to start globe-trotting, eventually making his way to China. Cavo was telling me about talks he was having there with MC Yan—the true underground pioneer of Hip Hop culture in

Being underground in China means exactly that. For any music to make it big in their mainstream of one billion plus like “Canto-pop” or “Mandopop,” it must be government sanctioned, and you can be sure the Chinese government was not checking for the pioneering 90s rap group he’s been associated with called LMF, which stands for Lazy Mutha Fucka. MC Yan was lamenting to Cavo that Bruce Lee has never been appropriately embraced by the Hong Kong government because he was actually

THE KUNG FU WILD STYLE EXHIBITION INTERPRETED IMAGES OF BRUCE LEE THROUGH VARIOUS PAINTING STYLES

INTERCOURSE 3

Fab Five at the Ching Chung Koon temple in Hong Kong, 2012 Photo credit: Sean Dinsmore

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Fab 5 Freddy, The Triumph of Bruce, 2012 109

Fab 5 Freddy, Self Portrait Of The Artist Surrounded by Bruce, 2012

110

DROP KICK TO THE HEAD: FAB 5 FREDDY

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Ecstatic Ensemble: Original Music and the Birth of the AACM PG. 50

Everyone Likes Everyone

KUNG FU HIP HOP

PG. 20

born in the USA and was married to an American woman. Besides a modest statue placed on Hong Kong’s Hollywood-style walk of fame, the recognition of Bruce Lee was marginal in Yan’s eyes and Cavo said I should join the conversation and consider doing a pop up exhibit with MC Yan to celebrate Bruce Lee. We decided to do this exhibit in Hong Kong. We would both take images of Bruce Lee and incorporate them into our respective painting styles. We would call it Kung Fu Wild Style, the name of course coming from the title of Hip Hop’s first feature film that I took part in. In the few days leading up to the opening, MC Yan and I got to hang out. He took me to ancient Chinese temples where dozens of Kung Fu films had been shot. I was impressed by Yan’s succinct way of breaking down and explaining how China really works from his underground perspective. “You see Fab, the Chinese government sees Hong Kong as the oﬃce, and mainland China as the factory.” Yan explained how the youth on China’s mainland have figured out ways around the blocking of major web portals like YouTube and Facebook and how underground blogs serve up the real-deal info on corrupt government. I was also impressed by how many young Chinese eagerly requested his autograph when we were making the rounds in Hong Kong. The Kung Fu Wild Style opening was a raging success with young, hip and cool Hong Kongers out in droves for an art opening the likes of which many said had never happened in that city. When the Hong Kong police showed up, we thought for sure we were going to get shut down as a couple hundred revelers had filled the street outside the gallery getting their groove on. The police were totally dumbfounded, MC Yan

The marquee at the on Essex St., in lower Manhattan, when Wild Style first came out in 1983. Image courtesy of Scheme RFA.

RELATED READING

DROP KICK TO THE HEAD: FAB 5 FREDDY

explained, because they’d never seen or heard of people playing music in the streets like this and they just told us to shut it all down by midnight which was exactly as we’d planned anyway. A few weeks after our successful Kung Fu Wild Style pop up, the Art & Labor gallery in Shanghai having heard about it all reached out saying they’d love to bring the work to their space for a January exhibit. Totally unexpected and the answer was “yes.” Then, we were contacted by the folks who do the New York Asian film festival at Lincoln Center here and they expressed wanting to mount the exhibit at the Furman gallery adjacent to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theatre in July of 2013 and have the exhibit open the same evening as a 40th anniversary screening of Bruce Lee’s Enter The Dragon. Of course we agreed, and MC Yan got to visit New York City along with Cavo. I took Yan around for the Fab 5 tour of the nooks and crannies where Hip Hop was born and bred. Next stop: the Smithsonian Museum's Sackler Wing in 2015.

BRUCE LEE HAS NEVER BEEN APPROPRIATELY EMBRACED BY THE HONG KONG GOVERNMENT

111

Colin Oulighan, Thetis makese an appeal to Zeus on behalf of Achilles, 2012 22"x30", India ink on paper

112

Colin Oulighan, Hermes, disguised as Achillesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aide, escorts Priam through the Achaean camp, 2012 22"x30", India ink on paper

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RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

All photographs culled from the Internet by Andrew Durbin

Relational Athletics by Andrew Durbin

culture, form, concept, smell, high/low, 1970s, humor, graďŹ&#x192;ti culture bro culture cross pollination, invisible things, gender

Zero In; Zero Sugar. Fitness Hydration. Innergear concept, humor, invisible things culture, form, high/low Bill Clinton toilet seat

culture, form Powerade: the Complete Sports Drink; Years of Work Make the Second That Counts: Power Through; First To Believe is First To the Ball; Focus. Hustle. Hydrate; Very Real Power; Sweat Out.

114

BRO ORIGINS, MEN INTERACTING WITH OBJECTS BETWEEN MEN

culture, form, concept, Monica Lewinksi invisible things, gender

INTERCOURSE 3

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RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

“THE BRO”

Fitness Hydration, First to Believe As a category, the bro encompasses several strata of male behavior and thinking, but it's rooted primarily in the frat culture of the second half of the twentieth century, especially that culture as it was figured in 1980s popular films like Porky's and Animal House. In those films, frat—later bro— is libidinal excess dreamt up in the play of relations between men living together, transformed into a comedy at the heart of which there is no real joke, only the humor of deferred contact: men interacting with objects between men. In part, the comedy lies in the failure to consummate the interaction with grasp. This is especially true for how these men interact with women. There is no “role” for women in these films, they don't act, they exist as parts and typologies; there is only her “placement”: by the pool, in the window, on the other side of the peephole. Her presence doesn't stand for anything other than the distance between herself and the men who see her. The traditional space created by fraternities, with its obscure hierarchies and rituals for policing behavior, excludes as much as it includes. Frats are exclusionary fields that privilege the male subject for both his maleness and his subjectness. Sweat out, Make the Second that Counts culture, form, concept, First to the Ball, Years of Work 1970s, humor, graﬃti culture bro culture cross pollination, invisible things, gender concept smell, Years of Work

Years of Work, smell pollination smell, First to the Ball culture, form, concept, graffiti, Very Real Power Ryder Ripps' Axe Painting (2011) aestheticizes the non-aesthetic of the bro. In a video of the work (you can purchase the actual painting for $550), a shirtless Ripps uses a can of Axe deodorant “body spray” to paint on a blank canvas. The spray leaves no trace on the canvas, but it isn't difficult to imagine that its dampened surface reflects, at certain angles, a separate, glossier shade of white—not exactly different from the canvas, but enough to imply a layer that, once dried, is left only as a smell. I haven’t seen the painting. I can’t only fantasize. The video is captioned: “culture, form, concept, smells, high/low, 1970s, humor, graffiti culture bro culture cross pollination, invisible things, gender.” Ryder graffitis the Axe can across the canvas, moving over select parts and returning to others to seemingly complete a selection. I watch this video and I think about culture, form, concept, smells, high/low, 1970s, humor, graffiti culture bro culture cross pollination, invisible things, and gender, but nothing specific actually comes to mind. I am interested, in this video, in Ryder's torso, which is viewable only from the side in relation to the painting. I don't think Ryder is bro; I think he's bro-ing a canvas, critiquing (in part) the historical image of the male artist, whose typical nudity (which in Ryder’s case is only partial) suggests the eminently sexual authority of the male genius who can appear naked without compromising or distracting our attention from the act his body performs (versus a female artist, whose nudity historically was misconstrued as a compromise, a distraction, an object). The act Ryder performs leaves no trace, really, only a smell: the smell of men.

RYDER RIPPS' AXE PAINTING (2011) AESTHETICIZES THE NON-AESTHETIC OF THE BRO

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RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

6 5

War is bro.

INTERCOURSE 3

The bro’d object—clothing, sports drinks—drifts toward parody but doesn’t quite become parody. Rather, the object sheds one meaning and gains another that doesn't obscure its first one so much as it complicates it by suggesting that the assumed function of a particular object or image was more an illusion of its advertised use than its point. The bro softens the frat. In “the real world,” after the brutally economized political space of the fraternity is made unavailable as a guiding force in daily life, concept pollination the frat is converted to the bro, who opportunistically embeds the frat into the larger spheres of public behavior and culture, legitimizing the male through an often humorous, kindly, but essentially-male privileged disposition that culture bro culture cross summer seeks to erase diﬀerence by overcoming it through and to think of Bill Clinton, whose thuggish, hamburger-a-day style routine gave way, finally, to veganism and philanthropy reducing all that is no bro to the stupid, heady, and weak.

116

HAVE YOU EVER KNOWN SOMEONE IN PORN?

pollination Have you ever known someone in porn? I briefly attended a large high school in South Carolina where the would-be valedictorian, a soccer player I was very, very certain was gay, raped a girl over spring break of his senior year. She went to the police, pressed charges, and eventually he was kicked out of school, derailing his path to Duke. (Slight justice occasionally finds itself meted out.) The soccer player, Alex, had always been a creep, cute but egomaniacal and pushy in the way that closet-cases so often are. (At least in my experience, in the South, in the early 2000s.) After high school, he made it through community college then found his way to Boston, where he got involved with a middle-aged gay couple who made popular amateur porn videos

“THE BRO”

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RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

with boys they found through the internet. This is where I come in. On a video aggregating porn site, I started watching the videos this amateur couple made, mostly for how gross they were, an occasional erotics that magnetizes me to it, handheld overhead shots of a thick cock entering an asshole twenty years younger than the couple fucking it. Or the basis of any desire is a sort of repulsion that immediately reverses course to become gravitational. Once in a cruelly short clip, after the guy’s dick entered the asshole of a younger man, the camera man pulled back to show Alex, flat on his back, smiling with a meth-y complexion, red hair. Wow, I thought, it’s him. Alex really liked this, getting fucked by these guys. He made about three videos. Through their site I found out Alex lived in Charlotte, North Carolina and played in a few gay sports leagues, mostly rugby. He liked to Tweet pics of his teammates in various states of dress, bulky guys who probably just want to be friends. Alex maintains an oﬀ-and-on porn career, mostly just with these guys whom he occasionally tweets provocatively at: “u thinkin bout my hole?”

ternité, establishing an excited sense of things as being related in mysterious ways, like university freshmen who discover a common, if abstract, bond with other “brothers” in a frat house or sports team.

culture 1970s, Years of Work, Zero Sugar, Fitness Hydration, Innergear Innergear To be with: Innergear

culture, concept, 1970s, Bros are never a joke anymore than they’re not not a joke, they’re post-joke. Bros are not only purveyor of the joke or prank but its victim too: fail videos, the flat aﬀect of homoerotic (but often homophobic) fraternity, of the pluralized “experience of maleness” and its constituency (brands: Five Hour Energy, Xbox, Powerade; hyper-gendered bodies: male, female; athletics, the gym). Bros tend to bro things, communalize them by imbuing diverse objects—iPhones, a tennis ball, a soda can, a watermelon—with fra-

Cold Sausage Innergear, smell, 1970s Are you, like everyone, trying to get rid of me? brief leisure risk averse drive-by the house

BROS ARE NEVER A JOKE ANYMORE THAN THEY'RE NOT A JOKE, THEY'RE POST-JOKE

117

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RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

where u jerk oﬀ in abandoned sand

Civility in the Wal-Mart, Skrillex on the iPod on the porch

found credit card

warm beer

tip the cup

pollination, smell

of cheap rum forward

split

business pleasure

1970s over the toilet

INTERCOURSE 3

the path to that place rotating within the klieg lights render it possible shatter

to find myself made inexplicable in the situation of appearances

It is summer and my time to think of Bill Clinton

finally receding

2,232 hours

deposed by the sun

a jersey lying on 5th, tennis shoes in Ft Greene reading the New York Post over a finance guy on the A I went to a party uptown with a friend from high school. He went to Georgetown University, where he majored in political science major. He lives in Crystal City and works as a congressional aide to a New York Representative (I can’t recall who). At the party all his bros took oﬀ their shirts and screamed about Kanye West and the Mets. The girls stood in the corner, talking. I joined them, and all the men eyed us suspiciously. Undiscovered life

fallen against the Mazda

about the Monica Lewinski Aﬀair, which, when unhinged from its

thrown out

118

IT IS SUMMER AND MY TIME TO THINK OF BILL CLINTON

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RELATED READING

the toilet

74 (charge my card)

The President is the ultimate bro. For example,

PG. 127

Internet Mourning PG. 120

RELATIONAL ATHLETICS: DURBIN

The bro begins from the position of intellectual and institutional superiority (men who run things are men), assuming the role of an instrument of power to be used against others as birthright. Living among men, as the President mostly does, and doing business with men, and caring mostly about the issues that men tend to care about, the President assumes a default that it is summer. For example,

“THE BRO”

When speculation began about Hillary Clinton’s second run for president, her critics targeted her apparent “weakness,” which they credited to age (even though she is not the oldest person to run for president—or to be president) and, in doing so, implied the well-worn misogynist trope that men age well, women don’t. Women cannot command if they do not age well. And whose nudity suggests a quasi-sexual authority of the male president who can appear in old age without compromising or distracting our attention to the act his body performs (versus a female president, whose age and gender could be misconstrued as a compromise, a distraction, an object). For example,

It is summer and my time to think of Bill Clinton. The United States’ greatest export is bad ideas. To be charmed by the fiction of its dreamier locales, a White House in the July night, is to be its truest dreamer. Mirror back to me, I will take a selfie for no one else. Vape under the World Trade subsidiary of that romantic sensibility I wore this carefreeness for several weeks. Manifest Summer is by far the shittiest time for looking cute. Vape terror of heights on the Chinatown roof Hurl a Powerade bottle full of Vodka across the street Vom on me in a cab I’ll take it We live in a joyous age

THE PRESIDENT IS THE ULTIMATE BRO

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Internet Altar by Monica McClure

Years later, my grandfather was dying and I went to the bathroom to apply lipstick, anticipating it was the last time he’d see me. But that was an image of my body I was preserving. What about the bodies of the dead? Do they like their jpeg botox, their frozen youth? Years later, I get a voicemail on my cell phone in the middle of a college graduation ceremony saying that it’s happened again. My friend Murray fell asleep at the wheel. Two days after Christmas in 2007 I am woken up at 3:00 AM. Brian has driven into a tree. Later, on the lower east side of NYC, a psychic tells me, “Someone you grew up with will die; don’t go to the funeral for his spirit will cling to you.” A week letter Adam’s body is dredged from the Seine.

120

DO THEY LIKE THEIR JPEG BOTOX?

Some of these men are survived by social media profiles. They’re younger than me now, but nonetheless their birthdays pass annually. An icon of a little blue cake is oﬀered. The same number of candles for everyone every year. Bountiful, promising, but finite. Time’s cymbals don’t have time to count you out. 3 friends posted on Justin's Timeline on his birthday. September 16, 2011 Katie Hughes wrote on his Timeline. September 16, 2007 at 9:18am happy bday! hope its a good one! When I see funeral selfies for the first time, it has something to do with this. Young people are reconstituting their bodies in physical space as bodies they’ve known slip into the shadows. I don’t understand the World Wide Web any more than I understand what happens after death. What does Lana del Rey keep saying? Heaven on earth. Our minds work hard to contain this superhighway spreading in every direction. Since our thoughts are now described as being “coded in memory” and our brains are “hard drives,” we have succeeded in norming the mysterious arrival of information and the ghostly functions

INTERCOURSE 3

I was sixteen when my friend Tom died. My dad drove my sister and I home from campus. How you handle the unaccountable sudden loss of a friend your age is perhaps the way you deal with loss for the rest of your life. My sister was dissociating; she rushed to the landline phone and began dialing Tom’s number from memory, listening over and over to his voicemail greeting, recorded in his real voice, crying, “Why isn’t he answering?” This was before everyone died and went to the Internet. In a very forward-thinking move, his mother paid his cell phone bill for years so we could hear his voice and leave grieved messages. I never spoke into the receiver, just listened to Tom saying his own name: confirming that he had lived and compounding the illusion that he was dead. We didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but it mimicked language in its tonality and its unresolved dialectic. We heard his voice, we heard our voices in the knowledge that they were being recorded, but he never called back. It was something we got used to. In the meantime, the grave we visited with handwritten letters was mute and totalizing; it was truly dead.

INTERNET ALTAR: MCCLURE

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Laptop by Grace Miceli

behind the screen. Unless juxtaposed against roses, churches, and cemeteries online, the dead are indistinguishable from the living. By contrast, the funeral selfies make a visual gap (the living here and the dead just out of frame) through which neurosis recreates a harmony with The Real.

INTERNET ALTAR: MCCLURE

CHAPTER 3: INTERNET ALTAR

Sampson Starkweather @SampsonStarkwea May 30

INTERNET MOURNING

I keep inviting dead friends to events on Facebook, not because I forget they are dead, but because I hope they show up. In Where Art Belongs, Chris Kraus is writing about the poetic marketing of Los Angeles housing developments with names that imply an Elysian existence for sale (or at least a warm-up to the Elysian Fields), “...stations in eternal flux, leveraging into the infinite…” When everything is available online, having is replaced by another kind of living. Life is a luxurious stay; death becomes a vacation home one might buy. Radical alterity collapses into a fantasy structure. The symbolic opposition between presence and absence implies the possibility that something is missing from the symbolic, but here on Facebook, the language is coherent. Happy 28th Birthday to my good friend Justin Murray, we still miss you buddy and I know where you are The road goes on forever and the party never ends!!! Our access to you grows as we come to embrace and interact with this semi-public heaven. When we couldn’t like your pictures in 2005, now we can. We write, we look, we troll. We feel we’ve made contact. Have we already begun to live in a shared afterlife? Every once in a while a medium intervenes. The poet Sampson Starkweather recalls his aunt taking over his late grandmother’s Facebook page ostensibly out of convenience but also perhaps to feel her body slip into a more omniscient vessel. Online alter egos are just ghosts after all: an image and a “voice” without the complications of a body and citizenship. We needn’t disavow death to go on living in the symbolic order. It is not not life, from the perspective of the living. It’s not that traumatic. What does Lana del Rey keep singing? Heaven’s in your eyes.

WE WRITE, WE LOOK, WE TROLL

In a sense, we are holograms. Social media profiles are sites where the ephemera of your life collects in semi-public view, anticipating some future form of absence. It’s not a gravesite, but a totem. A tombstone is too totalizing, but a digital wall scrolls fluidly through body-sensed time and advances technologically in-step with everything else. My dead friends never age. I miss their bodies. I envy their fresh faces and never-fading tans. Since the invention of the camera, photographs have been linked, quite amicably, with death. A moment dies in the flash, never to repeat itself. But we’ve got it—forever! Someday, if we live long enough, most of the people in our pictures will be dead. We don’t just look to be painfully affected and to feel an image working on our bodies, as in Barthe’s punctum. As late capitalists, we look to claim. Reenacting our own various colonizations, we pose instinctually for the event photographer. We are conscripts of a gluttonously self-reflexive time. A digital photograph never fulfills its promise of reflecting our optic vision back to us. It’s frustrating. It makes us tilt chins and purse lips; it makes us feel so fat; it infuriates; it makes us violent. My late relatives’ photos were placed next to La Virgen de Guadalupe statues, funeral bulletins, rosaries, candles, notes, a mess. The altars were tucked in corners and behind closets. There was an intense feeling of slippage in the air. I remember a hologram. On your way out of the door you passed Jesus weeping in the garden and on your way in he was Mother Mary praying. The hologram marked the fuzzy point where the physical spaces dedicated to memorial fades into the endless metaphysical space of mourning.

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Bunny Rogers, told an interviewer: “I disagree that mourning is a finite experience (the ‘mourning period’). There are beliefs that there is a correct way or length of time to grieve the death of a loved one, yet it is popular and accepted to say, “you never really get over your first love.”

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GUYS, I'M STILL ALIVE

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Hart Island PG. 34

Marion Field December 31, 2013 Guys, I'm still alive. It's really disconcerting to have stuﬀ about me pop up in my newsfeed talking about me in the past tense. Be a good friend and keep a private journal if you need to start working through your grief now. It does not make me feel good to see these sorts of things. I say this with a lot of love, so let's just chalk some of this up to a learning experience. But c'mon now. That journal is probably the only good place to have my illness be all about you at this time. I need a little privacy and I'd really like to be able to check the news feed for cute Christmas baby pictures without bumping into eulogies.

The Rose Gallery at sister-unns.com by Bunny Rogers and Filip Olszewski, 2011-present

Only the dead stay true to our idea of them. Outside of finite time, the dialectical rules apply diﬀerently. Conceptual artist Sophia Le Fraga has been documenting the already archived texts of the bereaved for years. She’s compiled a graveyard of unanswered missives and spent years “trolling” their profiles. In another era, it may have been the work of a gravedigger to exhume the prizes of the dead. Today—if a person’s online life is lived decidedly—those prizes are on display. Maybe the saddest thing is to be dead online. Living death is a lack of trace: no mark of the always already absent presence. Even if the trace is simply the simulation of a presence—like all social media representation is—it better be one that refers to something beyond itself. What can an egg icon on Twitter point to except for a personality, a voice, not yet hatched? It’s inhabited by absence. But we are talking about the presence of absence and how the language and imagery is foregrounded in your dead friend’s blog, so you respond with language and imagery. You post a YouTube video to feel a connection. You open up a dialogic space. When Tom died, my family had a closely monitored dial-up connection. I dreamed about him. When Adam died, I read our last Myspace messages and googled

“Neuilly,” the name of the Paris suburb where he’d last been seen.

INTERCOURSE 3

She created an online memorial to eternal love, with roses symbolizing the convergence of infinite love and grief. At Sister Unn’s, the roses structured the absence of the beloved as well as the lover. Here was a space that held our yearning inside it, but locked out the bodies who generated the yearning. Eventually, the site of yearning multiplies itself out of existence. A digital rose has been added to the store for you. You go to find your special rose, your special dedication and get swallowed by rows of roses. Scroll forever. You’ve visited the site so many times, you’re no longer a visitor. You’re a rose saying goodbye to mortal life in the Garden of Gethsemane.

INTERNET ALTAR: MCCLURE

Bubble animation: Lilli Carré

Sonnet The bird’s on a feeding tube, but it still wears a mask to look beautiful. The falcon hears the falconer. I’m sorry to say that I strayed, lost my faith in your senselessness. It’s called a hood, and it makes a bird look like a fly. It’s made of leather. It has bells, sometimes, and stitches, and plumes. The falconer takes out the feeding tube. I don’t understand how to apprehend glory—there’s a frozen forest with a lake inside it, around it, before it, behind it. The center holds: Christ doesn’t come and go. The hospital bed looks mostly empty, but the bird’s head looks downright godly. — Anthony Opal

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â&#x2014;&#x201E;

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INDEX

Sleights of Hands

Send Blank Tape

Fiction: An Excerpt from Murders of the Great Misery

SHORT FORM

The Eggplant Isn't Waves or Orange

100

101

102

103

105

106

107

108

109

Drop Kick to the Head

106

124

Drop Kick to the Head (continued)

110

111

VISUAL INDEX

Relational Athletics

114

115

116

117

118

119

121

122

Internet Altar

120

125 125

MISC.

Daniel Kent. Self Sucking, 2014. Inkjet print, Finger Oil. 27.5 x 39.25 in.

74 (charge my card) When I die, invite everyone over. Make sure I’m stripped down, wherever I am, There’s no need to move me, or fix my face, or take out my organs, or anything. Just leave me like I am, just exactly like I am: arms, hands, legs, feet, mouth, tongue, eyes. No weapons—no boots, brass knuckles or swords— barefoot is ok, as are elbow strikes, but the fist, the closed fist, is mandatory. Knee, heel, palm, forearm—but every third swing is the fist, the fist until it stops or breaks. Play music and serve blackberry brandy— charge my card, and order in whatever. — John Reed

127

128

Course Works

Instructors from Pioneer Works expand on their subjects. 129

COURSE WORKS

Disorientations within the skyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s volume, as captured during Pittsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; flight aboard the Russian parabolic-flight aircraft, which produces 25-second periods of weightlessness and double gravity. Sketches describe the relative motion between the aircraft, ground, and his body during one weightless maneuver.

130

COURSE WORKS

Bradley Pitts

On Shifting Perception Space tourism and civilian drones are poised to dramatically alter our relationship to bodies of air and space, much like the introduction of train travel dramatically shifted our relationship to landscape and time. At the train’s introduction, speeding through the landscape while stably seated introduced a new disorientation as near objects streaked by, while those in the distance seemed to follow the train as they revolved on their own axes. For the first time, humans traveled fast enough to require the synchronization of clocks over large distances (the impetus for time zones) and noticeably lengthen or shorten the duration of daylight. These experiences made the impossible seem possible, and then we got accustomed to them. Space tourists will soon slip through and above the atmosphere, experiencing the planet and atmosphere as a single, dynamic entity. Simultaneously, participants will have new experiences of mass and gravity. The foundations of our earthly experience, which once seemed stable, will reveal themselves to be conditional. Meanwhile civilian drones will make us see occupiable airspaces where we once saw void (if we saw these spaces at all). Initially these experiences might be disruptive to our worldview, but we quickly grow accustomed to what was once miraculous.

that it can be felt and occupied, emphasizing the creative agency of our perception? In repurposing technology to serve disorientation, we engage and subvert notions of what we consider to be technology’s function and value. This cuts to the core of our globalized ethos, forcing a reexamination of the structures and value systems that mediate our worldviews. Technology is a cultural product and as such its most significant eﬀects are the perceptual shifts that we experience as a result of its innovations. By forefronting the unique ways technology articulates our relationship to our surroundings, we can highlight the perceptual shifts that technology represents and thereby reframe it primarily as a perceptual device: a medium of perception.

As we’ve become adept at subsuming technology as a natural extension of our bodies, the initial disorientation produced by innovation has become less noticeable. What’s lost is the liberating moment of productive disorientation when our prior understandings get set aside. In this moment, before the world gets made anew, we experience new, unmediated encounters with reality. While technologists seek to produce new orientations, art seeks prolonged disorientation. How can we hold open the window in which perception is remade, drawing awareness to it so

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David Sheinkopf

On 3D Printing During the Civil War The first documented photographic image of a person was an accident. During a ten-minute exposure taken from a Parisian rooftop in 1838 by Louis Daguerre, a man on the street stopped to have his shoes polished. By standing still for a few minutes during the exposure, his body altered the light coming into the camera for long enough to be recorded on film while hundreds of other pedestrians passed by without leaving a trace. As a result, photographic portraiture was born. Technological breakthroughs are often accompanied by a frenzy of ambitious questions. This was especially true of the photographic process. Can we add color to these prints? What if we combined two exposures… and so on. We may think of the 3D printer as the technological innovation of our age, but by 1861 the rudiments of 3D printing were already being developed. François Willème was the first to attempt threedimensional documentations of his subjects. He began by placing a human subject in the center of a circular array of cameras and taking 24 simultaneous photos. The shutters of these cameras were linked by an elaborate springand-wire system that opened all 24 cameras and then closed them seconds later. Willème hid all aspects of the photographic capture, placing the cameras behind panels, and even went so far as to disguise the lenses behind sculptures placed around the room. The resulting photographs were then projected one by one on a screen. The imaging tools he had available were glass plates, which could be projected using a “Magic Lantern,” and relied on a candoluminescent limelight (the incandescent bulb would not come into wide use until the 1890’s). He then used a pantograph to trace the silhouette of each of the 24 images. While the pantograph (in use since the 17th century) was traditionally used to scale and reproduce images in two dimensions,

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Willème replaced the second drawing nib of the pantograph with a blade and carved each of the 24 silhouette images of the subject into a block of modeling clay. This block was turned 1/24th of a rotation after each planar silhouette was carved. After the block had been fully rotated and carved he was left with an accurate representation of the original subject in three dimensions. The clay form was then detailed and a mold was cast so that it could be replicated in plaster-of-paris. Willème’s studio was very popular throughout the 1860’s before falling out of fashion. Subsequent attempts to recreate the process in England and America found little success. But it’s hard to imagine that the realist sculptors of the late 19th century were not paying attention to Willème’s method of accurate 3D representation. Auguste Rodin described his approach to sculpting as modeling a figure based on the sum of its profiles, necessarily looking at his subject from a multitude of angles. Willème’s work represents one recorded precedent for approaching threedimensional form as the aggregate of many twodimensional components, a precedent to which all modern methods of 3D printing still adhere.

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An unfinished example of WillĂ¨me's early process in which he carved 40 half-profiles of his subject into sheets of wood planed to a sharp angle. The sheets were assembled into a nearly seamless cylinder which formed a representative model of his subject.

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Marta Pia

On Suminagashi: Painting Born by Chance

One of the oldest forms ever referenced is called Suminagashi, which literally means â&#x20AC;&#x153;floating inkâ&#x20AC;? and originated in East Asia during 825-850 CE. This form, unlike its Middle Eastern counterparts with more complex ingredients, is remarkably bare bones. Ink and water are the only elements in a delicate process that render patterns that reflect their surroundings. Air currents, noise, dust, waves, water pureness and temperature are just some of the environmental ingredients that make each sumi print unique.

Suminagashi paper marbling by Marta Pia.

Marbling is a method of water printing in which a color pattern is laid onto a liquid surface and then transferred onto paper producing patterns similar to smooth marble.

According to legend, Jizemon Hiroba felt he was divinely inspired to make suminagashi paper after visiting the Kasuga Shrine, in Nara Prefecture and wandered the country looking for the purest water with which to make his papers. He finally arrived in Echizen, Fukui Prefecture where he found water especially conducive to making suminagashi. He settled there, and his family carries on the tradition to this day. The Hiroba Family claims to have made this form of marbled paper since 1151 CE for 55 generations. Others have proposed that it may have derived from an early form of divination called Hydromancy (also called the Water Bowl), which originated in Greece and was also used by many ancient indigenous tribes. This technique was a favorite of prophet Nostradamus, who practiced it as a means of receiving messages and predictions through the movement of water in a bowl. He recorded what he saw and combined it with psychic messages.

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Matt Granick

On Doing it by Hand

After a solid day's work, he had sawn the piece in half, leaving two boards that were three feet wide and one and a half inches thick. Again, a passerby asked him, why hadn't he cut it on one of the big machines? The man replied that all these people had come to see what the newest and fastest machines can do, but that he had come to remind them what people are capable of accomplishing. The comprehensive approach of a traditional Japanese workshop is deceptively humble. Many of the tools, like saws and hand planes, are designed to work on the pull stroke, so the saw cuts as you draw it towards you. The European counterparts work on the push stroke, cutting as they move away from the user. This traditional Western approach requires a formidable workbench to hold the wood in place under the extreme force needed to cut it. With much less effort and no workbench, a Japanese handsaw easily cuts a piece of softwood on a small portable sawhorse. This technique allows for mobility and frees a craftsman from the cumbersome nature of a traditional European shop. A small

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Traditional Japanese handsaws.

A few years ago, at a woodworking expo, I watched a man take a three foot wide, three inch thick board and begin to saw it by hand. This is a very strenuous and diďŹ&#x192;cult task, and he was not a young man. Many people passing by him recommended that he take the board to one of the high-powered machines being displayed at the event and make quick work of the task. He just nodded and smiled in response, bracing his foot against the bottom of the board as his arms moved in a steady back-and-forth rhythm.

toolbox often covers all the bases and allows more space for creation. Machinery is virtually indispensable in a professional shop, and I wouldn't want to suggest otherwise. The fact remains, however, that great and continually-relevant accomplishments in woodworking occurred long before power tools were available. While I can expound on the many philosophical merits of learning the practices of our forefathers, the virtues of handwork are as practical as they are technical or artistic. Not everyone has ready access to a $20,000 sliding table saw.

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Japanese block print of woodworkers on the job.

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These drawings are a collection of audience responses to the prompt “draw a glorious moment in the future” from the show LYFE™, to be premiered in May 2015 in conjunction with Performance Space 122 at Lincoln Center. 138

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Eliot Krimsky

On True Self in the Information Age

The leap from the biblical apple to the company Apple has been a heroic but isolating journey. Depending on which side you’re on—and in which particular moment in technological history you find yourself—the technology created by Apple and co. either enables freedom, or facilitates alienation. Modern capitalism has taken alienation to new levels. In a system where personal relations are objectified, the business world doesn’t just sell products—it sells personality. This is taken to extremes as today’s CEO (insert your Zuckerberg here) doesn’t even need a marketable personality, but instead sells the data gathered from the personalities that we create for each other on the social platforms he makes available to us for “free.” As intimate aspects of ourselves—such as emotions–become more curated and marketable, what is individuality in the 21st century? What is the self gaining by “technological freedoms” in the digital era? How is the self “cut oﬀ” by those supposed freedoms? As a musician and artist, I care about innovation and expression. These interests often come from an intangible inner voice—frequently connected to dreams and intuition—which can be un-earthed from within. This type of radical discovery allows the artist to create from a place of mystery and to see people and the world in new ways. I believe that this intuitive voice is essential, healing, ever changing, and held inside everyone.

be mined for mass profit. As Web 2.0 develops, these reduced designs become more prominent. I am fascinated with Facebook’s Look Back utility, which compiles highlights of your past year into a haunting movie montage—compressing “life” into our most “liked” moments of the year. While utilities like these can be seen as fun, silly and banal, they add to an already existing ambience that subtly rewards us with comfort when we see our liked moments neatly put in boxes, and slightly slaps our wrists and creates discomfort when we don't. Soon we will experience even more of our intimate selves through computers. These reduced designs often enable us to navigate our lives toward a false sense of identity, and away from uncertainty. As we trade complexity for a simulated Eden, separated from error, we may be trading the very things that are necessary ingredients for innovation and true expression. As emotions and communication become ever more mediated in the 21st century, it’s more important than ever to investigate the un-calculable nature of humanity.

Social media has set up a great conflict for the self. While they come with essential aﬀordances— new ways to express individuality in culture and new possibilities for social change—most big social media products have encoded designs that reduce the self to information, which can

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MISC.

Mark Hogancamp, Untitled, 2014. ÂŠ Mark Hogancamp. Photo courtesy One Mile Gallery

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Portfolios

Rachel Sussman Paul Laffoley Dan Asher Kenan Juska 143

Rachel Sussman: Harsh Realities

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Rachel Sussman's subjects have been continuously alive for at least 2,000 years. The parameters of her project are simple: to capture, with the instantaneous medium of photography, the oldest living organisms in the world. However, nothing about this project is straightforward—neither locating these organisms, determining their age, nor deciding what even counts as a single being. We come to learn that while a certain Bristlecone pine is thought to be the oldest unitary organism on earth, it stands as one of the adolescents of her collection if compared to the oldest clonal colonies—organisms such as a 9,550 year old Spruce Gran Picea nicknamed “Old Tjikko,” which can self-replicate, producing new clones of itself with identical DNA. It’s not easy living more than 2,000 years. And it’s not easy finding organisms who manage it. They make their homes in extreme climates and in places that are diﬃcult to get to, a hermitage which makes sense for someone who can’t get up and move. Far more important to survival than nutrients, it turns out, is distance from the the attendant dangers of an easy life: humans in search of land, fuel, or material for commodities, hungry animals, burrowing beetles, and opportunistic fungi. What is alarming is the vulnerability of these old individuals, so good at carrying on. This vulnerability may not be legible to the untrained eye, but is part of what makes Sussman's photographs so intriguing. You have to learn how to read them. Even in their alien beauty—the strange textures of out of the way rocks, the startling patterns of ancient bark formed by harsh climates—these photographs document evidence of more disturbing trends. For instance, what might stand out as the most regal aspect of Old Tjikko’s form—the tall vertical trunk at the center of its clonal ring, is in fact the youngest part—an abnormality, that has been growing only since the 1940s. This growth signals, according to researchers, the rising

alpine tree line caused by steadily warming temperatures. As an artist, Sussman is able to ask questions that the increasingly specialized fields of science lack institutional support to consider. By engaging in scientific practice, not simply as a means to locate or identify her subjects, but as a critical component of her project, Sussman augments the urgency of her photographs, pushes the anthropocentric boundaries of time and self, and creates a workable platform from which to advocate for action against climate change. Sussman shoots her haunting photographs of ancient mosses, slow growing pines and colonies of bacteria on a 6 × 7 medium-format, film camera, only making use of natural light. The resulting photographs are presented on a scale that allows the viewer to approach the subject as if approaching another human. Yet, through meticulous composition, Sussman often obscures the precise size of the organism. Indeed, much of Sussman’s project uses scale in order to dismantle anthropocentric divisions between Nature and humans. Human viewers connect to the concept of Deep Time through images of a living, material link. And these organisms become more human, more immediate, when presented on human scale. A scale that Sussman emphasizes in the size of her prints, and also by referring to her subjects as ‘individuals’ and to her photographs as ‘portraits.’ We come to see these individuals, not as exemplars of their species, anonymous specimens, categorized and preserved for the accumulation of knowledge, but as singular beings with strange, fascinating lives, determined as much by the contingencies of environment and human activity as by their DNA, and through Sussman’s work, endowed with the ability to speak. — Lingling Yang

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Paul Laffoley: Organizing Providence

Paul Laffoley, Thanaton III, 1989. Oil, acrylic, ink, lettering on canvas. 73 1/2" x 73 1/2" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts The operating system for this painting instructs the viewer to touch the upright hands, stare into the eye, and pitch their consciousness into a kite allowing for astral travel. 153

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My appreciation of Paul Laffoley’s “thought forms” stems from their existence as actual paintings. It surprised me to first see one in person at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore—it was analogous to seeing my first Mondrian in person and understanding the physicality of the brushstrokes. If the text on the canvas can be considered mark-making, then the scale of the reproduction sometimes renders Laffoley’s strokes illegible. Paul Laffoley has a long-standing interest in architecture. He was a student at Harvard’s GSD, leaving after a dispute with a professor who dismissed Frank Lloyd Wright in favor of Le Corbusier. Laffoley told me, “I’ve liked architecture for the one reason that you can’t start a building without diagrams. That’s how I’ve always started too.” The paintings feel like blueprints attempting to detail universal philosophical and spiritual models as functional systems or structures. The geometry that Laffoley lays out on the painted plain acts as a supporting lattice to connect the content. As a painter and comic book reader, I am interested in where and when an eye travels on the canvas. This element of time inherent in looking at a painting also seems to be at the center of Laffoley’s work, like any painting they can perceived through a gestalt understanding (for example how a Chinese person with no knowledge of the western alphabet might view them) but they are also paintings that want to be read. The images are geometric abstractions and the ideas schematized within the paintings are also abstract.

In our conversation, the psychoanalyst in me was looking for origin stories, primal scenes behind his paintings. I was excited to see that his early work from the 1960s was super in tune and consistent with the painting he was working on when I visited him in his studio in Boston. As I listened for clues among his stories, he talked about his brief time in New York in 1963 working for Minuro Yamasaki on plans for the World Trade Center. One of his jobs was to show floor plans to potential occupants of the towers. It felt like a formal clue when he mentioned all the plans had the same, square layout – it seemed so clearly a deep-seeded imprint, an antecedent to years of square, painting composition. How can you not hang on every detail of a man who is himself so tickled by coincidence? Even the presence of Ad Reinhart in the anecdote that follows had me reeling over the connection between the power within the shades of a single color, and the grid as something within a painting that moves in and out of our perception. —Joey Frank

Paul Laffoley, The Number Dream, 1968. Oil, acrylic, ink on canvas. 73 1/2" x 73 1/2" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts In 2001, Laffoley was in an accident that ultimately resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Fans of his made him this prosthetic Lion's leg because he was born under the zodiac sign Leo. Photo Credit: Joey Frank 155

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The Warhol Story I don't like composition in paintings, I think composition is hype. You are taught to have positive and negative space. You got to have something over here, opposite weight on the other side and all that sort of stuff, and I said, “I don’t work that way. I want to get into the painting fast.” So I wanted a compositionless format. That’s how I began with the mandalic structure. How I got onto the mandala was when I worked for Warhol. When I first got to New York in 1963, I started calling up artists that were in magazines and he was the only one that responded. I mean, most of those guys are hidden, shaking in a room that somebody’s going to see what they're doing and copy them. I called up Jim Dine and he said, “Why do you want to meet me? Do you want to paint like me?” I said, “No, I just was hoping for advice.” You know, like any kid, I wanted to talk to the stars. Warhol was very open, he said, “Meet me at the Allan Stone Gallery, on 86th Street.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “What have you got going on?” and I said, “I was just kicked out the architecture school at Harvard for disliking Corbusier...” Alan Stone was one of the first to accept pop art at his gallery because a lot of Europeans really didn’t like it. I remember on a trip to Europe in like 1965 they said, “You're American?” They say, “Why do you do pop art? You must be nuts.” And they hated it. They really hated Roy Lichtenstein because he has a European name and there’s a country with the same name. I go upstairs into the Allan Stone Gallery, but I don’t see anyone who looks like Warhol, there’s somebody that I didn’t know standing around looking at the art. I was carrying this suitcase and I got tired of carrying it so I stuck it up against the wall. Then, Alan Stone walked in with a checklist and a collector. He was selling things like junk, like light bulbs and really funky stuff off the wall. He had this rap about what everything was, but the collector said, “I don’t want to buy a light bulb, I can buy my own light bulbs.” Then he paused and asked, “Well, what about this suitcase?” Alan Stone thought quickly, 156

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“Oh, that's called Lonesome Traveler. Notice how the artist has turned the handle inward so that it’s facing the wall.” The other man in the room had turned to watch and said, “You stupid fools. That's just a suitcase. I saw somebody walk in with it.” And at that moment, Warhol comes in, sees this, laughs his head oﬀ. He says, “I'm going to start working with suitcases,” to the man who was standing there, because that man was Ad Reinhardt. After that, we went to a cafe around the corner and ordered Cokes. Warhol said, “Okay, open up your suitcase.” I had made a model of a factory fitted into the suitcase and Warhol goes nuts about it. He loved it. He starts examining it and asks, “When did you start doing architectural models as pop art?” I said, “Well, you just thought of that. You do it.” And then Alan Stone was looking at my drawings and he says, “These I like. They look like renderings of buildings but they have feeling in them.” And Warhol practically throws up because what he wanted was something that had no feeling. So anyways, we went outside. Alan Stone goes back to his gallery and we're walking along and these really raunchy chicks come up to Warhol and go, “Sssss.” These were people who worked for Vogue and Warhol used to chase them around begging for jobs but since he had suddenly become a big star they didn't know how to respond.

Blueprint for floors 35 - 40 of World Trade Center Tower A. Ad Reinhardt, Abstract Painting no. 4, 1961. Oil on linen. 60 1/8" x 60 1/4" Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum TV Color Test Patterns from WABC Channel 7 in the 1960s. 'Five Deity Mandala' from 17th Century Tibet. Courtesy of Creative Commons Paul Laffoley, The Levogyre, 1976. Ink and press type on acid free board. 24" x 12" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts

just test patterns. They had crosses, they had circles, and they were square. Warhol had said to me, “Figure out what it is on television at that time. Tell me what you think about it.” And I said, “These look exactly like Tanka paintings, Hindu Mandalas and that kind of stuff.” He says, “What the hell are you talking about?” I say, “That's what they are because in most mandalas, you have a cross in some way. Then you have circles, and the circles are like fire and then you have like different gods around. And those gods are in multiple, it’s the same thing as when you have multiples of an object.” That was it, right then, I'm out of there. He threw me out. He said it was because I figured out within minutes what he was doing. Because he did images that were multiplied. He was doing Tanka paintings, only he was using commercial objects. And so you'll notice in many of hisworks—the single cells of the things are squares, and that kind of stuff. The only ones that were like Japanese paintings were his piss paintings where he’d get guys to piss on the canvas. And there was some special kind of metallic oil that would then settle and make an image. The rest of it was commercial imagery. So I went home, back to Boston.

We quickly got into a cab and he asks, “Well, what can you do?” I say, “Well, I can do carpentry and plumbing.” He says, “I don’t want you to do that. You're going to watch television.” And I respond, “I'm going to watch television? And you're going to give me a place to sleep?” He says, “Yeah. And you're going to watch television in the men’s room.” Up on Lexington Avenue, way up, there was an abandoned fire station. Warhol says, “You're going to go into this room inside. I have a lot of televisions set up and I've got times for people to watch. Since you're the new guy, you're going to watch between 2 am and 6 am, at night.” Well back then there wasn’t programming all night long. On the television at that hour it was 157

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Paul Laffoley, The Urban Fossickated Octave, Oil, acrylic. lettering on canvas. 51" x 51" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts 158

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Astrakakiteraboat explained by Paul LaďŹ&#x20AC;oley

This painting tells the story of the first legitimized Egyptian architect named Imhotep who designed step pyramids for King Zoser. I created a narrative in which the architect lives in the 20th century, imagining that he would have intuitively worked with kites. The kites would be analogous to ka; the flight of the Egyptian soul after it leaves the body during death. Before the Wright Brothers, kites were at the forefront of invention and innovation. Kites are a perfect ka metaphor because the string connects the juxtaposing forces of a person's body weight to the breeze which allow the kite to fly. This functional tethering to a physical apparatus would directly mirror the ancient Egyptian architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s perception of soul. So in this painting, the kite functions as a physical manifestation of the ka. Since the ancient Egyptians used boats as their main form of transportation up and down the Nile, the architect would have naturally been drawn to boats as the most rational substitute for the body. This line of thinking brought me to the idea that the kite-drawn-boat would be a perfect place to practice astral projection.The anatomy of the kite would need to consist of two things: a tail and a message sender. The message box in the painting is made large enough to hold humans. The kite in the painting is a huge box kite, 69 ft tall, and opens up like a series of steps.

Paul Laffoley, Astrakakiteraboat, 1983. Oil, acrylic, ink and letters on canvas. 68" x 74" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts

I considered whether or not Imhotep would be designing flying saucers if he were alive today. Flying saucers operate by transforming the polarity of positive ions to negative ions in the front and conducting the ions to the back. A Boeing 747 has to form a catenary turn, but the saucer operates against nature since nature and can move any direction easily. Those ships were created and dreamed up in the 20th century by agnostics uninhibited by a religious belief. Imhotep's mind was connected to his religion, he would not have gravitated towards saucers because there would be no correlation between body and soul to ground and flight.

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Paul Laffoley, Alice Pleasance Liddell, 1968. Oil, acrylic, ink on canvas. 73 1/2" x 49 1/2" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts 162

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Sexuality of Robots Usually I look at any text or artwork ready to make associative connections to other texts or artworks. In a Paul Laffoley work like The Sexuality of Robots, all the references and labels are the works themselves. It's as though Laffoley constructs an associative essay onto the canvas so that the viewers find an argument complete with a hierarchy that includes an "Homage To" part of the artwork that cites people whose work has lead Laffoley to the conclusions on the rest of the canvas. The Sexuality of Robots asks to be unpacked—a sort of bento-box that presents itself as collage but actually shares a phenomenological appeal with "Op-art." The picture plane is meant to vibrate with pattern, asking our eyes to move to read, glance and relate. Connecting the 20th century myths of Pinocchio and Frankenstein as precedents of robotics would be insight enough, but relating them to the stone Venus of Willendorf (an enigmatic relic dating from 20,000 years ago), as a kind of very early sexualized robot, seems totally profound. When I asked Laffoley to discus how we might be making robots to, as he says, "participate in our sexual world," he brought up the movie Her, by Spike Jonze. As Laffoley describes it, the protagonist falls in love with an operating system because she has a female voice, but, "eventually she finds the ghost of Allen Watts and he starts telling her that there are millions of people out there to love. Artificial intelligence is like living architecture, your house can reject you!" That human's might create robots as sexual others who in turn sexually reject human kind is a deep underlying conclusion lingering in the adjacent work.

Paul Laffoley, Sexuality of Robots, 2009. Photo collage, ink, colored pencil, vinyl lettering. 31" x 31" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts.

The paintings that follow are two of Laffoley's works from the 1960s that have only one reference figure per painting. They almost come oﬀ as portraits, and each features a reproductions of a portrait: the first of writer and philosopher Ayn Rand, and the second of, Alice Liddell the namesake for the protagonist of Alice in Wonderland, striking a philosophical pose. —Joey Frank 165

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Paul Laffoley, Ayn Rand on Love, 1960's, Oil and acrylic on canvas. 49"x49" Courtesy of Kent Fine Arts 166

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Dan Asher: Wonder Wheel

Following spread Left: Pastel on paper, 1980's. Right: Oilstick on paper, 1980's Opposite: C-print, 1990's

All work courtesy of the Dan Asher Estate. 169

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Top: Installation view, 1992. Photograph by Aurel Scheibler Ink on paper, 1990's Silver gelatin print, 1970's Bottom: Three C-Prints, 2000's

Opposite: C-print, 1997

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Artist statement from Dan Asher's notebook: "In this direct and intuitive approach to painting I seek to show the relationship of the human physiognomy to the forces of nature. It can also be seen as a response to the maudlin, mawkish regurgitation of pop on classic imagery which is prevalent in much of today’s art in this increasing electronically flattened universe. As the world is rapidly being turned into an arena of space-age bellicosity with distinct images of adolescent arcade game combativeness by the proponents of the attenuated pyramid scheme which goes under the moniker of free -market capitalism and severely ar thritic ideational carcass of the creaking behemoth of later-day communism. As the superpowers seek to lead us headlong down the road toward conflagration, with the indefensible mayhem of military buildup and nuclear proliferation, I attempt to evoke a sense of wonderment and reciprocity which pervaded many pre-industrial societies which I believe must be coupled with clean- eyed, ideologically un-besmirched approach to the world socioeconomic problems, which draws its main inspiration from the wellsprings of human creativity, cooperation and innovation as propounded in Jane Jacob’s recent book Cities and Wealth of Nations.”

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From left: Ink on paper, 1980's Pastel on paper, 1980's C-print, 2000's Ink on paper, 1990's Early portrait of Debby Harry, silver gelatin print, 1970's 176

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C-print, 1997 C-print, 2000's 178

DAN ASHER

“I think it’s important to go beyond what we know and are comfortable with or fearful of. It’s also important to take a view about the world that isn’t just cynical. Cynicism is easy. And it can be totally right. But do we want to spend so much energy not doing something?” —Dan Asher One of Dan Asher’s haunts was the Russian Baths on East 10th Street. He liked to socialize in the sauna with other regulars, sometimes arguing, sometimes singing. In a city where personal appearance is so highly controlled, body culture at the baths is unique. A place in whose dingy, crowded basement New Yorkers not only take oﬀ their clothes, but drop some of the pretense, too. Asher’s work has a similar intimacy. There’s very little armature. It doesn’t have complicated conceptual schemes, but leads to unlikely places through unassuming passageways. Sometimes the images have the premonition-like feeling of a deer in the woods; even when they seem known, or recognizable, they have the slightly mysterious quality of appearance—of something perceived before it’s known. It’s hard to say what is revealed, and how it all ties together, but there’s an unmistakable sense of fascination for the world. You come to it, first and foremost, because Asher has come to it—you look, because he is looking so intently. If there is an organizing principle in a career that spans subjects as various as homeless people in Japan and the aurora borealis; mediums as diverse as photography, oil stick, video, pen, and clay, it is a pervasive sense of wonder. Asher’s fascination with the phenomenal, or unusual, transcends personal obsession. His work restores dignity to subjects that might otherwise be objectified, and renders intimate ones that first appear distant or monumental. Without glorification, or irony, his pictures of people with Down syndrome, or backyard wrestlers, co-exist with the vast scale of the natural world—oceans, ice-

bergs, mountains. Everything seems to communicate on a human level—realities existing within realities, instead of oddities or exceptions. Even when the imagery seems most arcane—in his oil stick masks, and tiny organism drawings— Asher never seems like he’s withholding information, or being esoteric. These shadowy forms feel like the result of direct observation, deep personal experience. Asher has said the drawings emerged from sensations he found overwhelming or inexplicable. The work is produced in the midst of experience, not reflecting on it later. Sometimes the feeling is chaotic, furious, the colors bold and bruised, the lines speaking all at once. At others the gestures are elegant and minute, like explorations made under a finely tuned microscope. Asher’s struggle with autism and bipolar disorder meant his interactions with people could sometimes seem obsessive or unhinged. He had numerous shows, both in New York and worldwide, but fraught relationships with dealers meant that he usually didn’t have representation. He was distinctly aware of the way his personality prevented the work from getting more attention, but autism never impeded his output. A documentary made at the end of his life, called A Near Life Experience, shows him wading through a strata of drawings, photographs and other objects strewn across his apartment—literally kicking it aside to walk. As bills mounted for cancer treatment, Asher often sold his work from a table on the street. He died of leukemia in 2010, broke, but with the hope his work would reach a greater audience without him. — Catherine Despont

179

7.9.05 Ground Maneuver. There are a few things I like about this one. Firstly, we find ourselves in “Firework Season;” the nature of collecting stuff off the streets everyday means that you find different things depending on the time of year, and July is just full of fireworks. It also has these markers of important occasions in people's lives...the Baptism cake topper, the little sweet 16 ribbons, there is something really sweet and personal about them. Like what is that little baby up to now? And so on. I found most of this stuff on Columbia St, just a few blocks from here. 180

Kenan Juska: Daily Operation

181

P ORTFOLIOS

Everyday Kenan Juska would take himself on a little walk with his eyes on the ground, looking for discarded pieces of culture. Each day’s haul would then be arranged on a 7 x 12 inch panel of wood. Seven days a week, twelve months a year— each day recorded in debris, glued together into its own memorial marker. What emerges resembles a kind of calendar but not a personal one. It is not a chronology. It is a map of shifting culture. And of conflicting cultures, sewn together. It is a topographical relief calendar. It is a kind of calendar that marks the passage of time in the haphazard way we forget. The recent past in the recently discarded. I see, as well, a familiar landscape of a vanishing Brooklyn (where the majority of these materials were collected), the Brooklyn that both Kenan & I grew up in. Some of those vacant lots that Kenan used to haunt have now become condominiums. Perhaps the trash is picked up more regularly now, the hedges are trimmed, the alleyways swept. And perhaps there will be fewer scribbled notes in our paperless future, fewer drug-store developed snapshots to be found in the draingrates. All of this only makes me more grateful to have these pieces. They read to me like signposts for our fading memories, pointing us down the side streets, around the back of the schoolyard, through the windows of the 6-story apartment building across the way, down the hall, past the landlady’s apartment, up the fire-escape and onwards, into the beyond. —Kray Dio Belly

182

KENAN JUSKA

1.13.06 sitting sideways. This is another one that's a little hazy for me in terms of the specifics of where I found everything, but I think this is a nice visual example of how all these unrelated materials can click together compositionally and find a nice synergy. 183

P ORTFOLIOS

10.18.05 more pills please. There is something about this one that feels very â&#x20AC;&#x153;rightâ&#x20AC;? to me. The construction of the collages was a very meditative process, and sometimes things would just fall into place, almost subconsciously. It also contains a couple of the recurring thematic elements that come up throughout the entire series: religious imagery and (self) medication, and happens to be the day I would marry my wife three years later. 184

KENAN JUSKA

3.15.06 hit by lightning. So this one really strikes a chord with me, because this unsolved murder was kind of an infamous thing in my neighborhood and something that I was peripherally aware of growing up. The story is that Thomas F. McAvoy, a postal employee and family man, left his house on a snowy night in March 1976 and was shot and killed on the corner of President Street and Fourth Avenue. He was not robbed, no motive was ever established, and his killer was never found. There are often signs like the one you see in this collage along with flowers attached to a lamppost on the block. I found this near a garbage can on the corner of Fourth Avenue. I thought of the fact that someone in Mr. McAvoy's family (his wife I believe) continues to print up the sign and hang it on the lamppost all these years later in hopes of finding an answer to what might've happened to him. Someone else came along and callously ripped it down and tossed it toward the garbage can. Growing up in Brooklyn when I did, mostly the 80s and 90s, crime—and street crime in particular—was very much at the forefront of my consciousness. I was robbed for the first time when I was about five years old, walking down the street with my babysitter. I've seen a lot of crazy things over the years—a lot of desperate, senselessly cruel and violent acts. I think that's why the thought of this man walking to the subway and never returning home always resonated deeply with me. Like it could happen to anyone…like getting hit by lightning. 185

P ORTFOLIOS

4.23.06 Jarmells. This is a strange one for me, because I remember being so happy when I found all these soaps, but I don't remember anything else about the day I found them; where I was, what I was doing, and so on. Something that I think is cool here is that judging from the design, these soaps look like they are from the 80s. Who saved all this soap? And why did they decide to throw them out on this day? I also like that Lifebuoy is the oďŹ&#x192;cial soap of the NBA. At first I thought of doing a collage with the labels, but I loved the way the bars looked together, so I just kept them as I found them. 186

KENAN JUSKA

187

▹ P ORTFOLIOS

INDEX

Rachel Sussman

114

146

147

149

150

152

154

155

156

157

159

160

163

164

167

168

170

171

172

170

172

173

174

Paul Laﬀoley

PORTFOLIOS

Dan Asher

188

Dan Asher (continued)

175

176

177

178

183

184

177

185

186

Kenan Juska

VISUAL INDEX

180

189

▹ FOOTER

INDEX

THE MOST INTERESTING MOMENT FOR ME ABOUT IMAGINING OTHER MINDS IS IMAGINING OTHER MINDS INTERACTING WITH ARTWORKS

HE HAS SEX WITH ALIENS, BUT IT'S ABOUT A LIBERAL PATERNALISM

WHY DO WE CALL THE SKY “UP” WHEN WE KNOW THAT WE LIVE ON A SPHERICAL WORLD AND THERE IS NO DIRECTION?

MERE REALITY IS POVERTY

THE WORST FUNCTION OF FICTION IS IDENTIFICATION.

YOU ALSO DON'T WANT TO BE SOMEONE WHO MAKES ART ABOUT THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF ART

THE NOVEL IS A VERY CONSERVATIVE KIND OF TELEVISUAL FORM IN THE HANDS OF MOST PEOPLE. THERE WAS ROOM FOR GROWTH, AND SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE ALL OF THESE DIFFERENT SUBCULTURES KIND OF FUSED

THE NEW AVANT-GARDE IS MAKING YOUR CHILDREN SANDWICHES IN THE MORNING

THERE'S NO WRONG WAY TO FUCK A GIRL WITH NO LEGS

I FEEL LIKE ULTIMATELY THE SOCIETY WE WANT TO LIVE IN IS BASICALLY A FEMINIST SOCIETY.

WE LIKE TO BE FAGGOTS. WE'RE THE FAGGOTS.

YOU SIT IN A GAZEBO AND STARE AT A FIELD, IMAGINING ALL THOSE MILLIONS OF BODIES IN THERE

IT WASN'T UNTIL SHE FOUND THE DEATH CERTIFICATE—BY LUCK SHE SAYS—THAT SHE WAS ABLE TO START PIECING THINGS TOGETHER.

ONLY THOSE STRUCK BY LIGHTNING WERE REFUSED PROPER BURIAL OUTRIGHT

STORY TELLING IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE GRIEVING PROCESS

TO DIE OF GRIEF MEANS TO STAY WHERE THE DEAD ARE

WE WANTED TO HAVE CONTROL OVER OUR DESTINIES. WE DIDN'T WANT TO JUST BE BLOWN IN THE WIND

IF I GIVE YOU A WIGGLY LINE, AND I GIVE YOU A POINT TO START, YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO

IMPROVISATION IS A SPEEDED UP FORM OF COMPOSITION

IT’S WHAT MUSIC BRINGS YOU IN CONTACT WITH

I HAD A BOOK ON DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS AT BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE

NUMBERS HAVE A MAGIC COMPONENT TO THEM.

I BEGAN TO HAVE A FEELING ABOUT THE COLOR OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY

IN INDIA, FOR INSTANCE, MATHEMATICIANS THINK OF LOVE-MAKING POSITIONS AS A POSSIBLE KNOT.

THERE WAS ALL KINDS OF MONKEY BUSINESS GOING ON

IT MIGHT BE AS BIG A REVOLUTION AS WHEN EINSTEIN FIRST LOOKED AT NEWTON’S IDEA OF PERMANENT TIME

WHY CAN I ONLY ROLL DOWN A HILL? WHY CAN'T I TURN AROUND AND GO BACK UP?

OUR ASSUMPTION THAT OUR WILL TRANSCENDS THE LAWS OF PHYSICS IS SILLY.

WHATEVER HAPPENS ON THAT DAY, WAS GOING TO HAPPEN AS SOON AS THE UNIVERSE WAS CREATED

WHEN WE’RE AT THE FRONTIER WE DON’T KNOW WHICH PATH IS RIGHT.

I DON’T THINK PEOPLE ARE ANY SMARTER TODAY THAN THEY WERE 2,000 YEARS AGO

MAGIC IS A WAY OF SHOWING THAT THE UNIVERSE ISN'T WHAT WE THINK IT IS.

ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT THINGS I TRY TO DO—IS MEMORIZE THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE BY NAME.

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT THE REAL SECRETS IN THE BOOKS

IT WAS THE VERY FIRST PUBLICATION TO DEAL WITH THE THEN-NEW TECHNOLOGY OF VIDEO

AUDIENCES GATHERED AROUND SEVERAL SMALL SCREENS IN AN...INVERSION OF FAMILY HOME TELEVISION VIEWING

READERS COULD SEND BLANK TAPES AND CASH AND HAVE THEIR TAPE FILLED UP WITH SELECTED PROGRAMMING

ANT FARM COLLECTIVE'S MOBILE “MEDIA VAN” ALLOWED THE ARTISTS TO PRODUCE AND PRESENT THEIR VIDEOS ON-THE-ROAD

DON’T FEEL TOO BAD FOR THESE MEAT PUNKS

LOWER GANGLIA, NEURO-FLUIDIC, SUB-PHALLUS, FLESH-CORDS, SYNAPSE BRAINLET, PENILE PROTRUSIONS, INPUT SPHINCTER...

THEY LEAPT AT THE FLESH PHYSICIAN, FIRST SINGLY, THEN IN PAIRS...

100 THAT DEVICE YOU'VE INSERTED INTO YOUR SKULL REPRESENTS A CERTAIN TYPE OF AUDIO 101 WE MADE IT MORE SPECIFIC TO UP TO 360 MICROTONES SO I COULD DIFFERENTIATE SUBTLE DIFFERENCES OF REDS 104 THE BEST JAZZ SESSIONS ARE STARTED IN DARK ROOMS WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED 106 THE BEST PLACE TO SEE KUNG FU FILMS WAS ON FORTY DEUCE, A.K.A 42ND STREET 107 MARTIAL ARTS HAD PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF BREAKDANCING 108 THE KUNG FU WILD STYLE EXHIBITION INTERPRETED IMAGES OF BRUCE LEE THROUGH VARIOUS PAINTING STYLES 111 BRUCE LEE HAS NEVER BEEN APPROPRIATELY EMBRACED BY THE HONG KONG GOVERNMENT. 114 BRO ORIGINS, MEN INTERACTING WITH OBJECTS BETWEEN MEN 115 RYDER RIPPS' AXE PAINTING (2011) AESTHETICIZES THE NON-AESTHETIC OF THE BRO 116 HAVE YOU EVER KNOWN SOMEONE IN PORN? 117 BROS ARE NEVER A JOKE ANYMORE THAN THEY'RE NOT A JOKE, THEY'RE POST-JOKE. 118 IT IS SUMMER AND MY TIME TO THINK OF BILL CLINTON 119 THE PRESIDENT IS THE ULTIMATE BRO 120 DO THEY LIKE THEIR JPEG BOTOX? 121 WE WRITE, WE LOOK, WE TROLL. 122 GUYS, I'M STILL ALIVE.

190

FOOTER INDEX

MISC.

Michael Crawford, The Postman Always Brings Mice

Artist Astrology by Joey Frank

, m r a le e d uz z l n or o p i a e -h t t tor th n g an r a k ES t r o t w s p i Mar . I t ’s d in I AR a s i g h o n of ngs ste er. A s u m h e c i o n s aw i t e r e p ow p l e g y o er t ellat ’s dr e in e of sim i z i n ov n s t a r d i t o b b u s h i s g a n c i t y c o m b w ay d a o u t t o r a p a Lo ies e an g ab t s a n’s c ion. A r e u s t hin m p r ai i si t e en t h me at te ur b cqu et w ke So ncil to o g e a n b c e r k li r e c k p e e a k g u a i a t i o t r a wo i c t u s p e s p r lan got l e to in a ig P ess fo e ne ab ili t y he B p el Th eling n sib r a, t a ho f e s p o o n t i ke b . re n - C e el l we I ra to f rg er or a la in

CAPR IC ORN As the sea go at, you each d ac ay o f y our life knowledg e the nex fo t a s yo u climb llows and go atfis and up footed out o h -t ailed f the oc the mo e u Today paintin ntain, like the an gp Kawara . It ’s th rojec t of On e Capri to crav co e essenc the fac tual, s rn way erious e of so unlock m a ething s the c ale the abs as ratio ndar da trac t re wit h th nal es la te a wall te e markers of tionship we h in ord er to time on umans x t abou h d ay h e e t a a O v rt e n h. Th e Kawara w phrase ’s d ay s h o ke u p a n d p on ainted projec t read, e did n othing Capric ,” some the day's date “every ornian , on oth thing th work e as salv er a thic, bu e. t might t might ir k the b ett er serve

VIRGO As the beautiful virgin, you might appreciate a specific piece of music without sound by composer John Zorn called “Theater of Musical Optics.” It’s the Virgo way to keep an eye out for bits and pieces. Zorn collected small discarded materials and arranged them in a way that felt musical, performing with them in time before a movie camera. Often thought of as a neat freak or detail oriented, its nice to embody a serious whimsy whistle while you work.

PI O i s o n h n i d , o OR c s SC t h e p a r a t ion g As ldin oll ec ress t s o e p l i c b m e w al i ink nn ur yo m i c t h e a e ch h a s H er m hi s t est . c n s u d by c h i a r d ay e a c u s r sc h t e n - i o w i n p Ro o u s c o r o p l e t S m fa the ge pe e firs s a ’ t g n. Th s s of m I en to at io mne g t he n do i m an , kin e xa r ma Th rd s al e g t h e e m , mal. n c a rop c i g llin t h for y te to c o l d h o n t r o o f o l h ow o n l sh i p s o f yc p s a t c o a s t o m e m a ke o l a r a t i o n d y i n t h w s o ep d e e m p t l o t s a n d a s t o e sc r p r e e r y b s e a t t i n k b r i c a l r o l w d e n s i n t d ev t n e t e u e a r h n o ls, t mm co mo ar i sy o n d f o r h e v i o n a t g c s se win und of es o all p a ro s, p r u ient . t pa een tw be

e ar ou e , y tiv ur s th he ta bu wi ’s t en en om ng . I t ld S I U al c e c lidi m e go k . AR su th col l fla ld a ric cal p gi . f T T en ith ie a G I e s w ind ic w t to lo St er o d SA s t h t i n g f m h e m y t o t e n h e o y o f u n t l d e e A r s y o alc wa in al t a s co f gi r bl bu erg in ius ing t r ic c st en s o ma is e n d y t a r a s h e a e E t h e r ay h e t h h e h e bo git , fl s th f th ys in st t l in of t a, t S a r ow i n i ’ e o r t r a r t h a i n n g e a d r e s i t y ar r n tur po ea ag A he he d e B e ulp e sa a n d g h t ki sh t h e d T e of a l sc e r e n n li u c b e d e n c e r n T h av l s u e p u l d r o u d a , i n t h e et a . Th c o e sh Th e en . m sh sy th y. urd ius fle sta ur, bod f b t tar Ec nta e’s st o agi ce r s ea f S ho d b e o an gin en

LIBRA As the ever-balancing scales, you would empathi ze with Jordan Wolfson’s recent robotic figure, a golden haired Golem dancing in front of her mirrored reflection. It’s the Libra way to complic ate their relationship with beauty. The fulcrum the pole juts out of where point of this sculpture is the the lower chest of this lady Justice where she meets izes the mirror. The mask that she looks out of emphas ce. that we never see our own face, even our game-fa

LE As O mi a p p o ght roud se i se alre lion r e l f - c o c o m a d y , yo a f a d J n t r o e s t h k n ow u a r m o u e n ny l ev r o u t h e ma yo r e m s m H o e n a g h a t ha nt ra f r o u c a i n d e s s l z e r s yo v u ac e c b e Le m y n pr ed t a g e ’s m u k n o o nv c a u s t r u o wa our s ot ec hat and w i c e c led tio it so h ism y t elf t y onl jun me som ge t n in take s a o ac . I t ’s ours y t t h gl e hing et im hat our s co s op kno t he elf p r o s e e nv s . H e s , w e m l a n d u r a e r a w l e d o s i n f p e r h a r i r o n o l z e b u t ay s c a g e t o t i n g g e po or m ties ed s men r ’s we d not b pe a n d a t i . I t p a t o wo o b e l n d ie er on m ce f t r k he i n g o ay s i n e l i e ve w h ve r b e b e t w u r b h a b ve i n i n b a i a y s ra t e he nd p ref en p n lio s t he ne ing ere r iv n, ve , b n c a t r u ut e f e se i t ’ or sn sw eo or n. th

AQU A A s t R I US h b ea r e wat er e que r, you s au t h t ion o sub r it y, an li d mig me ans t he h wer Bar n t b e in O ne e t t N ew man m pain ent ’s t t he ings wh a ve r t r t i s t u s e r e ed ic a l s to tr a d e e p i c t p a r t f r o ks o m th m o m r i a l “ su e Sch b o as t h ent ”(su lime by T ol’s ver ch ev d h t h f a vo o m a s C a n t n a t e Hu i si on o u r it se of t he s ole, ano re in a dson R f l la iv f t scie . I t ’s t he ublimit y her Aqu rg e c an er n New t i fic ae Aquar iu of t he p ar ius) in vas s m on A an’s B t het ic t s way t aint ing o r r b et w mer ic a oken O ut hs, t h polit ici w be e ze e w e li n s Pi k t w hile h , o ay s e c c o s e sn a p s, G e o n e i g h b i t u a t e s m m en t o rg s t r ibu p ed in h e Wash r ing sig himself n Lut h te to as alf and ing ton m s – a p s er K ing assinat ointed d onume Jr. nt ed C ow a p r i c o n t o p ay r n, M ar t in

n, R CANCE ed crustac ea w n As a cla t fe el a froze h you mig nding of the ta res und ers lass sculptu ng . It ’s two -to in ll e Y tin of Dus er way to e c the Can the chaos of th e g bing b e mana l a d in a ti ocean ese tion. Th phies” of emo og eogra “psych ll the paint a ed contain nd claw snipp a larg e energy a e k li , at fe els them melt ing d in wh e into a imagin olidate g s n to in o r c e rn tu b ett ines , slowly gh the floor maga z water. M ayb e s wit hin f rou block o ty of the bodie ir contents th e u a the b e nd se eping th a upply. puddle water s into the

TAURU S As a be efy bull , you m want to igh a hori zon bsorb the wid t e o around f the great pla n Ja m e s Turrell’s es Ro d e n Crater p rojec t. It ’s the Taurus way to c alm in se e th spac e b e comfort able k etwe en an endle pasture sc ale o a s f this p Someth nd blanketing s art icula and hid ing sk y. r oc de of the M n nature migh ulus and it s s about the my th ubterra inotaur t help u ic ne s postu if the A Th e mo nc late the an m L abyrin of light ents of silenc ient G re eks w th e, ere it self as a mir ro exp eriencing th Q uakers. r to our e full va inner li stness ght.

t the ok a ylons ht lo mig er ing p ands. u o y ow ding h ins, INI l wo t t G E M s e t o f t w g e a s t i ve r h o c o n n e c R id As a klyn Br e East t r y and t hough ing, h t d o o t t e n o in , a em fle ling ay Br ther ding ini w e st an e G em ve tog e t imes s A . Ro eb 7, h o 6 I t ’s t s t hey l ight at c e John e in 18 A . g m g t hin ef for t s ever sin t he br id hing ton cut s r i i d a e in e t W h t st ar is son o a G em h 1883, t h s and ling, al May 24 ve b n a Ro e i b b o n o e o p l e h n d a r t he p es of p d bac k et we en b e y t t ica the air all n u m h co m t hroug . s for t h orough b the

PI S A s CES yo t h e E i n u r l i f t wo m a s t e e i s sw i m i m a ke s n c o m o t m i n i Tim n Pi sen me o on A g fis s sa e, S sc e s e r i n k n l b e r h g m o f f e a p a c t h i s h t ? ow t do a fis s lig e – m shi You this an ubl e h, a ht b a ss t t r il d a Sp d f e e , are m I e ounc i s t l. h w h e c i a d i n g yo u v e n i n g e p h a t w l Re ? B c i rc se e i l l y wo s i c e ex a t i v a h p l i n g n g an rld o al wo peri it y, b a- ta up e fis d en f ph rld nce eyo ow! nd hf a e r g ys b u i ce y – ic s t t r n the s. ke , a b u e i ep ou n t i t l t li he igh gh t t

Marcel Dzama, (For Intercourse Magazine), 2014. 17" x 14".

LONG FORM

INTERCOURSE #3

194