Kent Shaw's Blog, page 16
November 4, 2013
- Lisa Ciccarello - H_NGM_N #11 - H_NGM_N: an online journal & small press
Preface: I am watching you move in the temple made of sand. It’s a s…
Maybe Lisa Ciccarello was born in a cave. Or in the dark. Or maybe she was born inside a storm cloud, just before the storm. Somewhere most people would claim inauspicious. But her poems make clear, it was an auspicious darkness. It is a darkness operating at all levels in her poetry. In this poem, she puts the reader between the grammars of interrogation and declaration. “You” should be questioning all that takes place here, but questions are not really an option. Why are you at a temple. Why would you ask. What keeps the palace closed to “you.” Such is the nature of Ciccarello’s position in this world of the poem.
It makes me think of Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s work. That heavy, inescapable tone that make you feel you swallowed graphite. Is this what fantasy is like. Is this all we have left to face. I don’t want to leave Ciccarello’s poem, even with the heavy tone, even with her repeating circumstances, because I always feel that this kind of poem must end in resolution. Then Ciccarello shows how unnecessary resolution is.
November 2, 2013
Pop and lock organic robots!! Pop and lock industries! Pop and...
Pop and lock organic robots!! Pop and lock industries! Pop and lock robotic nonstop!
October 25, 2013
"HARLEM GAZELLE, by Harmony Holiday
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There’s nowhere between the merely savage and the..."
HARLEM GAZELLE, by Harmony Holiday
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There’s nowhere between the merely savage and the merely sentimental so nowhere snaps into a local
dissatisfied and free
zone. Choreographing a solo for mulatto dancer about the whites only mourners bench Billie Holiday describes seeing in her childhood church. The dancer is forever/half/there, haunting each lament with the math in her movements and considered movements. Running toward the bench, then backing away, then leaping toward it again, then scooting away on her ass, as if from some predator, then tiptoeing up to ask permission to join again, then sitting, then crying, then running away, then turning back to ask for forgiveness, then nevermind, then turning back to say nevermind, then being asked to join, then the mourners can’t mourn without the math in her movements and considered movements. Then she no longer cares. Then she hides from them. Then she builds a new church, a blacks only mourners bench. That doesn’t work either. Impossibility is a destiny and she reaches its needles and spins on them like they mention pop song heroine in gardens from where she’s been left out of the myth and written new ones in a two-way language. The roosters catch on and jiggle their coos something urgent and tender as she sidles between them like movie shot in Manhattan stoop feet dawn from now on, dissatisfied and free
”- from jubilat 23. Wow. Like wow. Like were you ever wondering what an art installation that was meant to commemorate the Civil Rights Movement would look like? How about a dancer? How about a dancer who is mixed race, but considered one race, who has to to make a racial statement about what is ridiculous about white people excluding and simultaneously insisting on including black people. Anger, frustration, expressiveness and anxiety all are in here, both in voice and in performance. It is absolutely outrageous to see how much historical perspective Holiday makes fit in here.
October 21, 2013
lehmannmaupin:
Check out Lehmann Maupin artist...
Check out Lehmann Maupin artist #TimRollins&KOS at FIAC, opening October 24
“Art is like prayer….if you don’t believe in it, it’s not going to do anything for you, but if you believe that this thing you made has some sort of power, then mountains can be moved. I’m talking about the mountains in your life,” says Rollins. Work by Tim Rollins and K.O.S is on view from October 24-27 at the Lehmann Maupin booth at FIAC in Paris. Click here for more information.
There may be very many of an US in here. US! It yells. US!!!!!
Sarah Sze talking about her installation at the Biennale. Then...
Sarah Sze talking about her installation at the Biennale. Then the curator at MCA Chicago giving her thoughts on Sze work with perspective. Please, please let this mean that Sze will have an installation in Chicago. How grateful I would be!
October 20, 2013
"A REPORT ON LOVE AND WRESTLING, by Jeff Tigchelaar
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Love and Wrestling first came to..."
A REPORT ON LOVE AND WRESTLING, by Jeff Tigchelaar
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Love and Wrestling first came to Massachusetts
In the Year of Our Lord 1620. The quarters were tight
On the Mayflower. Love was about
Nine years old; Wrestling,
A little bit younger.
Love and Wrestling were brothers.
Their father, William Brewster, was the leader of the
Separatist.
When Love and Wrestling were in their youth,
America hadn’t even been born. The country was yet just
A spangle in its mother’s weary eye.
Love and Wrestling were known to frolic
In the fields of Plymouth Plantation.
They managed to survive
Those terrible winters, and even the Indians
Proved friendly. By this time Fear had already arrived.
And also Jonathan.
Patience was longer in coming.
It came to pass that Love grew up.
He married, and fathered four children.
We knew much less about Wrestling.
- from Summer 2013 Pleiades. If you were going to tell the allegorical history of the United States colonization, wouldn’t you start with the two figures of Love and Wrestling? That’s what Tigchelaar did. And look at how boyish and brotherly they are. They earnest and physical. They are passionate and passionate. Just like they would be as “a spangle in [a] mother’s weary eye.” What a great touch for Tigchelaar to add the allegorical figures of Fear and Jonathan [Edwards, I presume] and Patience to the beginning of the country.
October 18, 2013
"YEAR OF THE PEACOCK, by Michael Loughran
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I hated ideas.
I wanted to eat beans,
or be a bean..."
YEAR OF THE PEACOCK, by Michael Loughran
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I hated ideas.
I wanted to eat beans,
or be a bean farmer, or be a farmer.
I was tired of myself.
Under the white noise of an airplane
bifurcating a cloud’s dumb glee,
I found some dirt to sit on.
April came, April went.
My kingdom abutted the kingdom of everything illicit.
At best, I saw one peacock.
- from Summer 2013 Pleiades. What immediately stands out to me with this poem is the peacock. And why shouldn’t it? Peacocks are pretty much the bold-faced type of the animal kingdom. But there’s only one peacock? And it’s the “Year of Peacocks”? What a horrible idea “Years of” are. If that was me, I think I’d hate ideas, too. Especially boring ones, like being a bean farmer. I’d be annoyed. I would wonder why the status of my kingdom leaves it only bordering the kingdom where all the peacocks are.
October 17, 2013
artruby:
Kaari Upson, Sleep With the Key, (2013).
I kind of...
Kaari Upson, Sleep With the Key, (2013).
I kind of want them to be regular old mattresses. I kind of want them to be hand-sewn.
October 15, 2013
artlog:
ICA Philadelphia plunged us into the brilliantly...
ICA Philadelphia plunged us into the brilliantly berserk mind of Jason Rhoades. More via GREY AREA: http://goo.gl/KxeTOd
Is this a map? A planetarium?
