RETROFUTUROLOGY

How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future

Steam Piano image courtesy Adrian Agredo.

OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 28, 8 PM
ON VIEW: Friday, January 28 – Friday, March 5, 2011
HOURS: Thursdays & Fridays 3–6 PM, Saturdays & Sundays 12–6 PM

Observatory is pleased to announce our new exhibition, RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show of visual art, curated by the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels).

Join us for the opening, Friday, January 28, at 8 PM.

About the show: To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past…

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and wires: A modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age can puncture the time barrier! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s? A steampunk 1890s?

Our visions of the future are nested. Our conception of time is hyperreal.

This is the process on which the present runs.

Come see contemporary art that investigates futures-past, futures-possible, and other nestings.

Featuring paintings, sculptures, and other works by many artists, including: Adrian Agredo, Tracey Atkinson, Emi Brady, Bunny M, Jon Burgerman, Chiezo, Devon Clapp, Jesse Corinella, Rachel Debuque, Derrick Dent, Matt Duffin, Ethan Gould, Andrea Hendrickson, Richard Herzog, Andy Hunter, Patti Jordan, John Lee, Haydex Li, Benjamin Mayock, Marianne McCarthy, Megan Murtha, George Pfau, Nick Raynolds, Matthew Robinson, Sean Star Wars, Tom Sarno, Rachel Schragis, Joelle Shallon, Greg Shelnutt, Niko Silvester, Melissa Stern, Lisa Temple-Cox, and Robin Treadwell.

RETROFUTUROLOGY
“How the Past Saw the Present // How the Present Sees the Future”

A group show of visual art at Observatory, Brooklyn,
curated by the Hollow Earth Society,
Ethan Gould & Wythe Marschall, Founding Colonels

The imagination (as a productive faculty of cognition) is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.  —Kant

To have an imagined future, you must simultaneously have an imagined present and an imagined past.

A DeLorean decked out in flashing lights and complicated-looking wires: It’s a modest-budget promise that, yes, the technologies of our age—our new computer chips and LED lights and cars with doors that open upright like a space pod—can puncture the time barrier, with the right old-fashioned mad scientist at the steering wheel! Where to go? A rowdy 1950s, wherein a white kid can invent rock and roll? A steampunk 1800s? A future wherein the promises of kaleidoscopic, holographic advertising from the late 1980s come to fruition—a world with yet another layer of retrofuturist dreaming added onto the small-town diner…?

Our visions of the future are nested.

Our conception of time is hyperreal. In explaining the visual gimmicks of a single cultural artifact such as the Buggles’s “Video Killed The Radio Star,” we must refer to the heyday of radio; the future promised by television executives in synthesizer advertisements; science fiction pulp covers from the 1950s; the neon-on-black-and-white aesthetic of MTV in its early years, not to mention the gallery scene that birthed that aesthetic; 1950s diner-decor futurism; the late-1970s body-posturing and dystopic styling of Devo; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, looking forward to 2026; the garb of mad scientists in movies from the 1940s;—and the sigh that comes with opening a magazine and seeing all of this, compressed down into an ad for sunglasses for hipsters.

Or not even for hipsters: The retrocamp fashion exemplified by an irritating blend of past and future has been recompressed and sold in shopping malls internationally. This isn’t marginal pulp—

This is the process on which the present runs.

You are invited to join us for a group show

The Hollow Earth Society seeks artists working in drawing, printmaking, and painting, and possibly sculpture and video/multimedia art (space is limited) for RETROFUTUROLOGY, a group show focused on past- and present-futures, to be up from January 29 to March 5, 2011, at Observatory. Submissions are due January 8, 2011.

How to submit:
Include all information listed below. Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered unless they are mind-staggeringly fantastic and presented with great humility.

1. Send us up to five images. Digital submissions will be accepted via email. Files must be in JPEG or PDF format. Please number your image files to correspond to your image list.
2. Send an image list. Double check that the numbers on your list correspond to the numbers in the names of your actual files.
3. In your list, include for each image: an image number, the work’s title, the date of work, the medium, and its size and price.
4. Along with the list, please include a brief description of each image.
5. Send a three-line bio, your contact information and an email address. You may also submit a résumé.
6. If you like, send an optional artist’s statement, no longer than 300 words.

THERE IS NO FEE TO ENTER.

Deadline: All email submissions must be received no later than January 8, 2011. (All accepted work should be physically received at Observatory no later than January 24, 2011.)

Return of submitted materials: Include a SASE and make sure there is sufficient postage, or pay for shipping and we will ship your work back to you. If work is two-dimensional, the Hollow Earth Society is more than happy to have it on file for future shows and keep it exhibited for sale on our website. The same 30% commission for art sold will apply.

Drop-Off: If you have been accepted into the show and are in the NYC area, you may wish to drop off your art at the gallery. Email us (gallery@hollowearthsociety.com) to schedule a date and time.

Pick-Up: Return of mailed artwork with return postage will begin on March 12, 2011.

Email submissions to:
gallery@hollowearthsociety.com

By post:
Observatory
543 Union Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215

To find out more, click here.

Anti-philosopher, literary critic, and erotica-obsessed overall word-genius Georges Bataille is a shadow-name, a name at the edges of theory. For every twenty references to a Derrida or a Foucault, there is but one to Bataille… I’m trying to read everything he wrote this year, and it’s going swimmingly. He immediately earns an Honourable Badge Of Merit.

Here a few early highlights:

In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element, which is of no consequence for itself—a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.

As one can see, I have placed the tool and the manufactured object on the same plane, the reason being that the tool is first of all a manufactured object and, conversely, a manufactured object is in a certain sense a tool.  The only means of freeing the manufactured object from the servility of the tool is art, understood as a true end.  But art itself does not as a rule prevent the object it embellishes from being used for this or that: a house, a table, or a garment are no less useful than a hammer.  Few indeed are the objects that have the virtue of serving no function in the cycle of useful activity.

—Theory of Religion.

These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature.  Literature is either the essential or nothing.  I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us.  But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a ‘hypermorality.’

Literature is communication.  Communication requires loyalty.  A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.

—Literature and Evil.

The man, looking all Nosferatu-esque. Probably thinking about “unknowledge,” the sovereign, animality, his own particular take on Marx, or—far more likely—about sex. Another possibility, given the content of his books: eating eggs. Dude must have loved him some eggs in the morning…

Extra points for the creepy child-with-cane oil in the background!

(Because I do not watch football…)

But I did make this dope-ass logo:

And my team = THE BROOKLYN SNAKES.

YEAAAH!

More strange doubling…

What is X?

THIS IS HIP-HOP! from Airwave Ranger on Vimeo.

What is X?

(But really—we’ll GET you, you hovertrucker…)

The CIA has a page for kids (thanks to Chris T. for pointing this out) that hilariously misuses (or, should i say, “misuses”) quotation marks:

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is an independent US government agency that provides national security “intelligence” to key US leaders so they can make important, informed decisions. CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Italicizing or bolding these words would have worked better… I think they think the quotation marks are “clarifying” because they “highlight” key spy “lingo.”

But given, oh, you know, critical US “intelligence” “failures”—9/11, Saddam’s not having WMDs after all, the Afghanis not welcoming us (surprise!) as liberators and bearers of heroic Freedom Fries, &c.—the marks come off as “ironic” and “mocking,” or rather “sadly hilaaarious.”

The creepiest rhetoric bon-mot here is the final admonition to the youth that yes, the CIA have real movie-quality spies, not no bullshit rent-a-spy fools in cheap tuxedos, but real laser-watch carrying badasses.

In fact, the Company’s brilliantest “intelligencers” may be right behind you, spying after all—watching you Google naughty pictures of Megan Fox and the Avatar pseudo-ladies…

Little wonder we can smuggle sensitive “intelligence” out of critical installations in Central Asia by pretending the classified info is a Lady Gaga album. Hilaaaaaaaaarious…

The spy urinal. (?) No idea. This is what came up when I Googled “spy Wikimedia” in hopes of getting an old, rights-expired photo of a Russian guy hatcheting an anarchist or something.

The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:

Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…

From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!

In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…

In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?

The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.

The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!

I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:

That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…

Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—

Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—

“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:

Or you could simply be amazed by the—

“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)

We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…

Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.

I have a love-hate relationship with genre. I love horror, but I find reading anything after Lovecraft tedious, unsurprising, mirthless, and generally not very horrific.

I love fantasy, but as a kid I got burned out on the culture, and now I loathe to pick up any book with hulking sword-brutes and large-chested elfin princesses on the cover.

I love science writing of all kinds, but most science fiction softer than Gibson is masturbatory hyper-Kurzweil-ism—which can be pretty scary stuff, full of utopias I would not want to live in.

I love comics, but they’re the most hit-and-miss medium I’ve ever explored; so unless a friend puts a comic in my hand, I sure ain’t buyin it. Overall,  I’m sure there’s good stuff out there. I just don’t have time to sift around and find it.

That said, my heart has a special place for werewolves, undead sorcerers, cyborg-cities, and of course for spandex-clad bad-asses with unconscionably bizarre powers. So, though I know little about Green Lantern—though I have in fact never bought a Green Lantern comic in my life—I was delighted when my friend Eric sent me a link to this Wikipedia page outlining the many different color-based Lantern Corps, the synesthetic-Freudian heroes and villains of the comic-cosmos.

For those who know even less than me about this phenomenon: In the universe of DC Comics, there are various, variously colored “power rings,” each fueled by a different affect, each giving its wearer the ability to fly and do pretty much anything else she can think of, provided the ring is sufficiently charged with the appropriate emotion.

The good guys and bad guys have naturally organized themselves into ring-mafias, the primary iteration of which, the Green Lantern Corps, functions as cosmic police (and is sometimes cosmic corrupt, and presumably has a good cosmic retirement package).

Here’s the ring-roster:

• Green – powered by will, originally susceptible to wooden objects. (!!! I know, Gentle Reader, I know: An ultimate weapon, powered by will = scary shades of the Reich. But apparently, these are the good guys. The green rings seek out strong-willed moralists, somehow. Personally, sounds like a recipe for disaster, letting a metal bauble invest a particular human with nigh-infinite power…) [Also, secret weakness = wood? Really?]
• Yellow – powered by fear.
• Orange – powered by avarice. (This corps is run by someone named “Larfleeze,” who looks like a flaming horse-skull guy. Highly awesome. I would work for that dude.)
• Red – powered by hate.
• Blue – powered by hope. (But these only work in conjunction with green rings, as hope requires will to affect change… at least, according to the Philosophy Department at DC.)
• Indigo – powered by compassion.
• Violet – powered by love.
• Black – powered by death.
• White – powered by ???. (The white ring is the most mysterious and may be the most powerful. In comics, as part of the constant recolonizing of the minds of our youth, black tends to be bad and white good. Here, interestingly, it seems the cool colors = good and the warm colors = bad, with white and black thrown purely in for chromatic balance.)

Given my longstanding interest in how different literatures use different colors, particularly red and blue, I now feel an obligation to read about the exploits of these Corps. Blue to me is not “hopeful,” per se, though red could certainly be “furious.” Orange as avarice strikes me as random, but there is something fearful about yellow. I’m intrigued.

That said, I can’t help but think of other possibilities for these emo heroes, who must crap forth certain affect in order to fly through the dark void, doing battle and looking muscular (except as imitated below). I imagine rings powered by minor affects (confusion over which line at Whole Foods is shortest; fear that a speck in your tea is a dead bug and not just a loose particle of tea; love-hate, the feeling of the frenemy; &c.). Rings powered by dream affects (lust for objects; total reversal of normal affects; lack of fear; fear of self). Rings powered by winks, by kisses, by jokes…

The possibilities are staggering, as are the color combinations. (The red-orange ring with the gray band, for instance, is powered by haughtiness tinged with lack of surprise.)

The folks at the Hand Drawn Map Association have been kind enough to publish my map of Our Hollow Planet Earth, which we live upon (potentially, unconfirmed).

I suppose now I have to write a story that relates back to the items on the map, none of which directly relate to the places mentioned in my one-sixth finished novel of similar name (The Hollow Earth). A sampling of the places mentioned in the novel thus far:

• New Orleans* (*actual place)
• Bechuanaland* (*actual place)
• Z’quoz
• Barrels Bridge* (*actual place? I don’t remember)
• The civilized Central Philosopher-Kingdom, or Hollow Kingdom, as it is commonly known
• The duplexiverse
• The Garden of Sulayman
• The Academy Of The Humay
• Mictlan^† (^†the Mayan underworld, may be cut)

For more pseudo-maps, monsters, inspirational hip hop posters, and geometric designs by the untrained by constantly doodling Author, visit the Author’s humble doodle-blog, Ill-Luminations—now with commentary by professional illustrator and collaborator Ethan Gould.

Of the Literary variety. Danger! Adventure! Perhaps misadventure! Check it out: Literary Death Match. Thursday, May 20, at Bowery Poetry Club.

If you want to see me win this DEATH MATCH… buy some cheap tickets.

Here’s the party line:

Not for the faint of heart, LDM NYC’s 26th episode promises to tantalize and titillate your most sensitive literary bits. We’ve assembled an army of brilliant judges — literary renegade Richard Nash, subversive comedian Jena Friedman and blogger/author/goddess Paulina Porizkova — to hold sway over the unruly proceedings.

A hodgepodge of lovable deviants will battle it out on the Bowery Poetry Club stage, including Melissa Febos, author of WHIP SMART, King of Counterculture Mike Edison (High Times, Screw), devilish storyteller Wythe Marschall (representing Electric Literature), and laconic absurdist-or-is-he Mike Topp, author of Shorts are Wrong and Happy Ending.

And—holy shit—it’s a Culture Mob article about the show.

If you live in New York, perhaps you really should come and see me win, on behalf of my friends’ stellar journal, Electric Literature. I will be winning via a story about a cowboy. I have many of them. Devil I am. Words I pitch, via fork, into flames. Pass the flask. All I read is words. If I had a car or a chuck wagon, all I would do is ride around shining:

From Juliet Macur’s “Coyote vs. Greyhound,” New York Times:

“When you get the dogs running in a dead run after a coyote, now that’s a sport,” [cattle rancher and ole skool coyote hunter John] Hardzog said before spitting snuff into a tiny gold spittoon. “The coyote is just about the smartest wild animal alive because they always have an escape route. I respect them. They can outsmart you. But greyhounds are smart, too. I think they’re the neatest dog ever made.”

Hardzog, who eschews seat belts and scoffs at “too many laws,” was 7 when he first hunted coyotes with his father. Now he has 40 greyhounds and greyhound mixes, some with scarred legs and faces, that he bred on his 318-acre ranch. Sometimes, they gnaw on stillborn calves and clean their teeth on the bones. He said he spent $600 on their monthly upkeep.

They have names like Matthew, Luke, Venus and Little Bit. Some are part Irish wolfhound, others part Saluki. All have a strong prey drive and hunt by sight.

Image by Justin Johnsen