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.

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.

The Grotesque In Art: A Discussion With Dr. Nancy Hightower

*Please note, this event will be taking place at the ISE Cultural Center in Manhattan: 555 Broadway between Prince and Spring.  Press buzzer for entrance and proceed to basement gallery.

Date:  Saturday, November 20
Time:  5–7 PM
Admission:  FREE

Presented by Anagnorisis Fine Arts and Phantasmaphile. In conjunction with the exhibit “Another Roadside Attraction: An Exploration of the Neo-Grotesque,” Dr. Nancy Hightower will lead a discussion on the grotesque in art as it relates to the artwork currently on view at the ISE Cultural Foundation:

“Modern contemporary art, film, TV, and literature embrace the bizarre in a way never before seen. Many might term what they see and read as ‘grotesque’—used pejoratively to mean that which is strange, unsightly, obscene; in some cases, even funny. The grotesque as a scholarly study, however, is something different. It’s not altogether different, mind you, for certainly the grotesque always includes elements of the bizarre. Yet many authors and artists have used the grotesque—this elusive intersection of humor and horror—to question the strongest rhetoric that holds our society together.

“The grotesque has a rich and long history, beginning in antiquity. It was simply ornamental back in Nero’s time, as we see in the “grottoes” of his palace, the Domus Aurea. Human forms blended into plants and animals, with a playfulness that delighted the eye. That ornamental version of the grotesque turned darker when Bosch incorporated it into his Garden of Earthly Delights and Bruegel in The Triumph of Death. Both works give us insight into the paradoxes of the artists’ cultures Over time, the grotesque grew to include an aspect of horror along with a humor that moved beyond an intellectual sarcasm. The purpose of such transgressive humor and horror addresses the paradoxes, hypocrisies, and binaries seen in our post-modern society.”

Dr. Nancy Hightower is an instructor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches courses on the Grotesque in Art and Literature.

I have recently been wondering: Is the body grotesque because it is profane (not divine, not the spirit)?

…The mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen.

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.

—Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion.

Tasty.

Now—with no pants on but plenty of flow, Die Antwoord are everyone’s favorite post-genre quasi-hip hop sex-obsessed musical… act? Are they an act a la bunraku? (The “real man” behind the Ninja is visibly, ironically puppet-mastering the Ninja—floppy cartoon penis, mullet/fade, and all?) Or are they more like Andy Kaufmann? (The “real” comedy act will begin as soon as I’m done reading the entire Great Gatsby out loud; the “real” Die Antwoord are always at the edges of themselves, of being-what-you-thought-they-would-be?) Who knows. The end result is fokken rad music, not to mention the awesome, wild, aesthetics-defying, sexuality-trumping, eye-bombing video:

Just as the erotic flees into the unknown, the obscured, and the secret, so does it return like a flood (”of what,” he asks, with a wink) at the call of the maximal and the cartoonishly intimate (sexy with a wink, “sexy,” the Robert Coover version of sex, sex as joke, as game). This maximal return is elegantly and hilariously incarnated (pun intended) in “Evil Boy.” Good show. Or, should I say, good “show?”—

The erotic, like the violent, like the gastro-orgiastic, defies simulation: Cartoonish, silly, ironic/self-aware “sex” or “pizza orgy” still produces in us the desire for sex, for pizza. No matter how silly the pizza obliteration party becomes, the pizza cannot be obliterated and in fact expands, conceptually, to consume the song, the obliteration. Or:

The Pizza Song (original and screwed) always effectively generates hunger, especially for junk food. It obliterates not “pizza,” some noble Italian culinary art, but “the obliteration of pizza.” It negates its own joke, the way that “sex” in “Evil Boy” negates the idea that “we’re going to have a larf with all these wooden cocks and this eyelash-less bird in a silly fur coat.” These videos are both so maximal, they overcome themselves.

Here the erotic finds and joins the gastro-orgiastic (and the violent—see: Tarantino, Oliver Stone…) and becomes simply the Beyond, that which lies beyond our ability to taxonomize, be really aware of, hold in our thoughts abstractly.

For to truly contemplate desire or hunger is to feel horny or want to eat: Any other “knowledge” of this animal non-knowledge is exactly what it wants least to be, a joke. The joke in supra-maximal art is that it is both actually funny and “funny,” or deadly serious—the last laugh of the corpse; the pizza-stuffed buffoon, off to a nap; the mid-coitus man and woman who have traded the sign of sex for sex, and then traded sex for the ultimate erotic (the unknown), which leaves them with nothing else, only laughter…

Some Rama-sentences I admire:

…Maybe the solution to the problem of the self won’t be a straightforward empirical one. It may instead require a radical shift in perspective, the sort of thing that Einstein did when he rejected the assumption that things can move at arbitrarily high velocities.

When we finally achieve such a shift in perspective, we may be in for a big surprise and find that the answer was staring at us all along…

There are curious parallels between this idea and the Hindu philosophical view that there is no essential difference between self and others or that the self is an illusion.

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!

• Ants live in a formicary, or mound
• The badger digs a sett
• The mole, for some reason, gets a fortress
• Otters create a holt
• Rabbits, when not in the familiar “warren,” chillax in a cony-garth or cunicularium
• Raptors of all sorts build eyries
• Squirrels live in a drey
• And wasps spin out of mud and bug-bones their noble vespiary

The Latinate terms are bug-like, intricate; I enjoy saying them in my head, “FOR-me-caree,” “VESS-pee-airee.” But the Germanic terms, “DREY,” “HOLT,” really phonically capture the simple, often austere, often dangerous grace of the mammalian world. What is a “drey?” Common-sounding, unfamiliar word. And can we picture a “holt?” (Have we ever tried to?)

As with the collectives, I love that we have these terms at our disposal, and can only hope that the animals of the future (lithivores, trash monsters, cyber-cats, droid-dogs, meta-animals, nanobots, entirely digital animals, such as already exist on Neopets or in WoW) will be treated to rich-sounding homes, neudreys and techvespiaries.

A formicary, I think… Could be oats. I don’t usually eat oats. Esp. ant-y oats.

“I don’t want them [my children] brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option—it isn’t.”

(His speech apparently also included the line, “There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual,” but he dropped it.)

This is highly, highly unfortunate, and I hope Mr. Paladino loses. I hope New Yorkers from Albany to Coney Island loudly stand up to this ethically backward verbal bullying.

But this is, alas, not necessarily the really crazy Paladino news. For, having swung his mighty sword of D-baggery at our friends in the gay community, Paladino felt the need to defend himself against criticism that he is… homophobic?

“Don’t misquote me as wanting to hurt homosexual people in any way. That would be a dastardly lie.”

His campaign manager added, “Carl Paladino is not homophobic.”

Wait, but he just said… Never mind. This one isn’t even worth making fun of.

Besides slim props for trying to resurrect “dastardly” and a big summary “go fuck yourself, Pal,” all I have to offer Mr. Paladino is the note that, rhetorically, you could, I suppose, try to turn the tables on the whole concept of “homophobia”—

I mean, you’re obviously homophobic (which is—good luck with that, by the way, in New York City—fucking hilarious) and should seek help. So you may as well “own” that phobia instead of trying to sell us this sort of anti-rhetoric. (”By X, I clearly meant -X! It’s those libs and progs, twisting my precious words!”) Just… do you.

Of course it’s unlikely Mr. Paladino will read this blog post, or, moreover, that he will take its sincere advice and go fuck himself. (Or offer even a visibly insincere retraction of his statement, or seek help.)

Somewhere, in the parallel universe where Jesus existed and was a Republican, maybe it’s okay to bash large swaths of people for no better reason than the time-tested fear of the unknown/envy of better dressers.

Luckily for us, we do not live in that dastardly universe. Email this dastardly vulture-taint (info@paladinoforthepeople.com) and tell him New Yorkers don’t want him.

He would alienate his would-be constituents with hate speech, then defend his statements with illogical claims about his lack of hate?

Recently I find myself more and more drawn to/inspired by animals, what animals are. What are they? They are an open question, or a series of open questions. I find them a series of forms that at once seem always-familiar and always-alien, like Barthes’s dream of knowing a dream-language, a language you know but cannot understand.

(Typified, for him, by Japanese, a language I once could understand, strangely enough; now my half-forgotten fluency is a type of dream-code, and I find it inspiring in a different way. But to return to animals…)

Trying to find out about one animal leads inevitably to others. From one morphological question, another arises; the answers mirror each other in new ways (extinct Caspian lions with flat faces, the masks of bay owls, the facelessness of moles, or moreover of cnidarians, of microbes…).

Courtesy Wikipedia, here are a few threads of bird-ness, of bird-multiplicity, that I’ve found inspiring today:

• [This one is amazing enough to quote without paraphrase:] “Vulture stomach acid is exceptionally corrosive, allowing them to safely digest putrid carcasses infected with Botulinum toxin, hog cholera, and anthrax bacteria that would be lethal to other scavengers.”
• Their stomach acid also enables vultures to “use their reeking, corrosive vomit as a defensive projectile when threatened.” Maybe explains not keeping vultures as pets?
• There is an owl called the fearful owl.
• There is an eagle called the changeable hawk-eagle. Doth it transform, eagle-to-hawk, hawk-to-eagle? Be it a Decepticon?
• A group of vultures is a wake. [I might have known this, but seeing it again caused me to pause and consider what a great name it is: The wake for the dead, the activity proper to the vulture, consumes their lives; they are master wake-sitters, forever nibbling in prayer.]
• A group of owls is a parliament. [Again, I had read this somewhere, but wtf. Owls are solitary hunters, no? For them to engage in parliament seems both unlikely.]
• The feathers of flight are the remiges. One of them is a remex. Beautiful words, both.
• The feathers known as alula or bastard wing feathers are not flight feathers. They allow birds to achieve a greater angle of attack without stalling. They are like the movable slats on the wings of airplanes.
• The tail feathers are the rectrices. One of them is a rectrix.

What the hell. I found that refreshing!

Now check out, Dear Avian-Enlightened Reader, this awesome long-eared owl:

Awesome long-eared owl photo by Mindaugas Urbonas.

One night, I heard a very young couple on the train arguing about the lyrics of an Oasis song I had not heard since middle school. Like Proust’s tea-soggy Madeleine, the words of the song brought me back in time and space as I sat perfectly still. I smelled the mosquito-thickened, pine-scented air of Atlanta. (I wondered, what the fuck is a wonderwall?)

Later, on a gloomy N train back from Queens, listening to Outkast and Akrobatik and Elliott Smith in my head, I thought I understood something of that early feeling of love for a love song, or belief that a love song can change your life, or even that it can say anything about your life; that a song can serve as a precis of all you hold in your secret heart.

The internal architecture (the dream-bones) of the song persist not because they have the life-stuff of an essay, a love letter, or a good honest fuck-you phone call, or even a fuck-off offering online (status update, profile deletion), but because they tend to make sense of out of nonsense, and to comfort us exactly when and where no comfort’s due—and to do so all on their own magical terms.

In this way, the song is always dishonest, a black magic, a dream magic—or at least the under-practiced hedge-cantrip of a matchmaker, favorite aunt, former best friend, advice columnist, or other romantically unworthy vizier.

The song’s bones persist because they call into play their own persistence; they are un-humble, selfish things, songs—like hungry beetles or hungrier, beetle-seeking spiders.

When it’s really raining out, you can see the run-off from abandoned ballads running down Ocean Avenue. The loose words (”angel,” “custard,” brands of liquor, units of time, rubble from the palaces of lost memory) get stuck under tires, like fluttering moths.

The poems concern:

1. The minotaur, a poetical figure combining the bull (Bos taurus) and the man (Homo sapiens sapiens).
2. Extinct animals we have only recently discovered. And now must mourn.

I wrote these poems in the spring and sat on them for a while, meditating on loss and the building-up of life, the psychic hermit-crabbing we attempt and must sometimes backtrack out of. Many thanks to Offcourse and its editors.

Part of my ongoing series on novellas (thanks as ever to New Directions and NYRB). In this review:

• Nazis
• Scooby-Doo
• The amazing Jakov Lind
• Cannibalism
• Ahab
• “Chronotrope: All of Europe’s madness… unleashed in a half-decade, the monster slouching out of modernity, not just towards Bethlehem but towards every quiet holy place.” [The woods.]
• Paralysis and becoming-deer

Lind, smoking a pipe, bout to get back to writing like a bad-ass, thinking about some deep shit.

But I did make this dope-ass logo:

And my team = THE BROOKLYN SNAKES.

YEAAAH!