Remember that one time with that one photo where I brought up Kari Devereaux?

If you’re in the Bay Area this Friday night, you should join me and Sex+Design et al. at The Summit (780 Valencia @19th, San Francisco) from 8 PM—>12 AM for her new show, “leaked. loved. lights.” It’s gonna be pretty hot, you guys.

Just a peek, now…

Photograph (of me!) from “nothing good happens after 2 A.M.,” by the remarkable Kari Devereaux. Do take a look at more of her work, which can be found here and here. Kari will show at The Summit in January (stay tuned for more info!) and is the focus of an upcoming feature in Sex+Design (which is where I work now. Have I mentioned that yet? No? You should really check it out, kids.)

(Well, no. Kids, you should not check it out. But those of you who are not kids should feel free to go for it!)

The Arc of Noise by Matthew Timmons, presented by 323 Projects

DO THIS!! Collaborative Sound Poem Hooray!!

Call (323) 843-4652 or (323) TIE-IN-LA.

Push “1” twice.

Leave a message—just follow the script shown in the video.

[A bit of context re: the first part, in case you’re reading along. What follows is a reply to a question/reply to a reply to a reply to something I wrote to fictionz. Got it? No? Doesn’t matter.]

Wow. Jeez. Way to strike a chord that’s been reverberating with a particular significance lately and which—for that very reason, no doubt—is going to elicit a tangle of haphazard non-answer-answers. Because even the short answer would be yes and no. And yes and no. (And I should stop now but you started it so now there’s no stopping me, but of course you’re free to stop whenever you’d like.)

First off, I suppose I should say that I myself am a(n all too?) frequent practitioner of self-censorship. I’ve never met a paragraph that I didn’t want to revise, and I’m not exactly skilled when it comes to the whole “urge-resistance” thing. I delete posts all the time. Sometimes it’s because they no longer seem to matter; sometimes it’s because they matter too much. And sometimes I erase posts because someone I know in “real” life has found me here and I’ve written something that—whether it’s about him or her or not—I find I’m not brave enough to share.

Clearly, I’m no model against which the health of anyone’s habits should be judged. But everything I’m about to blurt out is absolutely sincere, muddled as it may be.

Self-censorship is a form of self-expression. The things we erase matter just as much as the things we write; the act of deleting matters just as much as its opposite. To choose not to speak at all is a way of expressing oneself. Whether or not this is healthy is another matter. Is it a creative act? Righteous protest? Passive aggression? An expression of one’s self, a self that—it just so happens—may not be so terribly brave after all?

Self-censorship can be healthy and it cannot. And it can also be a shame. It’s easy enough to find examples on my dashboard. A few days ago, luckypaperstars wrote about having just deleted a number of her posts, about how good it felt “to put down old baggage.” I’m relying on her word, of course, but this sounds pretty damn healthy to me. A day later, Meaghano posted a humorous, painful, poignant reply to a distressed teen, which turned on journal entries she herself had written at age 17. Oh my God. This is so much more than unlocking Pandora’s Book of Humiliation. (M-Y-D-I-A-R-Y) (the combination was M-A.) (for every one of us.) (every single one.) To unlock it and read without matches in hand is enough… but to share it? And to make use of it? I was awestruck. I am awestruck, still.

We never know how the histories will be written but we all want to be victors so we do what we can to stack the deck. Think of all the artists who’ve destroyed their own work (Martin, Cézanne, Bacon, Morisot, O’Keeffe, Watteau, and on and on and on to the point that I feel like I shouldn’t have named names because everyone did it everyone does it, everyone) because they thought it wasn’t good enough. It didn’t fit. It was a failure. But oh oh oh how easily we forget the importance of failure!! In some ways, it’s all we have.

So now I’m going to do a little self-censoring of my own. Because seriously (and I get the sense that you’re getting this), I could write a book or two or twelve on the subject of failure. (Not that they’d be any good.) (But I could write them.) (The volumes, by the way, will comprise LIFE WORK # 2. I’ll get on that project right after I finish writing the one about how modernism is all about light bulbs and water.) (Yes.) (I am totally serious.) (Sort of.) Maybe I’d start with why El Lissitzky—surely no virtuoso, not most of the time—is so damn good. And then there’d be Duchamp’s “art coefficient” and maybe the whole thing would end up somewhere around Silvia Kolbowski’s An Inadequate History of Conceptual Art. Maybe these will become posts of their own, at least. But at the moment, another example is pressing its way through to the keyboard.

Tacita Dean. FLOH. Pretty much the Best. Book. Ever. FLOH is “flow” is “flea” is made up of photographs Dean picked up at flea markets, photographs that range from enthralling to utterly banal, photographs that have been arranged in accordance with a logic that seems to shift with each viewing. (I’ll post some of the spreads above in just a bit. Promise.) There is so much to mine, but what matters just now is what these photographs have in common. For one, they are anonymous. But more importantly (for our purposes… or my purposes, at least), they have been thrown away or lost (and found). And they are analog.

It is no coincidence that FLOH appears at the moment that the digital makes the death of print seem unavoidable. Dean herself is forthcoming about this. FLOH is rich with another man’s treasures, cast off images cut free from the homes and histories that didn’t want them, free now to mean everything and nothing all at once. We can hardly help but be touched; their distance from their origins and their proximity to one another, to us, is part of it. Yet while we may find a certain strain of beauty here, we cannot help but admit that someone judged these to be failures. The criteria is known to us, even. Someone blinks or looks away just as the shutter clicks. He couldn’t hold still long enough, squirming, so we are left with a blur. Oh God, I hate how I look in that picture. Someone tried to lose these photographs but they were found.

How much of that possibility remains in a world gone digital? These are the images that we are now free to lose forever with ease. How long does it take to press a button?

Erase.

Delete.

sometimesagreatnotion:

(On Valentine’s Day plans)

Liz: I will spend half the day in twilight sleep and then I will go home and watch the Lifetime movie ‘My Stepson Is My Cyber-Husband’.

Jack: Wow, that is inspired. You truly are the Picasso of loneliness.

Liz: Or, I am that painting elephant of being awesome.

It’s tough to limit oneself to a single quote from each episode of 30 Rock. But I think this one will serve quite nicely.

art-documents:

art-it:

Roni Horn, Library of Water

yes.

fullcredit:

Yes, I know that it’s a stupid holiday, and that it’s made up by Hallmark, and that I’ve spent the last nine of them either working at a restaurant or with a guy that I cannot stand, and that I will probably spend this year in the office (thank you, reply brief due on February 16), but STILL — these are really pretty.

Limited Edition Calligraphy Valentines, from Mara Zepeda of Neither Snow.

Oh, how happy am I that my dearest Mara is getting such attention? I have letters she sent me a dozen years ago (gulp), and I swear this is her real handwriting. This is a woman amazes me in every way… this woman who built a giant, swinging nest for ten, this woman who stayed up for a week so she could drain eggs and hang the shells from the ceiling for an installation, this woman who walked with me into a firehouse just so we could see if the firemen would give us a ride back to campus (they couldn’t, but the rest is still a good story), this woman who… well, everything else I’m thinking of is maybe too cringe-worthy (although I’m dying to tell the story about the naked people on the lawn…) (and the one about us cutting her now-husband’s hair. from opposite sides. at the same time). But no matter: Mara Zepeda deserves your love. Please do check out neithersnow in all its incarnations, be it via the design*sponge link above, here or here. You won’t be disappointed. Promise.

art-documents:

metempsicosis:

Eva Hesse

Hang up, 1966

It’s hard to get much better than Eva Hesse. And it’s really hard to get much better than this.

“Appropriation— a very short introduction: A conversation between David Evans and Ann Lee,” from criticaldictionary.com, no. 21.

Who is this Ann Lee character? Lunatic genius or just plain lunatic? Profound critic or pretentious con? (Or both?) And what about her book? (Which, I am told, can be ordered for the cost of printing along—or downloaded free of charge— here.) Tour de force or travesty?

homeofthevain:

No matter how keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain unkindled. A poor man is robbed of his overcoat; another poor fellow is turned into a beetle — so what?

There is no rational answer to so what. We can take the story apart, we can find out how the bits fit, how one part of the pattern responds to the other; but you have to have in you some cell, some gene, some germ that will vibrate in answer to sensations that you can neither define, nor dismiss.

Beauty plus pity — that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Lecture on Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”

Is “pity” the right word? I’m tempted to go with “the poignant”… but then again, I always am.

art-documents:

Robert Longo / untitled 1981

I’m supposed to be writing about this RIGHT NOW.

This counts, right?

art-it:

dododododada:

deverwhatever:

Yves Klein, Leap into the Void, 1960.

“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.” —Antonio Gramsci

“Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces.”—Sigmund Freud

Oh my: A conversation between David Evans and Ann Lee, published in issue #21 of criticaldictionary.com.

Ann Lee’s Appropriation: A Very Short Introduction can be ordered (or downloaded for FREE!) here.

If you happen to read the interview (or the book), I’d love to know what you think. Anonymity is promised here.

art-it:

Olafur Eliasson

I believe this is a photo of Eliasson’s Beauty (1993). Please let me know if I’m mistaken.

Sometimes I forget why I’ve chosen (or fallen into?) a life that revolves around art. And then I come across something like this, and I begin to remember… Thank you.