If I had a favorite narrative genre, it would be what I like to call “psychological disintegration.” I’ve long been seduced by madness, the deterioration of identity. The descent into madness of the lonely civil servant Poprishchin in Gogol’s Diary of a Mad Man. The identity confusion of Trelkovsky in novelist and artist Roland Topor’s … Continue reading
I really can’t decide what’s more shocking: that Noah Davis painted the beautifully macabre images adorning the walls of his posthumous retrospective at David Zwirner before the artist was 33 years old, or that these gorgeous works were painted by someone who ever lived at all. So saturated with ghastly resignation and mourning, Davis’s paintings … Continue reading
David Lynch’s short film released on Netflix, What Did Jack Do?, works as both a gift to Lynch fans and a troll on Netflix viewers. In the film, Lynch portrays a detective who diligently interrogates a monkey suspected of homicide. Shot in black and white, Lynch stages a minimal scenery: a table top illuminated by … Continue reading
I am always living between two realities. There is the reality of presence, of now and of exteriority. And then, there is the reality of distance, of timelessness and of interiority. These two realities–the reality of me here now typing on my computer and the reality inside my fantasy space of memory and dreams–feel no … Continue reading
Fatebe (“FAT-E-be”) is in the midst of the Lacanian Mirror Phase. “She’s starting to interact with her own image and own sense of self versus the drawing of herself,” says her creator, the New York-based artist Ebecho Muslimova. “[The film] Ex-Machina, popped in my mind; she’s looking at herself in a mirror, self-realizing. I feel … Continue reading
By and large, I’ve grown to despise comic book and superhero films. When I see praise lavished upon these narrative-less, stakes-less, CGI shlock-fests I stew with hatred for the artistically bankrupt culture that produces and pays for them to be continuously made. So when I went into a theater to watch Todd Phillips—a director best … Continue reading
The politics of liberation are essentially corporeal. The struggle for free will—for subjecthood—is defined by the ease and unease of the body. The fear of hunger is physical; the wretched horror of deprivation is one of bodily need. All emotional despair is felt as corporeal absence or excess. If I am so wretchedly miserable that … Continue reading
Curating isn’t an easy job. At its best, the act of curation is its own form of artistic creation–a kind of creative essaying. The curator has a thesis derived either from his/her own observations about the world or filtered through a particular cultural criticism that is then supported through the arrangement of art objects. There … Continue reading
Few cinematic sequences signify the dawn of postmodernism and all its attendant schizoid unknowability beneath its constructed surface veneer better than the final scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. In that scene, the audio tapping specialist Harry, portrayed with quiet and contemplative everyman rage by the great Gene Hackman, rips his apartment up with … Continue reading
In her 1994 essay The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity, art historian Linda Nochlin ties the genesis of modernism to the French Revolution, framing the guillotine as a symbol of the severing of inherited dynastic power ushering in an era of radical politics, creativity, and culture. The guillotine becomes representative … Continue reading