As Minneapolis burns to a crisp after the murder of George Floyd by four homicidal cops (charge and arrest, and then, convict and sentence all of them already!), cities across America see police forces violently spiraling out of control at protesters, including arresting and shooting beanbag rounds at journalists, Trump goes to war with Twitter … Continue reading
No. No I don’t want to visit your online viewing room, your digital group exhibition or your virtual gallery. Even more, I don’t want to review your online viewing room, your digital exhibition or your virtual gallery. And Zoom openings? I’d rather go to the opening of my toilet seat. I don’t know about you, … Continue reading
Your job, Genesis, is to short-circuit control,” once said the preeminent literary gentleman junkie William S. Burroughs to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge who, as much as we obsess about h/er on Filthy Dreams, needs no introduction (or shouldn’t!). And short-circuit control s/he did. I mean, what socially imposed and regulated norm of living didn’t Genesis shatter, … Continue reading
“Doing things, similar things…” These are the vague yet salient words extracted from Trump’s predictably maladroit national emergency address, unwittingly evoking the bracingly confrontational and unnerving self-portraiture of our inadvertent queen of self-quarantine: Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja. As we bunker down in our contaminated cities, fantasizing about remote escapes, and “cancel culture” takes on a … 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
How could anyone be done with Xanax? When the nostalgia bug hits and you can’t avoid compulsively revisiting imagery from a media-soaked 1980s childhood, who doesn’t need even just a little smidgen from a bar to quiet down the blaring romanticism? I know I certainly did while visiting Katherine Bernhardt’s Done with Xanax at Canada … Continue reading
“I feel a vague nausea stroking and tapping the lining of my stomach,” writes David Wojnarowicz in his essay “In the Shadow of the American Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins.” I don’t think I ever quite understood the feeling of David’s nausea until this past week. It took everything in me not … 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
Let me start by saying I identify as a queer femme human being. With that being said, I was saddened when I learned the “Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art” is no more. Well they still exist, but have now dropped the “lesbian” and “gay” from their name. Gonzalo Casals, Leslie-Lohman’s Executive Director, told … Continue reading
To mark this year’s World AIDS Day, London’s Live Art Development Agency (LADA) hosted the first UK screening of Marion Scemama’s 2018 film essay Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: A Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life (1989-1991), co-directed with François Pain. Having spent the past two years immersing myself in Wojnarowicz’s life and work, I was hungry … Continue reading
