Can you write an essay about porn theaters that doesn’t cite Samuel R. Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue? Similarly, can you look at photographs of queer spaces and not immediately start flipping through Jose Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia to find a relevant quote? These two texts have done a number on criticism and critical … Continue reading
Emily Colucci, Filthy Dreams. That’s how I signed the guestbook for Carrie Schneider’s exhibition I don’t know her at CHART. I don’t usually bother to write in exhibition guestbooks. The only major exception is the book for Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition in which a placard assured us fanatics that he would receive it. … Continue reading
“To be Gorgeous, strictly speaking, is something in itself. To be Gorgeous therefore is admirable, to be Absolutely Gorgeous most desired.” So begins an essay in one of the many zines in the Brooklyn Museum’s Jimmy DeSana: Submission exhibition, which is joined by the museum’s concurrent Thierry Mugler: Couturissime show in advocating for skin-deep/skin-tight beauty. … Continue reading
To look without fear. That’s the title of Wolfgang Tillmans’s current dizzying retrospective at MoMA. But this begs questions, namely, who is supposed to be looking without fear? Tillmans? The audience? If it’s the viewers, what are we bravely confronting? Berlin clubs? Photographs of Frank Ocean, Kate Moss, and Chloë Sevigny? A whole lot of images … Continue reading
Two sultry gazes stare sightlessly from a weathered window or a picture frame as if stolen from the bedroom wall of a fanatical teenage girl in 1955. James Dean and Elvis Presley, icons of mid-20th century rebels without causes. Ripping it up, hip thrusting, jailhouse rocking, Vampira attracting, drag racing, they are double martyrs to … Continue reading
Represented by a logo of a human eye and eyebrow, with the eye acting as a razor blade, Infinity Land Press is, by its own website’s description, “a press that provides exclusive, clandestine publications which are inoculated against the circulatory system of the established book market.” Created and founded by artists Martin Bladh and Karolina … Continue reading
Why a hap-hap-hop-hoppy Easter Sunday to you, dearest Filthy Dreams bunnies! What’s that? You’re not religious? That doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the ecstatic joy of trash religiosity. I mean, this Easter, I feel like I finally understand the resurrection of Christ. I mean, nearly 30 days into my bout with COVID-19, I know how … Continue reading
Michel Houellebecq once wrote, “They would have to pay taxes, submit themselves to administrative formalities while ceaselessly bearing witness—powerless and shame filled—to the irreversible degradation of their own bodies.” Here, Houellebecq speaks of inevitable physical decline as inevitable spiritual decline. With your strength, goes your spirit. With your beauty, goes your hope. Whether we are … Continue reading
American art critic Kristine McKenna, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 1991, referred to artist Barbara Ess’s signature pinhole photographs as “luxuriously beautiful.” Those photographs, in which subjects are blurred, information is blacked out and realities blend into fantasies, expose photography as a medium that, at its best, is rife for the subjectivity of … Continue reading
If you go onto the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s website and look at their exhibition offerings, you might notice that a great many of their recent shows are made up of works in the museum’s permanent collection. Frank Gehry’s architectural expansion of the museum is in full swing, meaning that there are fewer blockbuster shows like … Continue reading