
Jeffrey Vallance's Stripe Painting Portrait of me (inspired by my Stripe Painting Portrait of Liberace, which I did for Jeffrey's curatorial project at the Liberace Museum in 1995, I guess!) I am honored.
The He-Man Action Movie Appreciation Society meets monthly to view promising high-budget mainstream shoot-em-ups in the context for which they were designed — big, loud movie theaters (although at $17 for an 11 AM matinee, it’s unlikely we’ll be patronizing the Arclight Pasadena again any time soon! No wonder we were the only ones in the place except for that one guy.) Actually, this was our inaugural screening, so we’ll see if the concept has legs.
I really loved the first Bourne movie, and the two subsequent entries were satisfying extensions of the premise — I guess I’m a sucker for movies that give people the impression that MKULTRA is some kind of fictional trope. And since I heard Matt Damon had been all “Never again unless it’s a quality project!” I figured this one could be solid. I try not to read reviews before I see a movie, so I had no idea how it had been received out of the gate. I’m actually still pretty much in the dark, though I heard us critics didn’t like it.
I have to say that I’m still processing the experience. In a nearly empty statish-of-the-art theater in row G, with the screen hovering at maximum engulfment eye level, the action was dizzying enough to send my vertigo-prone HMAMAS colleague scurrying to the back row (and apparently the 3D version has been exploding heads in China). But I toughed it out, since I probably haven’t frequented one of these joints in three years or longer, and it’s a formidable sensory environment worth embracing on its own terms...
Image: Jim Shaw, Dream Object ("In a thrift store, I saw a Salvador Dali cartoon book... Then I found a book like box of 40's Dali ties and scarves on cardboard leaves like a distributor's sample box plus a collage with a ground of 40's nude photos & Peter Lorre as...), 2015, paper collage on board, 15 x 20 inches | |
Descending in tandem from the rafters was the gender-corrected biorchid soft kinetic sculpture Disc®otu m’, a sack of mirror-encrusted fabric containing two motorized vibrating wads of material. I’ve always been puzzled by Duchamp scholars insistence that the title of his last painting Tu m' was an abbreviation of the French expression “Tu m'emmerdes” or “you’re shitting on (bugging) me.” As far as I can tell, it’s just a guess – it could be completed with any French verb starting with a vowel. Why not “Tu m’blank” as in “You blank me,” which, rather than sealing the tomb on painting because of some specific affect (irritation, beshitment, boredom), emphasizes (and probably expresses doubt in the validity of) the very hierarchical subject/object binary model of communication (and by extension reality itself) by which it achieves its agency. Disc®otu m’ in addition to presenting a disembodied teabag of Damocles that visually mimics the geometry-bound domes, was intended to expand Duchamp’s contraction, doubling it with mirrors and subjecting it to seizure. Lazarus, Come forth!