'Now in her 80s, Elaine Sturtevant has been dealing with simulacra throughout her career. Most famously, or infamously, she has been remaking the works of other artists since the 1960s. She has copied Andy Warhol's flowers and Marilyns, and even his "unwatchable" eight-hour black-and-white film of the Empire State Building. She has remade works by Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Jasper Johns and a host of other artists, mostly male.
'Her meticulous versions are neither forgeries nor fakes. Nor are they homages, the Paris-based American artist insists, much less parodies. Although Sturtevant never asks permission, Warhol did give her his silk screens, so she could redo his flowers. When asked what his work meant, he is said to have quipped: "Ask Elaine Sturtevant." Warhol himself derived his flower images from images he found in Modern Photography magazine. Nothing comes from nothing.
'She has replicated Frank Stella's early stripe paintings, and adopted the role of Paul McCarthy's mad abstract expressionist in his 1995 video performance Painter. In the latter, Sturtevant's version is near indistinguishable from the original. She becomes McCarthy's Painter, just as McCarthy himself became a grotesque and scatological version of Willem de Kooning in his hilarious video. Clips from Sturtevant's remake play on multi-screen videos in this Serpentine show, called Leaps, Jumps and Bumps. On a loop, a phallic rubber finger, drooling pigment, is shown dipping in and out of a can of paint, to the endless mantra: "Sex and death, sex and death, sex and death …"
'In Sturtevant's remake of the late Félix González-Torres's Untitled (America), lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling form a glowing nest on the floor. The Cuban-born American died from Aids in 1996, and it was a Sturtevant version of this work that appeared in his Serpentine retrospective in 2000. I doubt he would have minded. I also imagine Duchamp would have laughed at Sturtevant's six identical versions of his 1920 miniature set of French windows, even though they are signed and copyrighted by Duchamp's fictive alter ego, Rose Sélavy. Others, such as the New York dealer Leo Castelli, have been less sanguine. Castelli apparently bought several Sturtevant versions of work by artists he represented – and destroyed them.
'All reality is now virtual reality, says Sturtevant. We are hollowed-out husks of what once we were. She thinks the planet now is very empty, which I guess is where the sex dolls come in. As well as videos of works by her, there are shots of owls, sportsmen, 1930s cartoon sex symbol Betty Boop – and even Liberace's shoes. There's Butt-Head's ugly mouth, from the Beavis and Butt-Head cartoon, and here's Sturtevant's own mouth, seen through a slit in a piece of sacking. In Trilogy of Transgression, Minnie Mouse waves on one screen, while tiny crucifixes threaded on a piece of string are pulled, gently, from an inflatable anus on another. How did they get there?
'Sturtevant's most recent work is less about repeating other people's art, or even her own, than it is about the constant repetitiousness of experience in the post-internet age. If Sturtevant hadn't done what she did, someone else would have. Someone, somewhere, is doubtless repeating Sturtevant now. The cycle is endless.'-- Adrian Searle
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Gallery
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Further
STURTEVANT – 032c Workshop
Sturtevant @ GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC
Video: 'Sturtevant: Leaps Jumps and Bumps'
'Elaine Sturtevant, plasticienne - L'Art & la Manière'
Video: 'NOWNESS - ELAINE STURTEVANT'
Sturtevant @ Gavin Brown's Enterprise
'Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art'
'The Original: Doing the Elastic Tango With Sturtevant'
'Sturtevant Inside Out'
Sturtevant interviewed by Peter Halley
'Klicken im Kopf'
'Where Are the Great Women Pop Artists?'
'Portrait of the Artist as another Artist'
'The Silent Power of Art'
'A Double-take on Elaine Sturtevant'
'Remake, Reuse, Reassemble and Recombine: "Sturtevant - Image Over Image"'
'Sturtevant Forms Hell and Finds Clarity'
'Flowers in Chelsea From the Original Appropriation Artist'
'STURTEVANT – FINITE INFINITE'
'You Should Ask Elaine'
Buy 'Under the Sign of [sic]' @ Semiotext(e)
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Hainley on TV
Bruce Hainley, Lisa Lapinski, and Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer discuss Sturtevant at 356 S. Mission Rd.
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Hainley on Under the Sign of [sic]
from Artforum
For a long time, I thought I was writing a book on Warhol. Two things scotched that idea: Wayne Koestenbaum dropped his A-bomb, Andy Warhol, and I saw Sturtevant’s epic exhibit, “The Brutal Truth” (for which the entirety of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt was given over to the artist’s work). Soon after, I was at dinner with a bunch of friends, and the Lady herself turned to me and inquired, “Hey, what’s up with that Warhol book?” I confessed, “Absolutely nada.” “Well, then, what are you going to do?” Without really thinking, I snapped, “I’m going write a book about you!” Little did I know where that hasty answer would lead.
Because Sturtevant’s art works the way it works, the book wouldn’t be a biography—although, certainly, there’s a delicious one to be written—or a hagiography, nor could it meaningfully probe her entire oeuvre. I also couldn’t launch things with a straightforward chronology: Sorry folks, no beginning at the beginning. There were many false starts, i.e., when Twitter launched, I was convinced that part of the book had to be written in exact, 140-character tweets; another version leaned too hard on the conceit of the eclipse. Thankfully, without a deadline, a contract, or the possibility of tenure hanging over my head, I had plenty of time to think and to try things out only to abandon them. So much of contemporary existence militates against such luxurious headspace and necessary failure. However much an initial mistakenness remains a crucial dynamic of Sturtevant’s methods, I did know it was time for someone to care enough to verify, with witnesses both for and against and a corroborating paper trail, every artistic move she made, the facticity of all the actions during her first, elusive decade of fun in the frenetic heyday of the 1960s and early ’70s. Of course, the book had to face up to the onslaught of right now as well, since Sturtevant maneuvers in two time signatures at once: the untimely and the instamatic.
Her various catalytic conversions prove that art can be (at its best?) an impetus for action—aesthetic, cerebral, insurrectionary. I wanted the writing to surf her energy waves, wiping out as infrequently as it could. With no words on the front cover, the book looks like Sturtevant’s Haring Tag, and the reader must flip it over to get the title and any other data, turn it over again to proceed. Divided into three parts and a coda, the text takes on a different form in each. What’s that great Grace Jones line, “Feeling like a woman, looking like a man”? Here, cohesiveness feels like reckoning with a single prismatic artist, but looks like discordant multiple genres. The first part, about her troublemaking in 1967, has three sections, and it opens with an in-your-face puzzle of two of its sections facing-off against each other: verso, and on every left-hand page until the section ends, a confrontation with the artist’s The Store of Claes Oldenburg; recto, an examination of her two Relâches. When those two sections conclude (clearly, but with little fanfare), the third section, on her Study for Yvonne Rainer’s “Three Seascapes,” kicks in, and the pagination becomes more regular. Genet, specifically his bracing text on Rembrandt, also from 1967, was the tutelary spirit, and I liked forcing the issue of two-different-things-at-once, a strange, syncopated forward movement and then a return to where one started—repetition and beginning again; illegibility and difference-production: sameness and homo-ness. Continuing the dance in another register, the second part delivers a Wildean dialogue going down, recently, at the Chateau Marmont, and concerning, among other things, her Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform). Part one uses no first person narration; in part two, mostly fictional personages speak, and the text operates like a script. It is only in the final, third part, dealing with the most mysterious period of the artist’s pursuits, from 1970–74, that an “I” appears to cause problems.
While the title nods, sempre, to Susan Sontag, I put matters under the sign of—in every patois—sick to grasp at as-is-ness and produce a psych. More than performing any mimetic relation to the artist’s work, I wished to terrorize how art history organizes itself, question how thinking sounds and the status quo of its forms. Hedi El Kholti at Semiotext(e) remained a fierce ally in his design of the book and in his spirit of adventure, allowing it all to be as bluntly elegant as possible while enacting many key Sturtevantian forces. Fingers crossed that the result happens to provide something like the anxious rush of a detective novel and/or of a game of hot potato played with a toy grenade.
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Sturtevant on TV
elaine sturtevant's house of horrors
Sturtevant Appropriation Art
Opening-Day Artist Talk: Sturtevant
Art Biennale 2011 - Sturtevant (interview)
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Hainley interviews Sturtevant
BRUCE HAINLEY: Before we launch into the `80s, a little back story. When you mounted your landmark exhibition at White Columns, in New York, in 1986, on the heels of your being in Bob Nickas`s 1985 show "Production Re: Production," it had been over a decade since your last shows-"Studies for Warhols` Marilyns Beuys` Actions and Objects Duchamps` Etc. Including Film," at the Everson Museum of Art, in 1973, and your Joseph Beuys show the following year. Were you making art during that period?
STURTEVANT: Totally, totally out of the art world from 1974 until 1985 or so. I was writing, thinking, playing tennis, and carrying on. My art, with its burden of being devised by conceptual thinking, was not banging against my head but in silent red alert.
BH: Well, something sounded with the White Columns show! It`s hard for me to wrap my head around how thrilling it must have been, after so long an absence, to encounter your Warhol Gold Marilyn [1973] and Warhol Marilyn Diptych [1972], your Lichtenstein But It`s Hopeless [1969] and Duchamp Fontaine [1973], and one of your huge Beuys copper-fat-and-felt pieces. How did you decide what to put into that show? How exactly did it come about?
S: That great White Columns show. It happened with the devotion and commitment of Eugene Schwartz, as curator, and the churning openness of Bill Arning, the director. Together we produced a show of high intensity and polemics that jolted and bounced in all directions. Fortunately the appropriationists were hanging out at the time, which gave me a whole new space for potent dialogue. This was very crucial, as it allowed entry into the work by negative definition-a valid, powerful position. Then again, the appropriationists made me a precursor, although refusing to be jammed into that category immediately put me back in hot water. The dynamic difference was that Sherrie Levine, leading the pack, brilliantly used the copy as a political strategy, whereas the force of my work lies in the premise that thought is power. What is currently compelling is our pervasive cybernetic mode, which plunks copyright into mythology, makes origins a romantic notion, and pushes creativity outside the self. Remake, reuse, reassemble, recombine-that`s the way to go.
BH: The notorious impresario and curator Christian Leigh was another big supporter of your work. Could you say a little about him?
S: Dear, dear Christian, with his keen and intense face-so clever, so fast, so funny, so bad. He played out fantasies in the murky art world that would have played out better on the dramatic stage. He was a supertalented guy, with critical panache, who made twisted turns that sucked him up-and that was that. As for where he is now: Maybe he`s a master samurai in Tokyo.
BH: You participated in one of his most extravagant exhibitions, "The Silent Baroque," at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, in 1989. How do you think that show, coming at the end of the 1980s, summed up the decade, the good and the bad?
S: The silence in "The Silent Baroque" was not very silent, but the baroque was very baroque. It was an event, a performance, a challenge to spectators-elaborate and much elaborated, all exceeding the frame. It anticipated the turn of the object to description, of concept to narrative, and of subject to content, which has the perverse, simultaneous double trouble of being ahead and being behind.
BH: One of my favorite pieces of yours from the `80s is your plan to repeat Michael Heizer`s Double Negative [1969-70]. Could you comment on that idea-why Heizer, and why that work? It seems so amazing, so weirdly fitting, that although you got to the point of surveying land out west, the project was never realized. To double Double Negative, both negating and non-realizing it, seems one of your most radical gestures.
S: Ah, yes, Double Negative. But I did that piece in the `70s, not the `80s. I was probing a repetition that conceals a terrifying paradox: To fold Heizer`s piece back on itself, or to fold it forward, is to negate its being, or to bring its being to a higher power. But then financial impediments created a work of art that was more radical than radical-the intent of radical movement.
BH: For some, especially those too young to have lived through the `80s, there`s such a glow to the decade-its Day-Glo and neon hues, its slickness and gloss and easy gain. But whatever its glamour, there was something truly amok there, though probably no more amok than now.
S: Well, the big blast of the `80s was the beginning of a not interesting place. Discourse was rhetoric; everyone was fraught with the feeling of money and the loss of parameters. Meaninglessness was posited as the meaning. New was no longer new. The times contained this loud rumble of fraudulent mentality: galleries cheating artists, artists giving paintings to critics and curators in exchange for reviews and shows, and other such dubious actions. But there was dancing at the Mudd Club, hearing raucous, often bad bands at CBGB`s, snorting in the toilet, shouting over music and dinner-the chic of wine, Pac-Man, money, stars, and hype. It was a kind of buzz that was exciting but not good-heralding the `90s task of permitting cybernetics a full swipe at art.
(read the rest)
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Book
Semiotext(e)
'Asked to sum up her artistic pursuit, the American artist Elaine Sturtevant once replied: “I create vertigo.” Since the mid-1960s, Sturtevant has been using repetition to change the way art is understood. In 1965, what seemed to be a group show by then “hot” artists (Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, George Segal, and James Rosenquist, among others) was in fact Sturtevant’s first solo exhibit, every work in it created by herself.
'Sturtevant would continue to make her work the work of others. The subject of major museum exhibitions throughout Europe and awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the 54th Venice Biennale, she will have a major survey at the MoMA, New York, in 2014.
'In Under the Sign of [sic], Bruce Hainley unpacks the work of Sturtevant, providing the first book-length monographic study of the artist in English. Hainley draws on elusive archival materials to tackle not only Sturtevant’s work but also the essential problem that it poses. Hainley examines all of Sturtevant’s projects in a single year (1967); uses her Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1995 as a conceptual wedge to consider contemporary art’s place in the world; and, finally, digs into the most occluded part of her career, from 1971 to 1973, when she created works by Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, and had her first solo American museum exhibit.'-- Semiotext(e)
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Excerpt
It’s hard to know where to begin.
Elaine Sturtevant made Warhol Empire State, a black and white film, in 1972. Although I have never seen it, to remake Warhol’s most notorious, ‘unwatchable’, and purely conceptual movie is an act of great, breathtaking beauty - in a way not unlike Douglas Sirk’s making of Imitation of Life (1959) anew. Warhol Empire State situates Sturtevant’s project in terms of contemporaneity; what is seen and unseeable; what causes thinking and what passes unthought.
In 1991, Sturtevant presented an entire show consisting of her repetition of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’ series. It was not the first time (although what ‘first time’ means in terms of seeing and re-seeing art is important to consider) she had investigated the flash and physics of encountering this work. In the mid-60s, she asked Warhol for the original silkscreen with which he had made his ‘Flowers’ - an image he appropriated, not uninterestingly, from a Kodak ad - to make hers. Warhol gave her the screen. At a later date, after being bombarded with questions about his process and technique, Warhol responded: ‘I don’t know. Ask Elaine.’ As Sturtevant puts it: ‘Warhol was very Warhol’.
This is a complicated statement. How did Warhol get to be ‘very Warhol’? How does one come to recognise - see, consider - a painting, film , or anything by Warhol once he and everything he’s done are slated only to be ‘a Warhol’? It is Sturtevant who knows how to make a Warhol, not Warhol. It is Sturtevant who allows a Warhol to be a Warhol, by repeating him. Copy, replica, mimesis, simulacra, fake, digital virtuality, clone - Sturtevant’s work has been for more than 40 years a meditation on these concepts by decidedly not being any of them.
Strangely absent from most histories of Pop and Conceptualism, her work has important ramifications for the understanding of both movements. It is as if Sturtevant, with a radical pragmatism, observed and considered so intensely the art of her contemporaries that her gaze burned through to its core. Study Sturtevant’s Stella for Picabia (1988). If the initial response is to see ‘a Stella’ and recall his famous 1962 dictum ‘what you see is what you see’, then to avoid vertigo upon figuring out that the painting is not by Stella, the viewer must hold on to everything usually thought about Stella and consider what it would be for all of it not to be what it was. Sturtevant discerned a way to present what you cannot see as what is seen. In no small part due to her being positioned as the original appropriator, and because she has made Sturtevants of certain Duchamp pieces, her philosophical consideration of her contemporaries and of contemporaneity has been short-changed. If Stella is a crucial impetus, so is Lichtenstein - in particular his amazing painting Image Duplicator (1963). She looked into, through, and beyond the eyes beaming out from Lichtenstein’s image. She eyed the science, the fiction, and the possibility of the sci-fi interlocutor’s demand: ‘What? Why did you ask that? What do you know about my image duplicator?’ Sturtevant’s project has been to pragmatically demonstrate what she knows, and how and why how what she knows operates.
In ‘Unwritten Histories of Conceptual Art,’ the final essay of Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), Thomas Crow examines the necessity of interrogating the ‘assumed primacy of visual illusion as central to the making and understanding of a work of art’, and focuses on how Sturtevant ‘acutely defined the limitations of any history of art wedded to the image.’ Sturtevant’s project questions the primacy of visual illusion - not by marking a point in the 60s when this became necessary, but by her repetitions demonstrating how aesthetics has, all along, been structured and determined by whatever is understood to be the non-visual, the non-retinal - the unseen and thought. Through her exploration of the underpinnings of what the encounter and/or physics nominated as ‘art’ is, she dematerialises the primacy of the object and of the visual, but not by abandoning the object, the methods of its making, or even visuality itself; this is why her work is stranger and more promising than even Crow suggests. She provides immanence - and it’s contrafactual. Sturtevant has written: ‘It is imperative that I see, know, and visually implant every work that I attempt. Photographs are not taken and catalogues [are] used only to check size and scale. The work is done predominantly from memory, using the same techniques, making the same errors and thus coming out in the same place. The dilemma is that technique is crucial but not important.’ Crucial that she paints, makes, does - but not important, crucial ‘to find a way to use an object that would not present itself as an object, that would at the same time talk about the structure of aesthetics as the idea.’ Not exactly jettisoning the history of art, she always illuminates the potential of art’s contemporaneity - which partly explains, for example, why she repeated a Muybridge (a study of a woman - Sturtevant - walking with hands on hips) in 1966, as well as Warhol Flowers in 1964-65, 1969-70, 1990, and 1991. From Duchamp Fresh Window (1992), to Beuys Fat Chair (1974), Lichtenstein Happy Tears (1966-67), and Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (1997), Sturtevant repeats works for the necessity of a catalytic recognisability, sparking an investigation of what allows ‘art’ to be, so that the entirety of the structure of art is reconsidered horizontally not linearly.
Sturtevant had her first her solo show in 1965 at the Bianchini Gallery. It included Sturtevants of Warhol’s ‘Flowers’, a Johns ‘Flag’, an Oldenburg shirt, a Segal sculpture, a Rauschenberg drawing, a Stella concentric painting, and a Rosenquist. When she redid the show a year later in Paris, there was a difference: ‘the gallery was locked at all times, making the show visible only from the street.’ 6 Originally most of her artistic peers supported her work, and even sceptical critics often applauded what they interpreted to be her savvily making fun of the artists and art of the moment, showing how ridiculous contemporary art was by doing something even more absurd. The climate began to shift when, in April 1967, she repeated The Store of Claes Oldenburg at 623 E. 9th St., a few blocks from where Oldenburg had made his Store on E. 2nd St. By the mid-70s, as Christian Leigh has noted: ‘What had at first been laughed at and appreciated for all the wrong reasons [...] quickly turned to anger, rage, mistrust, and misunderstanding on a collective scale.’ After her 1974 Beuys exhibition at Onnasch Gallery, New York, Sturtevant ‘made a slow and conscious decision to stop making work. A theoretical stance rather than a defeated withdrawal, she felt that the combined hostility could only dilute and dissipate the power of her work.’ Some have interpreted Sturtevant’s withdrawal as a repetition of Duchamp’s silence, his abandoning art for chess-playing and breathing. Her work would not be seen again until the 1986 White Columns show in New York.
Sturtevant as Beuys, walking down the street for the frontispiece of her 1992 Württembergischer Kunstverein survey, or with a pie in her face for Study for Beuys Action (1971); as Duchamp, in Duchamp’s Wanted (1969), or covered with shaving cream curved into devilish horns for Duchamp’s Man Ray Portrait (1966); as Cranach’s Eve with Robert Rauschenberg as Adam for Duchamp’s Relache (1967). John Miller has been the only writer to identify an inherent Feminist critique as part of Sturtevant’s project. This is something the artist denies, although she suggested such a possibility in a letter to Francis M. Naumann, writing that her intention ‘was not to anger anyone but rather “to engender polemics”, to “give visible action to dialectics”, and “to narrow the gap between the visible and articulate”.’ I would want to question her choice of the word ‘engender’. While Sturtevant’s project is not limited, nor reducible, to an investigation of how the concepts of ‘genius’ and ‘original’ are conditioned by ‘gender’, I do believe that her work concerns the polemics of engendering and its relation to being, identity, and selfhood. To one critic who inquired whether it is ‘important that you do the work of exclusively male artists?’ Sturtevant replied: ‘Oh no, that question!
It never dawned on me. My choices were made on another level.’ She has made a work by Yvonne Rainer, but when pressed on whether she saw gender/biography as having little to do with her project, or if there were a fluidity about the imaginary that overwhelms/disregards gender/biography, she responded: ‘Surely you don’t want me to reiterate. Gender discourse has nothing to do with the work. Why agitate? Why bring it up? A[nswer]: desire & drive to/for surface + flacks probing issues.’ To bring the issue to a complete halt, she added: ‘These questions are not for you/you.’
Miller situates Sturtevant provocatively in the tradition of the dandy, but unlike the numerous male artists who ‘cultivate a persona infused with artifice in order to project an aura of exceptionality, their female counterparts tend to concentrate on selfhood itself as artifice, foregoing Romantic pretensions of genius.’ Miller invokes Wilde’s aperçu - ‘it is only the unimaginative who ever invents. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything’. He goes on to describe Sturtevant: ‘By raising the challenge of an artistry divorced from the production of new imagery, she calls closer attention to art as discourse than before, making it, rather than the art object per se, the subject of connoisseurship.’
How gender appears and disappears (part of the body’s difference, the body as difference), how it can be destabilised by looking like exactly what it is not, potentially analogises some of the ways Sturtevant’s repetitions work. She has written that it is Duchamp’s ‘reluctant indifference [...] his repetitive indifference, lack of intention, non-commitment - a sort of throwing away; letting it all go’ which has captivated her most, not his objects. Sturtevant’s words beautifully repeating, yet not exactly repeating, continue: ‘What Duchamp did not do, not what he did, which is what he did, locates the dynamics of his work. [...] The grand contradiction is that giving up creativity made him a great creator.’ She concludes that ‘how Duchamp lived contains the functional totality of his work.’ Despite her own indifference to biography, her own appearance as difference - somewhat Rrose Sélavy-like - in certain of her works, and given her most recent pieces focusing on the body as object (using parts of nude bodies collaged with objects - such as a breast juxtaposed with the top of the Empire State building), Sturtevant begins to provide a trenchant commentary on identity and self. On the back of a recent catalogues, over the image of a glorious fuschia field and a rising Batman figure, appear the words ‘Body, Objects, Image’. Sturtevant has said that the work concentrates on the ‘cybernetic overload, the danger of rejecting objects, about “having” instead of “being”.’ The announcement card for a concurrent show at Air de Paris had World Cup soccer players kicking the ball, and on the verso the Adidas logo; both recto and verso were diagonally crossed by the phrase: ça va aller (everything’s going to be all right). She wrote to me about this card: ‘Simply put & it is simple: mass culture is art and not reverse’.
Some of the redefinitions and reversals are perhaps more ominous. Her video in the Paris show, Copy without Origins, Self as Disappearance (1998), demonstrates how her work has never been historical (nostalgic homage) but proleptic. The video examines ‘our cyberworld making copyright a myth, origins a romantic notion; with self as information, and identity as disappearance.’ If the body is an object, how does one object if one wishes to, and what occurs if virtuality dispenses with the need for bodies altogether, everything seemingly electronic, light and immaterial? To consider the questions raised by Sturtevant’s work, appalling or enthralling, remember Warhol’s automatonism, his body as invisible sculpture, absence; think about the human as only an affect or effect, a device of the aesthetic. See the number of Sturtevant yous, the number of Sturtevant mes making up whoever me is. Self and being as immanent contrafactions.
Every word she wrote to me was a facsimile. It’s hard to know where to begin.
*
p.s. RIP: Rene Ricard, Philip Seymour Hoffman. ** David Ehrenstein, Morning, D. Oh, thank you about Roussel. With 'TMS', I was deliberately trying not to work with my literary influences and use influences from other mediums instead and strictly, not that things didn't slip in anyway. I wasn't thinking consciously about Roussel, but it makes total sense, and even putting my thing in the same breath with his work is a great compliment. Yes, RIP Rene. Really a fantastic poet and, at least in my experiences from hanging out with him in the early 80s, a very scary guy. I've always said that Rene was the creepiest, most untrustworthy, sadistic person I ever knew, but he was brilliant at it, which I guess I mean as a compliment, and, in any case, he was a singular and amazing human, and it's a real loss. And then PSH, Jesus. Terrible, terrible. ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. Little Phatty was cool, yeah. Thanks a lot for getting 'The Weaklings (XL)'! Sales, yeah, I don't know, and it doesn't matter. I only hope it does well enough to make the publisher glad they put it out, I guess. ** Grant maierhofer, Hi, Grant. Nice to see you. Oh, what did I say about the 'Guide' sigil? No, the mention of it in there is deliberate, but I guess I meant about the actual wish that the sigil makes, which is very hidden although findable if one has a lot of time and nothing better to do, ha ha. Great that you found Perec. He's incredible and major, I think. I'm good, working hard on stuff and trying to get ready for the big trip next week, which, given that I have to buy a ton of protective winter clothes and stuff, is kind of a chore. I have no idea about what's going on with 'The Weaklings (XL)'. Some cool people have said really nice things about it on Facebook. That's pretty much all I've seen/heard. ** Etc etc etc, Hi! Yeah, I've seen the headlines and gossip and blah blah re: the relentless Justin Bieber media stalking and demonizing and stuff. I've never been interested in Bieber, but I'm definitely on his side re: all the hating and vengeance-wishing and stuff going on. It's really depressing to me how moralistic and conservative even a lot of intelligent, 'cultured' people become when something like that, which has nothing to do with anyone's lives but his own, and which is 90% roiled up media speculation of the most knee-jerk, mindless, self-serving kind, scratches their surface and reveals so much colonizing emotional ugliness. Anyway, ... Hm, I think a lot of the younger fiction writers whom I'm most excited about are really into rap, especially the more inventive, experimental stuff, and I would imagine that there's quite an influence there, although, yeah, I'm not sure if there are writers intentionally trying to translate Rap's aesthetic and force into fictional language. Interesting question. I would guess so. Good tidings back to you, bud. ** MANCY, Thanks. Yeah, I'm sort of three-quarters excited and one-quarter scared shitless about the Antarctica trip. Seems like a good ratio. That's very interesting about you making that change and doing the therapy/meds experiment. I think you know that therapy helped me a ton back when I needed it, and I still have no clue how it worked. Huh, that's a curious observation about your piece. I find that kind of analysis really suspicious off the top of my head, but who knows, right? And if you say it got you thinking, and I guess that's all the justification it needs. Really good luck with all of that, obviously, and, I don't know, if talking about it here and sharing anything here would help at all, please do, okay? A new video, awesome! I just watched the first few seconds, and it looks amazing. In fact, I'll imbed it at the p.s.'s bottom for maximum sharing, if that's okay. Everyone, if you scroll down to the end of the p.s., you'll see a video imbed. It's a new work by MANCY aka the fantastic artist Steven Purtill. His videos are always really incredible things, and I urge you strongly to click 'play' and enjoy the results. Great! Love, hugs, support, respect to you, man. ** Thomas Moronic, Yay! I was just thinking this weekend that I missed your imaginary conversations with the slaves, so, yeah, thanks! Beautiful responses, really heartening. Plus, it's so nice to know that there's at least one other person out there who's really attending to and studying and finding inspiration in their texts. A bunch of people I chatted re: the post with were especially into Weatherwax and the mini-Cobain kid, and it's true. There was something really magical going on there. Seems like it would be so fascinating to go to China, much less in the company of a beloved from there. I remember Wolf and Marc waxing very enthusiastic about their visit there a while back. ** Steevee, Hi. Yeah, really sad. He was kind of non-stop great in basically everything. I hate heroin just about as much as I hate anything in world, and there it goes again. I want to hear and maybe get the new Against Me! album, for the obvious reasons, yeah. ** Bill, Hi Hotsauce2, I know. I got all ticklish when I found that one. I have a weird fondness for white pants. Not wearing them but seeing them on people. Lingering 70s teen idol brainwashing or something. ** Misanthrope, Hopefully, I'm going to be so mummified that frostbite won't have an "in". Greenland and Iceland are both on Zac's and my future travel plans in theory. Totally. Glad you had fun at the Chuck E. thing. Oh, yeah, I was glued to the Superbowl, you bet, ha ha. I think the Seahawks won, right? So, you're happy? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff. Sad to see that Destination Out is finishing its run, but your reasons are very good ones, and it was incredible thing, and I'm sure it'll keep rippling and rippling. Thanks much about 'The Weaklings'! That means a lot. The Boys2brelocated "poems" were actually slave profiles that originated on the blog in early versions of those posts, but from back when I was allowing myself more freedom to edit and play with them. So, there was enough of my hand in them that I decided to 'steal' them. Mm, I spent a fair amount of time organizing the book, yeah, for sure. A couple of the poems were written after I started organizing it and were written somewhat for the purpose of bridging within the mss., yes. I don't want to say too much about the possible cycle yet, but that's what I'm thinking seriously of doing. Originally, I wanted to write one last novel, as I think you know, but I've found something that's really huge and really important to me that the novel I'm writing is investigating and representing, and I believe will it require more than one novel to represent, and there are a lot of reasons that I don't really want to go into as of yet that make the idea of finishing my work as a novelist with a cycle seem like not just a good idea but a given. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. The post reminded me of my former self as a high school musician/band member too, and I actually did sing, not that I could sing, mind you. Oh, that's totally cool about the post, obviously. Thank you a zillion. ** Okay. I highly recommend that you check out the book I've spotlit today. It's by the brilliant poet/critic/writer Bruce Hainley, and it's about the brilliant/important artist Elaine Sturtevant, and it's published by the brilliant Semiotext(e), so, whoa, obviously so many reasons for you to indulge. See you tomorrow.
Steven Putrill ULTRADUSTER