ALL OF MY PEOPLE
FORMS OF MELANCHOLY *VIDEO TOUR*
Lecture by Marisa Olson here (see post comments for live chat transcript)
Cafepress shop here
Sego Art Center
some installation shots on flickr
EXCERPT FROM THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST (1968, P. 38-39) WOLFE, TOM.
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| But of course!-the feeling-out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories of the new American night-it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world- only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts, sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes- with all this Straight-6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead, which somehow tied in with the technological superheroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics- Postwar American suburbs-glorious world! and the hell with the intellectual bad-mouthers of America’s tailfin civilization… They couldn’t know what it was like or else they had it cultivated out of them-the feeling-to be very Superkids! the world’s first generation of the little devils- feeling immune, beyond calamity. One’s parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression- but Superkids knew only the emotional surge of the great payoff, when nothing was a common any longer- The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very neon Renaissance-And the myths that actually touched you at that time-not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses, and Aeneas-but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, Plastic Man, The Flash-but of course! On Perry Lane, what did they think it was-quaint?-when he talked about the comic-book Superheroes as the honest American myths? It was a fantasy world already, this elector-pastel world of Mom&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan-the family car!-a huge crazy god-awful-powerful fantasy creature to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction-you’re already there, in Fantasyland, so why not move off your smug-harbor quilty-bed dead center and cut loose-go ahead and say it-Shazam!-juice it up to what it’s already aching to be: 327,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long and soaring, screaming on toward… Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future… Billy Batson and Shazam! and turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental gas in the research lab… |
CONTEMPORARY SEMANTICS BETA, CURATED BY CONSTANT DULLAART
I was invited to participate in a show curated by Constant Dullaart that opened this weekend in Amsterdam at Arti et Amicitiae.
Proposed Installation Example
PREFACE TO THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by OSCAR WILDE
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The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, compex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.