DC's

* (restored)

 

“I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend

art from history. I will rescue art from the future,

from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative

notion that it will become more valuable with time.”

– Rene Ricard

 

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Life

Rene Ricard was born in 1946 and grew up in Acushnet, Massachusetts. As a young teenager he ran away to Boston and assimilated into the literary scene of the city; by age eighteen he’d moved to New York City and where he was accepted as a protege by Andy Warhol. He appeared in the classic Warhol films Kitchen (1965), Chelsea Girls (1966), and ****  (1967), as well as in a number of other noted underground films, including Warren Sonbert’s Hall of Mirrors (1966), among others. He was one of the founders of and original performers in Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous.  Having achieved stature in the art world by successfully launching the career of painter Julian Schnabel, Ricard helped bring the artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat to fame. Ricard was played by Michael Wincott in Julian Schnabel’s biopic, Basquiat (1996) In December of 1981 he published the first major article on the artists. The piece appeared in Artforum magazine and was called “The Radiant Child.”

In 1979 the DIA Foundation published Ricard’s first book of poems, a self-titled volume styled on the Tiffany Christmas catalogue. His second book of poetry, God With Revolver (Hanuman Books) was published ten years later. Along with a handfull of one of a kind zines, Ricard has released two other volumes of poetry since then: Trusty Sarcophagus Co. (Inanout Books, 1990) and Love Poems (C U Z Editions, 1999). In 2004, Rene did the album cover for Shadows Collide With People by John Frusciante The majority of Ricard’s poems are now achieved in the form of paintings. He is represented in New York City by the Cheim and Reed Gallery on West 25th Street. Ricard is reclusive and famously mercurial. He lives and works at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City.

 

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Looks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Words

The Radiant Child (1981)
Rene Ricard

I remember the first Tags (where is Taki?), Breaking (where you spin on your head), Rapping (where I first heard it). I know the names, but are the names important? Where is Taki? Perhaps because I have seen graffiti, then seen something else, thrown myself on the dance floor, then gone on to dance another way, I say that the reason for abandoning so much during the ’70s was that each fad became an institution. What we can finally see from the ’70s buried among the revivals and now surfacing (Tagging, Breaking, Rapping) was at least one academy without program. Distinct to the ’70s, graffiti, in particular, was the institutionalization of the idiosyncratic that has led to the need for individuation within this anonymous vernacular. This is why the individuals (Crazy Legs) must distinguish themselves.

Artists have a responsibility to their work to raise it above the vernacular. Perhaps it is the critic’s job to sort out from the melee of popular style the individuals who define the style, who perhaps inaugurated it (where is Taki) and to bring them to public attention. The communal exhibitions of the last year and a half or so, from the Times Square Show, the Mudd Club shows, the Monumental Show, to the New York/New Wave Show at P.S. 1, have made us accustomed to looking at art in a group, so much so that an exhibit of an individual’s work seems almost antisocial. Colab, Fashion Moda, etc., have created a definite populist ambience, and like all such organizations, from the dawn of modern, have dug a base to launch new work. These are vast communal enterprises as amazing that they got off the ground as the space shuttle and even more, fly-by-night, that they landed on solid ground. (continued)

Bruce Hainley on ‘The Radiant Child’ (2001): Rene Ricard’s prose coordinates itself by digression, but I won’t digress: What’s at stake for anyone interested in thought’s embodiment is ecriture. Ricard writes, and–neither simply art history nor art criticism–his writing wrongs. Ostensibly, “The Radiant Child” is what some might consider an overly personal twirl by the Factory star (Kitchen; Chelsea Girls), poet (1979-1980; God with Revolver), and downtown eminence through the scenes (“communal exhibitions”; Mudd Club), modes (graffiti/tagging), and references (Warhol, Twombly) that would mark many of the soon-to-be art stars of the ’80s. But even more than being about Jean-Michel Basquiat (Ricard was the first to think about what and how his work might mean) or Keith Haring; or about graffiti and its “dyslexic development in that the second generation is capitalizing on territory pioneered by its lost innovators”; or about the slightly sickening fact that the “crass fast-turnover speculators’ market can have a deleterious effect on an artist’s future career” since “we are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals”; the essay is an attempt to theorize, via Haring’s Radiant Child, which manages to be both a tag with the “same effect as advertising” and “something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb,” how “we are that little baby, the radiant child, and our name, what we are to become, is outside us and we must become ‘Judy Rifka’ or ‘Jean-Michel’ the way I became ‘Rene Ricard.”‘ (read the entirety)

 

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Six poems & a reading
Rene Ricard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RENE RICARD, FAMOUS AT 20 (1979)

… and I still expect to be deferred to
To get in free with a crowd
So I don’t go to places where I have to pay
Sure I miss out on a lot but there was a time
When every doorman in town knew me as an ornament
Wherever I stood
Even though I’m not on the A list anymore
And don’t even get invited to the B parties
I’m still treated well where being
A former underground movie star
Still carries a little weight
I can still turn on the charm
And find a small but enthusiastic audience
Where the star of a more elegant time
Is still appreciated once in a while
By the fossil hunters
I am no longer sought after by the great hostesses
The truth is I don’t care anymore
I’ve seen them come and go
The addresses change but the guest list
Remains the same
The rich are the worst
And the very rich the very worst
They only want the Nobel Prize winners
The Academy Award winners
They are like little kids when they meet someone famous
Or someone even more rich then them
Because the dreams of the poor are only exaggerated
into the grotesque by the rich
Yes those great hostesses who purport to be lion tamers
End up being nothing but head hunters
Laughed at behind their backs
But who wouldn’t
Yeah, it’s a vulgar sprint for the famous
And the nouveau cute who feed to them
All those pretty young kids thrown to the vampires
Some vanish and the lucky ones
Become vampires themselves
I didn’t – that’s all
It’s all right to joke about it
But my stomach turns when I have to wait
In line outside some posh nightspot
And watch my poor friends led like tugboats
While one of those drunken fiends
Prods them into a limousine
What will it get them?
A few grants for a pathetic art project?
This year’s pet? Society’s darling?
You think they’d say “Hi” to try to get me in
But it Le Monde, dearie
You know who you are
All you sycophants and grant hustlers
I will never apply for a grant
Let me starve!
I must look out for my biography
I may be a pariah but I am still
And always will be a living legend
I’d rather starve

 

Rene Ricard reads (2010)

 

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Performances

Warhol’s ‘Chelsea Girls’ feat. Rene Ricard

Michael Wincott as Rene Ricard in Schnabel’s ‘Basquiat’

Rene Ricard in Michele Civetta’s ‘After the Fall’

Book launch: ‘Rene Ricard 1979-1980’ in Paris on May 4, 2018

 

 

Rene Ricard speaks about the lost Warhol film The Andy Warhol Story (1966):

I made a film with Edie about nine months after she left the Factory. Andy suggested, ‘Let’s do a movie with you as me in it. The Andy Warhol Story. I really hated Andy by then. I realized his was a passive exploitation – that it could be humiliating and horrible. He had been asking me to do this for a long time and I had refused. But one night I took an Obetrol – a very powerful twenty five milligram amphetamine pill, the best. They were very hard to get, rare and very good. It’s a good high, very gay, very lovely speed. That night we were making this Tiger Morse movie, part of a twenty-four hour four-star movie in which I was supposed to be an extra. ‘Don’t do too much talking’, I was told. Well, the pill got me hysterical and I was amazingly good at it. Andy fell in love with me for it. Once again he said, ‘Oh, you’re so good tonight; let’s do that movie I’ve wanted you to do.’ So I finally said okay. The only reason I agreed to do his film was to get even with him. I said, ‘Okay, let’s go to my place and do it.’ I was living in a very beautiful apartment on Fifth Avenue with Avery Dunphy, who was being kept in this luxurious place by a doctor who was mad for prissy Wasps. Mirrored coffee tables, a huge white silk-satin couch.Beautiful, right? What Avery wanted to be was chic -which was all anybody wanted at that time. Having Andy Warhol make a movie in that apartment, even though it wasn’t his, was very chic. I called Avery and told him what was happening – that we were on the the way. I told him, ‘I want orchids. I want the place filled with orchids.’ He asked, ‘Well, where am I going to get orchids at this time of night?’ I told him about a place in the East Sixties that’s open until mid-night. I figured I’d do it right. Right? I didn’t have any money, but at least I could have orchids. Besides, I was trying to get even with Andy. So Avery went out and bought the most exquisiteorchids you’ve ever seen. He bought orchids to die over. I know the difference between good orchids and vulgar ones, and these were expensive and good – from Hawaii or Vietnam, which is where Paris gets its orchids. When we all got to the apartment, Andy asked, ‘Who do you want in the film with you?’ I said ‘I only want Edie Sedgwick. Who else is there in your life but Edie Sedgwick?’ Andy said, ‘I don’t know if we can get her.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it without her.’ I took another pill and I got wired. Wired! There’s a point when you take speed when you talk a lot, and yet there’s also a point where you take too much and you don’t talk. That’s the point that second pill got me to. So Andy got Edie on the telephone and offered to pay for her taxi, and about three hours later Edie turned up. I didn’t want to make the movie when I saw her. She was wearing a dirty blond fall. She looked like the cheapest piece of filth. Here was my Edie, my Edie, and I was making a movie with her – co-stars! No longer was I an extra, and she looked like hell! She was wearing a kind of Marimekko type dress, and mean! She, too, hated Andy at that point: she had been eighty-sixed. When she was with the fairies, she was on speed and she was Edie, she was ‘on’. When she was with Bobby Neuwirth, who was a hetero, she was on downs, and Edie on downs was not pretty. Well, when she arrived at the apartment, the cameras started rolling. I had my own personal vendetta against against Warhol, and so did she. And I was playing Warhol. So I played him the way he behaved to the people under him. She played herself according to how she felt about him then. The things she said to me were horrible. I don’t remember them. I don’t even remember what I said. I was awful. I have nightmares about what I did in that movie… saying things about Andy that were true, how he disposed of people. Paul Morrissey, who was behind the camera, was white with rage. I went through the paintings… how Andy doesn’t actually do the paintings himself. Stupid things like: “Gerard get me an egg. Do you want to know howI paint my pictures, you people out there?’ I’d crack the egg in a glass and then I’d say to Gerard: ‘Cook it!’ That’s how I paint my pictures.’ We did one reel and stopped. Then Andy in his sick, masochistic, dreadful way – after all, here were these two people on camera saying the most ghastly things about him – said ‘Let’s do another reel.’ He had been standing holding his fingers in his mouth, which he does when he’s anxious, and he was loving it… getting the truth. So we did another reel, and in this one it got violent. Edie started it. At some point I gave her some orchids. I said, ‘You’re not dressed up enough for this movie. So do something. Take these flowers.’ She took them and crushed them. I got very upset. And I – me, Rene Ricard, not the Andy Warhol me – was just made demented by that. I love orchids. It was a personal thing from me to her. I said, ‘You really need to fix yourself up, my dear. Put them on you somewhere.’ She cried out, ‘I hate them! I don’t want to be beautiful!’She wrecked the flowers. Edie was hating me. We were both hating each other because of the roles we were playing… I loved Edie, but I couldn’t stand being in a movie with her the way she looked. She was horrible in the movie, and mean. The things I was saying were so horrible. Paul Morrissey suddenly reached out from behind the camera and ripped my clothes off me – a new white silk shirt and new pair of white linen pants. He ripped them. The camera was turning. Paul was out of the frame. I guess he was livid because of the things I was saying about Andy. So we finished the film – two reels. Edie rushed home. I didn’t care about her at that point. My clothes were a ruin. I was a mess. I was wiped out by the pills. Dazed. You’ll never guess what happened then. Andy Warhol at that point was close to a guy called Rod La Rod. He was handling the sound on this film. They asked me to see the rushes in the Factory. I sat there watching it – Paul, Andy, Rod and a few of the other serfs were there -and I saw what they had done to it. Edie’s voice is there, but when I speak, you can’t hear it. They were in glee.

 

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Visuals

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Many, many heads are opened up in ‘Ice Cream Man’. Brains are eaten. The whole shebang. Length is determined in the heat of the moment, no? Or it usually for me. So you’re back in Blighty or almost. Three hellish days, mostly tomorrow and Friday, and then a fainting act, or that’s our prognosis. Luck. ** _Black_Acrylic, Harper obviously answered your question. I’ll just add that the local element is that I proudly published that book through my Little House on the Bowery imprint. ** Carsten, Like I said, I haven’t watched that doc, but I think calling BM alternative is really pushing it. It’s for largely heterosexual people willing to pay big bucks to set up a tent or situate their SUVs in a parking lot in the scorching desert and hang out with other ‘open minded’ people for a few days. I know of no impact it’s had in culture, politics, society, etc. It’s like a cross between a glorified campground and a convention except that instead of fans of comic books or sc-fi they’re fans of ‘alternative lifestyles’. The people I know or know of who go to BM are homeowners who still mourn the demise of the Grateful Dead and see it as a way to ‘get their freak on’ once a year. To me it seems inert and self-satisfying pretty much period. But, again, I haven’t watched the doc. ** Bill, His work has been here in various contexts for sure. I’ve had Paul Thek’s work in the thematic posts, but maybe I haven’t done a whole post about him. I should. He’s great. He’s trending right now, so maybe I’ll wait until he’s marginalised again. Me too on the heatwave. At least it’s short. And tonight is the solar eclipse which Paris gets 90% of, so that might be a good distraction. ** Hugo, A fellow ‘donc’ fan, cool. ‘Hogg’ will take you somewhere special. Other than the jetlag, I find plane flights kind of invigorating, or at least after I’d had my first post-flight cigarette. I’ve been mostly my usual self, and I think things are moving along. Nice: the Cioran translating. ** James Bennett, Hi! Derek M is who turned me on to Altmejd’s work. Pretend apartment scams have become a thing? I guess that would happen. I think when I last moved I looked mostly through what was available on established realtors’ websites? Urgh, sorry, man. I should be around until Zac and I go to Stavanger, which should be close to the end of the month. Hit me up post-swelter. Thanks a lot about ‘God Jr.’. Oh, I think to try to explain to myself and to you why its last section is my favorite thing I’ve written will take more concentration and time than the p.s. allows me. In person? Thank you, sir. Are you going to look but not look at the solar eclipse today? I’m not sure how to do that, but I think I’ll try. ** Diesel Clementine, Hi. It’s weird but a lot of the dark rides, etc. I thought were kiddie shit when I was a kid seem sublime to me now. Not sure how that happened. I think I’ve looked at Temu and AliExpress maybe once, so I don’t know what the vibe is there. I’m so not a good consumer. Other than books, clothes, food and cigarettes, I have almost no interest in buying things. My apartment looks like a gallery between exhibitions. Condolences about the break up, but you seem to be making the very best of it. ** laura w., He and I had a long talk, but I can’t remember it in detail to lay it out. After ‘FNoaD’, he ended up working for Bresson for the rest of Bresson’s life, helping with the making of the films and stuff. He had nothing but good to say about Bresson as a guy. I wish I could remember the buts and bolts. The heat is rising here rapidly, but at least it’s not humid so far. I’ll have to turn on my shitty AC any minute now. Other than the heat, things are smooth here, maybe even too smooth. Hang way in, pal. ** HaRpEr //, I didn’t tell anyone I was writing a novel cycle until I was sure it was going to work, which happened when I finished ‘Guide’. Tricycle! I like it. I predict an enlarged dictionary definition of the word. ‘Red Desert’ is really great. Those early Antonioni films need to be more seen and talked about than they currently are. ** Steve, Meaningcore, haha, nice. Uh, I’ll need to pop outside for food and cigarettes and maybe a solar eclipse peek, but I think the indoors will suffice. You overheated there? I’m forgetting where all the waves currently are. ** Thom, Happy that you dug it, man. Fun times for sure on your end, it sounds like. Over here, August is anti-productivity — inhabitants having fled, venues taking a summer snooze, etc. Well, I guess unless one is in the middle of writing a novel, which I’m not. I am determined to make the next three violently hot days fly right by. Let’s see if determination lives up to its reputation. ** Right. I thought I would mark the occasion of the solar eclipse by bringing back this Rene Ricard post. See if that makes sense. And see you tomorrow.

 

‘David Altmejd’s work is a unique and heady mix of science and magic, science fiction and gothic romanticism: a post-apocalyptic vision which is at the same time essentially optimistic, containing as it always does the potential for regeneration, evolution and invention.

‘‘A perfect object for me’, the artist has said, ‘is something that is extremely seductive and extremely repulsive at the same time’. Decay exists in balance with regeneration, the exquisite in tandem with the grotesque. The sculpted heads that have been Altmejd’s recent focus provoke that shiver of the uncanny lifelike sculpture tends to induce, but skilfully realistic features are interspersed with crude expressionism, gobbets of raw matter or hanks of fur. They have a hallucinatory quality – vivid and startling. One head might sprout another, inverted, so that they they share a pair of eyes, or a face is split into a trio of profiles and half-a-dozen eyes, as if refracted by a kaleidoscope. In others the faces are gone, as if they have been scooped out, but the gaping wounds reveal cavities of dazzling crystal or the inside of a hollowed-out fruit, as if to collapse the categories of animal, vegetable and mineral. There is an immediate sensuality in the artist’s juxtaposition of finely-wrought realism with crude gesture; the proximity of crystals and delicate gold chains with fur and abject matter suggesting ever-present decay.

‘In counter-balance to the aesthetic of profusion is a sculptural impulse to containment and order, evinced in gridded forms and orthogonal mirrored structures recalling Sol Lewitt or Lucas Samaras. Some of Altmejd’s best-known works are his vast, labyrinthine vitrines built of Plexiglas, and often with mirrored elements. They play on the aesthetics of design and display as well as minimalism, but these structures are not simply a means to contain or protect the elements housed within. Rather, the entire structure is an organism or a machine, making visible the processes of growth and decay, generation and destruction that take place inside it. Movement is frozen, but sculptural elements are animated through repetition and incremental change, like the stuttering frames of stop-motion film.

‘Altmejd described himself early in his career as a ‘process artist’. His works not only reveal the process of their making, but suggest that those processes have simply been paused in their unfolding. His monochrome relief panels are austere in comparison to the heads, focusing our attention on the plaster-like material and the actions wrought on it − where it has fallen in wet splats, where a brittle, chalky surface is scratched or fractured, where hands have gouged and clawed. Hands themselves, in cast form, appear and multiply in some of the sculptures, fostering the illusion that the works create themselves. Monumental figures, such as the ‘Bodybuilders’ and the ‘Watchers’, are similarly engaged in their own making or unmaking, sprouting hands that clutch and mould the very substance of their bodies.’ — White Cube

 

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Further

David Altmejd Site
DA @ Xavier Hufkens
DA @ David Kordansky Gallery
DA @ Instagram
DA @ Twitter
Yeasayer + David Altmejd
Learning from Objects: An Interview with David Altmejd
David Altmejd, le prestidigitateur
Video: David Altmejd: The Heart is a Werewolf
In Conversation: David Altmejd
Video: Chaorismatique, David Altmejd sculpteur
La métamorphose dans l’œuvre de David Altmejd
Inside David Altmejd’s Crystal Palace
David Altmejd Creates Sculptures That Blur Concepts
David Altmejd’s New Busts Embrace the Real and Absurd
David Altmejd’s World of Pure Imagination
David Altmejd’s seductive yet repulsive sculptures
David Altmejd: la beauté du monstre
Dans les abysses mentales de David Altmejd
David Altmejd ou l’art du malaise absurde
Getting Lost in David Altmejd’s Hall of Mirrors
David Altmejd is Arresting
Ten questions for David Altmejd

 

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Extras

The Desert and the Seed, 2015

David Altmejd at MAC Montreal

David Altmejd at MAC Montreal

David Altmejd: Heads | Art21 “Extended Play”

 

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Interview

 

Philippa Snow: I wanted to ask you about how you got into using the werewolf motif.
David Altmejd: It was pretty intuitive. I think I just felt as though my work was a little too structural, very minimalist; I would use large light tables, I would use Plexiglas, so all the materials were pretty cold. I just thought at one point that these structures I was building needed to be infected with something. Then I started thinking, what would be the one object that would contrast with them the most? So I thought about a body part. Actually, I thought about a head, which I thought would be powerful enough, and would contrast with the coldness of the structure. I thought with a head, I could start creating a very particular energy.
But then I thought that maybe a human body part, the human head, was a little — not necessarily cliché, but certainly something that had become commonplace in contemporary art. Some of my favourite artists have been Kiki Smith, and Louise Bourgeois, and Robert Gober, and I love their work; but I did feel that following work like theirs, the use of human body parts in art had become more predictable. So I thought instead about referring to the body of the werewolf, which in my mind is the most humanlike monster: meaning the werewolf body part would be just as powerful to look at as the human body part. It’s possible for a viewer to identify with it. But at the same time, it’s weird instead of being familiar. And I really like that.
So that’s the reason I started using the werewolf body parts in my art. And very soon afterwards, once it found its place in my work, I started being conscious of ideas of transformation, and energy, and contrasts between light and darkness, and tension, and all these things, so I just decided to keep the werewolf as a kind of totemic figure in my work.

PS: It’s interesting that you mention the transformation aspect of it, because a lot of your work has the appearance of being…this is an odd thing to say about sculpture, but it almost has the look of something that’s in flux, or something that’s in development. It looks like an organic thing.
DA: Yeah, and it’s important for me to feel that the object, or the sculpture itself, is in the process of developing. One of the things I realised about sculpture that made it really amazing, and that gave it so much potential, is the fact that it exists in a real space. It doesn’t exist in the space of representation. So it exists in the world in almost the same way that a body does, or a person does, you know?

PS: Right. A photograph or a painting of a body that’s life sized is never going to be like a body in the same way as a sculpture of one at the same scale.
DA: And the body of a person is probably the most amazing thing that exists, for so many reasons. So the fact that sculpture inhabits the same space means that it has the potential for having the same kind of presence. Ever since I realised that, I’ve been trying to use the body of a person as a model; and one of the characteristics of a human body is that it’s constantly transforming. A person is never a finished object, and that’s part of what makes them amazing.

PS: And because a lot of the structures are quite dreamlike, there’s quite often the suggestion of a psychological transformation as well.
DA: Absolutely, yeah.

PS: Are there any filmmakers you’re particularly inspired by?
DA: There are certainly filmmakers whose work has excited me. Often I don’t like saying this, because I think that people consider it really, really obvious, but I love David Cronenberg.

PS: Oh, me too!
DA: But not necessarily because of his taste for the organic or the weird. I like him conceptually. I like the way he builds a movie. I like the way he understands — and this is my interpretation, I don’t know if it’s his, but I just have a feeling that he understands the film as being this independent object that develops its own intelligence, and its own language; its own logic, its own sexuality. I kind of like the fact that he steps back and lets the film develop by itself as if it was a body. Who else?

PS: I mean: David Lynch was the big one I was thinking of. But I’m always thinking about David Lynch.
DA: I would say that Lynch has been very, very important for me. Just as much as certain American visual artists from the eighties and the nineties are an influence — ones that still work today, but were very well-known then, like Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, Mike Kelley — I see David Lynch the same way. They were very important for me at the beginning. I really admired that attitude; the space that they were exploring, which was somewhere between supercomedy and superdrama. You know how sometimes there are scenes in Lynch where you don’t know if you’re supposed to laugh, or to feel uncomfortable?

PS: I was thinking about it because of his being very interested in the fragmentation and the refraction of the human body — but especially in the head. There’s always a lot of stuff about head trauma, decapitation. Are you watching the new series of Twin Peaks?
DA: No, I haven’t been.

PS: Oh it’s amazing! I’m a Lynch obsessive anyway, but it’s really pulled me right back into the depths of that obsession.
DA: I do intend to watch it; I saw the first episode and I’m meaning to go back. I really loved the way the special effects are so clumsy, if I’m allowed to call them that?

PS: He loves that, I think.
DA: Because they could have been high-tech, but he obviously chose otherwise. That was amazing. That was completely his sensibility. Nobody else could have done that and actually pulled it off.

PS: No — it’s like the robin at the end of Blue Velvet. It’s an aesthetic decision.
DA: And so funny and not-funny at the same time. Personally, I like being uncomfortable. I think my favourite kind of laughter is uncomfortable laughter; and I think the best horror is the sort of horror that makes me want to giggle because I’m so uncomfortable.

PS: On an unrelated note (or maybe a related note, as we’re talking about uncomfortable laughter) — I read in an interview that you’re really into the Real Housewives?
DA: Oh my God! Yeah, yeah, absolutely!

PS: Because I’ve never seen the Real Housewives shows, but I did do a thing this year for which I had to watch every episode of Keeping Up With The Kardashians ever broadcast in one month. There are thirteen series of it, so that was intense.
DA: I’ve never watched Keeping Up With The Kardashians, but my idea is that it’s one family, so they’re all sort of together in this, right? They’re not all rivals? But the Real Housewives are so great because they’re all rivals.

PS: Is that inspiring somehow, because you’re watching — I don’t know, humanity play itself out?
DA: I mean: it’s hard to see the humanity.

PS: Really? It’s just totally inhumane?
DA: Totally inhumane. I think that it’s totally human, because even the producers are human, so it’s technically a product of humanity. So it’s human in that way. But the set-up is so unlike anything you could understand or experience. I can’t start to think or imagine what it would be like to have a camera on you all the time, or have people there encouraging you to drink wine all the time so that you’ll be in a volatile mood. And producers who will make more money if there’s a fight! It’s a horrifying set-up. It’s like putting a rat in a maze, a labyrinth: of course they’re going to act like rats. They’re in a context that’s kind of indescribable. So it’s hard to understand them. But it’s exciting to see human beings try to survive in such a weird, extreme environment.

PS: We could tie it into our earlier discussion by saying that Real Housewives is a constructed take on the organic. And there are a lot of physically constructed bodies in reality TV, also! Certainly in the case of the Kardashians.
DA: Yeah, you mean facelifts and so on?

PS: And really extreme body augmentations. I find that fascinating, as well.
DA: And it’s funny, because with the Real Housewives there are different — they call them franchises, but it means there are spin-offs in different cities. And they’re usually groups of women who have transformed their bodies in very different ways. For example, the Real Housewives of New York are a group of women who are transforming in one very specific direction, and then you go to Beverly Hills and the Housewives there are taking a totally different transformative route. They end up looking like different species, in the end. It’s amazing.

 

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Show

First Werewolf, 1999

 

Untitled (Jane), 2003

 

Untitled (Black), 2003

 

Untitled (Blue Jay), 2004

 

Untitled (Swallow), 2004

 

The Lovers, 2004

 

The Builders, 2005

 

Untitled, 2006

 

Untitled, 2006

 

The New North, 2007

 

Untitled (Dark), 2008

 

The Center, 2008

 

The Egg, 2008

 

Untitled, 2010

 

Untitled, 2011

 

Untitled, 2011

 

Untitled, 2012

 

Untitled 3 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled 5 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled 6 (Rabbit Holes), 2013

 

Untitled, 2014

 

The Flux and the Puddle, 2014

 

Eye, 2015

 

Le Grand Theatre, 2016

 

The Vibrating Man, 2019

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Or you might think, ‘Huh, that’s all?’ Negotiating omnipresent paranoia sounds noisy in the bad way. I think I just worry at worst? How does a paranoiac know they’re being paranoid? Isn’t that assumption inherently unreliable? If you can make others intuit that re: your new writing thing, you will be a literary god. ** Tosh Berman, My pleasure, Tosh, she’s worth a read for sure, I think. ** _Black_Acrylic, Even Sypha’s not curious? That’s something. Maybe you should start a ‘Shards’ Spy substack. Could be lucrative? ** Carsten, Hey. I have a strong aversion to Burning Man, and the religious-adjacent pontificating by its adherents doesn’t help, but I am tempted to watch that doc. It seems like a post-internet Rainbow Gathering kind of equivalent, and attending one of those back in the 90s was one of the miserable experiences I’ve ever had. But, yeah, I’ll try to watch the doc with open eyes. ** Don., Hi, Don.! I think I can imagine that transformative thing to some degree at least, and it does feel too deep and personal/complicated to get words to convey. Interesting. Aw, thank you for fighting for my talent. I’m not sure how to fight for yours, but if there’s a methodology, I’m ready. ** Uday, Déconfit is such a good word, isn’t it? The French do make excellent words. Even the simple ones. I think my favourite French word is ‘donc’, which comes out of French people’s mouths all the time. There’s something about it. Or how and when people say it, I guess. Interesting about veganism being the turf of the Hindu right. I guess a lot of people in the States who hate vegans think they’re snotty purists. ** Steve, The heatwave is creeping into being. Yesterday it started, today it’ll tick upwards, and tomorrow it’ll start blasting us full on for three days, they say. So the hatred of ‘ICM’ is mostly people scapegoating it within the general ‘AI is the boogeyman’ thing going on these days? I have a very faint memory of hearing a portion of that McLuhan album at the time. It was a thing in the late 60s to try to get hippies to think by slapping electronica or psychedelic jams behind the spoken words of relative brainiacs like McLuhan or Timothy Leary or Baba Ram Dass, etc. Same thing with Terrence McKenna especially in the early Rave days. ** laura w., After that frustrating losing battle, I think I’ll leave ‘Luigi 3’ to my imagination. I hate boss battles. When I lived in LA, I’d always make my gamer roommate win those fights for me so I could start wandering and poking at puzzles again. Thrilled that you loved ‘Four Nights …’. When I first moved to Paris I met and had a long, great conversation with the guy who played the main part in it. In real life, he was/is an astro-physicist. This had better be the last heatwave of the summer or I’ll … well, actually I can’t do a thing about it, can I? Smooth skies to you. ** HaRpEr //, ‘Nightwork’ is excellent. ‘Télex n° 1’, yes, that’s it. A friend of mine is the person who translated it. I guess it’s the most experimental by far of his novels, and my friend said it was a nightmare to get into workable English. Well, you can do like me and write an interconnected cycle of short books and have your cake and eat it too? Maybe? ** Thom, Cool. If our local fete foraine ever brings back its dark ride, I’ll hit audio record on my phone and send it to you. Week is looking scary scalding hot over here, but I’ll try to make it work. I hope yours is cloudy (but not humid). ** Okay. Today I decided to give David Altmejd a solo show in my galerie. Have a look around please. See you tomorrow.