‘When Donald Barthelme took popular characters (Batman and the Joker) and placed them in unusual, postmodern situations in his short story “The Joker’s Greatest Triumph” (1967), he was doing something new: taking an old, familiar story and turning it inside out. He did something as daring when he reinvented the story of Snow White in his 1967 novel of the same name.

‘The importance of these literary experiments can be seen in the influence they have had on generations of writers. Now reinventions of popular stories (such as the inversion of the superhero comic in Alan Moore’s Watchmen) and retellings of fairy tales (like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked) are as common as a cold, but when my paperback edition of Snow White was reprinted in 1971, the experiment was unusual enough to warrant this statement on the back: “Donald Barthelme’s Snow White is not the fairy tale you remember. But it’s the one you will never forget.”

‘“She is a tall dark beauty,” the book begins, rather predictably, but then quickly veers off into strangeness, “containing a great many beauty spots: one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more or less in a row, as you go up and down:

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The hair is black as ebony, the skin white as snow”.

‘We recognize the dark hair and white skin, but what of these birth marks, represented in my edition, not by asterisks but by thick black dots with a white spot in the middle, all in a perfectly straight column that would have been impossible on the curvaceous heroin? This odd reliance on typographical symbols on the first page of a novel, draws our attention to the markings on the page, in much the same way that Laurence Sterne drew our attention to the ink, letters and symbols on the page in his novel Tristram Shandy, published two hundred and fifty years earlier.

‘Nothing else appears on the first page. This strange bit of text is only a fragment and we must turn the page to get the next, unexpected line: “Bill is tired of Snow White now. But he cannot tell her. No, that would not be the way. Bill can’t bear to be touched. That is new too. To have anyone touch him is unbearable. Not just Snow White but also Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem or Dan”. Bill and the other six men are obviously the dwarfs, although there is never any mention of short stature in the novel. In early versions of the Snow White tale, these dwarfs did not have names, but thanks to Disney, now they do, cute names like “Dopey” and “Sneezy.” Rather than these, Barthleme gives us common, everyday names, pulling the fairy tale out of the realm of unnamed myth and cute Disney characters into the mundane reality of the modern world.

‘Not only are the names plain, but we learn that “Bill is tired of Snow White.” How could anyone get tired of Snow White? What kind of fairy tale is this? Bill also has become adverse to any kind of human touch. This is a psychological problems, rather than a mythical conflict between good and evil. ”That is a peculiar aspect of Bill, the leader,” we read, “We speculate that he doesn’t want to be involved in human situations any more”. This “we” introduces another mystery of the novel. The narrator refers to the group as “we,” but he never uses the word “I” and refers to each character in the third person. The narrator cannot be pinned down to any single persona in the book. The narrator, then is both part of the story and apart from the story, a character in the story and an uninvolved spectator, troubling the role of the narrator in telling a story either from within or without the main events.

‘This unknown narrator even interrupts the story at one point to quiz the reader with questions like “Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( ).” He also tests the reader’s understanding of the story, asking, “Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince figure?” Such a question is less comprehension check, however, as it is help from the narrator in understanding the parallels between the fairy tale and this novel.

 

 

‘However, the narrator leaves the hardest work up to the reader: “Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )” and then asks, “What is it (twenty-five words or less)?” This last question is one of the most metafictional elements in any piece of metafiction, as the narrator is directly asking the reader to participate in the writing of the novel. The reader is supposed to pencil in an answer and actually add to the text. Whether the reader actually does this (I didn’t) is irrelevant. The invitation to become a coauthor (which is what Roland Barthes called the Writerly Reader) is undeniable. The narrator is inviting the reader to participate in the production of meaning. As for what that meaning is, I wouldn’t presume to take over your responsibility! The rest I will leave up to you.

‘In short, the book is not so much a retelling of the story of Snow White, as it is an examination of relationships, especially the relationship between the writer, the text, and the reader. Nowadays retellings of fairy tales are as common as a Hollywood, but few have managed to do them with such intelligence, insight, and wit as the great Barthelme.’ — Metablog on Metafiction

 

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Further

Donald Barthelme’s barthelmismo
‘DONALD BARTHELME’S SYLLABUS’
‘The Beastly Beatitudes of Donald B.’
‘Preface to an Introduction to Donald Barthelme and “The School”’
‘Heteroglossia and collage: Donald Barthelme’s Snow White‘
‘Fatigue, Indolence And The There Is, Or, The Temporal Logic Of Collage In Donald Barthelme’s Snow White‘
‘Language and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White’
‘Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Ethics, and Gender in Barthelme’s Snow White’
‘BEYOND FRAGMENTATION: DONALD BARTHELME AND WRITING AS POLITICAL ACT’
‘The Pirate and Rogue in Donald Barthelme’s Anti-Fairy Tales’
Podcast: ‘Donald Barthelme, The Collective Shrug’
‘Interview by Donald Barthelme with Larry McCaffery’
The Donald Barthelme Archive
‘Saved from Drowning: Barthelme reconsidered’
‘Game’, by Donald Barthelme
‘Donald Barthelme on the Art of Not-Knowing and the Essential Not-Knowing of Art’
‘The Balloon’, by Donald Barthelme
‘The Indian Uprising’, by Donald Barthelme
‘DONALD BARTHELME NARRATES THE PROGRESS OF THE REINDEER’
Buy ‘Snow White’

 

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Extras

Donald Barthelme interviewed by George Plimpton

Donald Antrim reads Donald Barthelme’s ‘I Bought a Little City’

Donald Barthelme reading ‘I Bought a Little City’

Donald Barthelme reads ‘The Teachings of Don B.: A Yankee Way of Knowledge’

Donald Barthelme and Narrative Appeal

Donald Barthelme & Stephen Banker, 1978 interview

Barthelme’s Snow White is Awesome

 

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Towards an Aesthetic of the Aesthetics of Trash: A Collaborative, Deconstructive Reading of Snow White
by Larry McCaffery

 

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Interview
from The Paris Review

 

You’re often linked with Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, and others of that ilk. Does this seem to you inhuman bondage or is there reason in it?

BARTHELME: They’re all people I admire. I wouldn’t say we were alike as parking tickets. Some years ago the Times was fond of dividing writers into teams; there was an implication that the Times wanted to see gladiatorial combat, or at least a soccer game. I was always pleased with the team I was assigned to.

Who are the people with whom you have close personal links?

BARTHELME: Well, Grace Paley, who lives across the street, and Kirk and Faith Sale, who live in this building—we have a little block association. Roger Angell, who’s my editor at the New Yorker, Harrison Starr, who’s a film producer, and my family. In the last few years several close friends have died.

How do you feel about literary biography? Do you think your own biography would clarify the stories and novels?

BARTHELME: Not a great deal. There’s not a strong autobiographical strain in my fiction. A few bits of fact here and there. The passage in the story “See the Moon?” where the narrator compares the advent of a new baby to somebody giving him a battleship to wash and care for was written the night before my daughter was born, a biographical fact that illuminates not very much. My grandmother and grandfather make an appearance in a piece I did not long ago. He was a lumber dealer in Galveston and also had a ranch on the Guadalupe River not too far from San Antonio, a wonderful place to ride and hunt, talk to the catfish and try to make the windmill run backward. There are a few minnows from the Guadalupe in that story, which mostly accompanies the title character through a rather depressing New York day. But when it appeared I immediately began getting calls from friends, some of whom I hadn’t heard from in some time and all of whom were offering Tylenol and bandages. The assumption was that identification of the author with the character was not only permissible but invited. This astonished me. One uses one’s depressions as one uses everything else, but what I was doing was writing a story. Merrily merrily merrily merrily.

Overall, very little autobiography, I think.

Was your childhood shaped in any particular way?

BARTHELME: I think it was colored to some extent by the fact that my father was an architect of a particular kind—we were enveloped in modernism. The house we lived in, which he’d designed, was modern and the furniture was modern and the pictures were modern and the books were modern. He gave me, when I was fourteen or fifteen, a copy of Marcel Raymond’s From Baudelaire to Surrealism, I think he’d come across it in the Wittenborn catalogue. The introduction is by Harold Rosenberg, whom I met and worked with sixteen or seventeen years later, when we did the magazine Location here in New York.

My mother studied English and drama at the University of Pennsylvania, where my father studied architecture. She was a great influence in all sorts of ways, a wicked wit.

Music is one of the few areas of human activity that escapes distortion in your writing. An odd comparison: music is for you what animals were for Céline.

BARTHELME: There were a lot of classical records in the house. Outside, what the radio yielded when I was growing up was mostly Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys; I heard him so much that I failed to appreciate him, failed to appreciate country music in general. Now I’m very fond of it. I was interested in jazz and we used to go to black clubs to hear people like Erskine Hawkins who were touring—us poor little pale little white boys were offered a generous sufferance, tucked away in a small space behind the bandstand with an enormous black cop posted at the door. In other places you could hear people like the pianist Peck Kelley, a truly legendary figure, or Lionel Hampton or once in a great while Louis Armstrong or Woody Herman. I was sort of drenched in all this. After a time a sort of crazed scholarship overtakes you and you can recite band rosters for 1935 as others can list baseball teams for the same year.

What did you learn from this, if anything?

BARTHELME: Maybe something about making a statement, about placing emphases within a statement or introducing variations. You’d hear some of these guys take a tired old tune like “Who’s Sorry Now?” and do the most incredible things with it, make it beautiful, literally make it new. The interest and the drama were in the formal manipulation of the rather slight material. And they were heroic figures, you know, very romantic. Hokie Mokie in “The King of Jazz” comes out of all that.

Are there writers to whose work you look forward?

BARTHELME: Many. Gass, Hawkes, Barth, Ashbery, Calvino, Ann Beattie—too many to remember. I liked Walker Percy’s new book The Second Coming enormously. The weight of knowledge is extraordinary, ranging from things like how the shocks on a Mercedes are constituted to how a nineteenth-century wood-burning stove is put together. When the hero’s doctors diagnosed wahnsinnige sehnsucht or “inappropriate longings” as what was wrong with him I nearly fell off my chair. That’s too beautiful to be real but with Percy it might be. Let’s see . . . Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frisch, Márquez.

Even Autumn of the Patriarch?

BARTHELME: After One Hundred Years of Solitude it was hard to imagine that he could do another book on that scale, but he did it. There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster. The challenge was his own previous book and I think he met it admirably.

It’s amazing the way previous work can animate new work, amazing and reassuring. Tom Hess used to say that the only adequate criticism of a work of art is another work of art. It may also be the case that any genuine work of art generates new work. I suspect that Márquez’s starting point was The Tin Drum, somehow, that Günter Grass gave him a point of departure . . . that the starting point for the essential Beckett was Bouvard and Pecuchet and that Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King is a fantasia on the theme of Hemingway in Africa. This is not the anxiety but the pleasure of influence.

You don’t, then, believe in entropy?

BARTHELME: Entropy belongs to Pynchon. I read recently that somebody had come forward with evidence that the process is not irreversible. There is abroad a distinct feeling that everything’s getting worse; Christopher Lasch speaks of it, and so do many other people. I don’t think we have the sociological index that would allow us to measure this in any meaningful way, but the feeling is there as a cultural fact. I feel entropy—Kraus on backache is a favorite text around here.

Do you see anything getting better—art, for instance?

BARTHELME: I don’t think you can talk about progress in art—movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it’s a horizontal line, not a vertical one. Similarly the notion of an avant-garde is a bit off. The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo.

You can speak of political progress, social progress, of course—you may not see much of it, but it can be talked about.

Well, you’ve established yourself as an old fogey.

BARTHELME: So be it.

 

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Book

Donald Barthelme Snow White
Touchstone/Simon & Schuster

‘An inventive, satiric modern retelling of the classic fairy tale provides an incisive and biting commentary on the absurdities and complexities of modern life.

‘In Snow White, Donald Barthelme subjects the traditional fairy tale to postmodern aesthetics. In the novel, the seven dwarves are men who live communally with Snow White and earn a living by washing buildings and making Chinese baby food. Snow White quotes Mao and the dwarves grapple with low self-esteem in this raucous retelling of the classic tale.’ — Simon & Schuster

 

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Excerpts

Baby Dim Sum

It is amazing how many mothers will spring for an attractively packaged jar of Baby Dim Sum, a tasty-looking potlet of Baby Jing Shar Shew Bow. Heigh-ho. The recipes came from our father. “Trying to be a man about whom nothing is known,” our father said, when we were young. Our father said several other interesting things, but we have forgotten what they were. “Keep quiet,” he said. One tends to want that, in a National Park. Our father was a man about whom nothing was known. Nothing is known about him still. He gave us the recipes. He was not very interesting. A tree is more interesting. A suitcase is more interesting. A canned good is more interesting. When we sing the father hymn, we noticed that he was not very interesting. The words of the hymn notice it. It is explicitly commented upon, in the text.

 

Dirty Great Poem

Now she’s written a dirty great poem four pages long, won’t let us read it, refuses absolutely, she is adamant. We discovered it by accident. We had trudged home early, lingered in the vestibule for a bit wondering if we should trudge inside. A strange prehension, a floating of some kind. Then we trudged inside. “Here’s the mail,” we said. She was writing something, we could see that. “Here’s the mail,” we said again. Usually she likes to paw over the mail, but she was preoccupied, didn’t look up, not a flicker. “What are you doing their,” we asked, “writing something?” Snow White looks up. “Yes,” she says. And looked down again, not a pinch of emotions coloring the jet black of her jet black eyes. “A letter?” we asked wondering if a letter then to whom and about what. “No,” she said. “A list?” we asked inspecting her white face for a hint of tendresse. But there was no tendresse. “No,” she said. We noticed then that she had switched the tulips from the green bowl to the blue bowl. “What then?” We repeated. We observed that she had hauled the Indian paintbrush all the way out into the kitchen. “Poem,” we had the mail in our paws still. “Poem?” we said. “Poem,” she said. There it was, the red meat on the rug. “Well,” we said, “can we have a peek?” “No,” she said. “How long as it?” We asked. “Four pages,” she said, “at present,” “four pages!” The thought of this immense work…

 

Royal Blood

At times, when I am ‘down,’ I am able to pump myself up again by thinking about my blood. It is blue, the bluest this fading world has known probably. At times I startle myself with a gesture so royal, so full of light, that I wonder where it comes from. It comes from my father, Paul XVII, a most kingly man and personage. Even though his sole accomplishment during his lack of reign was the de-deification of his own person.

 

Mr. Quistgaard

Although you do not know me my name is Jane. I have seized your name from the telephone book in an attempt to enmesh you in my concerns. We suffered today I believe from a lack of connection with each other. That is common knowledge, so common in fact, that it may not even be true. It may be that we are overconnected, for all I know. However I am acting on the first assumption, that we are underconnected, and thus have flung you these lines, which you may grasp or let fall as you will. But I feel that if you neglect them, you will suffer for it. That is merely my private opinion. No police power supports it. I have no means of punishing you, Mr. Quistgaard, for not listening, for having a closed heart.

 

Three-Pronged Assault

“I had in mind launching a three-pronged assault, but the prongs wandered off seduced by fires and clowns. It was hell there, in the furnace of my ambition. It was because, you said, I had read the wrong book. He reversed himself in his last years, you said, in the books no one would publish. But his students remember, you said.”

 

Bill

BILL has developed a shamble. The consequence, some say, of a lost mind. But that is not true. In the midst of so much that is true, it is refreshing to shamble across something that is not true. He does not want to be touched. But he is entitled to an idiosyncrasy. He has earned it by his vigorous leadership in that great enterprise, his life.

 

MOTHER

“MOTHER can I go over to Hogo’s and play?” “No Jane Hogo is not the right type of young man for you to play with. He is thirty-give now and that is too old for innocent play. I am afraid he knows some kind of play that is not innocent, and will want you to play it with him, and then you will agree in your ignorance, and then the fat will be in the fire. That is the way I have the situation figured out anyhow. That is my reading of it. That is the way it looks from where I stand.” “Mother all this false humility does not become you any more than that mucky old poor little match-girl dress you are wearing.” “This dress I’ll have you know cost two hundred and forty dollars when it was new.” “When was it new?” “It was new in 1918, the year your father and I were in the trenches together, in the Great War. That was a war all right. Oh I know there have been other wars since, better-publicized ones, more expensive ones perhaps, but our war is the one I’ll always remember. Our war is the one that means war to me.” “Mother I know Hogo is thirty-five and thoroughly bad through and through but still there is something drawing me to him. To his house. To the uninnocence I know awaits me there.” “Simmer down child. There is a method in my meanness. By refusing to allow you to go to Hogo’s house, I will draw Hogo here, to your house, where we can smother him in blueberry flan and other kindnesses, and generally work on him, and beat the life out of him, in one way or another.” “That’s shrewd mother.”

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I was going for holes you could look at, though. ** Bill, Hi. Yes, that was my thinking and gamble. I would think there’s never been a year when the US of A needed Halloween more. ** Armando, Yes, RIP Sid Haig. Sad. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Matta-Clark is amazing. I only didn’t include him because his fit felt too obvious. Kapoor only made it in despite similar issues because that random guy fell into one of his. Paris still has a couple of M-C’s holes in its buildings’ walls. ** Steve Erickson, I read somewhere online yesterday that ‘Liberte’ just got an American distributor. I don’t recall which distributor though. A quite small one, of course. How many drafts do you normally go through on big pieces? Or is there a ‘normal’? ** Misanthrope, Yeah, George, if you were presented with a hole, you wouldn’t have a clue to do with it, ha ha. I believe I did run my ‘Hole’ joke by Leo in that interview. I think he looked uncomfortable. He’s a bit of a Boy Scout, that Leo. This Friday already! Wow, time flies and all that stuff. Heavy. Great heavy. ** Right. The blog’s spotlight turns, angles, and focuses on Donald Barthelme’s great ‘Snow White’ today. Go into the light, please? See you tomorrow.

 

Fabian Bürgy
Viktor Popović
Zdzisław Beksiński
Taryn Simon
Alan Saret
Neil Campbell
Sebastian Martorana
Banks Violette
Ryoji Ikeda
Ander Mikalson
Valentin Carron
Tara Donovan
Reuben Wu
Anna Sadler
Egill Sæbjörnsson
Thom Kubli
Bryan David Griffith
Noi Sawaragi
Alix Poscharsky
Daniel Arsham
Bukichi Inoue
Jacques-André Boiffard
Amie Siegel

 

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Fabian Bürgy

Smoke 1, 2013
Cement, hole, smoke

Smoke 2, 2013
Cement, pedestal, hole, smoke

 

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Viktor Popović

Untitled, 2008
iron, used motor oil

 

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Zdzisław Beksiński

Wife Portrait, 1956-57
Few works are darker than those of Zdzisław Beksiński. What does it all mean? Nothing – Beksinski never knew the meaning behind his works and was adamant against any sort of interpretation. His wife died in 1998. A year later, his son, a popular radio host and movie translator, committed suicide. Beksiński was stabbed to death in Warsaw in 2005. The killer was the son of his long time caretaker who murdered him over about $100.

 

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Taryn Simon

A Cold Hole, 2018
In Taryn Simon’s A Cold Hole, participants jump into icy water while visitors in an adjacent gallery watch through a cinemascopic aperture.

 

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Alan Saret

The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple, 1976
In The Hole at P.S.1, Fifth Solar Chthonic Wall Temple, sunlight is the natural medium that influences the general shape of the sculpture. As part of MoMA PS1’s initial exhibition Rooms, this site-specific installation consists of a carefully sized and shaped hole dug out of the brick wall. When the sunlight faces the exterior side of the building, a focused stream light enters the hallway and shines down to the floor.

 

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Neil Campbell

Boom Boom, 2004
acrylic on wall

 

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Sebastian Martorana

Untitled, 2015
Marble sculpture of the impression made in the pillow of his late father in-law after lifting him up from his death bed.

 

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Unknown

The black painted spiral staircase at the Zeitz Mocaa Museum of Contemporary Art, Cape Town, South Africa, 1991

 

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Banks Violette

Black Hole (Single Channel), 2004
In works such as Black Hole, Banks Violette aptly portrays a phenomenon of excess. Heavy-metal aesthetics become a mirror of youth culture anxiety, an adopted language compensating and empowering sensations of immense sorrow and despair. Citing examples where musical lyrics become instigating factors to real-life violence, Violette refers to an over-identification with fiction where artistic expression exceeds critical confinement, and fantasy and reality are blurred. Black Hole lingers on this edge of transition: its aestheticised destruction offers both horrific contemplation and potential for misuse.

 

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Ryoji Ikeda

point of no return, 2018
concept and composition: Ryoji Ikeda
computer programming: Tomonaga Tokuyama

 

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Ander Mikalson

Scores for a Black Hole, 2019
With Scores for a Black Hole, events both quotidian and profound unfold daily around a seven-foot hole filled with black ink. Big enough to fall into, this void serves as a site for collective action and shared experience, exerting a powerful gravitational field. Numerous collaborators invited by Mikalson—from artists to actors to novelists to children to yogis and more—enact a scripted yet unrehearsed response of their own to the black hole, allowing for the spontaneous, unforeseen and unrepeatable to take shape.

 

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Anish Kapoor

Descent Into Limbo (2016)
Visitors enter the installation through a small doorway leading into a freestanding concrete and stucco room, approximately 20 feet square. In the center of the floor is a circular pit, the sides painted black so that it at first appears solid, hiding its true depths. Kapoor designed Descent Into Limbo to appear like an endless chasm in space; looking down into it is a dizzying experience. Last week, a 60-year-old Italian man fell into the hole. The man was hospitalized following the incident, which took place August 13, according to the local newspaper Público.

 

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Valentin Carron

A wall two holes, 2016
The “eyes” are the result of an elaborate and carefully constructed intervention. An entirely new wall has been built in front of the existing one, and the holes themselves are lined with concrete forms that subtly differentiate their perimeter from the plaster that surrounds them; even the surface of the wall behind the holes has been painted black, as if to further accentuate the overriding power of negative space.

 

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Tara Donovan

Transplanted, 2001/2003
“Transplanted,” first created in 2001, is an aggregation of brown tar paper that has been ripped to expose imperfect edges and stacked at varying heights and widths, suggesting, maybe, a mountainous landscape, undulating ocean, or topographic map.

 

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Reuben Wu

Lux Noctis II, 2018
Each image is a carefully-planned scene consisting of multiple lighting positions, layered to produce a theatrically-lit composition. Using the GPS-enabled aerial light/drone in specific positions in space, I am able to create moods of drama and tension through chiaroscuro, and the ability to illuminate isolated features of a scene and include unwanted elements.

 

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Anna Sadler

Mouth Endoscopy, 2011
apparatus, body, flesh, installation, machine, medical, bed, kinetic, light, ready made, space, breath, hole, internal, mouth

 

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Egill Sæbjörnsson

Hole, 2007
A hole in the ground that speaks Icelandic.

 

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Thom Kubli

Black Hole Horizon, 2016
What kind of relations exists between oscillating air, black holes and soap bubbles? Black Hole Horizon is a meditation on a spectacular machine that transforms sound into three-dimensional objects and keeps the space in steady transformation. The nucleus of the installation is the development of an instrument that is operated by compressed air and that resembles a ship’s horn. With the sounding of each tone, a huge soap bubble emerges from the horn. It grows while the tone sounds, peels off the horn, lingers through the exhibition space and finally bursts at an erratic position within the room.

 

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Bryan David Griffith

Wane, 2016
Smoke from open flame accumulated in encaustic beeswax.

 

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Norimizu Ameya

The shape of me, 2010
Holes weren’t dug as such. Rather, these particular holes were dug to open our eyes to the “holes” that existed inside us from the beginning. As well, it is precisely because they can’t be shared with everyone that they are “holes.” However, the fact is this was also pointed out clearly from the very beginning in Ameya’s own words. By this I mean the very title, “The shape of me,” which excludes others. Accordingly, even if the holes were filled in with dirt after the exhibition, the loss would have actually been deeper on account of them losing their shape. And so rather than sharing our sins, all we can do is – as Ameya says – take these holes that the other in the form of Ameya has exposed inside of each of us and, instead of trying to fill them in, make full use of them as “tools” that belong to no one.

 

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Alix Poscharsky

One Morning, 2015
A coffee cup at filmed from above. The coffee starts swirling and finally explodes into a universe.

 

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Daniel Arsham

Dig, 2011
Artist Daniel Arsham turns his attention to Storefront for Art and Architecture, March 1-April 23, for an unprecedented archaeological quarry delving deep into untapped streams of process and form. Dig unfolds in 3 segments, the final in which Snarkitecture create and inhabit the exhibition. From March 29-April 4 Storefront will be transformed into a deep façade filled with EPS industrial foam. From April 5-23 the public will be invited to view Arsham removing pieces from solid white infill, carving tunnels, crevices, and peepholes. In this final stage, Dig will become accessible to the public through rotating doors acting as windows on the site’s exterior, and by appointment through navigable passages that Arsham has excavated.

 

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Bukichi Inoue

My Sky Hole, 1998
A stereo audio recording of transition from outside the sculpture into the hole. The outdoor sculpture is in Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (広島市現代美術館). I recorded it for its furnace-like sound.

 

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Jacques André Boiffard

Bouche (Mouth), 1929
Boiffard uses light in very different ways. In Bouche the light makes everything appear to be disintegrating. In the extreme close-up of the torn-open mouth, the light fragments in the reflections of the saliva and so dissolves what it first made visible: the inside of the mouth. The camera is sharply focused on the uvula at the back of the throat, which opens and closes the path into the body. The uvula regulates breathing in verbal expression and the entrance to the esophagus.

 

________
Amie Siegel

Black Moon/Hole Punches, 2010
Black Moon/Hole Punches, is a series of photographs derived from the hole punches, or black moons, that a laboratory cuts into the first frame of the film negative. Siegel printed the hole-punched frames, which are always omitted from a final edited film, from the digital transfer of her Black Moon dailies.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Thanks, David. I figured you would know his work. Ah, happy birthday a day late to Robert Bresson, the master of all things! ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Mr. Berman. Very happy to have your input on and kudos for Mr. Ronet. You’re very good, I hope? ** Sypha, Well, my pleasure, of course. I’ve gotten through the first few tracks. Ace! Your ‘JCGN’ is a delightful surprise and, you know, really works. I see your dilemma. You don’t think Boy Destroyer could go auto-tune, ha ha? A book of lyrics sounds good to me, no surprise. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ah, excellent! About the Zine Fest and the possible collab. All the luck re: the grant there is. I don’t know ‘In Fabric’, but I will hunt it. Thanks, bud. ** Steve Erickson, I saw Albert Serra’s ‘Liberté’, if it’s of interest. I thought it was pretty much a total failure. It’s intriguing for the first forty minutes or so, but then just gets stuck in this kind of quasi-Barry Lyndon-meets-Grandrieux set piece for an endless series of watered down Sadeian explicit S&M sex scene-ettes that get very boring and never add up to anything. It just ends up seeming like a self-indulgent exercise on Serra’s part. Disappointing. Good luck with the edit! ** Misanthrope, Very hard for me to imagine it being difficult to get LPS and Kayla on board unless I read them totally incorrectly. Voila! The magic word! ** Okay. I hope you enjoy the holes. See you tomorrow.