Text by Gary J. Shipley
Images by Devin Horan
With an introduction by Steve Finbow

Standard Edition
Softbound with flaps, 128 pages, 148 x 206
Collector’s Edition
Book + original artwork

https://www.infinitylandpress.com/mutations

 

 

“Mutations is a rewriting of the Real, a reimagining of the Imaginary, a shocking virus of words that transfigures our perceptions of good and evil, a contagion of collages that fixes our gaze even when all we want to do is look away.”
– Steve Finbow

“Gary J Shipley’s writing has a way of making every form he works within advance, in an overarching sense, such that the next exciting thing you read, no matter how advanced, is rendered a jalopy, and never more convincingly than in Mutations.”
– Dennis Cooper

These letters and images create, by their forms and the mutations of these forms originating in the body, a fluctuating picture that must correspond objectively to a transcendental collagic representation of the final and highest realities. Whoever says “loss of identity” also says Mutations, metamorphosis, transvaluation, poetic creation. Between the two there is a distance, a dangerous journey. What is the risk? Bewilderment, madness, suicide. Mutations is not striving for another being, but for another mode of being. It is more than anything something which transforms the body. It is the sustained, discrete violence of an incision that is not apparent in the body of the text, a calculated insemination of the proliferating collages through which the texts are transformed, deform each other, contaminate each other’s content, tend at times to reject each other, or pass elliptically one into the other and become regenerated in the repetition.

 

 

You are not the diagnosis. Everyone in the room will want you to be, but it won’t happen. The doctor will say the MRI scan was… problematic. She will pause like that. She will be reluctant to use the word tumour. Reluctant because cancer spreads, it doesn’t roam. And this was moving around inside your head. Appeared independent of the tissues of your brain. But that couldn’t be right. They will need to do another scan, but you will refuse. You will know already what you need to know. You will drum your fingers on the desk, and you will say: “In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm.” The remark will be met with consternation. Nobody will talk for at least twenty seconds. As you get up to leave the room, the doctor will also rise from her chair. You will hear her entreating you to come back as you close the door behind you. Once you leave the building you will never go back.

To be between mutations is to be an even purer possibility. You will feel it. You will feel it like a headache of someone recently decapitated, like the headless part of that equation. Your head is so sweet you can barely swallow it. The facts of the people in that room, the lightbox on the wall, the shining pamphlets, the mannerisms of the auto shop, have degraded in the hours since you left. For your “confectionery head / that draws the cup of fever / is the suicide of truth”. What a thing it is, to just be what you are and nothing else; what an accursed state, what a sterile immutability, what a faded god.

 

 

You will dream of plagues. Your eyes will barely function from lack of sleep. You will hear them open and close. Like Saint-Remys you will know that “even destroyed, even annihilated, organically pulverized and consumed to [our] very marrow, […] we do not die in our dreams, that our will operates even in absurdity, even in the negation of possibility, even in the transmutation of the lies from which truth can be remade”. As long as you refuse to wake up you will not die. You will wonder if you have ever woken up—even during those times when it seemed as though a bulb of the harshest, nastiest light had been switched on inside your head and would not go out, when you’d seen the outside bathed in that sick glow for months, for years, that perhaps even then you had not really come around. Perhaps even then death had not been near enough to smell you. The women with their faces cut off for fun: perhaps they didn’t feel it happen. And the eyes: who’s to say they ever saw anything.

You will find eyes distributed about your rooms. An eye will look out from a wall. You will not ever see it blink. You will come to see the eyes as yours. But it won’t be through them that you’ll see what it is you’ll come to see. It will not ingratiate itself to light or the dimensions inseparable from vision. You’ll see it without seeing it. Its outline will move and fade and militate against its being one. Anomalous, it will have “no critical incidence in the system. Its figure is rather that of a mutant”. If it is to be thought of as tentacled, those tentacles will reach inward—as if to pull itself apart. You will fill a bathtub full of sick from the prolonged unlocatedness of this, from the swell of every durative thought.

 

 

“Thus there will come strange jolts, paradoxical mutations, flights that are returns.”15 And you will find yourself back where you started, with torsos shuffling across ceilings and vulvas blooming on withered plants. You will remember the oncologist talking about the finger-like spread of a hypoattenuating peritumoral edema in the white matter that surrounds it. Cracks will appear in walls, in windows, in the floor. Your rooms will fall away beneath you. You will look down at your feet as if down a lift shaft. The world, then, when it returns will do so in bits, in horrific fragments of itself come together in some aleatory nightmare of ever more spasmodic forms. What available light there is will eat your eyes out of their sockets. You will look out from this nowhere of vermicular digestion and vomit your organs into your lap. When your sight returns you will see your vomit is also made of worms, and those worms are made of worms, and so on downward, inward, until you are sick again, and more worms and more sick and so on until your bulimic interiority will speak—and you cannot speak.

“The ‘worm’ constructs itself out of various previously autonomous systems […] until it coincides—at its most abstract—with a potential for pure contagion. It specializes in nonspecialization, assembling itself out of everything it infects, its nature continuously mutating as it assimilates new material.”16 But then the worm must ask itself: How to infect yourself with everything and once infected turn away from it—to have this aggregation somehow turn away from itself. To live inside this suiciding. To know everything about what it is to know nothing: expert in your own disinterest, in the broad strokes of your ignorance, in the painstaking detail of it. The impossibility of being this meticulously oblivious, this assiduously weary. You will welcome your voided acumen with a kiss. You will that your infinitude become contagious.

 

 

You will imagine returning to the hospital, to the oncology ward, your legs giving out from under you in the waiting room, looking up at all the “wan-faced pseudo mutants with eyes like blind fish” tepidly waiting for their treatments. However scared you get you will not suffer the indignity of that. “Mutants built their own shelters out of saliva and ash”; they do not need their gamma knives and radiotherapy, their shunts and their chemo, their considered prognoses and statistical variance. Mutation like life is dangerous. Mutation is the noise of the message conveying its own message. There is no such thing as a managed end, only an end to management, a wilful relinquishment of control. “Stop sending your ships through the narrow cosmo-logical corridor. Stop making them climb the extreme walls of the world. Let them jump over the cosmic barrier and enter into the hyperspace of the Universe. Cease having them compete with light, for your rockets too can realize the more-than-psychic, postural mutation, and shift from light to black universe which is no longer a color; from cosmic color to postural and subjective black. Let your rockets become subject of the Universe and be present at every point of the Remote.” The ziplock bag in the kitchen cupboard with your ovaries inside, you can eat them whenever you like.

Your skin will turn the grey of Margate beach. The grey of the forgotten economy-meat-eating patrons of its greasy spoons. The grey of faded newspaper print and burnt-down cigarettes and 60s Brutalist high-rise flats. The grey of the diseased matter in your head. The grey of the dream you have of somewhere else. And as for the colours that aren’t grey—because for all its symbolic felicity no seaside town is shaded so homogenous—they are the greyest versions of themselves, and could not be greyer without thereby ceasing to be examples of variance, however nugatory. Just to smell you is to sense the spiders getting fat.

 

 

What happens next is dictated by the process. It cannot be documented in advance, and any stipulations around it must remain tentative at best, as “the initial escape from form is represented by a process of unpredictable mutation”. You see snakes caught in webs the rats have made. You see them in the intestines of a suspended horse. The severed heads in a row in front of you wear the same expression. All the disembodied organs are similarly fetal. Every fragment dismembers; every dismemberment fragments. Then it’s all a blur. There are fleeting resemblances. You’re choking: there’s a cock in your mouth facing the wrong way. You’re surrounded by desert. Its contours are reflected in the sky. The vision is particulate and strained and discharged of belonging. There are areas of blackness scratched at to establish flimsy increments of light. “Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent morphological trajectory.”

The six-legged men will gather among the trees and masturbate each other with their broken teeth. The world is ending tomorrow and the drunks are drunk. Old women are groping at a child. Ice cream is melting down its arm. At the edge of what you can see: translucent worms eating eyeballs out of heads. The world is ending tomorrow and the horror of boredom. A woman no longer has the bulk to keep her trousers up; she lets them drop only so far; she plays the fistula in her arm like a penny whistle. Hurry, the sea is turning black! Hurry, the memory is in my throat!

 

 

The sun will create a shaft of warmth and light through the room. When you place your hands in it you will be able to feel them again. Your head inside it will be freed of the weight of its being there. You will fill the room like smoke. It’s your face on Sivart’s two screens. You are telling him he needs to wake up. You are the plumes rising from his ashtray. You are the faint clouds of water vapour coming out the mouth of the old woman. She is stroking her lap as if there’s a cat. You will tell Travis that it’s okay for him to masturbate over those Nilsen drawings in his book. You will order him to do it while you watch. You will talk him through it, you will seduce him. When he’s finished you will both be sick in your mouths and swallow it. Curling up into a ball you will hug your own cadaver. Your eyes will float in a pool of someone else’s blood. You are every individual part of the smoke now trailing down the hallway, down the stairs. You will be breathed in by the baby on the ground floor so that its head will explode when the father throws it at the wall.

You repeat to yourself how it is that “without a profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated—without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably thundering and torrential nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there could only be a revolting utopian sentimentality”. And yet you cannot help feeling that in spite of your mutability you are ascending, and that this suffering is flagrantly unnatural—that these accumulating horrors are some bleed-through from some other world, and syrupy too, and idyllic, for what do they stand for but a superstructure that somehow censures this behaviour from afar. Horrors shored up by the dream that they might not happen.

 

 

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Biographies

Gary J. Shipley is the author of twelve books, most recently Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard (Anthem), 30 Fake Beheadings (Spork) and Warewolff! (Hexus). He has been published in numerous literary magazines, anthologies and academic journals. More information can be found at Thek Prosthetics.

Devin Horan made the films Boundary (2009), Late and Deep (2011), Grodek (2014), Akra (2017), and The Animals Are Sick With Love (2020) and was the editor of Pages of Natural History (Pagine di storia naturale, 2019). His collages are an ongoing project begun in 2013 entitled Insomnia of Worlds, which will consist of 1000 pieces. https://jesuve.tumblr.com/

Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead (Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017) And Death Mort Tod – A European Book of the Dead (Infinity Land Press 2019). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.

 

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Infinity Land Press website
https://www.infinitylandpress.com/

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p.s. Hey. ** Today the blog enacts one of its occasional hobbies of serving as an usher to a newly born book, in this case an excellent tome by the mega-scribe Gary Shipley and the fine artist/filmmaker Devin Horan as produced by the unimpeachable Infinity Land Press, a fount of just about the most sumptuous looking books out there. A win win win, in other words. Please pore through the evidence of ‘Mutations’ and give serious consideration to the idea of giving it a home in your home. Thanks! ** h (now j), Hi. Ah, you’ve actually seen his films projected. That’s something. I think I only saw one of them that way so far. So sad: that overly surgery body feeling post-eating something sweet. It doesn’t seem fair. I guess it’s ‘god’s’ way of keep us non-obese. I’m happy you’re enjoying the Steve Abbott book. He is much missed. Wonderful guy too. I enjoyed my espresso, and it was a double! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I should have and did assume(d) you’d know his films. And yes about the Mekas. And yes, RIP Morricone. That’s a big one. Startling how much great and varying work he did. ** Sypha, Hi. Okay, I really must read him then. Inked into my search pad. Oh, right, the travel restrictions. But you played miniature golf and that’s really all that matters, isn’t it? Sort of? So you’re just gonna stay in your hood and vacation in your yard and smell the roses and so on? ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. Very happy to have made the introduction. No, the Schmid post is still upcoming. I’ve been moving it around. In the next couple of weeks. Really, thank you a lot about ‘Zac’s Drug Binge’. Means a lot. Yeah, I’m really happy with the new formatting. No, I don’t mess the gifs’ original timing. I do obviously pay a lot of attention to the timings and work carefully with them and build the sequences around the gifs’ cycling in and out of sync with their compadres. Especially in the new novel. Anyway, yeah, thank you! I’m really proud of it. A screenplay! Interesting. Curious form, no? I quite like working with it too, or at least when I feel I can approach it as freely and independently as I do any other writing form. Its conventions are so entrenched, and it’s exciting to try to fight and reinvent them, if you know what I mean. So that’s going well? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Excellent about the new writing, and it’s great you have a trusted and speedy reader to feedback for you. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha. If you had known Emshwiller’s films, I might have literally fallen off my chair. Well, I didn’t make the puke post with July 4th in mind, but when I realised it was imminent, I did realise that putting it and the food one squarely in that slot might have a nice meta effect. Cheesecake is kind of evil. I think my kid logic was more like ‘I’m not going to get what I want, and here’s how I’m going to adjust to that.’ ** Bill, I’m glad his film intrigued you, obviously. Cool. Manic energy sounds like a good way to cool down the possible overly Maddin-like problem. Okey-doke. Puking while smirking and pretending to be bored is one of Gregg’s specialties. ** Right. You know what’s before you today, and I hope you will welcome it into you in some fashion or other. See you tomorrow.

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Cynthia Delaney Suwito Knitting Noodles (2017)
‘Cynthia Delaney Suwito has always appreciated instant noodles as a quick and tasty meal. Now she’s turning them into a performance art piece. The Singapore-based, Indonesian fine arts graduate is knitting noodles at a Singapore gallery, creating a long edible scarf as part of the Untapped Discovery exhibition of emerging artists. ‘The 23-year-old spends three to four hours every day boiling, cooling and then knitting the noodle threads, adding 20-30cm to the length of the piece daily.’

 

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Ayako Fudamoto I can’t sit there (2016)
‘“I can’t sit there” is a mutated chicken sculpture made up of chicken dishes and apparently inspired by an urban legend of a four-legged chicken.’

 

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Dieter Roth Poeterei 3/4 (1968)
‘Swiss provocateur Dieter Roth printed his 1968 poetry journals on bags filled with sauerkraut, lamb or vanilla pudding (the last spiked with urine).’

 

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Andy Yoder Licorice Shoes (2003)
‘Yoder presents a giant pair of black wingtip shoes that mostly fill Plus Ultra’s limited space, turning the gallery into a sort of oversized shoebox. The odor in the space and the shiny surface of the shoes reveal that they are made of licorice. Yoder has clearly traveled far in his pursuit of black licorice. Included on the shoes’ extensive surfaces are licorice swirls, chunks, buttons, dogs and faux euros rimming the soles. Even the laces are made of licorice. The only place where there isn’t any licorice is inside the shoes, where the artist has used shellacked rice paper to perfectly imitate chic leather interiors. Despite their size, the shoes are remarkably lifelike, convincing from every angle.’

 

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Jamie Tan Cakes (2018)
‘In what might be a new standard for food artists everywhere, she’s sent her incredibly detailed cake sculptures down a completely different road: to be displayed in Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, as one component of Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas’ exhibition, Theatre of Disappearance. Tan made more than 70 cakes for the exhibition, a process that involved baking at least five cakes every day in the few months prior. Her works are edible but hardly look it. Instead, they emulate the textures and appearances of naturally occurring geographical formations – jagged rocks, molten lava and swirle marble.’

 

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Marcel Odenbach Seduction (2016)
‘The first thing I spot is a big pink painting with three enormous wafer biscuits. It is made by the German (video) artist Marcel Odenbach. Once you start approaching the work however, the wafers disappear, and an endless number of photographs start to show, all of them arranged by colour scheme to form the two different layers, the wafer and the chocolate and hazelnut filling. The big pink background then transforms into pages and pages of books in German. According to the gallery, all these elements together form an ode to the city of Vienna, the wafers as a symbol of the city and the collage of photographs with portraits of famous people as a symbol of the Austrian scientific and cultural world. Among them you can see the neurologist Sigmund Freund or the poet Ingeborg Bachman just to name a few.’

 

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Yosuke Amemiya Apple (2020)
‘Through the ages, I have been associated with immortality, temptation and love. Today, I am all but the humble fruit, a snack. My creator, Yosuke Amemiya, challenged my sweet origins and if you look a little closer, my hyper-realness is brought to life with the help of fibre-reinforced plastic, sculpted, formed, and hand-painted into the juicy, delectable, oddly-fascinating shape that I am. My curious appearance is a question of what is fact or fiction, a riddle. If you hold me – I will surely melt away. If you touch me – my softness will break away. Only with the heart, in total silence – you will find the answer.’

 

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Nayland Blake Gorge (1998)
‘Gorge (1998) is a video of the artist sitting shirtless being hand-fed an enormous amount of food for an hour by a shirtless black man from behind. In 2009, a live version of Gorge was staged in which audience members fed Blake.’

 

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Chloe Wise Pissing, Shmoozing, and Looking Away (2015)
‘The Canadian-born, New York-based artist Chloe Wise’s first solo show riffs on the luxury handbag trade by recreating purses by Chanel, Coach, Louis Vuitton, and Prada using toast, bagels, challah, and croissants.’

 

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Ed Atkins Old Food (2018)

 

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Maha Malluh Food For Thought – Al Muallaqat (2015)
‘Living and working in Saudi Arabia, artist Maha Malluh’s work centres upon the impact of globalisation and consumer culture within her nation. “My inspiration for art comes from my country, a land of contrasting images and ideas. Good art… forces you to pause, to contemplate and think harder about your surroundings.” Her sculptures are assemblages of objects found in junk shops and flea markets, their decrepit state speaking volumes of the culture that once valued but has now discarded them. Food for Thought – Al-Muallaqat is composed of aluminium cooking pots used traditionally throughout the Arab world. The title Al- Muallaqat links the installation to pre-Islamic 6th century Suspended Odes or Hanging Poems traditionally hung in Mecca.’

 

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Willie Coles Null (2012)
‘The work was produced by casting McDonalds hamburgers. The skull and crossbones depicted on the top of the burger is best understood when paired with the statement by Coles, “Because you know it’s shit, it lacks nutrition, is mostly fat, sugar and carbs. Because this represents the height of our civilisation, shit food made by people on shit pay that fucks your health. Do you want fries with that?”’

 

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Suzanne Anker Remote Sensing (2019)
‘Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. Her practice investigates the ways in which nature is being altered in the 21st century. Concerned with genetics and toxic degradation, Anker frequently works with “pre-defined and found materials” botanical specimens, medical museum artifacts, laboratory apparatus, microscopic images and geological specimens. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights.’

 

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Martynka Wawrzyniak Chocolate (2017)
”Chocolate’ is a nine minute film in which the artist gets gradually covered in chocolate syrup, until she is left almost completely submerged.’

 

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Tom Friedman Untitled (Pizza) (2013)
Styrofoam and paint 86 x 86 x 5

 

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Wayne Thiebaud Various (1962-1963)

 

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Kader Attia Untitled (Ghardaïa) (2009)
‘French-Algerian artist Kader Attia’s 2009 scale model of the ancient fortified town Ghardaia in the Saharan M’zab Valley was constructed out of couscous that evoked sand. (Conservators were requested not to rebuild it if it crumbled.)’

 

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Charwei Tsai Tofu Mantra (2005)
‘Tofu Mantra marks the beginning of the Mantra Series where I wrote the Heart Sutra, which is a Buddhist scripture about the nature of impermanence and emptiness, from memory onto ephemeral objects. While the human flesh-like tofu is decaying, the text transforms through various stages of growth and decay as it materializes from thought.’

 

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James Ostrer Various (2010-2014)
‘Ostrer became fascinated with the idea of sugar as subject matter in 2009 when Kelloggs mascot, Tony the Tiger was banned from television advertising. As a committed confectionary enthusiast, Ostrer describes this work as his caveman paintings about his relationship to food. He explains, “Our ancestors would have had to be stung by a load of bees to get the taste of sweetness but all we have to do is grab something from the nearest shop.” As big business and powerful brands seduce us to consume more sticky unhealthy treats, the question begged, Wotsit all about? Ostrer set to work, planning his distorted sugar icons out of foodstuffs in every kind of convenience food, bought in bulk. Transporting the mass of products back to the studio, he organised the boxes of sweets, buns, crisps and pastries as a painter would a palette, adding dyes and artificial colouring to the cream cheese so that the messy creative process could begin. The models are positioned on a plinth and smeared with layers of lurid-coloured cream cheese and adorned with junk food.’

 

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Janine Antoni Gnaw (1992)
‘Two-part installation: 600 lbs. of chocolate gnawed by the artist; 600 lbs. of lard gnawed by the artist.’

 

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Bob Trotman Cake Lady (2002)

 

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Elizabeth Willing Lick (2018)
‘Lick showed a girl eating and licking a pane of sugar glass with an up-close focus on how her mouth moves while licking and eating the glass.’

 

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Tony Matelli Double Meat Head (2009)
‘Tony Matelli’s “Double Meat Head,” a self-portrait diptych, represents the two stages of Matelli’s existence — the first stage signified with live, fresh meat, the second stage signified with decay, in which the flesh decomposes, consumed by maggots.’

 

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Alonsa Guevara Various (2014-2017)
Oil on canvas, 8 inches diameter

 

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Zina Saro-Wiwa Barisuka Eats Roasted Ice Fish and Mu (2014)
‘”Table Manners” is a series of films made by video artist Zina Saro-Wiwa is a documentation of her local community in the Niger Delta. Each film has a central character and dish, the subjects face the camera while eating; the sound of their chewing and swallowing contrasts with the relative silence of the everyday task of surviving.’

 

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Oliver Herring Color Spit Quartet (2015)

 

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Meydan Levy Neo Fruit (2019)
‘Bezalel Academy of Art and Design graduate Meydan Levy has developed five edible artificial fruits, which comprise printed cellulose skins filled with a cocktail of vitamins and minerals. Called Neo Fruit, Levy’s fake fruit have soft cases that are 3D-printed from translucent cellulose – an organic compound that gives plants their structure. These skins are then injected with nutrient-rich liquids with various colours and flavours. Levy describes the process as 4D printing because, unlike traditional 3D printing, the final form of the fruit changes after it comes out of the printer. The cellulose skins are printed in a flat, compressed form, and only take on their final fruit-like appearance once the liquid is added. The final form of the fruit is determined by built-in arteries, or micro-tubes, in the 3D-printed structures, which fill up to give the fruit volume.’

 

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Simone Rachell Water Closet, Blow Dryer, Chair (2008)
‘Meat can embody many different meanings and every artist seems to exploit a personal perspective on the overall signification of such material. However I think that the softness and moist qualities of meat most readily suggest links to “the erotic”, but the smell of blood of mutilated corpses and guts may bring to very different realms.’

 

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Justin Favela Floor Nachos Supreme (2019)
‘Justin Favela has always seen nachos as work of art. “The endless combinations of ingredients, the textures, the history and the debate of the best and most original nachos make the dish a conversation piece and catalyst for conversations about belonging and authenticity,” he writes on the text panel for his piñata sculpture “Floor Nachos Supreme.”’

 

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Studio Wieki Somers & Rafael Mutter Chocolate Mill (2012)
‘For a major retrospective of Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld, the team at Studio Wieki Somers collaborated with chocolatier Rafael Mutter to create Chocolate Mill. The piece was comprised of a giant cylindrical chocolate block that was carefully organized in 10 stacked layers, with flavored shapes used to create different geometric patterns. As a crank-turned blade similar to a cheese slicer grazed shavings off the top, the hidden layers were slowly revealed.’

 

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Greely Myatt Piece of Cake (2008)
Cypress and Acrylic 17.75″ x 6.5″ x 3.25″

 

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Caroline Brooks Various (1876-1882)
‘Caroline Brooks, an Arkansas housewife, was the unlikely artist who brought butter sculpture into the spotlight nearly 140 years ago. At the time, farmers’ wives were in charge of churning milk into butter, and often used wooden molds or stamps to shape the bricks. By sculpting the butter instead, Brooks took the practice one step further and turned it into a staple of so many fairs. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876, Brooks crafted a butter portrait of a young woman called Dreaming Iolanthe and put it on display. According to Pamela Simpson’s book Corn Palaces and Butter Queen, the sculpture was “repeatedly praised as ‘the most beautiful and unique exhibit at the fair.'”‘

 

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Fernando Mastrangelo Medallion (2013)
‘They are handmade versions of ready-made decorative ceiling medallions meant to evoke the plaster Putti ornaments that surround chandelier escutcheons in traditional aristocratic and institutional decoration. Unlike the Home Depot or Lowe’s versions, each are individually made from resin, then carefully articulated with various crystalline materials (specifically commodities like sugar or candy). By hanging his medallions on the wall, instead of from a ceiling with lavish chandeliers descending from their cut-out centers, New York-based artist Fernando Mastrangelo clearly addresses commodification and decoration. These evoke the idea of paste-on history, of shelf commodities presented for inspection by prospective carry-trade buyers who (theoretically) prefer to see their ceiling decoration at eye level with the gaping center hole staring blankly back.’

 

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Carmen Argote Cotton-Candy Tumbleweeds (2012)
‘Tumbleweeds found on the unearth Selig zoo site roll down into the amusement park and become intertwined with the lingering presence of the park.’

 

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Alexandre Dubosc Freequences (2019)
‘Pavlovian short film optico-auricular. (Sculpture Cake or “Caketrope” filmed live on the theme of sound.)’

 

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Eduardo Navarro Into Ourselves (2018)
‘In his exhibit “Into Ourselves”, visitors will find dozens of pen-and-paper drawings spread out under heat lamps, and a large soup pot on a hot plate in one corner of the room. On the nights that Navarro holds a serving, he dissolves one or more drawings into the pot of soup and hands out individual cup servings to visitors. Navarro explains that these specific drawings, made using rice paper and edible sharpie, are actually based on concepts of quantum physics, such as the holographic principle. The majority of Navarro’s artwork is thematically designed to involve all of our senses, not just sight. He refers to the stomach as a kind of “internal eye” and elaborates on the idea of patrons being able to take away a part of the exhibit visit with them, absorbing the essence of the art into their bodies.’

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad. Thank you so much, and it’s really good to have you here. That is a very interesting question about Rhys and Nathalie Sarraute. I have no idea. I wonder if one could find out. You were at the Pompidou premiere of Patric’s film? I was there, well, if we’re talking about the same screening. I’m happy you like the film. Yes, I just saw that Le Clef is screening ‘Glitterbug’. I’m going to try to go if I can. Such a great place/project: Le Clef, no? Thanks again. Come back anytime. If we’re at the same event out there in Paris, say hey if you feel like it. ** h (now j), Hi. Yes, yes, she was/is really something. Ah, I know so well about interesting projects that don’t pay well. In fact I think those are the only projects I know. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, she was a very special artist. I look forward to reading your piece! Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has written a very interesting sounding piece that you oughta read. David: ‘Here’s a piece I’ve written for Benjamin DeMott’s website “First of The Month”: “Keeping Up Appearances” It’s about Agent Orange and Erving Goffman.’ ** Bill, Hi, B. Yes, I hope Alan’s holding up. I haven’t interacted with him since the last time he popped in here unexpectedly a couple years ago. I saw that Cahun show. Yoshiharu Tsuge … hm, I don’t know. I’ll go search him out and see. And I’ll try to find ‘The Swamp’. There’s a pretty good store near me that specialises in manga. Thanks, pal. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, man, I went through that: the building I lived in being sold and having to vacate. Stressful. But I’m sure you’ll find something as good, and nice about the long fair warning at least. But … excellent about the show! And the regular spot to boot! That’s fantastic news! I’m assuming I/we will be able to tune in? Keep me informed. Great, Ben! ** Misanthrope, Yes, it’s the same Alan. Same with me: not a peep. Logic is my saviour. I used to swear by Oscillococcinum. It was always kind of a miracle thing for me. But I haven’t sought it out over here. Right, it’s July 4th almost. I forgot. Well, enjoy the weekend, and, yeah, keep your distances. ** Steve Erickson, Ira Robbins, right. That’s cool news. I was a dedicated Trouser Press reader back in the day. Hope that works out, obviously. Seems like it will. Why wouldn’t it, I guess? I thought the early Araki was interesting, uneven but promising. But then he decided to make snark his thing, and his scripts became intolerable (to me), but he found his thing, and he has his big fans, that’s for sure. And James Duval is always wonderful in the films if nothing else. No, the COVID-related visual art so far is very obvious and didactic, very Ai Wei Wei, who, of course, is already cranking out big ‘poetic’, ‘meaningful’ COVID-milking installation pieces. I’ve heard nothing about the NYFF this year, only what Nik wrote the other day. ** Okay. Today’s post has an ‘evil’ sibling post that will appear here tomorrow. That is all. Try to enjoy. See you tomorrow.