Spooks *

* (Halloween countdown post #14)

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Matt Copson Sob Story, 2016
‘Sob Story is a hand-drawn animation and a new installment in the artist’s ever-growing saga of Reynard the Fox. In the film we enter a grandiose cave in which Reynard (or at least his head) is being roasted alive on a slowly revolving spit. He struggles to deliver a death-bed speech and a plea for his innocence.’

 

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Tetsumi Kudo Various, 1967 – 1974
‘Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990) was a radical and visionary outsider. Almost forgotten until recently, Kudo is being rediscovered internationally due to his foreboding depictions of an ailing world and the emergence of a ‘new ecology.’’

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Claude Wampler Droolie Andrews, 2019
‘A Glow-in-the-Dark painting, approximately 16′ x16′, activated by a light show produced by 7 theatrical programmed LED lights mounted on pedestals.’

 

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Stuart Brisley And For Today … Nothing, 1972
‘British performance artist Stuart Brisley’s And For Today … Nothing, 1972, was staged in the depths of a run-down, shabby building in London. A dirty bath was filled to the brim with black water and rotting meat, where flies and maggots festered away. Brisley lay naked in this dirty mess every day for two weeks, with his head positioned just far enough above the water so that he could still breathe. Small groups of visitors were then invited to enter the building and observe him in this vulnerable, half-dead state. Subjecting his body to an almost intolerable situation, Stuart Brisely drew viewers’ attention to the fragile line between life and death, an attitude which would have a profound impact on the contemporary art that followed. This performance was part of a group exhibition at Gallery House, Goethe Institution, London, but the smell of cold water filled with decaying offal became so disgusting that all the other artists forced him to leave.’

 

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Sam McKinniss Various, 2015 – 2018
‘What’s your favourite scary movie? Sam McKinniss: Carrie, duh. Or The Shining. What’s the best nightmare you’ve ever had? Sam McKinniss: Ex-boyfriends visit me in my dreams all the time, it’s EXHAUSTING and sometimes VERY HOT. Do you believe in ghosts? Sam McKinniss: Yes.’

 

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Sue de Beer The White Wolf, 2018
‘The White Wolf uses the classic werewolf narrative as a lens through which to explore broader themes of transformation, memory, and the psychology and physicality that form our sense of self. The film, which is set on a fictional island off the coast of New England in the late 1980s, follows the intersecting experiences of several characters connected through a medical clinic, to a secret history shared by inhabitants of the town.’

 

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Dennis Oppenheim Material Interchange, 1970
‘Fingernail lodged between gallery floorboards. Stage Splinter.’

 

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Richard Hawkins Disembodied Zombies, 1997 – 2000)
‘In 1997, Richard Hawkins started a series of prints called “Disembodied Zombies”; these were digitally collaged images of male models and actors, their decapitated heads taken from glossy magazines. The creepy zombie-like heads, adorned with abundant blood-like drips, were graphically presented on colorful backgrounds. The series was a doorway to personal and collective obsessions with the body, beauty and erotic desire. Hawkins is a key figure in LA not only because of his own work, which perfectly synthesizes the “Sunshine & Noir” aesthetic with which LA is identified, but also because his influence as a teacher at Art Center is felt by many younger artists.’

 

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Lonnie Holley I Woke Up…, 2018
‘The first real artworks I made were tombstones for my young niece and nephew, who lost their lives in a house fire. I was honouring their death, and ever since I think I’ve always been honouring the death of something. What it’s taught me is that we need to grab something positive from every life, because that’s where knowledge and wisdom come from. We should try to grab it before it turns into history.’ — LH

 

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Peter Peryer Gone Home, 1975
‘Tributes have been paid online by New Zealand’s art galleries, museums, artists and fans of eminent photographer Peter Peryer who died on Sunday. Peryer received several awards for his work and also became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 1997 for his contribution to photography. One of his more famous works, a picture of a petrified dead cow, made international news and had the German government attempt to remove it from an exhibition.’

 

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Marianna Simnett Mother, 2007
‘Simnett’s work examines the perception and imagination of the (human) body. In the works she has created to date, the themes of sickness and the intervention of medicine figure large. Themes of contamination, disease, violation, sexuality, identity, and metamorphosis. Central to surrealist visions are issues of vulnerability, autonomy, and control. Simnett cites empathy, trauma, catharsis and the embodiment of these as important themes in her practice. Throughout her body of works and the works themselves is a nonlinear narrative of “bodily dread”.’

 

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Andy Holden The Structure of Feeling (A Ghost Train Ride), 2020
‘An art exhibition where you can ride a ghost train through it. The ride takes 40 minutes, with carts leaving every five minutes. ‘The Structure of Feeling’ takes viewers on a trip through a cartoon landscape of the artist’s own devising. The journey – on motorised carts along predetermined tracks – sends you through desert, woodland, a haunted library and an abandoned city. It’s a show filled with animated films and 3D movies about melancholy, physics and, you know, the meaning of life.’

 

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Alessandro Bavari METACHAOS, 2010
‘Metachaos, from Greek Meta (beyond) and Chaos (the abyss where the eternally-formless state of the universe hides), indicates a primordial shape of ameba, which lacks in precise morphology, and it is characterized by mutation and mitosis. In fact the bodies represented in METACHAOS, even though they are characterized by an apparently anthropomorphous appearance, in reality they are without identity and conscience. They exist confined in a spaceless and timeless state, an hostile and decadent hyperuranium where a fortress, in perpetual movement, dominates the landscape in defense of a supercelestial, harmonic but fragile parallel dimension. In its destructive instinct of violating the dimensional limbo, the mutant horde penetrates the intimacy of the fortress, laying siege like a virus. Similar to the balance of a philological continuum in human species, bringing the status of things back to the primordial broth.’

 

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Sarah Sitkin Human Leftovers (2017)
‘‘creepy’ and horror’ are terms I struggle to transcend. I use materials and techniques borrowed from special effects, prosthetics, and makeup (an industry built on the foundations of those words) but the concepts I’m illustrating really have nothing to do with gore, cosplay, or horror… moving a person out of their comfort zone is the first step in achieving vulnerability, and in that space, a person may allow themselves to be impacted. I am deliberately making work that aims to bring the audience to a state of vulnerability.’ — SS

 

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Mike Nelson The Coral Reef, 2000
‘The Coral Reef is the installation as scary novel. Horror and the gothic haunt Nelson, but in this extraordinary creation it is not vague creepiness he creates. It is the creepiness of our time, the strangeness of our cities, the paranoia of this absurd age. As soon as you enter the door marked The Coral Reef, you are in a seedy world of – what? Ratty hotels, call-centres, terrorist cells, taxi offices – you are not sure what exactly what the interstitial, transient rooms and antechambers you pass through or glimpse through dirty windows are, or where. But a machine gun and a mask left on a worktop is almost superfluous to the atmosphere of menace. An overwhelming sense both of abandonment and anticipation sucks you into what feels like a narrative about terror and conspiracy.’

 

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SOCIÉTÉ F.P.T.P. Le Cri de Johnny (2010)
‘A myth crumbles as soon as we know that the famous very manly cry of Hollywood cinema, the one who alerted the jungle — this Tarzan, aka Johnny Weissmuller — comes from a clever mix between the song of an Austrian yodeller, the cry of an American hyena and the musicality of a sound engineer.’

 

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Christopher Winter Spook-a-rama, 2008
‘Spook-a-rama, a series of eerie, darkly comic works by the Berlin-based artist, Christopher Winter, opens at Edelman Arts on October 30 with a séance. Intended to summon the spirit of Hans Holbein the Younger, the concept is unorthodox but hardly unheard of. As Winter explains: “Victor Hugo used a method called Turning Tables to talk to spirits. These conversations with writers and poets who also drew for him inspired my own Holbein Table.” Should such spirits choose to speak and/or actually to draw for Winter and his audience remains to be seen. But the séance sets a spectacular stage for one of Edelman’s most intriguing full-house installations. Named in honor of the former Ghost Train in Coney Island and featuring paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video, viewers are invited to hover over a gruesomely Germanic abyss: an abyss defined by hallucinatory landscapes and peopled by strangely sinister looking children and the spectral vision of legendary artists such as Durer, Kippenberger, and Picasso.’

 

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Matthew Day Jackson Me, Dead at 38 (2009)
‘Facing death head on, Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Day Jackson wants to put our fear of dying to rest in his Me, Dead ongoing series that imagines his end in various mortifying ways.’

 

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Michael Mersereau Various (2020)
‘Michael Mersereau (b. 1977) is a multidisciplinary media artist and filmmaker. He is from the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California, US and holds an MFA from Mills College (Oakland, California) and a BFA in Painting/Drawing from the California College of the Arts (San Francisco, California). Mersereau splits his time between San Francisco Bay Area and Montréal, Québec.’

 

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Ann Lislegaard Oracles, Owls – Some Animals Never Sleep, 2012 – 2013
‘A few years ago, I saw Blade Runner by chance when I turned on the television in a hotel room in Amsterdam. I had seen the film several times before, and I had also read Philip K. Dick’s novel, but this time, I was utterly fascinated by the owl. What I saw made me think about the potential narratives that lie hidden within the silence of objects. So it made me think: What if this intriguing and secretive creature were to suddenly receive a voice? What would it say, and how would it say it? This was the initial idea for the piece: giving this animal a voice.’ — AL

 

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Mary Ellen Mark Various, 1977 – 1992
‘Mark traveled extensively since her first trip to Turkey on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1965. Her pictures of diverse people and cultures are groundbreaking images in the documentary field. Her essays on runaway children in Seattle, circuses and brothels in India, Catholic and Protestant women in Northern Ireland and patients in the maximum security ward of Oregon State Mental Hospital demonstrate original and insightful ways of examining each theme. Her photographs are compassionate and factual.’

 

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Bubba Sawyer Chainsaw 3-D mask unboxing, 2019
‘The horror Zone: Hey bubba who’s your favorite leatherface witch movie ? Bubba Sawyer: The horror Zone 74 always. The Greek Pianist: I noticed you don’t have the “Grandma” mask that Leatherface briefly wears in the original. I think it would be a great addition to your collection man 😁. Bubba Sawyer: I forgot about that one I’ll eventually get it.’

 

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Bloober Team SA Layers of Fear, 2016
‘Layers of Fear is a first-person psychedelic horror game with a heavy focus on story and exploration. Delve deep into the mind of an insane painter and discover the secret of his madness, as you walk through a vast and constantly changing Victorian-era mansion. Uncover the visions, fears and horrors that entwine the painter and finish the masterpiece he has strived so long to create.’

 

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Nicola Samori Various, 2016 – 2019
‘Nicola Samori’s dark, Baroque-inspired oil paintings are skillful reproductions of classical portraits and still lifes on canvas, wood, or copper, purposefully destroyed to negate classical representation and question painting itself. His process entails “skinning” his painted figures with a palette knife or diluent, layering another image on top, and repeating the process until images fuse and signs of erasure and scratching dominate the reworked surface.’

 

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Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen Vinyl Terror & Horror, 2015
‘Sound artists Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen have developed their own destructive brand of turntablism. Reminiscent of that artist who took a knife and some sandpaper to pristine black vinyl, this duo carefully destroy, cut up, reform and reconfigure record players and records. They throw shards of record on to deformed decks, filling the already uneasy gaps with glass shatters, creaking classical symphonies and needle chaos.’

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Great episode! I too have barely scratched Current 93’s gigantic surface. Great about the Flash Fiction course. That seems like a genre you could really nail. Maybe even a couple of your extant works could fall under that rubric if I’m remembering. Excellent! Speaking of bleak winters, there are strong hints that Paris might be going back into complete quarantine here very soon, possibly only for two weeks, but even that would be rough. Hoping it’s just a scary rumour, but … ** Bill, Hi, Bill. I did really like the Maddin short, and thank you. He’s so great. I’m not huge BlB fan, it’s true, although I like a couple of the early ones, but I suppose I’ll catch up to the new one at some point or other because I always seem to for better or worse. Did you watch it? Thoughts, if so? ** Misanthrope, I remember when he was Sypha_69, as I imagine you do as well. I think you’ve always been ‘plain’ old Misanthrope, no? Awesome that the trail was fun. That’s all it needed to be. So you’ve officially done IRL Halloween. Gold star or something. The performers in haunts always, always target the girls/women, especially if they’re cute. Haunts want screams. The trick to warding them off is to look them in the eye and smile bemusedly like you think they’re just so charming, and they’ll usually do a bee-line around you. Imagining you and Joe and Rigby together is very intense. Yeah, right, that MC5 clip? Cool. ** Sypha, Hey. It definitely needed to be alive again. And thank you again from the future. Yes, it was originally posted in 2010. 10 years ago, wow, so hard to believe. I wondered if you were still following his stuff closely and guessed probably not that closely. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. New Ehrenstein! Everyone, David has a new piece up at the great Los Angeles Review of Books called ‘Cocooning, Then and Now’, and I bet it’s killer, and why don’t you go find out? ** Ferdinand, Hi, F. I’m happy that ‘Try’ spoke to you. Or with you, I mean. No, I never felt hesitation about writing about what I wrote about re: family, friends, etc. I’ve never lost a friend because of my work, only gained friends. Other than my nephew, who’s also a writer, my family has always had less than zero interest in my work. They don’t read it, never have. They immediately change the subject if my writing comes up in conversation. The words ‘sick’ and ‘perverted’ have left their mouths on the rare occasion when they have referenced it. Whenever there were reviews of my books in the local media and my mother’s friends saw them, my mother was extremely embarrassed and worried what her friends would think of her for having raised such a sicko son. None of which bothers me except maybe deep and secret in my psychological makeup or something. So, no, I never thought twice about doing what I do because of them. But I’ve always put a lot of emotional distance between me and my family. If you’re closer with yours and want them to think well of you or to not know you’re a complicated guy, I guess I can see those worries being a preventative. But of course I would say the only respect from them that would be meaningful is respect for who you actually are. ** Steve Erickson, Good news about the long lines, well, except for the actual drag of waiting, obviously. NYC doesn’t have drop boxes? Dull is the word. I didn’t think the performances were that much at all, committed but cookie cutter, serviceable to bad. Although the guy who played Bobby Seale wasn’t bad. ** Armando, Hi. Yeah, I wish I could suspend belief with fiction films, but I’ve always watched films with one eye on how they’re made even back when I was a little kid. Nerd. No, the hype on ‘BWP’ back in the day didn’t bug me because the film successfully did what the hype was saying it did. The concierge isn’t around on the weekends. I’ll see if I can track him down today. If you ever want to make a guest-post and can, of course you’ve very welcome to. Thanks. ** Okay. More Halloweening today. I was going to say don’t be scared, but I guess by the time you get all the way down here, you’ve either been scared or not. I’m guessing not. See you tomorrow.