OUT OF FOCUS

ELISHA SAPHIRO

Elisha Shapiro (aka Nihilist Field Marshal Shapiro) is a Los Angeles-based media prankster and conceptual artist. He has been creating his neo-dadaesque public spectacles for the past 25 years and first came to public attention with his 1984 Nihilist Olympics. The Olympics were followed by a Nihilist campaign for President in 1988 and a Nihilist campaign for LA County Sheriff in 1994. Nihilism Expo--a World's Fair for Nihilists was his project, staged in 1999. He currently hosts a monthly cable TV show called Nihilists' Corner. In 2006, Shapiro was the Nihilist Party Candidate for Governor of California.

http://nihilists.net

Luther Price

Luther Price grew up in Revere, Massachusetts with his sister Sally. Together the siblings would obsessively watch daytime broadcasts of woman’s melodramas on their black and white TV—films like Imitation of Life or Mildred Pierce—re-enacting the histrionics on a reel-to-reel recorder. This obsessive kind of self-dramatization and hysterical re-enactment continued throughout Price’s career, first through the various, self-invented monikers that he adopted while earning his undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at MassArt (personas included LA, Laija Brie Aethy, Brigk Aethy, Brick, Fag and Tom Rhoads), and then in his later performative revisitations of traumatic incidents like a gunshot wound, deaths in the family and childhood nightmares.

Larry Paradiso, Laija Brie Aethy, LA, Brick and Fag were all predominantly sculpture and performance artists with different logic structures built into each. These characters were not performances per se. Rather, the artist would form personalities in order to execute his fine art projects, often assuming these characters’ mannerisms or affectations full time. Laija Brie went to Nicaragua on a cultural exchange program in 1985 and adapted to his surroundings, becoming Brigk Aethy. There Brigk was accidentally shot at close range by his 15-year-old bodyguard, a devastating wound forcing his return to Boston by emergency means and leaving him teetering between life and death. Eat Fuck Live Shit Want Need was a sculptural installation that the artist created in immediate response once he regained some semblance of health. Permanently scarred, Brigk was fundamentally changed by the event for years to come. The artist turned to filmmaking as an extension of his sculptural practice, inventing the persona Tom Rhoads to plumb his childhood traumas, particularly the circumstances surrounding the suicide of his aunt Sally at age of 23 on the day of Price’s birth.

“Tom Rhoads was a nice guy who would buy you an ice cream cone,” Price explained, an adult manifestation of his haunted childhood. Rhoads made frightening Super 8mm visions of a fecund homecoming, dressing as his mother in Warm Broth, 1987-88, and using those original reel-to-reel performances with his sister for Green, 1988. These early performance films were so startling in their raw vitality they were championed by filmmakers, curators and critics alike, who responded to their urgency of vision and alarming psychological complexity, frequently citing the use of Super 8mm as a medium to reconstruct memory or a traumatic past. As Rhoads evolved, it became clear the work was becoming too harsh, too brutal for such a childlike filmmaker. Tom Rhoads started Sodom in 1988, but the artist soon realized, “[Tom] couldn’t have made Sodom.” So cleft was that film between such opposing forces, he was forced to invent his longest-running persona, Luther Price, out of his apotheosis of good—Martin Luther King Jr.—and that of evil—Vincent Price.

The resulting film and filmmaker would make an immense impact on the avant-garde film community of Boston and the world over. Sodom is extreme, as horrifying as it is whimsical. Made of found gay pornography and biblical disaster footage, the voracious boys of the porn footage are sutured into sequences of cataclysm via a rudimentary hole-punch technique. Halos circle these victims of dogma, victims of plague, victims of hedonism as they dance in a sea of religious calamity, celebrating and damning, all in the same frame. Sodom sparked a zealous coup among film programmers and audiences, who were fiercely divided by an artist who some regarded an heir to Kenneth Anger and Jean Genet, others, a homophobic zealot. Sodom provides no easy answers for viewer. With its gorgeous organic aesthetics, hypnotic soundtrack, gruesome and graphic depictions, the piece performs a harsh rebuttal to the ideals of contemporary gay lifestyle.

Price continued, prolifically producing two strains of film work: his performative films carried on from previous efforts, with the filmmaker embodying physically and emotionally grueling characters, as seen in the feature-length A, 1995, and the Clown and Meat series, 1992-94 and 1990-1999. The latter series revisits his traumatic shooting and later the loss of his entire family to cancer in the span of one year—a body of work which includes Ritual 629, 1999. Price’s other strain assembled found footage, imposing an emotional sense upon this chaotic world for future, foreign scrutiny. Early works in this vain included Bottle Can, 1993, In Black and White and Jelly Fish Sandwich, both 1994, pieces in which Price builds new associative structures of logic, “an attempt to put history into time capsules and send them into space, in the hope that someone will get the right message,” Lia Gangitano writes, “However, as the films’ scrambled forms suggest, the message has degenerated, history has become a series of misdirections.”

Price finished Me Gut No Dog Dog in 1995. A found footage film that culls army recruitment propaganda, gay pornography, family home movies and some amateur Karate narrative, Price uses the barrage of leisure-time footage and outmoded training films to build a personal past. Price fascinatingly coagulates these random scenes into a work recreating his childhood dread of the Vietnam draft. The impending horror of this institutionalized violence is layered against his dormant homosexuality and the army’s homosocial climate, a conflicted fear and thrill of being caught or forced into brute sexual encounters. The film recounts a loss of innocence, with (as in many of Price’s films) the voice of Karen Carpenter ringing its close, as she coos a pathetic rendition of The Beatles’ “Ticket To Ride.” Children file down communion isles as a pretty teen slams his head on a pillow, bracing against some aggressive, off-screen penetration and the tune’s chorus lyric, “He’s got a ticket to ride, and he don’t care,” suddenly acquires an ominous, thanatotic drive.

Due to duplication issues brought about by the explicit content of Me Gut No Dog Dog, Price has since only produced unique films, hand splicing, painting or warping existent footage in one-of-a-kind cycles of work. These hands-on processes are obsessive and laborious for Price, who still considers himself more a sculptor than filmmaker. Never one to linger on any one process, each new body of work almost becomes a skillful disavowal from its predecessor. The Inklbot series (1998-2008) is the result of the laborious hand-painting techniques, often working from nothing but clear leader, while the Biscuits series re-edits 13 identical 16mm copies of footage shot in an African American retirement home in Boston to arrive at a more emotionally accurate documentation of these living situations. Silk and Ribbon Candy (the latter, part of the Ribbons series) belong to this decade of abundant production. These works show the filmmaker re-creating contexts and revising the past, remolding existent images and narratives in lieu of adding to the din. Price has worked in this manner for the past decade, Ritual 629 being one of the last original footage pieces he has created. Not that this slows him. The filmmaker, who still lives in Revere, produces 10 or so films a year. —Bradford Nordeen

The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists

The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists, edited by Koen Brams & Krist Gruijthuijsen
published by JP|Ringier, co-produced by Kunstverein Amsterdam and de Appel arts centre



The Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists
Editor: Koen Brams
Contributors: Inge Arteel, Eddy Betttens, Ralph Bisshops, Koen Brams, Koen Broucke, Geert Buelens, Bert Bultinck, Philippe Codde, Martin de Haan, Alpita de Jong, Pietha de Voogd, Ingeborg Dusar, Bart Eeckhout, Arja Firet, Christien Franken, Serge Heirbrant, Rokus Hofstede, Steven Jacobs, Paul Janse, Monica Jansen, Liliana Jansen-Bella, Bart Keunen, Sven Lütticken, Piet Meeuse, Bart Meuleman, Myriam Pelgrims, Jürgen Pieters, Dirk Pültau, Catherine Robberechts, Maarten Steenmeijer, Jan Struelens, Roger Van den Borre, Bart Van den Bossche, Barber van de Pol, Jan Pieter van der Sterre, Dirk Van Hulle, Peter Venmans, Paul Verhaeghen, Kaat Verleye, Françoise Vervondel, Gerben Wynia

The Addition
Editor: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Contributors: Alan Abel, Aninomian Press, Bik van der Pol, Michael Blum, Heman Chong, George Cup & Steve Elliott, Keren Cytter, Chris Evans (i.c.w. Will Bradley & Tirdad Zolghadr), Ryan Gander, Gruppo Parole e Immagini, Will Holder, John Fare Estate, K.D., Matthieu Laurette, Gabriel Lester, Benoît Maire, Oscar Neuestern, Adam Pendleton, Michael Portnoy & Olivier Sudden, Roee Rosen, Alexandre Singh, Uqbar Foundation, Barbara Visser

Design: Roosje Klap
ISBN: 978-3-03764-123-1

www.kunstverein.it/

France Fiction

http://france.fiction.free.fr/

bruce mclean

'Artist artist there is a sculpture in your body'

This is also an essential part of the strategy to limit deleveraging actions.

VOTE VOTE VOTE

First International Opinion Poll in SILVER STAMMER !

After a lecture on 'The 10 most ... Pop Music Video since I got YouTube', I decided to come back to the web, my personal web, and to propose it to my sharing community.

ENJOY and VOTE YOUR FAVOURITE!

J.


For the image thanks to Niccolo!

do you do you?

Bob Fosse and Billie Jean

thanks to Francesco

Bob Fosse the pleasure of quoting in anticipation!

La Bionda

thanks to chiara

Holger Czukay Photo Song

Λένα Πλάτωνος

thanks to Samon

Wendy Sulca

Para el norte, centro , sur....
thanks to Manuel!

Jon Lajoie

Jan Terri

Bevi stu chinotto! W Milan!

grrrrr tigresa!

Single e accoppiati

a fianco
a posto
a proposito
al di là
al di sopra, al disopra
al di sotto, al disotto
all’incirca
d’accordo
d’altronde
in quanto
l’altr’anno
per cui
poc’anzi
quant’altro
senz’altro
tra l’altro
tutt’altro
tutt’e due
tutt’oggi
tutt’uno


abbastanza
affatto
allora
allorché
almeno
altrimenti
ancorché
apposta
appunto
benché
bensì
chissà
davanti
davvero
dinanzi, dinnanzi
dopodomani
dovunque
ebbene
eppure
fabbisogno
finché
finora
giacché
infatti
inoltre
invano
invero
laggiù
malgrado
neanche
nemmeno
neppure
nonché
oppure
ossia
ovvero
ovverosia
perciò
perfino
pertanto
piuttosto
poiché
pressappoco
purtroppo
quaggiù
qualcosa
qualora
quassù
sebbene
seppure
sicché
siccome
sissignore
soprattutto
sottosopra
talmente
talora
talvolta
tuttavia
tuttora

Marios!

Chiedo venia ma, dev'essere un vizio generazionale, ogni volta in cui trovo Buddha sulla mia strada gli sparo. Metaforicamente, s'intende.

Chiunque non si pensi come Dio (indefinibile, illimitato, onnicomprensivo, transitante da una definizione all'altra nel desiderio di non avere definizioni) sta, purtroppo, nell'armadio di chi dichiara di voler distruggere gli armadi. Non basta ripetere ad oltranza, come Lutero, "Non sum" ("Non sono", ed anche "Non esisto") per sparire come uomo, donna, gay, lesbica, ecc. agli occhi propri o degli altri. Il perfetto "queer" dovrebbe stare sospeso in un mondo iperuranio in cui (ironia della sorte, quando si continua a scambiare le parole con le cose!) proprio in nome dell'inclusività totale di ciò che sceglie di essere di volta in volta, non può entrare in relazione con nessuno. Se non posso definirmi, e quindi non sono distinguibile da nessun altro, giacché l'altro parimenti non è definibile, con chi entro in rapporto?

E, contestualmente, vi pare che stiamo parlando di "esperienze reali", di qualcosa che potete riconoscere (e quindi, un'altra volta, definire!) nella vostra vita?

Non credo sia un caso se i teorici e le teoriche queer si interessano in maniera precisissima e dettagliata più degli oggetti e dei feticci utilizzabili in campo sessuale che della relazione sessuale stessa (l'affettività non pare essere per loro un campo di indagine, e nemmeno una questione degna di nota, neppure se interagente con il sesso).

In conclusione, contesto il fatto che assumere un'identità sia per forza prescrittivo in termini negativi: se putacaso io esercito la professione di dentista, ed al "queer" fa male un dente cariato, forse sarà molto trasgressivo e rivoluzionario dichiarare che, il giorno in cui lui/lei mi si presenta, io sono una callista e non posso farci niente, ma è molto probabile che il queer si incazzi giustamente di brutto e cerchi un/una dentista meno rivoluzionario/a e più professionale…

Un nuovo concetto di universale, anche se ora non assume più l'immagine di un diamante purissimo ma di una mappa "contaminata" a macchia di leopardo, non mi serve a nulla: almeno fino a quando io intenderò liberare me stessa assieme al resto del genere umano, e non liberarmi da me stessa (farò anche schifo a qualcuno/a, ma è stato solo l'amore che sono riuscita ad avere per me a creare quel ponte verso gli altri/le altre che io chiamo "amore del mondo").

Dire: oggi sono gay, domani sono etero, dopodomani sono una donna (e fra tre giorni sarò un polipo trisessuato di Urano) per cui mi comporto di conseguenza, fa esattamente quello che i queer vorrebbero sfuggire: prescrive comportamenti immodificabili.

Perché se quando sono gay vesto firmato e mi scopo Mario, quando sono etero vesto in jeans e scopo con sua sorella (ma ci riesco solo se penso a Mario), quando sono donna metto il migliore dei miei baby doll e scopo Mario e quando sono un polipo trisessuato Mario vorrebbe cacciarmi nella pentola del bollito, io sono (al massimo) un bisessuale con forte propensione omosessuale e una grande fantasia: ma una fantasia non bastante a mettere in discussione i ruoli socio-culturali ascritti alle categorie menzionate.

Io avrò in testa una gerarchia per cui un gay si deve comportare così ed una donna cosà, ma non mi verrà neppure in mente di discutere se questo sia vero, falso, opportuno, ecc.: la mia "liberazione" consisterà nel passare da una definizione data ad un'altra.

E in effetti, se io non posso neppure definire me stesso, cosa volete che perda tempo ad indagare generi, ruoli, categorie? Ci sono, ed io mi limito (proprio, LIMITO) a passarci in mezzo recitando ora un personaggio, ora l'altro.

Sapete, l'unico problema che ho è che i vicini di casa non lo capiscono, e ci chiamano "froci", a me e a Mario…

Tratto da:
http://www.culturagay.it/cg/saggio.php?id=90