One of the things I feel about the current art that’s being spotlit is that it claims to be subversive on some level, by imitating the culture that surrounds us, or the culture of people who are in control – which is ad, media culture, et cetera – but I think its subversiness is purely intellectual and it’s not visual. Because if you look at the work of these artists, their work has become the very thing that they hate or that they intend to disrupt or they intend to undermine. And I think it’s a joke. (…) I try to show my own sense of things and my own sense of time, creating a history that’s for me, or it’s a record of things for me – one that challenges the record we’re given daily, whether through the newspapers, through television, or through politicians. If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation’s capital and start annhililating the people who I believe responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It’s like a machine that runs itself that can’t stop. – David Wojnarowicz, The Weight of the Earth, January 1989

31 March 2019 - text - Comments Off on One of the things I feel about the current art that’s being spotlit is that it claims to be subversive on some level, by imitating the culture that surrounds us, or the culture of people who are in control – which is ad, media culture, et cetera – but I think its subversiness is purely intellectual and it’s not visual. Because if you look at the work of these artists, their work has become the very thing that they hate or that they intend to disrupt or they intend to undermine. And I think it’s a joke. (…) I try to show my own sense of things and my own sense of time, creating a history that’s for me, or it’s a record of things for me – one that challenges the record we’re given daily, whether through the newspapers, through television, or through politicians. If I were a violent person, I would run out into the street and buy guns and go into the nation’s capital and start annhililating the people who I believe responsible for this pre-invented existence. But the originators of this existence are long dead. It’s like a machine that runs itself that can’t stop. – David Wojnarowicz, The Weight of the Earth, January 1989

Akemi Takeya, Sweet heart / Granular Synthesis (1997, 7:30)

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Injuring, Wagering, Controlling: Looking Back at a Metalanguage, Diedrich Diederichsen, 2018

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Henrike Naumann. 14 Words

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Seth Price, There Is No Society (2018)

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wfw weekend #465

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wfw weekend #464

18 March 2019 - exhibition, features, weekend - Comments Off on wfw weekend #464

Kathy Acker. Blood and Guts in High School (1978)

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Notes on ‘Camp’, Susan Sontag, 1964

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To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, Vogue Magazine, 1961

8 March 2019 - hyperlink, text, web - Comments Off on To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weak- nesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us. – Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, Vogue Magazine, 1961