missoni, madison avenue, new york

July 20th

Since I last wrote anything here, Ive been occupied with new work and negotiating with agencies, Elite models in Manhattan, I shall be photographing one of their models wearing my new vulture sweater, on Thursday. I got on the phone to them last week and made an appointment to see a booker, he showed me some head shots of girls after looking at my website and I selected someone, shes pretty amazing.Basically, shes been scouted and they need to see her in some test shots to build up her portfolio and that’s why Ill be providing prints to them.
I have a new digital camera. For days I agonised over the most appropriate way to try and document this coming together of crucial elements, a professional model, a garment/tool/art-object, a context, a functional use for an image(to display a garment in such a way that people will be able to visually ascertain how it is constructed, ie. A knitting pattern.) a decorative use of an image, and a conceptual sub text.I went off on a spiral of researching hasselblads and all kinds of large and medium format cameras, but its not useful to think I can suddenly find my way around that kind of gear.The important thing for me here is to have experimental authorship on how a fashion image is constructed.I have to provide Elite with prints for the model’s book, that’s what made me get jittery, normally I have a kind of blind faith in whatever format is available to me.
Right now, I am browsing Helmut Newton’s archive of magazine facsimiles from all his fashion work. He has always been someone whos output really provokes me, but now I find it even more entrancing than usual, his work is just incredible, made at a time when fashion editors could take these massive leaps in editorial audacity and fashion photography was providing some of the most revolutionary life documents albeit in the most odious of contexts.
Couture.
The thing I hate most about couture is its deliniation of what constitutes an occasion. Anyway, Helmut Newton has models wearing knitted swimsuits pressed against the bulbous glass of a helicopter hovering metres above the ocean, models with coked up eyes falling backwards in priceless chiffon and silk into turquoise swimming pools.His images are so modern, visually quoting Bader Meinhoff women and 1968 parisian student radicals, space races and corruption, cold war and gender ambiguity.
So my shoot happens Thursday.
Meantime, I was at a discussion tonight at the home of www.16beavergroup.org, an artist collective……. on my street..
Interventionism and the historical uncanny:
Or; can there be revolutionary art without the revolution?
Gregory G. Sholette, April 2, 2004 (DRAFT)
Here is a link to it.
http://www.16beavergroup.org/sholette/massmoca.pdf

This was an interesting encounter for me, to visit with a radical group who use open discourse as their preliminary engagement with culture. The basis of the talk,the essay linked above, was pretty limited in that it was directed almost exclusively towards a show of work, here in the states, of “interventionist art.” The writer made no bones about that and also pointed out specifically that this piece of writing wasn’t as considered or dense as his previous writings, that it was an almost off the cuff riff on the exhibition in question and that he had found correlations between current “interventionist” work and the aims and objectives of the constructivists in Stalinist Russia…. almost like he was channeling.Personally, I found it a solid and informed bit of writing, but I found the links he drew pretty tenuous. I also had no concrete idea of the art he was discussing.
The talk was half an hour late in starting, then there were hiccups while someone tried to plug a hard drive the size of a keyring into someone elses computer and then a projector was found and then, it seemed, there was nothing really to look at that was pertinent to wherever the talk was going to meander.That’s all cool and indicative of how generous the environment is towards the activity in hand, I liked all the bumbling, “shall we go downstairs? It will take another ten minutes we didn’t expect so many people, and there is a screen.” No lets stay here, ok. Etc.Lets start no lets wait for so and so, etc. I felt very warm towards this group anyway having looked at their site and their extensive links to other pockets of collectives internationally and so on.
When the talk began at first, it was odd, like a flexxing, a kind of shimmying around, a lack of detail, ( its like a soap, you need to have been there the week before) and then suddenly it seems to be going somewhere and a guy across from me is talking about “interventionist- art” in really blatant generalizations about how its pretty “slacker” and based on half baked references to the 60s, and so on and while I was digesting this I got sort of roped into talking about a particular group… but only because I was the only person there that had heard of them. I didn’t do that I went back to the guy who was basically dismissing, any current notion that an artist could engage with the public in a “radical” way that would provide a meaningful appendage or extension to the culture of the left………
In defense of public art with a political slant,I talked about how I sometimes work in consultation with, and in the context of community… that, I and artists like me, approach these contexts in rigorous ways to find forms and meaning, site specifically and so on. What happened after that was so wierd,,,a guy from Belfast also interjected and talked at length about community art/public art as it relates to a northern irish context also and after that we both seemed to get relegated to “community art” corner. I couldn’t believe it. Suddenly socially engaged and context specific practice was set back about two decades and patronized in such a clumsy unintentional way…the talk meanwhile had flowed into other interesting avenues and it wasn’t fair to try and commandeer it, but I was so disappointed.
So much of the debate lacked a sense of scale, there was little or no sense of diversity in political context and localised objectives beyond “the Left” no real sense that “the museum” as a locale is redundant for many artists, not just activists, and so on.There was, surprisingly, no mention at all of net art, as a medium for radical engagement.
Blabla, there were some fantastic moments in the talk, one woman, Martha (id love to find out who she is)was really a fantastic compelling speaker and made some extraordinary points, specifically in contextualising the legacy of 60s agitprop, but generally I felt pretty isolated and marginalized, the line between “community art” and “art proper” was pretty well defined by more than one or two people… and I am always deflated by that, like I am by the hieracrchical distinctions between craft and fine art.In this day and age. People said some pretty offensive (to me) things. How scandalous it was that some artists had to subsidise their careers as “paint monkeys” (working in advertising) How “problematic” it was that some teaching artists had to instruct their students how to contribute to “the spectacle” of tv and the advertising industry. This was in a space where someone had stuck up that almost life size photo montage of Kate Moss wearing Helmut Lang which came free in the first issue of Another magazine.
Nice Image!
Communal discourse like this is often not accurately representative…. in a room of about twenty people, the dialogue was dominated by the same three or four or five talking heads…that’s pretty normal. But there were artists there who several times were invited to discuss their work which was in the show in hand and somehow those moments slipped by.Man. ( I say man a lot now.)
In my opinion, some of the most inspiring(to me) socially engaged artists have come from the USA, that’s why I find tonight so confusing. The other thing is that there may have been more complex underpinnings from previous talks that I wasn’t party to, Adorno was often cited and ive just picked up a collection of his essays to try and penetrate further what I might have missed last night.Because this is a website/scrapbook environment, I don’t have time really to embed my opinions in more scholarly terminology. But art linguistics is something I have enjoyed here, the whitney critical studies programme was good for that, (oh they say THAT like THATnow.) I actually really get into the spoken word nuance of these occasions and really enjoy it.There were some great examples of that tonight.
Im really glad I participated in it, it was interesting, 16beavergroup.org.

July 22nd
So Im waiting patiently and excitedly for crystal from Elite to turn up and at 5 to eleven her booker Calvin calls and cancels for today because "shes working." Of course she needs to prioritise work, Calvin says she can make it for 1pm tomorrow. Im like, sure,ok fine, thank you(thanks thankyou thankyou) then when I sit down again and time creeps round to 11.30, 11.45, 11.50, and that little square of light gets bigger by the window and then on cue the room floods with daylight at noon… im like oh no! Crystal HAS to come before noon …FOR THE LIGHT. And when I mail this to Calvin hes like, 1pm or all day Saturday. So I need to go ahead tomorrow because the work is due in scotland.Also…the heat. ITS DEADLY. This poor girl will be wearing a big lump of a sweater in unbearable humidity.The heat is solid, I noticed this one mother today, how the heat was making her murderous, she was carrying a kid and another kid was walking behind her but too close and accidently banging into her and it was making her deranged. Spike Lee got that right.

Instead of being a fashion photographer for a day I went up to chelsea to see a show at David Zwirner. 525 west 19th street. Curated by Andre Schlechtriem..title:
"Happy days are here again."
A Group show, advertised in www.flavourpill.com, in the territory of dearraindrop…ish, id say baby spiderplants of that mother-impulse.Teenage bedroom crassness and neurotic cut and paste, stealthily enjoyable, sort of, like spying on where someone is strong and where they are weak because once its on the wall theyre kind of disempowered in a way…. these young sex atari marijuana vintage babyartists, and you can scrutinise them then.I’m totally fascinated by them now, I really think americans have got a whole niche area that I don’t really sense in scotland.I definitely think its engendered in specific climates(heat) and colonialist/pioneer nations which erradicated indigenous history to make way for what? The Giant Pineapple? Meteor City? (A member of Dearraindrop claims to be from Meteor City) which is basically a dome close to where there was a deep impact meteor strike thousands of years ago. Meteor City is like a geegaw rest stop on Route 66.
The first time I went to Australia, I lived in a house that was peopled by this disdainful demograph and they are really magnetic people, not powerful in the sense that they have status, charismatic in the sense that they are very centred and fearless.This art really reminds me of those people I lived with, who were actually really inspiring, the matriarch of the house became one of my best friends despite the distance when I left australia.

In the show,there were two stand out paintings …one painter in particular, Tyson Reeder, I just went , shit! God! That’s beautiful.Then I read his biog, everyone else had more than one piece but he just had the one. And I was looking at it going ok, this is a controlledclumsy, totally kind of "beautiful" painterly painting and it would be very easy to dismiss it for several reasons , but I looked at it for ages and the thing I absolutely loved about it was that you could see that whoever had made it had been totally immersed in the process of making it, that they knew what they were doing and it was borderline painterly-whimsy-childlike-art-made mature but it was riddled with sophisticated pleasure.But then I just thought to myself, fuck it, im not going to dismiss this work because its so blatantly about visual enjoyment, I really like this painting.Then I thought, I like this painting because it doesn’t have a shred of cynicism or disquiet or foreboding in it, and yet it can hang in this environment with these other works and be it’s own thing.
In sharp contrast to that, I headed for the Whitney, had a quick wizz round the Ruscha drawings (superb) and sat in central park waiting for a talk.
The talk was so flimsy, and at the same time there were so many parallels with everything that’s been going on since 16beavergroup. (I had mailed beavergroup my concerns about stereotypes of "community" art and was really gratified to get a whole seam of really generous and insightful emails back from various constituents,Martha, was Martha Rosler. Greg, the essay writer, is a founder member of Repohistory
(disbanded now), and he provided me with a copy of another essay which is really a fantastic testimony to invisible practice. It really is good, the only thing I would question is the use of sarah lucas as an example in this context. Do read this essay if you find the time.)

"Dark Matter, Activist Art and the Counter Public Sphere"

So after absorbing a lot of this very vibrant aftermath from Monday night, it was really hard to be generous towards the talk by Oscar Tuazon, chaired by Heather Felty Kouris.
The talk was around some of Oscar’s installation work using sponatneous dome architecture in gallery spaces. "A city without a ghetto" is one of his works. He is obviously very aware of the Utopian metaphors he is engaged with and very conscious of not being seen to provide solutions. He essentially advocates the Buckminster Fuller dome as an idealised space, to be assembled in a gallery and approached in the manner of an un-art object, borrowing heavily from outsider dome expertise and a culture of dome making which thrives on the internet, and in areas of the states. He mentioned one specific place called Drop City and the "Dome cookbook" by Steve Baer. I love all this stuff, I can see why this artist is incredibly excited and driven by research in this DIY area of culture. Also, he was born in a dome house, and lived there till his parents realised it wasn’t the best place to bring up a baby.So I started to feel that I was looking more at a from of autobiography-by- architecture, which in fact would have been a more interesting position. Instead he just seems to be going through a process of emulation, and Im just tired of Utopian metaphors, even my own.
This talk coincides with not one but two utilaitarian dwellings being shown in New York, one made by LO_TEK at the Whitney and one at The Cooper Hewit design museum. Both robust mobile design units which can be galvanised and shipped to different areas, the one at the Cooper Hewitt is a working prototype made form shipping containers to be used in refugee situations, Ive seen it it totally works, its really soothingly well designed and costs peanuts to assemble.

31st of july

Ive been so busy with the vulture project, ive not had time to really consolidate whats been going on, but some really good things have come out of it and I think the process and the outcome are both really valid reflections of how my thinking was shaped by being here.
the art work is at the printers, I had to really force the images I had made, they needed a lot of tweaking, crystal had been wearing a white vest and you could see it shining through the jumper so i spent ages in photoshop at micropixel levels fixing stuff.
my time with crystal was so short, she came with her mother “princess” on a day of torrential rain, and she had just been at a Loreal shoot where they had made this amazing quiff of her hair and whenever she was taking the sweater on and off she needed her mum to help her so her hair didnt get squished. She was exceptional, and really translucent and full of goodness. Her mother is jamaican and she and her three sisters were born and raised in the bronx and currently living in queens. Theres been an agency war to secure a contract with her and shes so sweet , i asked her, who would you like to work with and it turns out stephen meisel has requested her, and she was excited about that. they scouted her in a wendy’s burger bar.When they both left i was sort of flabbergasted, and really happy,but when i looked back at the images I felt that they were rubbish and cliched, however they werent. like i did lost of cross referencing with current fashion images and really wound up thinking about how functionality was at the heart of me making the image it wasnt about trying to convince someone of its status. The text and the garment as an indicator of its own construction was always going to override the residual concerns.
once i had the images i had to do all the layout and the graphics and type out a pattern, and the weather has been so oppressive, thick like soup and wet and hot at the same time. so its been a wierd little pocket.
then i had to try and suss out where to get stuff printed and also, make sure i got really slick photographic prints made for crystal’s portfolio because that was my end of the deal, thats how they allowed me to work with her. First prints i got made were shit because the lab didnt listen to me they just did generic printing. meanwhile, i was all over trying to find a large format digital printer, and after many phone calls ended up at this high end commercial printer who do like the billboards for tommy hilfiger and roca wear. it was totally bizarre, they took me on a tour of the presses and the laminate finishers and they had people pulling out samples and gear for me to look at, i was blown away by one rocawear board where a guy a girl and a baby were so bling and so accessorised and branded that they could have been masai warriors, the garments had gone beyond clothing somehow into a new cosmology.
so i didnt work with them because it was too BIG what they did, they sent me to a place called Duggal, which is where cindy sherman gets her prints done. so Duggal are doing it and they’re really good service providers and provide test strips and so on...i pick the thing up tuesday.its a poster. and i ended up getting crystal’s prints done there too, and they made a beautiful job of them. And i delivered the prints to calvin at elite, her booker, and he was really into them. when i first called him and said i wanted to work with an african american girl, he said oh yes, we have those. and i was like ..?.. and when i got there he was black too and i was really worried momentarily that i had offended him by specifying race but of course not.
In other news, i saw the most totally incredible film last night, a real honest to goodness masterpiece, called “L.A plays itself.” made by Thom Andersen, who i think i heard in passing is a lecturer in film at UCLA.I actually heard an interview with him on New York public radio a week ago.
Its a really powerful documentary encorporating thousands of minutes of footage from the history of film to explore how Los Angeles is utilised in cinema, as a background, as a subject, as a symbol as a historical index. the whole thing was so well researched and featured many subjects, including modernist architecture in the hollywood hills, the symbolism of the automobile, the immoral syphoning of water to feed the city, race riots and the shame of a municipal public transport system which actively misserves an impoverished community by raising fares and failing to provide routes and timetables. The cliche that noone walks in LA is disproved through hispanic cinema from the 50s and finally, we land in neo realist black cinema from the 1970s where as someone who loves cinema, he seems to breathe a sigh of relief to have found some attempt at representation of a real city which can co-exist with the myths of LA.The director loves Los Angeles, the real Los Angeles, the city so derided and despised throughout the world as some kind of manifestation of the plastic, the corrupt and the degenerate.
The two examples of 70s neo realism he showed were “Bushmama” by Haile Gerima,and Killer of sheep by Charles Burnett, both from a school of black film making specific to LA., directors I have never heard of before but which completely moved me, from the clips he showed.
I would really love to see a full screening or at least track down some copies of these films

the documentary is exceptional.

while i was waiting for the film to begin i browsed in a shop nearby who were selling original 1960s ballpoint twiggy brand pens, stripey pens with twiggy on the packaging saying "twiggy blue ink colour luv"

twiggy! she went down a strom here apparently.

august 3rd.
i couldnt sleep,its hot and they’re fixing the roads outside. there is no noise pollution legislation in new york worth speaking of and if there is, its difficult to implement. people put signs up in the lift here in the building with numbers you can call and complain, its wierd to think that a whole building of us might be wide awake, unless someone has some really knock out fancy sleeping tablets.
i turned on the tv tonight just in time to catch, “couple fear” or some such title, a bunch of couples all trying to win...10,000 dollars and a high roller trip to vegas. and to win this, you know what they did? the girl from the (heterosexual obviously) couple got in a glass tank and lay down, she was wearing shorts and a a sports bra and goggles. then somone sprinkled her with about thirty severed chickens feet. then, they literally poured about a hundred rats in on top of her, and she had to lie there with the rats all scrambling and gnawing chicken feet on top of her body, while her PARTNER PICKED THE CHICKEN FEET OUT ONE AT A TIME WITH HIS TEETH. he was basically fighting the rats to get the feet with his arms tied behind his back. and they stopped the clock when he got to ten. so this first couple does it ok, then this other couple, she gets in , she blanches at the chicken feet and then she really freaks right out when they put the rats in, she is struggling to try and get up and out from under them and her husband is saying relax honey, just relax, and is so desperate to win and such a schmuck trying to coerce her into doing this thing and shes crying and desperate and they help her out and she has shock,shes trembling, and noone takes care of her.and later the camera pans back to them and he is mildly berating her and she lunges at him then stops herself.
what an absoloutely base and revolting bit of television.

the kids selling “candy for a dollar” on the subway...why have you only ever got peanut m and ms and starburst?

i bought a national rail pass, its really a big deal to sit and look at a map and think that for a specific amount of time i couild go anywhere here.
i have a meeting with sabrina gschwandtner tomorrow, a curator and producer of a publication i found really interesting. i invited her to come and see my new work before it goes in the box to scotland, i found her while browsing through some stuff about forcefield and dearraindrop.she’s networking strands of art activity which utilise craft techniques.
roadworks have stopped. at 3.30 am exactly.

Aug.5th met with sabrina, it was really enjoyable,she publishes knitknit, a knitting zine.and she was telling me about some interesting things going on, like “knit for kerry” a knitter who makes pro kerry hats and sweaters and distributes them. we talked about the phenomenon here of people really visually supporting a candidate, theres a lot of big button badges around, like people obviously feel strongly enough to notify other citizens where their political loyalty lies. and theres a lot of street level canvassing and active debate on the pavement.She invited me to make a contribution to the next knitknit, which id love to, I admire the cottage industry of it. it was really interesting to hear how she started out making clothes to pay her rent in brooklyn and she teaches rich ladies to knit as a moneyspinning sideline. That’s so indicative of real life in this city, of getting by through resourcefulness.
That night I went to a bar in brooklyn that was a former sicillian mens club. It was a very gregarious bar, great jukebox, nice people to chat to, brooklyn brewery beers on draught.
coming back on the subway, i got talking to a guy who said he was a boxer and we hung out for a while, i ended up accompanying him to madison square gardens where he said he needed to train but it was all locked up, and anyway, by then id started to realise that he probably wasnt a boxer,well he had been at some point maybe..which didn treally matter.. it was all great fun, he had some very complex theories on life. we sat on a bench and the sun came up and the buildings looked incredible. alfredo peters was his name,he knew everyone on the street in that area.He gave me a number and I tried it just to see what it was and it was for the new york city mission.

Im stuck in waiting for the TNT guy to come and pick up this work.

while i was at duggal picking up the poster, who walks in but DENNIS HOPPER!!!

with a huge camera around his neck. that brings my famous people tally up to four i think, Nick Cage, Ben Kingsley, Dennis and the guy from Birdie and Platoon, sort of lanky preppy guy i can never remember his name.

These are some pictures i took tonight on the way to get some dinner.

aug9th

i just wrote a substantial amount of text for here and my computer crashed so i lost it.it will kill me to re-enact it, so heres a list of some of the stuff i mentioned.
1. seeing my friend stewart laing.
2. a very small hassidic jewish child getting in a cab while his mother put his pram in the boot and his trouser leg hitching up to reveal an artificial limb.
3. stewart showing me the mongraph of henry dirger which i absoloutely loved.
4. then, flowing seamlessly from his drawings to seeing a customised t shirt in a huge junk shop by the williamsburg bridge, it was handpainted in day glo colours with clusters of small outlines, hand stencilled of men in stilletoe heels, wearing t shirts, with their cocks out and trilby hats on. I WISH i had bought it. i might go back.
5. The magnificance of the Williamsburg bridge.
6. My visit to the studio museum in Harlem on Saturday, the permanenet collection, the work of three resident studio artists.works in the permanent collection by Kerry James Marshall, Kara Lynch, Chris Offili, Mark Brandenburg and others.
7. My reproduction( from “Happy days are here again” at David Zwirner in chelsea) of an untitled Mark Brandenburg drawing of Michael Jackson with a marching band, which is awesome.He draws black and white negative images in pencil.
8. The “black is beautiful” t-shirts in the museum.
9. The “Man in the Mirror” a sacharin made for tv drama biopic of Michael Jackson’s life which was actually really good. Michael’s case will be heard in 2005.
10. The Neue Gallery, Fifth avenue. (german and austrian paintings and decorative arts)Egon Schiele, most exquisite and wonderful draftsman of female labia,pencil ponderer of the thigh,how much he makes me think of modern graphic comic books and how much the photo of Gustav Klimt in a big sort of bohemian nightgown standing outside his country residence, cradling a cat, made me think of Jeff Bridges as the pompous children’s book author in “The Door in the Floor”.The Neue Gallery is a total gem. It gets right to the point, only two small floors.The collection of bauhaus furniture is really moving.
I love Egon Sciele’s landscapes immensely, such a stick.
Finally, i leave with my train pass on wednesday, my vehicle to the rest of america departs at ten to three from Penn station.
and, I finished this:
http://www.hamandenos.com/woolworld/newyorkcity.html