Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
Translated by Ralph McCarty. University of Chicago Press, January 2012. 256 pp.
Discussions of Yayoi Kusama must inevitably reckon with the state of the
artist’s mental health. The 82-year-old Japanese icon, who deftly
inserted herself into the epicenter of Minimalism, Pop, and performance
art in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, continues to produce
eye-popping, whimsical, surreal works. She also lives — by choice — in a
mental institution.
An art-world provocateur turned living legend, Kusama is, despite her
stature in the art world, also something of an “outsider artist.”
Although she was schooled in art — unlike artists to whom the term is
usually applied — she is seemingly driven more by personal neuroses and
compulsions than artistic or intellectual trends. However, Kusama’s
place in contemporary art is more complex than the simple story of an
outsider finding her way into the fold. Her autobiography, written in
2002 and now appearing in English for the first time, seeks to secure
her reputation among the international avant-garde. Yet it is also
highly ambivalent, pointing to the limitations of traditional
distinctions between insider and outsider.
Throughout Infinity Net, Kusama is careful to emphasize her
outsider status, mainly in regard to her Japanese identity. The book’s
prologue muses on the first Yokohama Triennale, held in 2001, which she
describes as Japan’s first large-scale international art festival and
its belated entry onto the contemporary art scene. Kusama is proud of
the first Triennale, for which she contributed two large installations —
a mirrored room and a mass of reflective spheres floating in a Yokohama
canal — but her tone is condescending: Japan has the money and the facilities but no real interest
in or understanding of contemporary art. I was shocked, when I first
returned from the USA [in 1975], to find that my country seemed a good
hundred years behind the times.
Like much of this self-aggrandizing book, this statement may be an
exaggeration. But even as a young woman, Kusama found Japan’s attitudes
toward modern art stifling. Born in 1929 to a wealthy family in the
small city of Matsumoto in the mountainous Nagano prefecture, Kusama
drew and painted constantly, but found herself well outside the artistic
and intellectual centers of Japan. Her isolation was compounded by the
nationalist upsurge of the 1930s, during which the Japanese art world
became more insular. At school, she studied nihonga, or
traditional Japanese painting, but felt frustrated and impatient with
its old-fashioned master-disciple hierarchy. Also, her family was
vehemently opposed to Kusama becoming an artist: According to the conventional wisdom of the time, a woman
had no future as a painter. This ‘wisdom’ held particular sway in an
old-fashioned and feudal family like mine, which still clung to the
ancient notion that actors and painters were disreputable at best.
Fittingly, the first chapter of Kusama’s story is an account not of her
childhood, but of her artistic birth: her departure, in 1957, for the
United States. The story has a fairy tale air. Needing a contact in the
U.S., Kusama journeyed six hours by train to Tokyo to look up Georgia
O’Keefe’s address in a copy of Who’s Who at the American Embassy.
She struck up an awkward correspondence with O’Keefe, and, despite some
bureaucratic obstacles, soon had a solo exhibition at a gallery in
Seattle.
Shortly thereafter, Kusama moved to New York, the better to establish
her starving-artist credentials. She describes at one point having
nothing to eat but “a handful of small, shriveled chestnuts given me by a
friend,” and was prone to days-long bouts of obsessive work — that is,
when she had money for art supplies.
Whether or not these conditions were as dire as she describes, they no
doubt aggravated her mental illness. It was during these early days in
New York that Kusama began her famous “Infinity Net” series of
paintings: canvases covered all over with a repeating, organic network
of tiny loops of paint. The aesthetic of these works was thoroughly
enmeshed with her hallucinations: I woke one morning to find the nets I had painted the
previous day stuck to the windows. Marveling at this, I went to touch
them, and they crawled on and into the skin of my hands. My heart began
racing. In the throes of a full-blown panic attack I called an ambulance… this sort of thing began to happen with some regularity.
Kusama’s wild, dreamlike descriptions of these youthful visions,
juxtaposed with reproductions of her early drawings and poems, are the
most fascinating part of the book. They suggest that, in addition to
being a response to contemporary artistic movements like Color Field
painting or Minimalism, her work may actually be seen as a
representation of reality as she experienced it. Such an interpretation
risks pathologizing, but unlike most artists who balk at overtly
psychological readings of their work, Kusama is unabashed about the fact
that for her, art is a form of therapy: “My Psychosomatic Art is about
creating a new self, overcoming the things I hate or find repulsive or
fear by making them over and over and over again,” she writes. Kusama
dates this practice back to a childhood spent with a philandering father
and a domineering mother, when she would often lock herself in the
bathroom and draw obsessively. Her hallucinations began when she was in
elementary school: flowers and pumpkins — both recurring motifs in her
work from an early age — would routinely sprout faces and speak to her,
or the floral pattern on a tablecloth would spread inexplicably across
the room. Dogs addressed her in Japanese; she could only bark in reply.
She describes spending agonizing days behind a “thin, silk-like curtain
of indeterminate grey”: On days when this curtain descended, other people looked
tiny, as if they had receded into the distance, and when I tried to
converse with them I could not understand what they were saying.
Painting, drawing, and later performance art and soft sculpture, forms
made from sewn and stuffed fabric, were ways of understanding and
ultimately controlling her disease. She never discloses exactly what
that disease is, although scholar and curator Midori Yamamura reports in
her essay for the 2007 exhibition catalog, Making a Home: Japanese Contemporary Artists in New York,
that Kusama’s psychiatrist, Dr. Nishimaru Shiho, diagnosed her with
hallucinatory cenesthopathy with bipolar and schizophrenic tendencies.
Kusama experiences odd bodily sensations despite the fact that there is
nothing physically wrong with her.
At any rate, the congruence between her hallucinations and her work
would seem to mark her as an “outsider artist”: one who creates art as a
personal outlet for some deep, compulsive need. And yet, Kusama is
highly aware of her profile in the press and her place in history. She
often offers long lists of her accomplishments — her autobiography reads
like a curriculum vitae in places — and narcissistically quotes at
length from press accounts.
She also claims to have inspired two iconic figures of Pop Art: Claes
Oldenburg and Andy Warhol. After they exhibited together in 1962, Kusama
claims that Oldenburg got the idea for his soft sculptures — droopy
fabric renderings of toilets, hamburgers, and other household items —
from her presentation of domestic objects covered in hundreds of stuffed
fabric phalluses. Warhol had attended another exhibition in which she
papered the walls with a single repeated image. In response to a show in
which he did the same a few years later, she remarks: “It was plainly
an appropriation or imitation.”
It’s impossible to know whether these claims have merit (sometimes
things are just in the air), but such statements betray an artist with
something of a chip on her shoulder and a certain bluster or swagger: an
irrepressible self-assurance, even cockiness, that has been a hallmark
(and perhaps raison d’être) of her career. It took supreme
confidence to break with tradition and leave Japan, to heed her own
voice despite financial and psychological hardship, and finally, to
attempt to break taboos — her own and the public’s — around nudity and
sex.
The third act of Kusama’s chronicle describes her 1970s performances,
many of which doubled as orgies. Just as her “Infinity Net” paintings
tread a path from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism and her soft
sculptures coincided with the ascendance of Pop art, Kusama’s Happenings
captured the zeitgeist of the anti-war, free love, and hippie
movements. She staged naked love-ins in public places and burned
American flags, Bibles, and draft cards. In her studio, she created a
room lined with mirrors and invited news crews to film a group of men
having sex inside. She cultivated a stable of young gay men she dubbed
the Kusama Dancing Team who lived (and routinely pleasured each other)
in her studio, available to perform at a moment’s notice. And she put
her mark on all of these activities by painting the nude performers’
bodies with polka dots.
At the center of this maelstrom of sexual expression and
experimentation, Kusama staunchly maintained her identity as auteur, not
as participant. She advocated free, even public sex, but not for
herself: I had no interest in drugs or lesbianism, or indeed any kind
of sex. That is why I drew a line between myself and the group … to
them I was like a nun — but neither male nor female.
She frankly traces this revulsion to a childhood transgression: being
ruthlessly beaten by her mother for dancing naked in front of the
neighborhood boys. Freud would have had a field day.
The polka dots, which became a Kusama trademark, were an extension of
the “Infinity Nets,” reflecting her hallucinatory visions but also
operating as a kind of camouflage, expressing a radical continuity among
all things: What I was asserting, was that painting polka-dot patterns
on a human body caused that person’s self to be obliterated and returned
him or her to the natural universe.
For Kusama, the application of polka dots (which might also be seen as a
sublimation of the sex act) is the means by which two people might
dissolve into each other or become inseparable from the world around
them. She calls it “self-obliteration,” an idea that seems both
desirable and threatening. It’s also a bit ironic given her pursuit of
celebrity. I was reported on almost as much as Jackie O. or President
Nixon. My name was in the tabloids day after day, magazines carried
stories about me, and the public was fascinated by my activities and
movements.
Kusama did attract a legion of followers, first through her Happenings
and then through assorted (now defunct) business ventures: Kusama
Enterprises, Kusama Polka-Dot Church, Kusama Musical Productions (all
involved in staging Happenings), Kusama Fashion Company, The Nude
Fashion Company, Kusama International Film Production, Body Paint Studio
(a kind of modeling agency), Kusama Sex Company (responsible for
orgies), and the “homosexual social club KOK,” which stood for Kusama
’Omophile Kompany. The list reads like a satire of the American
entrepreneurial spirit, but Kusama is nothing but earnest about all of
these endeavors, which she saw as additional ways to spread her message
of sexual liberation.
This account of her heyday in New York is followed by musings on
Kusama’s personal relationships with other artists. There are brief
sections on O’Keefe, Warhol, Donald Judd, and others, as well as a
lengthy account of her prolonged, troubled affair with Joseph Cornell,
whom she first met in 1962. Cornell — something of an outsider himself —
was apparently obsessed with Kusama, telling her, “I’ve dreamed of
swearing my love to a Japanese girl,” and telephoning repeatedly at all
hours of the day and night. It’s not clear what Kusama got out of their
years-long relationship, or whether, given her attitudes toward sex, it
was ever consummated in the conventional way. The story is, however, a
rare glimpse into the intimate life of the fabled, reclusive artist, who
died in 1972.
By 1975, Kusama’s health was failing, and she traveled to Japan to have
an unspecified operation. She originally planned to return to New York,
but her hallucinations returned and she decided to remain in Tokyo. In Making a Home,
Yamamura notes that Kusama voluntarily checked herself into a “Jungian
art therapy institution” in 1977, out of “a rational, self-preserving
impetus.” Since then, she has continued to make paintings, collages, and
sculptures — in a studio she constructed across the street from the
hospital — and has also become a prize-winning novelist.
Is Kusama a crazy lady who happened to be in the right place at the
right time, or a canny opportunist who rode the waves of the moment? We
may never know. Despite her highly constructed and performative public
image, she may in fact be something else altogether, an ambassador for a
reality with which we, in our reasonable efforts to dissect the
universe, have largely lost touch. Loathe though I am to cast her as
some exotic earth mother bringing the world back to original truths — a
conceit that smacks of the most insidious kind of Orientalism — there is
still something restorative, refreshingly sincere, even magical about
her work. It speaks for itself, suggesting that it’s not so much whether
she’s an outsider or an insider that matters but how her story
dispenses with that distinction altogether." - Sharon Mizota
Štakori i otrovna voda. Nadrealna psihološka skulptura američke propasti i konfuzije.
The experimental producer's latest LP arrives roughly a year on from his last, Sushi. As with that release, HELL, NYC 3:00 AM will come out on Hippos In Tanks.
"This record is about my demons just as much as its about society's
demons," Ferraro explains. As the title suggests, the album explores the
seedy underbelly of New York, the city Ferraro calls home. He describes
it as "a surreal psychological sculpture of American decay and
confusion" and says it was inspired by "the things I see," such as
"rats, metal landscape, toxic water, junkie friends, HIV billboards,
evil news, luxury and unbound wealth, exclusivity, facelifts, romance,
insane police presence [and] lonely people... all against the sinister
vastness of Manhattan's alienating skyline." You can stream snippets of
two of the album's tracks, "Eternal Condition" and "Stuck 2," over at
the Hippos In Tanks - www.residentadvisor.net/
Whether one found pain or pleasure in James Ferraro's mysterious landmark Far Side Virtual,
it was an unremittingly bleak black mirror, twisting horribly familiar
source material stripped from the contemporary digital brandscape into a
set of uniquely alien compositions for the modern age. That album
signified Ferraro's emergence from lo-fi and often extended cassette
tape and CDR jams to become a perpetrator of hi-definition digital
miniatures. However, since Far Side Virtual in 2011, follow-up Sushi and his Cold
mixtape saw Ferraro veering away from abstract instrumentals and
towards a wonky, glitchy sound that it was even possible to nod your
head to. NYC Hell, 3:00AM is perhaps the logical conclusion to
these shifts, finding Ferraro trapped in a modern personal hell of
discordant vocals, introverted musings and ingenious sampling - not
unlike this year's The Redeemer by his onetime collaborator, Dean Blunt.
Absurd, leftfield electronic soloists are most definitely in - NYC Hell
arrives in a month that's seen the release of Oneohtrix Point Never's
bizarre Warp debut and Tim Hecker's follow-up to the award-winning Ravedeath, 1972
- yet Ferraro's gradual metamorphosis has made a most unlikely turn.
While Lopatin and Hecker's collagic albums continue their respective
trips into the inhuman void, Ferraro (and Dean Blunt) are changing their
scenery, and getting in touch with their very un-digital humanity, which is what makes NYC Hell so surprisingly compelling. It almost entirely disregards the Tim & Eric-like use of the bastardised on-screen version of reality that fuelled Far Side Virtual,
in favour of a harsh and dystopic evocation of our own physical
surroundings: the dull hum of the city is forever within earshot, and
Ferraro's own voice is always muffled in low-fidelity – two brazen
universal truths of modernity.
Characteristically unsubtle, Ferraro opens with 20 seconds of a
digital voice repeating "money, money, money", leading into an overture
of ambient dissonance blending environmental sound with organic and
digital drones. 'Fake Pain' follows, swiftly interjecting David Ruffin's
sampled God-like vocal performance from The Temptations' 'I Just Wish
it Would Rain' ("People this hurt I feel inside!"). In parallel to this,
a low-bitrate beat stumbles along with a trailing, unquantised synth on
its tail, and Ferraro's own autotune-buggered voice muses aimlessly,
snaking through the mix semi-discernibly, as on much of the album.
Juxtaposing the theatrical impassioned agony of Detroit soul's greatest
with the downbeat bedroom mumbling of Ferraro's inner voice, audibly
captured in front of a laptop (space bar hits can clearly be heard) sets
the scene for the album. This is universal pain and anguish, yet the
bleakness of the urban landscape - in this case, New York - does
everything to fuel a nihilistic and seemingly hopeless outlook. 'Stuck
1' presents the looped clatter of the street and a singing police siren
alongside a cut up synth string bed that can never get off the ground,
ultimately faltering and giving way to the city din.
The vast majority of the tracks aren't, however, instrumental. After
'Fake Pain', autotune actually dissipates, and we more often than not
hear Ferraro's voice in all its imperfect glory. He quivers and hobbles
around the notes, but never really hits them. His tone is an adopted
facsimile of radio-friendly pop singing, characterising Ferraro the
singer as something of an X Factor contestant type. Symbolically,
there's no other stereotype that better typifies the modern day hell in
which Ferraro's album resides: falsely confident, brainwashed by
auto-tune and several dozen Now! compilations into assuming they can sing, drunk, stoned, wired in.
'Cheek Bones' is possibly the catchiest of the record's crunk dirges,
with Ferraro painfully spewing lyrical about cigarettes giving him
cancer, and not wanting to get said cancer. The closing triptych of
'Vanity', 'Irreplaceable' and 'Nushawn' see the introversion take a
gradual and menacing about turn. 'Vanity' loops and juts along, fleshing
out an amateurish beat with a menagerie of lopsided samples presented
as musical furniture. 'Irreplaceable' treads a submerged two-chord path
for 6 full minutes, Ferraro pining once more and adding occasional
glockenspiel notes. The climactic 'Nushawn' twists the album's tale into
something wholly more menacing. A choice cut from Patrick Bateman's
many stone cold lines in American Psycho and a looped slice of Bernard Hermann's chilling Taxi Driver
score underpin wordless vocal lines, autotuned out of recognition, and
ultimately hinting at a murderous, psychotic climax in the life of NYC Hell's protagonist.
While still destined to divide his audience, with the excruciating and brilliant NYC Hell, 3:00AM,
James Ferraro has quietly and calmly made some of the most affecting
and intoxicating music of his career. Years of prolific drone
explorations, the lessons learned on Far Side Virtual, and the near-pop sensibilities of Cold and Sushi
all merge into something new here. Deceptively dense, this music
unravels at a snail's pace, and repeat listens also reveal the man's
sick skill with illogical hooks. The drone of the city, the neon lights
of ubiquitous branding and the horror of a modern life spent rotting
away behind a laptop are all captured perfectly by Ferraro's uniquely
harrowing surrealism. - Tristan Bath
James Ferraro discusses DIY aesthetics, apocalyptic visions, and his new album NYC, HELL 3:00 AM.
Photo by Sylvia Kochinski.
In November 2011, James Ferraro flooded a stack of end-of-year-best-of lists with the sharply produced sound-abstraction Far Side Virtual.
The laptop-produced masterstroke spawned a slew of genre-bending
digital releases and an ongoing discussion surrounding its conceptual
themes. Ferraro has kept out of the race for editorial consensus,
instead keeping himself busy pushing toward totally new vistas in music.
Since his days releasing scummy CD-Rs as a member of pioneering
noise duo The Skaters, the music world has been paying close attention
to Ferraro’s activity. His latest opus NYC, HELL 3:00 AM is
out on October 15 by way of LA-based electronic label Hippos in Tanks.
In this follow-up to last April’s online mixtape release Cold,
Ferraro continues to work his moody, atmospheric deconstructions into a
framework of cultural critique—describing in disturbing detail the
psychological structure and decay of the American consumer economy.
James discussed the album’s dark matter, his fascination with
post-apocalyptic dystopias, and how the landscape of his mind has
changed since Far Side Virtual.
Catlin Snodgrass So you’re back in LA?
James Ferraro Yeah, I came to LA to record Far Side.
CS And you decided to stay?
JF Yeah, it kind of set itself up like that.
My label’s out here in LA so I’m back-and-forth between here and New
York a lot. I was also working on projects that were related to Far Side so it kept me out here for a little bit longer. But I’m out here post this album, NYC, HELL, to kind of get out of the inferno a little bit.
CS Does the change in environment have an effect on what you’re producing?
JF They’re kind of both their own thing. There’s a distinction, but I’m inspired by both places.
CS You’ve spoken a lot in the past about
expressionism in music and it being a canvas for audio art. Obviously
your work is heavily conceptual. What’s on NYC, HELL’s canvas?
JF There are so many concepts that are
inherently a part of the process. There’s a kind of iconoclast thing
going on with this one. A lot of things to do with how the media affects
emotions and how it creates an emotional environment or a stratosphere
for human interaction. It has a lot to do with how these experiences are
intertwined with life and how they all work in collaboration with each
other.
CS FADER called Eternal Condition/Stuck 2 “a scene in a really depressing movie.”
JF It’s not necessarily that. People’s
thresholds for intense emotions and pain are different. I assume some
people will feel that way, but other people might feel empowered by it.
CS There’s been an obvious shift in mood from Far Side and Condo Pets’s glossy, glamorous aesthetic to darker themes of misery and chaos. What sparked the temperature change?
JF To be honest, my mood and my inspirations for this album were really similar to Far Side. There all the things that I take from culture. Far Side
was masked in this glossy elevator Muzak kind of sound. You hear the
gloss, but beyond that is this darker reality of what’s really going on
in culture. HELL was more of a personal story. I allowed myself to look deeper.
CS Is it as much of an intellectual effort?
JF I can’t really say that because it’s an
expression that came from me. They both came from the same place. I can
definitely see how people can create a distention between the different
albums, but for me they’re in heavy conversation with each other.
CS To me, there’s a sound distinction. It
seems like you’re playing on a lot of hazy R’n’B deconstructions in your
newer releases, particularly with Cold.
JF I think maybe that’s just in my blood.
Maybe those sounds come out of me because of who I am and what I love. I
just allow myself to have complete freedom and that’s what came from
it. People are going to interpret it however they want.
CS What did you listen to growing up?
JF Everything from rap to classical. My
parents had really amazing taste and my father is a record collector so
he always had different records on deck. Because he was a DJ I heard
everything. I love it all. It’s hard for me to narrow it down to a
particular genre.
CS So you come from a musical background?
JF Yeah, my father was a musician and my mom
was a vocalist so they sort of rubbed off on me. My dad was really
supportive. He was always working on his own musical projects, playing
in a lot of bands. He was a DJ in Rochester, NY for a little bit. It’s
always been a part of my life.
CS When did you start recording?
JF In high school. I used to make beats on
this thing called MTV Music Generator for PlayStation. It was deep. I
used to make beats on that program with all my friends in middle school.
CS I feel like a lot of writers have the
false perception that your work is heavily laced in stock commercial
Muzak samples and recycled sound bites.
JF Yeah, people think that I sample but I
don’t. I actually never use samples. I sample my own sources of sounds. I
use AT&T Natural Voices and text-to-speech generators so it’s all
original content.
CS There’s a strong emphasis in your work on the by-products of consumerism. Can you talk about where that comes from?
JF What that means, as far as I relate to my
own art, is that I like to think about signs reaching a point of excess
when they begin to lose meaning.
CS Excess to the degree that it becomes something frightening?
JF Yeah, that sense of excessive repetition,
something that originally has meaning but then starts to lose it through
repetition. At that stage it becomes something entirely different.
Icons and symbols are things that really interest me. That’s a heavy
part of how I begin to work.
CS Your records evoke a pretty dystopian scenario.
JF Yeah, I think life is pretty dystopian. But I allow it to be both. That’s the potential of people.
CS That presents an interesting point of discussion: that our nightmares or fears are the benchmark for our aesthetic interests.
JF Yeah, people have been working with those
themes since the beginning of theater, literature, and philosophy. We
love apocalyptic scenarios.
CS Your work seems to be as grounded in an image as it is a sound experience.
JF Absolutely. It’s a lot like the sampling.
What I use the image for is to lift away from the original meaning of
something and to show how it affects the essence. Tabloids are a great
example of that.
CS What was the image in your mind when recording this album?
JF For this record, I was really interested
in 9/11 and surveillance footage and how the image stands on its own
with a separate meaning from the actual event, like how we judge
criminals based on an image rather their actions. When it comes to
social, emotional, and economical dimensions, the image is usually what
sums it all up. I think it’s interesting how society has fallen on that
as something reliable. The thing about that, is that it was just from my
raw experience of what’s around me: subway stations, trash on the
ground, rats, everything that was around me at that time. I accumulated
the material for the album as I went on. I went into it totally blind
and at the end I realized I was making a record about these things.
CS So it all starts with visuals?
JF I would call it a vision.
CS Conceptual or aesthetic?
JF Definitely both. For this record, a lot of my own personal rules changed. I allowed myself to step back and let it be. Far Side was much more controlled, whereas NYC, HELL is about letting go of control and seeing what comes out.
CS Was it a surprise to you?
JF In a lot of ways it was. It was a raw
sculpture or a living thing, because it was living along side of me as
it was manifesting itself.
CS That’s the most honest way to make music.
JF Yeah, when it has a life of its own.
CS After a long stint as an instrumentalist
of sorts, your vocal arrangements have been taking center stage lately.
How did that come about?
JF It was just natural. My solo work is all
more instrumental, but in The Skaters I used my voice a lot because it
was our main instrument. I’ve always sung, and that theme of letting go
helped it come into the picture. Separating myself from it, I would say
one of the central themes of HELL is the power of money and
how it acts as a god in a society that is built on the worship of
money. If you think about the lyrics as a stage for these things, then
they definitely represent that.
CS Cold’s eighth track “Slave to The Rain” really seemed to propel the concept of that album forward.
JF Yeah, that song in particular has a double
meaning. It’s “Slave to the Rain,” but also “Slave to Rain;” as in, the
raining of money, and to rain emotionally. It has a lot to do with how
society is dictated by money. Sexual interest in people and even
emotional love is dictated by the power of money.
CS My personal favorite record of yours is Marble Surf,
which people probably don’t bring up very often. Or often enough,
rather. It kind of got dusted under the rug back in 2008. You have a lot
of great material out there that’ll probably be revisited for a long
time.
JF Thanks. There was no control over how my
early stuff was put out into the world. I used to make CD-Rs and stuff
to sell at shows. All that work comes from a really interesting time in
my life. I love that period, just for that reason alone.
CS Being a part of a DIY community?
JF Yeah, the CD-R community really had its
own scene. And with ??Marble Surf??—among the people that were into my
music back then—did cause a little bit of stir because it was one of my
very first efforts as a solo artist.
CS Are you always working on something?
JF Yeah. I’m recording all the time. It’s
just a part of who I am. To always be writing music down and making
melodies is the part of my being that expresses that.
CS You’ve always had a laptop-produced, DIY approach to making music. Do you generate most of your work from home?
JF NYC was recorded at an actual
studio, but that’s different from anything I’ve done before. I really
enjoyed that experience of having a space to create in. I don’t have any
strategy or agenda, but I’d like to record in that environment more
often.
CS Tracing your history from these kind of
pastoral, hypnotic lo-fi releases to something much more high-def and
pristine, really exposes your range as an artist and how you’re
constantly changing. When do you become exhausted with a particular
sound?
JF My perception of genre is that it seems
like such an outdated way to consume art and music. The aesthetic,
style, and ideas are always changing, but as far as switching sounds or
genres, I don’t really think about it like that. I don’t get sick of any
one sound. People never see the process, so when they hear the end
result it might seem like I’m jumping from one thing to another. For
example, I have Far Side Virtual 2 recorded, but I never
put it out because it didn’t make sense to. It’s just all within me. I
can’t really explain it. I’m interested in a lot of things and I feel
like I’m everything at once. At the end of the day, music classification
and genres made sense at one time, but in 2013 I don’t think they have
that much meaning. Even post-modernism is an outdated theme because we
live in a post-modern culture. In the ’60s, the Beatles even killed that
concept with baroque pop. At the time that might have been seen as how
an artist today will have multiple styles, but in the next ten years, I
don’t think people will even think about music like that.
CS How do you think they’ll perceive it in the future?
JF They’ll probably think of it in purely aesthetic terms.
CS With every album, it feels like you’re on the working in a totally new genre, which is why your sound has been so hard to peg.
JF I’ve definitely been called a lot of
things, and as soon as those things die out, I’m a new thing. I think
that’s a part of being yourself and doing what you want to do. If people
are into something, they’ll create a world around those works.
CS Like the vaporwave movement.
JF People have talked to me about vaporwave.
It sounds really interesting and I like to hear other people’s take on
it. Apparently it’s a post-Far Side concept. I mean, there’s so
much shit going on in the music world, it’s hard to keep up. But I’m
just an artist, and I create what I create. It’s hard to speak about it
beyond that because I feel like it’s too early to say. I’ve been making
music a long time, and started with The Skaters when I was 17. I was
really young back then and things change. My ideas are different now.
I like the name though. The name is cool.
CS From what I understand, you don’t perform live very often.
JF That’s changing. I’m booking shows and
planning tours now, but I was going through a period where I was purely
focusing on writing music. Luckily I did because I’m happy with the
results. It’s been a transition period, so I think I’ll do a lot more
now.
CS In an ideal world, would you play more shows?
JF Absolutely. The Skaters and I were on a
3-year tour and it was a nice break from recording. So definitely. I
love playing shows.
CS With the exception of The Skaters and
Lamborghini Crystal, you’re mostly a one-man operation, but are there
any artists you you’d like to collaborate with?
JF Also Bodyguard, which is Sean Bowie from Teams, and me. Do you know Teams?
CS Oh right. Is that project active?
JF Yeah it’s definitely still active. As far
as collaborating, I’d say yes, on a production level, maybe with certain
producers. But as far as other artists, there are a lot of people I
haven’t met yet. There are plenty of artist I’d love to know and have
that conversation with though. I’d say Arca, Dean Blunt, you know,
people that are on my same squad and are peers of mine. I feel really
blessed to be surrounded by artists like that.
CS You usually construct an album with a particular listening format in mind. What format was NYC, HELL intended to be heard on?
JF Any format. It’s night music though.
Sushi
“Sushi is designer, Sushi is my obsessions, my darkness, it’s just my life squeezed into my music” - James Ferraro
Ever soundbite conscious, It’s incredibly easy to imagine
James Ferraro embellishing a really quite normal lifestyle with as much
Zoolander outrageousness as possible. It is, of course, part of what
makes him an interesting and infuriating artist. However, while those
incensed by Ferraro’s divisive 2011 album Far Side Virtual and subsequent, at times even more ridiculous pseudonym projects will probably be irritated by Sushi too, the effect is likely to be less so; it’s unusually digestible.
Eschewing previous extremes, on his latest release it
seems Ferraro has climbed down from the grotesque bombast of BEBETUNE$,
worked through the tamer, if just as fitful BODYGUARD, and is now far
more focused on what r‘n’b and hip hop have to offer than what he can
inflate through satire and manic reverence. Having found a useful metaphor, Sushi neatly
encapsulates the sound of the record, seizing upon the strange
fascination Western culture still levels at the unique elements of
Japan; the adoption of certain cultural traits, like sushi,
microtechnology and intensive design, while more accepted today are
still considered exclusive, even elitist.
It makes sense then that this sense of wonder translates into a sound
that oozes “Ferraro does original movie score to an expensive club
scene/’: a talented, though highly idiosyncratic composer instructed to
soundtrack the big boss’s gangster hang out, all cool white and blue
lighting, uzis, T shirts and blazers. Obviously it’s situated in Tokyo /
LA / NYC / wherever you want. Even that place in the Czech Republic Vin
Diesel goes to in XXX, if Orbital hadn’t got there first.
The result sounds like Ferraro has been listening to a lot of Mike Will, Ryan Hemsworth, Mykki Blanco, Kuedo, Late Nights With Jeremih and,
most comparably, labelmates Nguzunguzu, though there appears to be an
attempt, whether intentional or not, at creating a distinct sound
signature similar to the trademarks of revered producers, rather than
simply cramming in as much of what is on Ferraro’s mind at any one time.
Rave and horn stabs, re-pitched vocal chirrups, time-stretched diva
vocals and rattling hi-hats (though none of a BEBETUNE$ intensity) all
clamour and fall over themselves for attention, but in a surprisingly
controlled manner for Ferraro. Sure, it’s messy too, but not as much as,
say, Otto Von Shirach’s Maxipad Detention. The oddest element
is definitely the abundance of synth chimes and bell tones providing a
distinct patience very reminiscent of Mark Fell. At first it’s difficult
to envisage anyone actually playing these tracks in a club, especially
as the production quality isn’t overly professional. But things get
weirder as the album progresses and it quickly becomes more like, well… a
‘normal’ record.
Opener ‘Powder’ is strong, but it’s at track six, ‘Lovesick’, that
the record hits its stride. From here, ‘E 7’ (probably not a shout out
to Forest Hill) has every potential to be a serious weapon if voiced by
someone like Main Attrakionz; ‘SO N2U’ is a strong NY / Philly
referencing house track, ‘Condom’ sounds like a hip-hop Drexciya, and
the updated ’80s ballad sound of ‘Bootycall’ sounds like something that
could be released on Software.
For all the curveballs that Ferraro has persisted in throwing to date, Sushi is
probably the straightest – and therefore probably the weirdest too.
Simply by showing that he can produce an album where over half of the
content shrugs off his syncretistic ‘outsider’ character and engages
fully with the influences and ideas at hand, it’s an interesting change
of direction, and arguably a good one too. Give it a listen, you might
be surprised. -Steve Shaw
Rapture Adrenaline
"James Ferraro, the crazed mastermind behind the Tiny Mix Tapes-praised Far Side Virtual (TMT Review), has made a movie called Rapture Adrenaline. It is 94 minutes long. FACT
reports that it is now out on DVD, albeit in a limited quantity of 500
copies. And, though they do not come out and simply say it, they also
report that it is the greatest movie ever made. Let’s go to the bullet
points:• Sleazy television station called Hell-TV.
• Sleazy television station called Hell-TV that is run by someone named Acid Eagle.
• A character named Professor Pizza who may or may not be the same
person as Acid Eagle, because the description is very confusing.
• Brutally murdered police officer reborn as super-human cyborg.
• Rochester.
• Driver taken hostage by seatbelt.
• A robot that becomes smarter and more dangerous and puts a boy and his friends in danger.
And more. The movie came out on VHS last year and everyone who
watched it is now dead, not because they killed themselves, but because
their bodies simply didn’t see the point of living after watching it. In
the present moment, you can buy the DVD here. Do so only if you possess no fear of your body snuffing out its own flame of life." - E. Nagurney
"Limited to 500 copies. Includes "Welcome To Candyland" exclusive
interview** James Ferraro's makes his much-anticipated cinematic debut
on the "94 minute epic science-action movie" 'Rapture Adrenaline'. "Set
in a crime-ridden Rochester, New York in the near future, Rapture
Adrenaline centers on a police officer who is brutally murdered and
subsequently re-created as a super-human cyborg. The main plot of the
movie revolves around a "Bug" (code word for a member of an alien
species that is similar in many ways to a very large cockroach)
searching for a miniature galaxy which is also a vast energy source.
"Acid Eagle" is the president of Hell-TV (Channel 83, Cable 12), a
sleazy television station specialising in sensationalistic programming.
Displeased with his station's current lineup (which consists mostly of
softcore pornography), Professor Pizza is on a seemingly endless quest
for something that will "break through" to a new audience. The rescue
turns out to be a fake; the two climbers are taken prisoner by a group
of ruthless thieves. The driver is now a hostage trapped by his own
seatbelt. However, the robot becomes smarter and more dangerous as it
plays putting the boy and his friends in mortal danger. In addition to
being an action film, the movie includes larger themes regarding the
media, resurrection, gentrification, corruption, and human nature."
Unfortunately we've not had a chance to watch it all, but a quick flick
thru tells us this is a proper trip..." - Boomkat
€15.00 - On Sale
H012
JAMES FERRARO "RAPTURE ADRENALINE"
(+ Extra "Welcome To Candyland" Exclusive Interview)
DVD - ALL REGION
Limited Edition 500 Copies
Originally released on a limited critically acclaimed VHS edition,
this succulent re-issue present an exclusive extra, WELCOME TO
CANDYLAND, an interview with the author and, at the same time, an
exciting voyage through some cult virtual-hyper-reality-simulacro. The
OJ chase, Hollywood forever cemetery, Dr. Phil are just some ingredients
of this delicious visual trippy cake.
The movie RAPTURE ADRENALINE is an educational mixtape program, a
cyber marine combat training video designed through primitive editing
techinques. Operating mythological transformations of popular movie
iconography, it reaches the merging point of the magical and the
political.
Co-production between HUNDEBISS VISIONS & MUSIC CITY
YTB COMMERCIAL: http://youtu.be/JxweGPLtcCA
"The beginning of Incognitum Hactenus provides a permanent record and expanded thought on The Real Horror Symposium (London, October 2010).
Extending from Graham Harman’s reading of cult gothic novelist H.P.
Lovecraft in his essay “On the Horror of Phenomenology” and the notion
of Weird Realism, The Real Horror Symposium addressed this
reciprocal relationship between the expression of horror and reality.
The symposium showed that while many dialogues on horror overlap, merge,
and diverge, there has not been a designated outlet for writers,
artists, and curators that would give voice to this new strain of
thinking. Thus Incognitum Hactenus came into being. Volume 1.1 Real Horror includes contributions by the London-based artist, writer, and curator participants in The Real Horror Symposium - Amanda Beech, Carl Neville, Ben Rivers, and Simon Clark – as well as U.S. writers Steven Shaviro and Ben Woodard.
CONTENTS
Editorial Caryn Coleman and Tom Trevatt………………………………….3 Martin Carl Neville……………………………………………………………5 Terror! Ben Rivers……………………………………………………………..10 View an excerpt of Terror! Knowing Horror Amanda Beech………………………………………………………..12 A Nature to Pulp the Stoutest Philosopher: Towards a Lovecraftian Philosophy of Nature Ben Woodard…………………………………………………………..20 She Tied the Tag Around My Toe Simon Clark……………………………………………………………26 Watch video of She Tied the Tag Around My Toe Transcendental Monsters Steven Shaviro…………………………………………………………27 Notes on Contributors……………………………………………….31 Image: Film still from Ben Rivers’ Terror! (2006), courtesy the artist
"The Aaron Sims Company has designed such celluloid creatures as the aliens from Green Lantern, the simians from Rise of The Planet of The Apes, and the samurai with the chain gun from Sucker Punch. Now, as a labor of love with no funding, Sims has directed Archetype, a short film about a battlefield robot whose programming is on the fritz. It's an absolutely stunning nugget of cinema.
We heard about this project, which stars Robert Joy (Land of the Dead, CSI:NY) and David Anders (Heroes, 24), several months back. What's more, he's planning a feature-length version. Here's a plot synopsis:
RL7 is an eight-foot tall combat robot that goes on the run after
malfunctioning with vivid memories of once being human. As its creators
and the military close in, RL7 battles its way to uncovering the
shocking truth behind its mysterious visions and past.
"I’m almost ashamed to admit that I hadn’t seen W.D. Richter’s slapdash madcap sci-fi send up The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension until
this summer. The film is so strange, so aggressively and willfully
weird, that I don’t know how its cult vibes hadn’t enmeshed me earlier.
The film stars a deadpan Peter Weller as the titular Buckaroo, a
neurosurgeon/rock star/superhero who, alongside his team/fellow
bandmates, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, must stop the Red Lectroids from
Planet 10. Or something like that.
The plot is a shambolic mess, sprawling out in bizarre directions. Buckaroo Banzai is never sure if its cyberpunk, or Moonlighting, or a winking jab at Flash Gordon, or a riff on a rock movie. It’s enthralling and terrible at the same time.
But there’s no need to oversummarize here, when all one must needs do to get a feel for Buckaroo Banzai is watch its marvelous end title sequence."- Biblioklept
Patrick Farley was one of many inspirations. His work has regularly bumped up against the limits of current technology. The results were sometimes awkward and even garish, but they were also sometimes incredible, and they always felt like a glimpse into the future of the form. His new comic First Word is perhaps the first time I’ve read something by Farley and felt that it was doing exactly what it meant to do. The technology, and Farley’s ability to manipulate it, has caught up, and there are several truly breathtaking sequences. I guess I should mention that it’s NSFW, unless you work somewhere awesome.
I’ll admit I’m not always entirely clear on what’s going on — the comic is wordless — but there comes a point where that really stops mattering. Curious what you all think of this." - Mike Meginnis
Another winter comes with its cold, gentle embrace. Gusts of wind are whistling through the tops of the bare trees and blowing the dust all around. All the streets, lanes and alleys are already empty. Church bells are ringing in the distance and it’s time for the clown, the hobo clown, to begin his (con)quest. Los Angeles-based artist, painter, sculptor and filmmaker Allison Schulnik reshapes an imaginary kingdom where diversity, displacement and alienation are a cause for romantic research.
First Image:Blue Head, 48” x 48” oil on linen, 2011, Courtesy of ZieherSmith, New York
Her stories move slowly between different backgrounds, motifs and scenarios thick-studded with a rich array of sad characters who get inevitably discarded and misrepresented in our society.The Hobo emerges as a recurrent image in her precious work. His historical significance derives from the american definition of being a vagrant; a drifter without a settled home or a family, used in the late19th and early 20th to describe the stories and attitudes current among the men of the road. Jack London (The Road, 1907) and Jack Kerouac were perhaps the most representative voices of the hobo culture. In his essay «The Vanishing American Hobo», published in the magazine Holiday in 1960 and reprinted in Lonesome Traveler, in 1960, Jack Kerouac quotes a little poem mentioned by Dwight Goddard in his Buddhist Bible to express the original hobo dream: «Oh for this one rare occurrence / Gladly would I give ten thousand pieces of gold! / A hat is on my head, a bundle on my back, / And my staff, the refreshing breeze and the full moon».
Clown With Hands, and detail, oil on linen, 84” x 68”, 2011
Home for Hobo #2 (Currier & Ives), oil on linen, 68″ 96″, 2009
Allison Schulnik elaborates her ethical and aesthetic vision ofliberation and individualism in much the same way. Hidden behind the mirror of isolation, there’s always a fiercely self-reliant creature. “My fixation on these characters is not intended to exploit deficiencies, but to find valor in adversity. Hobo clowns, misshapen animals or alien beasts, they are typically built upon a human frame, drawing from film and dance. I like to blend earthly fact, blatant fiction and lots of oil paint to form a stage of tragedy, farce, and raw, ominous beauty — at times capturing otherworld buffoonery, and other times presenting a simple earthly dignified moment” (A.Schulnik)
Hobo with Bird, oil on linen, 84” x 68”, 2009
Big Monkey Head #2, oil on canvas, 60″ x 60″, 2010
Schulnik’s work features a constantly changing world soaked with infinite possibilities, as illustrated in her marvellous claymation videos.
Hobo Clown, 2008. Stop-motion/claymation video, 5 min. Featuring Grizzly Bear’s Granny Diner, Japanese bonus track from the 2006 album, Yellow House.
Forest, 2009. Stop-motion/claymation video, 4:30 min. Used as the music video for Ready, Able (Veckatimest, 2009) for the Brooklyn-based band Grizzly Bear
Schulnik’s whimsical claymations, paintings and porcelain ceramic sculptures provide for a fascinating insight into her visionary exploration that incorporates a myriad of artistic influences: Bruce Bickford, Glenn Brown, Music, Lightning Bolt, German expressionist films, Eric Yahnker, Andre Butzer, Jules Engel, Ub Iwerks, E. Michael Mitchell, Ray Harryhausen, Jan Svankmeyer, Klaus Kinski and Terry Gilliam, just to name a few.
Hobo Clown with Long Nose, 2011, ceramic and wood pedestal, 17 x 10 x 10 inches (ceramic), 34 x 10 x 10 inches approx. (pedestal), Courtesy of ZieherSmith, New York
It’s always interesting to see the perspective of an artist on another artist, musician or director’s work. For instance, Schulnik’s overwhelming dramatic energy and theatricalism blend seamlessly with the world described in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991). Surprisingly, Schulnik’s Long Hair Hobo is very similar to Gilliam’s Parry (Robin Williams) in spirit, feeling and disposition. Without dwelling on the despair and suffering revealed through their eyes, Allison’s Hobo and Parry are forlorn rejects (or fools) undertaking the same journey into romance, imagination, passion and self-knowledge. The movement of their invisible pilgrimage is not defined solely by external incidents, but also by internal, psychic turmoils, artistically (and theatrically) represented in the dream-content, as Carl G. Jung sums up: “If our dreams reproduce certain ideas these ideas are primarily our ideas, in the structure of which our whole being is interwoven. They are subjective factors, grouping themselves as they do in the dream, and expressing this or that meaning, not for extraneous reasons but from the most intimate prompting of our psyche. The whole dreamwork is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic.” (CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, General Aspects of Dream Psychology, 1916)
The Funeral Party, and detail, oil on linen, 102” x 132”, 2010
Schulnik’s characters are all unmistakably dreamers. They’re just the same as us. Dreamers wandering in a constant state of painful uncertainty, and still haunted by sad memories of the past. It’s no coincidence that Schulnik chooses Scott Walker’s song, It’s Raining Today, to accompany her sixth and latest animated short,MOUND (It’s raining today / But once there was summer and you / And dark little rooms / And sleep in late afternoons / Those moments descend on my windowpane / I’ve hung around here too long / Listenin’ to the old landlady’s hard-luck stories / You out of me, me out of you / We go like lovers / To replace the empty space / Repeat our dreams to someone new).
MOUND, a sublime parable about what it means to be on the outside, stands as the most touching claymation the artist ever made. It is part of her current exhibition at New York’s ZieherSmith and features over 100 hand-sculpted and sewn puppets, the labor-intensive piece took nearly eight months, at times requiring 2 hours to create a single frame. To put it simple: Mound represents a visual, emotional experience you can’t miss. Seriously, you can’t love anything more than this.
Born in 1978 (San Diego, CA), Schulnik earned her BFA in Experimental Animation from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (CA). She has had significant solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Rome and London, and has exhibited in both visual arts shows and film screenings around the world. Her work can be seen in the public collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), The Chaney Family Collection (TX) and Museé de Beaux Arts (Montreal). In 2013, she will have a solo exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, California. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
