Growing the Grotesquerie

Arthur Jones is Funny

I just had a piece on The Rumpus about Arthur Jones, the animator, and the guy helping Simen (below) take a picture of the cat.

The Luminous Dead

Simen Johan's Majestic Animals

Saturday, I went with Simen, a good friend and photographer, to Chelsea. We went into the gallery and saw the photograph above (top). The frame was too thick and the whole thing was hung too low. Lately he's been creating new work with taxidermy, though this is only his latest. I had seen some of his animals in New Hampshire. I have seen Simen pick up a dead bird in Maine, on our way to the beach where we collected seaweed. His animals are majestic, more alive than the living. Below is Simen (on the floor) taking a picture of a shaved Mr. T (coolest house cat) in the laundry room at Colony Hall at MacDowell with Arthur (standing). The pictures of Mr. T, sadly, did not come out.

The Documentarian

The Wobbly Films of Ken Jacobs

I wrote a short piece for The Rumpus about the films of Ken Jacobs. I saw the films of Ken Jacobs at a Light Industry screening in Sunset Park on March 17. These films document. So I would call them documentaries. They document the effects of visual stimuli. But they also document people, like Bob Fleischer Dying, which was a portrait of a man in a blue shirt sitting in a chair. As we walked out of the screening hall, I was still carrying my beer. There was a young man walking in front of us holding up a camera that was attached to a long stick pointed at us. He made it look like he was just walking down the stairs, but he was filming us. "We're in art," Michael said. I think the man was filming us because we were walking with Amy Taubin, the film critic. Everybody was in the movies that night.

Seizure State

GIGANTIC Welcomes JOE WENDEROTH as Editor of SEIZURE STATE

The INSCRIPTIONS of the SEIZURE STATE along with the first SEIZURE PERSON will be published in Issue 1 of Gigantic.

Drawn to Emptiness

Rite of the Shabby Spectacle

In the upcoming issue of Gigantic, Deb Olin Unferth and Joe Wenderoth conduct experiments and consider the positions of resignation and agency w/r/t the spectacle of television.