Last August was the closing night of a small Williamsburg music venue that had that thing– that magic. When the Knitting Factory said goodbye, I wrote a little piece on the space and the sacredness of protecting these rooms for the groovement, only to find that months later it was edited to include a little note at the bottom:
As of 11.23.22, we learned from Brooklyn Vegan that Nick Bodor of Cake Shop and Bruar Falls has purchased the former Pyramid Club space at 101 Avenue A in Manhattan and plans to open a Rock-focused live music venue there in collaboration with The Knitting Factory. The target opening is March 2023. Woah. The Pyramid Club?? In a desire to stay up to date, I found myself on a landing page to find a story about an astronaut coming upon an overgrown estate to find “the best party in the world.” I also found an Insta page filled with random, mid-quality photos of branches, trees, and gray wood. This until recently. On Instagram: buds, moss. And on the landing page: “The Baker Dispatch” and a feature in NY Mag. In the first Baker Dispatch entry, we got, at quite the relief, a bit of insight into the venue to come, including an ode to what was: We will be inspired by the spirits of the space where RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and other beings of the night lurked under the floorboards, crafting their looks before hitting the stage for their first drag shows…where Andy Warhol hosted transmissions on MTV…where Madonna and Keith Haring rubbed elbows—and other body parts—with the downtown punks…and where Nirvana played their first New York show cheered on by Iggy Pop—it was a legendary night, but the band felt it went so badly, bassist Krist Novoselic shaved his head out of shame… More recently, some photos popped up of the progress of renovations. Almost unsettlingly routine for the reality of what existed there. If memories have ghosts, I can’t imagine how it must feel to interact with those that live there. In the post read: I just kept wondering how The Pyramid had become this: a nondescript afterthought of a dance club… What happened to The Pyramid’s prime as one of the few cultural gathering places where there were no judgments? Everyone was welcome. And all things considered to be on stage… To which I thought: many things make a space. And sometimes the space itself is shockingly far down the list. What is very high? The people– the energy they bring, their hopes and dreams, their presence, interactions, intentions, their kindness, or lack thereof. Then, music… definitely music, and to what extent it meets them at those aforementioned vibrations. A million other things make a space. Of course, Nick Bodor doesn’t need anyone to tell him this, but it got me thinking. Part of what made Pyramid and even the Knitting Factory BK so great is that they offered these safe little breeding grounds where a little branch of creative culture could experiment and indulge and flourish and totally coat the walls with expressions of their time and place. It’s why when we think of Pyramid, we can only really think of it in that time– it’s time. New breath in a legendary space– one that centers on music, inclusivity, and expression– is in general a great new page if you have to turn it. Because, unlike a Blank Street or a TJ’s, we get to kind of have a hand in deciding what to make of this space. The new movers and shakers. You, music lover, creative spirit, kindness spreader, expressive, complicated human, and vehicle of social/cultural movement. And I know that is a hopeful statement… but I do. I hope it’s special.
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The thing about trying to understand ‘punk’ is that it never wanted to be defined or categorized – that would be inherently against the point. “All punk is attitude,” said Joey Ramone. Punk as attitude suggests that it is not the content itself but the style, the sentiment, and the intention. And it’s one against “the system”. Which might be taken to mean, the limiting need in our society to systemize and categorize everything. In his book, Punk Sociology, David Beer writes of the concept, “one of the defining characteristics of punk is this very discomfort with categorization and definition”. This is probably why, in punk history, punk is so resistant to being boxed (stubbornly, and rightfully so). To defy definition is punk.
Still, in approaching that attitude- in all its grey-area glory- Vivienne Westwood’s clothes freed people of so many of the sartorial symbology that the fashion system had pushed them into. Women didn’t have to look ‘pretty’. Sex and sexuality didn’t have to be hushed. People could be loud and wild and angry. They no longer had to buy in. They could take what was in the world and make it their own. Of course, there is an irony to her story: showing at Paris Fashion Week, selling at high-end auction houses, archival pieces displayed at the V&A and all. This is what the system does when something resonates, even at its own expense. Westwood recognized that the moment it started to happen. She recollects in the documentary, “I realized we weren’t really attacking the system at all. [Punk] was being marketed.” And it is at these moments I think it is so important to return to the attitude rather than the aesthetic. For it’s the attitude that is at the root of the movement, and it’s the attitude that cannot be systemized. Through Vivienne Westwood’s career punk took so many shapes. “A climate revolution” is one she left us with. “You’ve got to kill the machine that is destroying us,” Westwood preached of the change that needed to happen. Perhaps because, too many times, she’s seen resistance become inherited by the machine itself. Maybe at some point, it has to be more about building a new one. This kind of reinvention and bold intent is exactly what keeps punk alive. Attitudes like Vivienne Westwood’s are a gift to the world– daring to disrupt the system even when her rebellion became a part of it. Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese born cross-disciplinary artist. She now lives and works in Berlin where she spent the better part of her art-making career. The influence of these two places shines through in her creativity as she explores performance and installation immersing her in the contemporary art world to this day. She is known in part for her giving life back to weird, thought provoking performance art of the seventies. But perhaps she has made an even greater mark in the art world through work with woven thread, bringing the medium miles beyond how its traditionally used.
Shiota uses thread to transform gallery spaces, intertwining objects of the everyday. Many of these large scale installations using thread alter the path her viewer takes in consuming her artwork. The way people move through the art gives them a sort of feeling of participating in it, emphasizing the performative nature of Shiota’s artwork. Shiota is able to create dialogue around a variety of conversations relating to human nature using this medium. I think though, that one common thread (no pun intended) that can be found through her work across media, is an expression of the human body in space; How does the body take up space? Move through it? What can exist in empty space and how do we interact with that? One Chiharu Shiota piece that sticks out to me is among these colossal woven installations: Crossroads. Shiota created Crossroads for Honolulu’s 2019 Biennial. It totally consumes the viewer into its inward spiral. Where the red woven yarn sucks into a tornado like center from ceiling to floor, there are multiple maps artfully entangled in the yarn. The intent was to create an installation that spoke to the Hawaiian islands as the world’s “crossroads”. There are connections among the yarn, among journeys through the installation, and the interconnectedness of everything in the world becomes unavoidably evident. In a facebook post while the piece was in creation stages, Shiota wrote: My inspiration for this installation has been connection. It is rather impossible for us not to connect with others. We do not exist alone in this world, we are all connected. I want to create a landscape of connections – lines upon lines visualize streets, roads, and intersections in our daily life. I want the viewer to reflect on their connections in life and the path they have taken.” Those words and that sentiment is so beautiful to me, especially when noting its location in a place that could be considered isolated. Our paths are all a journey and they intersect in such unexpected ways- it’s quite a humanizing notion. Beyond this though, I think this piece showcases Shiota’s ability to shock, overwhelm, and create this sense of awe. Her art is in a sense obtrusive, it kind of forces itself to be seen. And yet Shiota accomplishes this with such graceful execution of such delicate medium. In the scheme of Crossroads, each path is so seemingly small, so fragile, so purposefully laid out. Each one though, comes together to make something so beautiful, so overwhelmingly excitant, and something that creates a sense of movement on its own path entirely. ROY DECARAVA:LIGHT BREAKWalking into the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, dozens of 11x14 grey rectangles on large white walls invite viewers to come a little closer, peeking into the window of each frame. These rectangles are photographs by Roy DeCarava, and they make up the gallery’s current exhibition, Light Break, which celebrates the photographer’s influential body of work throughout his career. When taking a closer look at each of his images, it is clear that DeCarava’s work ranged greatly in subject. However, it doesn’t take long to notice that regardless of what is in the photographs, they all share a certain artistry and a graceful capturing of the given moment.
Roy DeCavara was born in Harlem in 1919. That neighborhood is where he would spend most of his life and would become a key muse of his work as he photographed the city and its people during the Harlem Renaissance. He spent his early life dedicated to art, mostly actually focussed on painting and printmaking, before switching to photography as his main medium when the artist was in his 20s. Today he goes down in history for capturing the essence of life in Harlem at that time and for his work using photography as art. In this sense, DeCarava insists to stray from what was considered to be “documentary photography” as his photos carry a deeper sense of connection. Moreover, having printed the images himself, DeCarava made very specific artistic choices to convey a mood. The most famous of which would be the mostly grey tones that are so identifiable in a DeCarava piece. Among the beautiful pieces David Zwirner has displayed on their 19th street walls, I found myself particularly moved by those that Roy DeCarava must not have gone out in search for, or may never have expected at all. When I got home to reflect, the four I found myself coming back to were: Wall Street, Morning ; Man Looking in a Petstore Window ; Ellington Session Break ; and Six Figures in Sunlight for that very reason. They are not among DaCavara’s portraits- in fact they look as though they would be gone after a few moments had he not frozen them in time. Beyond this, they each bring out elements of the photographer’s expertise. Wall Street, Morning, for example, I find to nod towards DeCarava’s beginnings in the art world as a painter. It resonated as a painting to me in its composition, its moody lighting, and the cat that, if painted, would have come across as artistic license. This is the thing about photography though, DeCarava didn’t paint this scene onto a canvas, he just saw the art in what was already there. It’s spectacular... to think that maybe it’s the street photographer’s job to find art in everyday life and freeze it so the rest of us can see the art in it too. Ellington Session Break, on the other hand, stuck put as a particularly intimate example of DeCarava’s work with jazz musicians. Not in the peak of a wonderful riff, but in a break, a mundane pause, a real, passing moment of contemplation. This brings me to Man Looking in a Petstore Window. When I saw this piece, I had no concrete answer to what might be going on in that man’s head. Maybe he is looking to buy a pet, but it seems more likely he stopped in passing, maybe on his way home from work just to engage with a lively, benevolent creature in a window. Whatever it was- I could certainly resonate- is there anything more human than a moment like that? And once again, there just happened to be an overlap between this man’s passing and that of DeCarava’s. Now, here I am, 70 years later, living a totally different life in many ways, resonating with that image in passing. Then there’s the most recent of them, Six Figures in Sunlight, which shares the passing street moment, ambiguous figures, artistic quality, 11x14 size, and grey toned qualities of the others. But this one differed greatly in mood to me. This is attributed mostly to the fact that this work is significantly lighter than the other three. But I would also point to the children, the sparkling shadows of the trees, and the airy, floating quality of the figures and their garments. Just as in tone, it seems there are several cases where Roy DeCarava breaks rules in clarity and motion. As a viewer we understand his choice to play with tones of grey, and we certainly understand his decision to blur motion in this dreamy piece. While DeCarava’s work often varies greatly in subject, to me what what brings them together is how real they feel. There is a sort of honesty and integrity of what was there in the moment the shutter opened. I am not shocked that DeCarava came upon these images during his day to day life in New York City, but I think that is what makes the viewer feel closer his works. These photos don’t seem staged or suspended around disbelief. This (combined with technical choices) helps to relay a certain ease to the images that I think is still so captivating to DeCarava’s audience. Moreover, I think this ease says something quite interesting about the photographer’s approach. I could be wrong, of course, but to me it seems DeCarava went into the world with a camera and a sense of curiosity, rather than a mission to capture a specific image. His art was just dependant on life however extraordinary or mundane it may be in any given day. In speaking further to what is conveyed through his artistic choices, I would suggest his famous grey tones do a great deal to add to this gentle creative spirit. They don’t force a contrast. In fact these pieces don’t force much of anything. Rather, I found Roy DeCarava’s photos invite- they welcome the subject, the image, and the viewer alike. As I move forward learning photography and finding my aesthetic and dialogue in my own creative work, I felt really inspired walking away from Light Break. Of course I can’t take to DeCarava’s subject matter of The Harlem Renaissance, and I may not even find a similar sliding grey-scale in my photography aesthetic, but I take inspiration from this exhibition in that, whether he intended it or not, DeCarava’s work opened my eyes to this inviting curious approach to making photos. SOURCES: https://www.moma.org/artists/1422 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/arts/design/roy-decarava-photography-david-zwirner.html https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/roy-decarava https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/light-break Jia Tolentino's Article on Tik Tok Proves the App Shouldn't Be Ignored... Even if You're Over 16.10/11/2019 After reading Jia Tolentino’s article in the New Yorker, How Tik Tok Holds Our Attention, I am realizing the problem with my previous attitude toward the app which admittedly was ~ to shrug it off all together~. After reading her smart, thoughtful work, I am still not rushing to download the app, nor do I have much interest in getting to know its rising celebrities (and wow does such blatant objection to new social media make me feel old…). However, what Tolentino’s article pointed out to me was that when something is so popular among youth, it’s worth looking closely at. Tolentino made it evidently clear- Tik Tok is going to tell us a lot about our future. Social media and technology have been snowballing all of my life, and it doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. With more than a billion downloads since its launch, it seems Tik Tok may be a good indicator of where we are headed next. There are many things about Tik Tok that we could look to to analyze the future of media and technology, but two in particular stick out to me. One is celebrity culture and fame in the media. It reminds me of Andy Warhol’s predictions of “15 minutes of fame” which seem to have come true in our highly innovative technological world that was known to Warhol as “the future”. Who and what we know about has changed with the rise of reality TV stars, then instagram influencers, YouTubers, and now, apparently, Tik Tok celebrities. Each step kind of seems to blur the lines of people and celebrities, and of stardom and career (or talent for that matter). The other thing that I find really important to look at is where artificial intelligence is moving. We are living in an increasingly “for you” culture. Things are personalized in health in beauty and for damn sure on the internet too. Technology wants to hold our attention- to keep us hooked. It wants to hold attention for a long time in a world and for a demographic that is notoriously inattentive. Tik Tok has certainly risen to the challenge. First of all, of course, through seeing this problem and capping the videos at 15 seconds. Young people get bored or lose focus after a short amount of time, and if this happens during a video, what are they going to do? Close the app! But beyond this, with artificial intelligence Tik Tok ensures that each user will see exactly what he or she wants to see. Naturally it’s nice not to have to dig through a bunch of creepy, problematic, uncomfortable videos to find something that will make you laugh (especially in an app like Tik Tok that completely owns the nature of pointless entertainment). This seems wonderful- that everything will know what we are looking for… how easy. But Tolentino points out that it might be something to be a bit fearful of. The fact that artificial intelligence can know us so well feels not only a bit violating, but incredibly dehumanizing as well. Can robots really understand us better than some people? And then how do we understand what we want or like ourselves? In this way, and many others, Tik Tok is more than just a silly, maybe stupid escape from a messy world… it’s a light shining on an increasingly technologically dependent future. When I was a kid, my best friend Carson and I spent hours flipping through Ricky Gervais’ children's book, Flanimals. Gervais, an actor and comedian, combines his knack for fun, witty humor, with his interest in ecology to create crazy monster-like creatures complete with bios, characteristics, and families. But of course to Carson and I, there was no critical analysis of Gervais and his thoughts on evolution, we just got lost in the details of these creative and laughed at those scientific descriptions combined with their silly illustrations. It was this whole idea that there are animals of their own dimension interacting in a humorous kind of ecosystem. It was imaginative. So imaginative, in fact,
While sipping my coffee to Joni Mitchell one one morning, lost in her piano and poetics, I found myself staring curiously at the Ladies of The Canyon album cover. To the slight left of the cover’s mostly negative square space is a line drawing of Mitchell revealing in her hands a painting of a colorful neighborhood. I soon discovered that neighborhood was Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles and that Mitchell created the work herself among a variety of other drawings and paintings archived on her website. Finding myself in a rabbit hole of Mitchell’s visual artwork didn’t come as much of a surprise to me, but what I couldn’t get over about the Ladies of The Canyon album art was how timely it seemed... almost trendy.
The Spike Jonze directed commercial for Apple’s HomePod, Welcome Home, steps out of its box as an advertisement. In fact it reshapes and pushes the boundaries of its box quite literally.
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AuthorCalli Ferguson Archives
May 2023
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