Ken Schles on ‘Invisible City’ and ‘Night Walk’

“For generations the Lower East Side was a churning cauldron of activity. Site of immigrants (my own family passed through there more than a century ago), it already had a long history of renewal and decay.”   Alex Bocchetto of Akina Books Interviews Ken Schles   Alex Bocchetto: With Invisible City you narrated New York’s […]

The Blood Red Procession Marches On in the Third City of God

@ Juan Diego Valera There is the stretch of grain, the hint of digital noise, and the ocular insolence of a mouse being lost in the jaws of a snake’s culinary embrace.   By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, January 2015 The edifice is indeed colossal in the work of Juan Diego Valera. Diente De Chucho (Tooth Pooch) […]

Nothing But Indifference to Harmony Korine’s ‘Raiders’ at Gagosian Gallery

Perhaps we’re just to take it on good faith or past merit that the artworks in Raiders are somehow quality by association.   By Michelle France, ASX, January 2015 Harmony Korine Raiders Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills January 10—February 14, 2015 Walking into the new Harmony Korine show at Gagosian, my reaction is an unexpected one: […]

Raymond Pettibon on Zines, Manifest Destiny and Teaching Math (2011)

  “The tracks divided the good and bad parts of town. I wasn’t exactly on the good side. You weren’t encouraged to play around the demarcation lines.”   Interview with Raymond Pettibon By Eric Nelson When I was 15, I became obsessed with Black Flag, playing everything up until “My War” on full blast at […]

Ed Ruscha on Route 66, Making Books and “Choppy Movement”

“So in a sense they (books) had no–there was no school of thought, and I felt at that time that it was unexplored. That’s one reason it attracted me.” MR. KARLSTROM: What about your books? This is a last thing that I’d like to at least get started on. You have created I don’t know […]

Tape, Rope, Water, Milk and Bondage in ‘Other Rooms’

The images present a bloodless eroticism, uncanny, simultaneously sexual and absented of desire.   By Owen Campbell, ASX, January 2015 Tanlines, tape, rope, water, milk, Callis shows the way things push against the body and how the body pushes back, contracts, evades. Elements like water and shade subsume the human body; rope, as it presses […]

Blood and Iron in the Temple of Menses

“I’ve surely made mistakes in the community, but certainly not in sexuality.” – Otto Muehl   By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, January 2015 The Vienna Actionists of 1960’s were interested in the documentation of transgression of the body in art and in society at large. They performed quasi-mystic rituals that were documented in blood and film. […]

Ed Ruscha on Studio Life, Domestic Life and Its Tax on the Creative Drive

Dirty Baby, 1977, Graphite and acrylic paint on paper   “I couldn’t mix the domestic life and the free form life, I just couldn’t. They’re sort of difficult to mix.”   MR. RUSCHA: There was one period when I moved to Pasadena. I had a studio at 60 West Colorado Boulevard that was about 20,000 […]

INTERNET GOTHIC in Doug Rickard’s ‘N.A.’

 XZc7w, 2011 @ Doug Rickard   Horrorcore, a sort of contemporary American gothic, with all the inherent inversion of values.   INTERNET GOTHIC and Transcendentalism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction By Owen Campbell, ASX, January 2015 In the preface of National Anthem Doug Rickard quotes Walt Whitman; in the coda he quotes Woodie Guthrie. […]

Bill Sullivan’s ‘Forest Hills’ – The Aesthetic Undoing of a Dream

In its sinister mode, it becomes a waking dream. It is a dream awoken with a bucket of steaming piss thrown into the viewer’s face with added cacophonous effect by the sound of mesmeric and distorted laughter.   By Brad Feuerhelm, ASX, January 2015 Bill Sullivan is a determined inquisitor of anachronistic practice. His work […]

Jean-Christian Bourcart on Camouflage, Voyeurism and Wearing Masks (1999)

      “I got the idea of camouflaging my camera in Frankfurt, where I was shooting an essay on its brothels.”     Interview conducted by Brigitte Ollier (Paris, October 9, 1999) English translation by R. Bononno   Madeleine I got the idea of camouflaging my camera in Frankfurt, where I was shooting an […]