The Vehicle
by Travis Jeppesen on July 21, 2013
i.
She gets to go all the time.
Lucky her – it’s on their dime.
Eject the future to hasten the ride.
Fehler is(s)t failure,
My whole tone gluttony.
This MP3 cassette should be slipped into the device.
A proper name comes buttholing out,
Savior is saved, mechanism’s deicide.
How can we begin inside?
We are going going
Despite the self-long divide.
ii.
Can’t wait to be a me.
That is: to be seen.
Or, not violated, just like
In a scene.
Who where you were
Was scarcely a be.
True to be running
In debt to the sun
Ceilings are lovely
The landscape. Lacks a gun.
Eat you mother and me loving
Glow. This song’s about having
Nowhere to go. Woman waits
At the airport
A man has a gun.
Now we are landing
So the plane becomes a car.
This earth won’t get us very far.
iii.
To be horrendous
Is to stare at the sky
And not know why.
iv.
History’s abortion funride – oh no!
Sounds can be masterpieces too.
The animals in the zoo.
A token collector on a subway away.
Rollercoaster crash – splat! Sunrise in Hades.
Haiti is a country and an island too.
Then there are places we forgot to go.
Places with names and a heavy throne.
The rulers all got down and disco’d their dismay.
Their subjects wore antlers and rolled in the hay.
v.
To be feared is to go into the sky.
Trace my theatrical, do or I.
Next prevalence it seems out the window
Circumstantial evidence points out the plant’s feeling
Blood runs down the pavement
Art is a body also.
Blast semblance apart
What are you left with
An egg.
Midnight riders in a city
Its name was seems.
I like the drug
When it chases after me
The semblance on the retard trace is too thin.
Humbled mostly by the machine’s indifference,
Thoughts got caught up in the going. Goal.
vi.
To live a life of pure chaos, that is true.
To live when there is nothing left to do.
To be raw in opposition to the world’s refinements.
To be ecstatic to fight against the designs of banality.
I don’t know who you are or what else what I am wanting.
All I know is the disease of truth – and how all its escape routes are in fact secret entrapments.
I go.
vii.
These vegetables are so sexy do you want one.
The sheep has a penis it stares into the sun.
Its eyeballs turn black and rot in its head.
The sheep keeps on going, alive to be dead.
viii.
Going is feeling and went to the store.
Went is the future of the past
Gone is to know more.
Growing on going and glowing is gay
Gone to the wentsburg is feeling okay.
Went there gone to the subjectless verb.
Has been was there and no gone to be yours.
Went had been going to the go-go or not?
Go or goes went down and up the elevator shaft
A bird. Were it is sure.
Cats go differently an animal is so.
Birds bark at elephants their going is no.
Rock stars burnt down the city okay.
No one escaped the going away.
Some went with others, the same were gone.
Growing into going their neighbors felt done.
Cities have gone and villages too.
The countryside stays and makes some shampoo.
Going is wiser than gone in the shed.
Diagonal sideways the going must be led.
ix.
I have to take twice as much to feel it now
A motorcycle runs into a cow
The countryside is grim and bleak
We’re driving down a narrow streak
Of road in a village I do not know
I have no desires, fingers, or toes
I am an ant outside of time
Flopping fishlike
Within the gag stream
Mother may I a higher berth?
(Mom’s a device I use to floss.)
Settle in to the vehicle’s girth
Order a pizza, log on to death’s favorite animation.
Circuits abounding – do you know sloth?
She’s a circle I once squared about.
Now Tina is screwing a moth.
x.
We ride past two swans in love alone.
To be a swan is to be alone.
To be in love is to live alone.
Like a swan.
Swans love each other.
I am alone.
They fly through the snow.
The swans.
Lost is yellow.
To be in love.
My sun in the ocean.
A really radical fairy evolves
To show them the way.
Fuck all ideology, let the fucktards hold sway.
Benevolence inside a mushroom? No way!
The dragon inside that masterpiece is gay.
Hold on to the radiator as I pull you away.
Let’s take the heat with us, away and today.
Away and today – these terms are not clear.
The stream stole them away from our ride
Productivities in the world’s oceans collide
Asleep on a mattress, one finds a house.
The settlers more like nomads,
Therapists weren’t allowed.
Diagnostic underarm made for a blatant propaganda poster,
The world’s idols were stools.
A chair in the shape of your favorite dictator: alarm comes free.
Today’s mantel tomorrow’s charm.
Yesterday a louse.
Get wind of that subject, he is lacking all over my time of day.
Sensate grief often a calamity, who knows how.
The mission to be thankful.
Logic’s often a cow.
Vehicle forgot to lick the envelope, now all art’s gone.
Will you miss it when you’re wearing my thong?
Here comes Miss Object bearing symphonic in her bosmatic Bild.
Sunday’s falling
Dot accords quill
To stab out
And quite often!
Shit the shirker and then a house.
Grubbing diagonally through motion’s ex-spouse.
Espouse the funicular till it falls off the rail
Each one dwells in their own private jail.
xi.
To wonder to wander.
And can they be combined.
To woander or to waonder.
Wo ander to wound her.
Wound the wand, wo
Ethereal beyond.
What a bad rhyme,
Happens all the time.
Wind in the wound, wo and.
Wanderer wonders deep.
Through which the blood may seep.
Don’t go into the horse this day.
Going, going, the wind is blonde.
American president in helicopters above me.
His hair is blonde, his skin is black.
There will be a terrorist attack.
Bite the ego off the frame.
Artist knows it’s a losing game.
The city sleeps with an artist’s wife.
It causes the whirl so much strife.
Tornado invades to give us shape.
Distance is learning to shadow each maze.
xii.
It was a calm day and all were gay.
They were so gay they had nothing to goddamn say.
If they hadn’t been gay would they have it to say?
Will they stay or go away? Will they spray?
Was there another way to play?
Lick the lolly and ride the trolley
Before you roll away.
Each that was gay could really spray
They will always stay
Just to be gay
And not have to say
That they can’t play
Pay to spray
From tubes that are fay
Crime does pay:
A rosebud
(is)
An anus gay.
For a day is today and mostly not as well.
Spirals are burning, he wants to smell me.
The smile came detached from the vehicle’s face.
The name game that he played was vague.
The answer came too late.
There were already swirls of diffidence
Haunting the interior of that lake.
Why does nature always put one in a bad mood.
To another, it is an abortionist’s joy.
Three-necked girls and a golden-toed boy.
Snotty eagles threw up on the farm.
The time had come to set off the dictator alarm.
Napoleon ran down the hill, gave everyone grapes.
The children ran off to go make some wine.
The adults chose to consume the children instead.
Napoleon has long been dead.
xiii.
I once ate an entire circus when out riding about.
You can’t understand the extent to which I spent my spout.
Bathing underwater in a statued fount
The girl ate a sugar cookie as she learned to count.
Days of rage give shape to our fears.
One is a hexagon
Another’s arrears.
Eat the foundational logic of a city’s sins
Find her in the bathroom choking
On scented fins.
It is a shark that controls my fears you see
She just had a teenage tracheotomy
Now she smells but cannot speak
Her veins are open to the slightest squeak.
I love a man teenage as I
Who once dug a dagger in my thigh
I struck back with a metal rope
Who fucked Alexander Pope?
He wanted to eat and he wanted to die.
He wanted to see a screwdriver fly through the sky.
He was too young to drink his fill
And thus he was forced to take a pill
All sorts of colors appeared to him there
He saw a fellow vehicle with pineapple hair
The sun fell into her robotic guise
Skizzy like an android with room for large fries.
xiv.
You are so repulsive the world goes by too fast.
Lines delineate a time when word wars were not enough.
A landscape bisects the factory’s waste.
An entire century contained in that space.
I was a flatland once too,
I must admit before I became a zoo.
The animals inside me
All have different numbers assigned
Most of the species
Designed with grind in mind
One but kin can never go in
The mother is a factory with a willing grin.
xv.
Body is something cannot be forgiven.
Body is something we give up when looking at.
The sea is poison, I don’t know a body.
The years limit what we can do with it.
The years limit where we can grow with it.
Riding past, we think:
xvi.
It must be hard to be a sea.
All those mountains to brush up against,
Kingdoms to drink your way through.
The sea has its own vegetables very very pretty.
Grasses and weeds and other things with salt.
Some silver fishes and the things they deserve.
Were the sea to be a verb, it would have sparkly hair.
xvii.
We ride past a mountain and glare at its peak.
(We ride past a past that plays hide-and-go-seek.)
Where did that mountain come from I was only an eye.
Silver truth is so satisfying when you’re falling right off of a gain.
Mountains are satisfied for feeling the same.
Once there was this landscape it had lots of sand.
A tree took root to give it a shade of blame.
Never a flower – no, that would be therapeutic.
The beetles still have something to remain in.
xviii.
My name is sometime.
xix.
If I were yet brave to give that dish its name.
A diameter of truth is real bad I’m shaming.
I want Sunday to matter so bad.
A green shade of noodle just blew past my solar.
Nighttime comes I wanna get away.
My shirt becomes a delicate spray.
We drive so fast I have nowhere to go.
Summer yearns to melt in the snow.
xx.
Can the sequel equal the golden ant?
xxi.
It was a year’s worth of microphones all stacked in the office
All horny and anxious
All waiting for their amps
No one knew which
Channel’s enamel
The war got wasted
Synths had an oligarchy!
And guess what got decided also.
Metal urgy is a feeling experienced by the ride at times
We had better not own.
Go outside to zone
The upended throne
Where exhaust is bright
Es tut mir leid
For there to there
A uniform share.
Bastard shat on his own prayer
Now Allah won’t climb the stair.
There is no hair
And so no reason to stare.
Don’t share. Don’t care. Don’t form a pair. Don’t pay your fare.
The world’s scheduled to end softer than this announcement’s red blare.
Walden, reel 3 (Jonas Mekas, 1964)
by Travis Jeppesen on July 18, 2013
Diaries, Notes, and Sketches – none of these are complete. Deep of winter, Velvet Underground grinds something out, a cat. This will noble to be blessed with the rest. He falls in love with a madwoman. Oh get more flow. The ethereal disaster. One theory of the cinema was/escape a bog. Wrapped in an American fag, there is no autumn. Only stairs. The machine joined this guild, soil owned hands (I think, believe.) He went all into the snow – glowing with hands. I thought his hands were on fire and I couldn’t much believe it. There was no precedent for that illusion. Or else it proceeds as though a dream. A patchwork. He remembers (reel 3) the women for peace, 42nd St. Nobody stopped, they were passing by. What the winter does in New York when it begins to break up, the street. Yet this pond does warrant a mention…Walden. My own private. A privacy trace. Film Culture gets mailed out Amy stops for coffee. From whence a beginning could be begged, down and diamond brite, the sentience like a strobe, peace and marching. Police violence for peace, I am marching. Blue jean legs the wrong direction. Night flow bravely exacter. Black power the construction site. Leslie sees it all through the coop window, red squirrels turned into hot dogs for fifty cent. Child’s foot massages glazed wood on chinese new year; become my favorite bastard. All the babies of filmmakers please. Benefits of democracy displaced dreams from a specific dreamer. What do I think sunwindslush. I love that ceiling. Dump the droll, enthusiastic boogiewoogie dimensionality, the cab driver’s breath. Jean Cocteau had a dream. Grown fuckers in the snow. I don’t care the love affair, tree. Sinful skipping bird moves so slow the sled slush. Whirrr. DON’T WALK. She doesn’t know how to. Stay. Don’t film the windshield. The city as seen from a boat. The city as seen from a moving vehicle. Jonas. People moving through the brushwork. Splaying with light. Could it be a funeral. For a man forgot to die. He went into midnight instead the rooftops. A man to breathe as the people crawl. Myriad impossibilities, this maggot being. Were a footprint in snow to be a lock. All fail the echoey considerations of this tumult. Still we climb, seeking a higher landscape. Hold on to this red sweater before the view slides by too fast; explosion. He smiles yes as it all explodes.
I read aloud
by Travis Jeppesen on July 12, 2013
….tomorrow night at Exile in Berlin.
Will you be there?
Irregular Readings
July 13, 7 – 9pm
Irregular Readings is an end of (gallery) season and early evening of short readings and vocal actions by artists and writers Travis Jeppesen, Amy Patton with Erik Niedling, Hanne Lippard, Nisaar Ulama, Marcus Knupp, and Tove El.
The evening is hosted by artist Katharina Marszewski whose already de-installed exhibition CV CE LA VIE will have closed just one hour before the beginning of this event.
Travis Jeppesen is a novelist, poet, and art critic based in Berlin and London, where he teaches at the Royal College of Art. His writings on art, literature, and film regularly appear in Artforum, Bookforum, Upon Paper, and Art in America. He is a contributing editor to 3ammagazine.com. Jeppesen’s new novel, The Suiciders, will be published by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press in October. Since it’s summertime, he will read a poem.
Amy Patton reads from the diary of Erik Niedling. The artist would like to be buried in Pyramid Mountain, the largest tomb of all time, conceived by writer Ingo Niermann. To make this goal a reality, Niedling lived one year as though it were his last. The Future of Art: A Diary recounts the joys and horrors of that year. Niedling will further give latest information about the current state, and future plans of Pyramid Mountain.
Hanne Lippard uses language in all its forms in an effort to create an original aesthetic of the word. Nuances of No, the first comprehensive collection of the artist’s text work was published in June by Broken Dimanche Press BDP.
Her contribution to the event reads as follows: Stretched neck, the mouth remains the end point of the spinal column. Spoken word is our tonal brainpower. Spelling remains trivial. Re-composed through the pointed ears of others. Comma. Coma. Karma.
Nisaar Ulama is a philosopher, interested in how societies form themselves through knowledge and images. He will give a short lecture about our actual political paralysis, which, he thinks, is founded by a broken concept of »reality«, an addiction to knowledge, and a collapsing relation between subjectivity and space-time. If there is still time, Ulama will explain how artists and philosophers can solve these problems.
Marcus Knupp offers a form of communication that passes through the membrane of implied meaning and into the meaning of a new meaninglessness. From his vantage point within the media and marketing industry his gaze is cast upon a wide range of cultural sectors, topics and forms of mainstream incorporation.
He will read from one of his new short stories that either deals with the event-culture obsessed lifestyleartworld we find ourselves trapped in or about his recent experiences in some unnamed dark Berlin basement.
Tove El‘s performances take their starting point in the situation and environment in which they are to take place. They raise questions about social codes, status, dreams and the struggle to pursue an artistic career.
Exile is located at Skalitzer Str 104, 10997 Berlin
China in Venice
by Travis Jeppesen on July 10, 2013
A review of Chinese art at this year’s Venice Biennale, at Randian.
Iraq in Venice
by Travis Jeppesen on July 8, 2013
An interview with Jonathan Watkins, curator of this year’s Iraq Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at Art in America.
Otto Zitko
by Travis Jeppesen on July 3, 2013
Otto Zitko paints lines. Long lines curving and curling, extending into nowhere, the void. A line never ends. It just goes and goes, infinite in its stark simplicity and ambiguity. Zitko uses lines to create environments. Such as the maze he installed at the 48th Venice Biennale. For his exhibition in Prague at the Austrian Cultural House, he limits himself to two colors: red and orange. Paints the entire room with them, totally changing the environment and violating the sacred white space of the gallery’s walls, effectively turning it into a fiery red-orange swirl, another world. Otto Zitko didn’t always paint lines. He used to paint other things, but in the late ‘80s, he decided to stop painting everything, everything except for lines. Where do Zitko’s lines lead? They are all contained in the same space. The Austrians have been kind enough to provide chairs for us to sit in and study these lines. Try to locate where it begins, follow its path throughout the walls and ceiling of the gallery, all the way to the end. And begin again. A line implies the dimension of time. Zitko’s lines illustrate time. You may sit in the gallery for hours, lost in Zitko’s maze of lines, until you ask yourself what time it is. The time is always now. It is never then or there. Zitko’s decision to stop painting in a conventional way wasn’t a nihilistic action, a gesture of aligning himself with the whole “painting is dead” debate that’s been going on for far too long. Rather, his intention to paint lines was and is based on the firm belief that this is the only way to develop painting any further. He is striving for a very specific and idiosyncratic form of purity that he can only hint at. A primitive gesture that becomes a reflexive metaphor – a line representing all lines, only gaining meaning in the context of the space it fills.
Originally published in the now-defunct Prague magazine Think Again in 2004.
Re-published in Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the “Contemporary”.
Reading the Palace
by Travis Jeppesen on June 14, 2013
What the “Encyclopedic Palace” ultimately offers are multiple examples of the extra-exclusionary, which may be nothing more than that fleeting moment in the act of creation when other people don’t exist—just me and my god(s).
My review of “The Encyclopedic Palace” at this year’s Venice Biennale for Art in America.
Waste: an object-oriented, collectively authored poem
by Travis Jeppesen on April 18, 2013
Below, you will find Waste, a collectively authored object-oriented poem composed last weekend at London’s ICA in response to the Bernadette Corporation’s retrospective, 2000 Wasted Years, as well as their collectively written poem, The Complete Poem.
Forever Okay: The Art of Jimmy De Sana
by Travis Jeppesen on April 14, 2013
Jimmy De Sana believed that the human body was every bit an object as, say, a toilet or a chair. Blend together, mix up the legs of a table, the legs of chairs, the bare legs of a person and see what you get. A person is no longer a whole, but known by her/his=its parts: head is a suitcase, brain a lightbulb, penis a shoe. Maybe become an entity with four legs instead of two arms and two legs. It’s all the same world, isn’t it?
There are those of us afraid of what we see. A world of interior objects we keep so that we can ignore other things – namely, the world out there. Furniture is static existence. De Sana’s work says something about domesticity. What does it mean to be a person and to disappear. There are no warnings, an announcement is never made. Objects are kept around us to avoid the sense of disappearing. To imply permanency. Railing, a railing against the sure swallow of the big fat void whose rim some of us dance around.
Jimmy De Sana’s gesture is a violence against disappearing. He committed suicide constantly in his work. He had to do that as a way of living in the world. Suicide salvation: the black-and-white photo that made him famous was him hanging from a noose naked with a hard-on. Or else he lies under a car, again naked, forever naked, wearing a mask with a tube connected directly to the exhaust pipe. Inhaling the car. Is he really killing himself there. I don’t think so. As with all of his photos, it’s more of a becoming-object than a becoming-dead. An extension of the car, that’s all. If you look at it as a body, then of course it’s going to die, but Jimmy De Sana did not want to die and his photos are not about death. Inanimate objects never die; you can’t get rid of them, no matter the state of decay. They’re never really alive, either, are they; they just are. Forever okay. A being that is a freedom in not-being.
For a gay person who has suffered violence directly, there is a fluffy comfort in becoming-object that few others may comprehend. It seems so hard. De Sana’s aesthetic looks hard, but I would say it’s just the opposite. Wooden boxes, pool chairs, torsos; the arch of a body run the length of a room, head in the toilet, an extension of the toilet; heads, faces almost never to be seen in these photos, to heighten the sense of disappearance, of desubjectivication; the light always soft; no more self to contend with, no such thing as death to confront. Jimmy De Sana is softcore, if the core we’re talking about is being, safe from the trenchant torpor of navigation.
This was among the least apparently glamorous approaches one could take in the 80s, which De Sana characterized, in an interview with Laurie Simmons, as a decade of death and money. The art market exploded, everyone dancing as dollar bill confetti floated through the air, meanwhile, guys are walking around with lesions, dropping dead all around you. It’s wrong to read these photos as documentary evidence of a gay S/M subculture that De Sana was never really a part of. Mapplethorpean scenes from a Manhattan night. Others have more aptly identified surrealism as the operative force, the fuel in De Sana’s vehicle. As an adjective, surreal is too vague and overused, and anyway, it’s the artist’s duty to carve their own reality out of this messy consensual one – that impulse comes out of a disbelief in messy consensual reality. It’s too easy to say that the world, as it is, is surreal on its own. Forty-year olds dropping dead for no real reason is surreal – becoming an object is pretty much okay, in a permanent sort of way.
There is, after all, a glamour, certainly a sexiness, in immortalizing yourself or some other selves in this manner. Don’t treat me like a sex object, screams the liberationist who, in doing so, believes they are on their way towards attaining autonomy. But for the corporealist, sex is just another utility; come here, let me touch you where it matters least. Jimmy De Sana knew things about bodies that we’re only now, in the twenty-first century, beginning to figure out. In this way, his photos can be seen less as a relic of a past moment and more as a blueprint for our present-future selves.
