blip drip

by Travis Jeppesen on October 16, 2011

The Lisbon-based musician/sound artist Motile has turned the poem “Blip Drip,” from my 2006 collection Poems I Wrote While Watching TV, into a song.

 

flip the want to get us through lack of sensate

warmth stare at artificial stars to ponder alone

no remorse for sacrifices inevitable to the stream

“no way out” but laughter the remembrance of

things not said not bother writing them down

 

GG Allin Hails a Cab

by Travis Jeppesen on October 14, 2011

First he got high enough to taste the ceiling. Poster announces live murder onstage. The city is a wild animal – voice of the police broadcast on shortwave frequency. Paranoia wears leopard-print pants. My friends address me as asshole. They told me I once belonged somewhere. So I let them follow me. Only to find the streets were lined with saliva: pizza by the slice.

 

Drunk saturation mobility. You love him more than you drink. Sally Salacious sings the boyfriend medley, no one will get in her way. Everybody competing to get heard. Repeat it hard enough and they’ll all go away.

 

I am here together with you, hairless and honest. Is that her real voice? The Hair Goddess. Coprophiliacs on parade. My life as a follower.

 

Maybe you forgot to put your arm around her at the right moment. Lead the children down the toilet of your thoughts – all the rats that once offered a definition. And the black-haired girl who just wanted a daddy. Even went on the daytime talkshow beside him. Cancer rains down like garbage in the streets. This is a story of New York City.

 

I was always the one to be prepared. On time every time, the voices. Puerto Ricans playing soccer in the cage. If I can’t wear women’s clothing I’d rather go naked. But no the men in blue will get you. Don’t get feces on my leather jacket; I am walking down the street.

 

Everybody talk at once please, I love it when that happens. Houston Street has gone to the pilgrims: this is what their children smell like.

 

They named him Jesus Christ.

 

Oh, death is such a non-spectacle at times. Whether in the jungle of cities or the desert of thought. I’m the living switchblade, sandwichbreath, syphilis on the docks. He stepped over a transparent Braille Bible on his way southwards aiming for the towers.

 

Borders never disappear; once trespassed, they are merely reset. A videogame version of blood.

 

His brother fucked off into a bottle of whiskey. Man those girls were haunted. Song of certainty goes like this. Look into my eyes and extract an emotion. Let it be known you can never think fast enough. The law doesn’t require tennis shoes.

Can you play my favorite song. The concert consisted of two songs and a punch in the face. Most of the audience had already run away by the time he shit on the floor, the sound had been turned off. Don’t invite violence into your gas station, kids. This is a story of New York City. The day was an ultimate example of one. Let me out into the junkyard. The Hair Goddess is squealing.

 

That bitch’s son got born soon after. She would’ve named it after him, had she been able to spell his name. Jesus Christ was someone else. There aren’t too many white kids around here. He’ll have to eat it with salt and pepper.

 

Things were never so direct, rock n’ roll. Shadow forecast, then nightfall. I wanna go to Drugland before it gets too dark to think it through. This makes the sixteen-year-old beside me snicker. I’ve met her father, I know what she’s looking for.

 

Life would be so much easier if you could fry it. Next week I’ll go down south with my boys there, record an album. With my brother we’re gonna tour Europe soon. Plans are underway. No I don’t speak no German. They can jail me but they can’t jail hate. He was a worthless son of a bitch. Get these motherfuckers away from me, we can’t bring them all with us. There’s a taxi, I’m going uptown. I don’t want to go to Brooklyn.

 

Towards an Object-Oriented Writing – or – How Anti-Formalism Helps Me Dream: Notes on an Idea (plus an announcement)

by Travis Jeppesen on October 13, 2011

For a while, it’s felt redundant to me, the way we write about art. I could say way(s), though I’m not even sure about that plurality anymore. The quest has been ongoing – and off-and-on – since Disorientations came out (and before, really): How to go about formulating this “poetics of art criticism” I keep talking about. I keep coming back to a phrase from my essay “On the Expulsion of the Friendless Warrior”: “the object and its mysterious anti-nature.”

This line of thinking led me to another, more vocational thought: Why is it that we review exhibitions rather than individual works? When I am asked to write about film, I am generally reviewing a single film. Same thing when it comes to books. In art reviewing, the individual work of art gets short shrift. It’s always a long shot of the orgy rather than a real probing of any of the participating entities.

What I propose, then, is a new way of writing about art. A hylozoic revivalism. In response to this feeling of being underwhelmed.

Object-oriented writing is a new form – neither poetic nor art-critical, yet retaining characteristics of both – that attempts to inhabit the object. That is, a writing that positions itself within the work of art, and also including all the necessary contradictions and impossibilities embedded within such an approach.

It could be suggested that the father of object-oriented writing is the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons, the mother the Roland Barthes of Mythologies. Though OOW is more likely their aborted fetus, having been revivified on a UFO by an extra-dimensional alien race that exists on a plane parallel to our own, and returned to this reality in order to contaminate it.

Traditional art criticism is largely predicated upon a two-tier approach – describing and judging. I’m not saying we should necessarily neglect these, but the field needs to be expanded. (In my own practice, I would like to bring judgment back to the table. You might have other goals.)

So, focus on a single work. Go inside it. Resist those urges that would reduce OOW to the status of mere exegetic response. Object-oriented writing is not a branch of criticism, but an art practice that allows the writer to collaborate with the art object. This allows a multiplicity of possible writings, ways, approaches, to flow forth; the poetic impulse of formlessness is the form. Everything is included, potentially, each element assuming equal value (let the reader decide what matters least): the historical = the formal = the philosophical = the poetic = the narrative = the critical. Etc. So one “historical” notation, in the same paragraph, might “illogically” follow a formal description and/or poetic eruption. You might spill your ink attempting to elucidate the reasons why the object willed itself into existence (if you believe it has.) Or proving that the object you see before you does not, in fact, exist. Or why it perhaps shouldn’t exist.

There are no rules governing this operation, nor should there be. For as long as I can remember, I have lived my life by trying to escape structures – the imposition of structures upon my being. Is object-oriented writing a crackpot semiotics? Maybe. Though I prefer the term “alien aesthetics.” I’m not so interested in language (I am), but in using language as an extension of my bodymind machine to inhabit the object. If you follow me there, you’ll find some interesting questions arise. Such as: Do we let the maker inside?

I’m really interested in exploring the site of no possibilities.

I acknowledge that object-oriented writing will always be, in its essence, an act of failed translation. But I am interested, as always, in the potentialities of a spectacular failure, rather than adding my murmur to the monotone that comprises today’s art critical chorus.

For now on, disorientations.com assumes a new focus. It will serve as a dedicated repository, a generative machine, for instances of object-oriented writing – all of which will vary in length and design. I will begin by posting, in the coming days, instances of object-oriented writing that I’ve done in the past – before this idea, which has been brewing for some time, arrived at its present articulation – many of which have been previously published. I will also use disorientations.com to occasionally clarify any issues that arise surrounding, or embedded within, object-oriented writing.

The Names

by Travis Jeppesen on October 9, 2011

The Names is a section from The Suiciders, a novel. Read it here.

Li Gang interviewed at Whitehot Magazine

by Travis Jeppesen on August 20, 2011

With a restless intellect and a rapidly developing oeuvre distinguished by surprising gestures that somehow manage to come across as both extremely logical and elusive at once, Li Gang ranks among the more intriguing members of the youngest generation of Chinese artists.

TransLife in Beijing

by Travis Jeppesen on August 19, 2011

I guess there’s not much left to say, at this point. After all, criticism stops as soon as the only question left to be asked is whether art is fulfilling its social responsibilities.

Wim Delvoye in Beijing

by Travis Jeppesen on June 27, 2011

The emergent church of Wim Delvoye is one that attempts to unearth the basest ethos of a tormented, corporeal Catholicism, while simultaneously debunking all that is considered holy in the secular world.

My review of Wim Delvoye’s show is now online at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

I’m in China

by Travis Jeppesen on June 22, 2011

….in case you haven’t heard.

Will be until late July, it looks to be at the moment.

If you need to get in touch, the best way is through e-mail: travis.jeppesen@gmail.com.

Facebook don’t work.

John Miller in Cologne

by Travis Jeppesen on June 22, 2011

Miller’s work is always defined by a certain effortlessness at crossing the cerebral with the visual. In this, he is more motivated by his subject matter than any one particular mode of expression or conceptual framework. The result is that it’s never easy to recognize when we’re looking at a John Miller work; his free-ranging style includes both Duane Hanson-esque statues of heroes of consumerism (Now We’re Big Potatoes, 1992) and Dieter Roth-ian excess, as in his 1994 Topology for a Museum, six pedestals holding up pukelike mounds of sculpted grimy excess, with children’s toys and Pepsi cans occasionally emerging from the muck. It all depends on what idea he is captivated by at any given moment, and following those captivations becomes the adventure of following John Miller’s work.

My review of John Miller in Cologne, at Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

Thomas Struth in Duesseldorf

by Travis Jeppesen on June 11, 2011

Read the review on Whitehot.

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