Akimbo

1. Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is a poet and essayist who was recommended to me three years ago. I’ve just reread The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. Her writing helped connect a number of thoughts I’ve had about living in New York at this time and creating work within such a politically charged country. She reminds us that as artists we are “those that choose their materials and from these decide how to put things together."

She goes on to write, "All artworks are, at the most basic level, simply an accrual of relationships that are the result of choices: this, not that. Form is the result of the convergence of subject matter with the limits of material and the artist’s choices regarding the material; this convergence of subject matter with form releases content. Meanings arise when persons engage with this content; meaning occurs in the mind and heart of the person who reads a poem, studies a picture, listens to a sonata. It is important to acknowledge this elastic space of meaning, where what the artist or writer intends and what the reader or spectator apprehends are not necessarily in perfect alignment. It is perhaps even more important not to confuse subject with content; this habit, reified by journalism, threatens to obliterate our critical discernment beyond the reductive literalism that has come to dominate our lives”

2. Yukio Mishima

I’ve just started my collection of first edition books by Yukio Mishima. His use of language and metaphor is staggeringly rich, nuanced, and beautiful. Mishima’s psychologically complex characters behave brutally while going to extremes in the pursuit of purity. One of my favorite books, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, is the story, based on true events, of Mizoguchi, a young Buddhist acolyte afflicted with an ugly face and stutter, who becomes obsessed with the beauty of the Golden Temple. Living in its shadow, Mizoguchi plots to destroy the Temple and eventually burns it to the ground.

3. Miguel Abreu Gallery

Miguel Abreu Gallery is located on 36 Orchard Street. They represent some of my current favorite artists including Blake Rayne, R.H. Quaytman, and Eileen Quinlan. Some describe their program as overly intellectualized and anti-emotive, but I love wandering into the antiseptically tiled gallery space and engaging with works that suggest location, place, object, and context within a visceral remove from the anchors of representational location, place, and object.

4. Minus Space

Minus Space is a gallery in Brooklyn dedicated to reductive art. I find my self increasingly drawn to works that make suggestions rather than statements, pieces that reveal themselves over time, that are contextually dependent, and materially complex. In my own art practice, even while dealing with locational narrative, I find myself employing many of the same strategies as reductive artists: limiting color, working with monochromatic relationships, applying precision and repetition.

5. Rhythm & Sound

Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald are the two music producers behind Rhythm & Sound, a techno-dub highbred coming out of Berlin. Together since 1996, they infuse 1970s style dub reggae with modern electronic production techniques. Working with reggae legends Paul St. Hilaire, Cornel Campbell, The Chosen Brothers, Love Joy, and others, they infuse classic echo and dub treatments with huge textural waves of hiss and surge, deep deep bass, snare, high hat, and keyboard beats. The overall sound is one of stripped down, minimal three-dimensionality, combining depth and emotion.