babylon

dash snow, untitled ("dead man"), 2006.

one of my personal highlights from the babylon: myth and truth show at the pergamon museum in berlin, along with a tiny engraving of louis XVI as the whore of babylon, blake's nebuchadnezzar, the posters from d.w. griffith's intolerance, and the early modernist portrayals of the metropolis as babel, was the dash snow series of cum-stained, glittered tabloid portratis of saddam hussein.

the show in general was hot and unorthodox, like anything you would expect from berlin.

loosing my ballardian virginity (part two)

i felt like an atheist touring a church, like a skeptic lured by an outlandish cult, on verge of giving in. ballard’s work, his style, his writing, his contributions themselves became irrelevant. it was his obsessions, his morbid lucidity, his flair for shocking and rocking that were on display. the autopsy show is a lesson in fetishism –the author as a substitute pop totem.





the show turned to showmanship in the “pornography and technology” room, which very much looked like a crossbred between bride of frankenstein and a cheap xxx film with a visit to the dentist theme. you had these creepy operation tables with pictures of car-wrecks. you had cronenberg’s crash playing. you had a letter report about wanting to fuck ronald reagan. you had joy-of-(twisted)-sex-style documentaries from the seventies, and a huge video pastiche of clinical, endoscopic porn.




i moved on from the awkward and fleshy to the cold, pasteurized “asepsis and neobarbarism” section. here the layout was more basic: a couple of digital signs hanging from the roof, again, with fragments of text that, unless you’d actually read whatever book they were from, one couldn’t really make sense out of. then four or five screens showing the shoddy 3D promos for hypothetic luxury developments that have become the staple of post-dubai urban marketing. “only injections of violence can disrupt the lethargy and make a new utopia possible,” read the little tag for the room. but isn’t that what all these new developments are about, spoonfuls of sugared violence? isn’t dystopia the new utopia?




the last part of the exhibition is a series of rooms that basically amount to the church of jgb. first off, a “reading room,” or all you can eat buffet, with a neat encased row of first editions—like the plastic foodclones on display in low-grade japanese restaurants—dominating the tables stashed with library copies that visitors can flip through. even though this was the perfect chance for me to at least read a paragraph of ballard, i avoided the books and just kept moving. i really like the idea of reading rooms in exhibitions, but not once have i seen anyone actually taking the time to sit down and read anything. let alone a novel.




the ballardly altar room was my favorite of them all. it was presided over by a fragment of the unlimited dream company, a 1983 film by sam scoggings, were ballard is asaulted with 90 two-second questions from eyckman’s personality quotient. do you enjoy meeting new people? are your feelings easily hurt? do you often feel fed up? do you enjoy hurting the people you love? would you call yourself a nervous person? Are you a warrior? do you worry about awful things that might happen? do people who drive carefully annoy you? as the postmodern inquisitional trial unfolds, the camera zooms into ballard, till you can see the sweat on his forehead and his eye looks like a fly trapped in a jar. in the context of the exhibition, the film feels like a contemporary relic of sorts, digital cartilage stripped from the ominous saint.



the show closes with visual epistles of ballardian apostles. a full iconography can be drawn from the black and white pictures of ana barrado, or from the barrage of michel lord’s future ruins series. the preaching of the word is present in the bits of ballardian techno-following (the ballardian blog, jgb groupie homevideos playing on cellphones).





the autopsy reveals the voice of this man that lives in a world that can’t believe anymore, but doesn’t know how to stop believing.

loosing my ballardian virginity (part one)

having never opened a j.g. ballard book in my life, it seems terribly inadequate that i cover and review the very first exhibition dedicated exclusively to his life and work. still, adequacy has never been my forte, and after being seduced by the show’s promotional poster planted right in front of the door to my building—“crec en res,” it read, I believe in nothing—i decided to go to the cccb and see what all the fuss was about.




upon entering the exhibition, i found myself sucked into this darkened, blue neon nothing. it was a little disorienting. there was probably an opening statement and bio pasted on the wall, but i skipped it and decided to make my first time as visceral and uninformed as possible. after a boring strand of interviews with writers on the subject of ballard, and a terribly anticlimatic “conceptual” “videoart” piece (very barcelona. if there is one thing i hate about the culture scene here is that it's overstuffed and heavily subsidized, meaning that practically anyone with decent connections and a catalan pedigree can show his or her crap in even the more established museums and galleries.) the show actually began setting its pace.




a striking ballardian background room featured a caged “inside” collection of mementos and minute watercolors of the lunghua internment camp where ballard and his family were detained during ww2. at the end of the room ran a projection of the bbc documentary home, where ballard return to the camp in the early 2000s. on the “outside” half of the room, behind a wooden pallet divisory wall, are eerie black and white snapshots of wartime shanghai. the overall effect of the room is subtle and shattering, a very effective way of exposing the roots of ballardian spirit.





soon enough, it struck me i really wasn’t as ballardly vestal as i thought. even though i’ve never had a go at j.g. himself—i’m still not sure why—i realized that a certain ballardian sensibility had penetrated my development early on, that it was very much a part of my pop upbringing. from the re-run of the empire of the sun movie—which impressed me as a kid, and might have led to some preemptive crush on christian bale—to the melted cheese aesthetics of stop-motion sci-fi and illustrated pulp, i began to fathom the idea of a non-ballard-reading ballardian…




to be continued

1973

fall brings images of dead yellow leaves falling from the trees, candied skulls for dia de muertos and the october '73 global oil crisis. to celebrate, the centre canadien d'architecture is preparing its 1973: sorry, out of gas exhibition (and pre-exhibition short-film cycle).

groovy.

mirage

no, it's not a mirage. it's not a collage.

the persian palace at the 1894 san francisco midwinter fair (offshoot of the chicago columbian exhibition of 1893). how do you like that...

reyes 2 (social topology)

i was skipping through the pages of the latest issue of celeste, scrapbook for the mexican pop aristocracy (the “art world” in mexico is very much a friends&family affair, run and fed –with some notable exceptions- by the twenty-to-forty-something litter of big-business), and came across a note on the recent pedro reyes show, “the principles of social typology” at the yvon-lambert gallery in ny.


like the name suggests, reyes wanted to unravel mathematical strictures to make the easy-access. literally. he built a huge warped klein’s bottle with wire and vinyl thread (the material essentials of the acapulco chair) a small group of people could climb into and chill, playing on abstract notions like convergence and connectedness.

his 3-d “ambigrams” read differently depending on the side you stand in front of. “esquire” on one side is “empire” on the other.


reyes came up with the name from the show taking from kurt lewin’s research on topological psychology, specifically from the concept of “field theory,” where the “field” is “the totality of coexisting facts which are conceived of as mutually interdependent.” individual action and emotion is submerged and tied to situation and environment.



but reyes is not just preoccupied with bridging between concept and physicality. his work is actually strongly political. he describes the klein bottle as a “structure that creates no exclusive domain, as it is a modality that, through a structural twist, unifies the inside and outside surfaces into a continuous surface…the topological principle of the klein’s bottle would enable a decisive shift from an “either/or” critique to an array of “and/or” scenarios.”


a short interview with antanas mockus, mathematician, theorist and former mayor of bogotá; reyes reveals an active political (and urban) intention in his work, referring to mockus’s use of mathematical principles as social/urban “parables” of transformation (in a somewhat superficial but actually telling move, mockus’s campaign featured a moebius strip, and a slogan that called for “everyone on the same side,” a call against the bloody antagonisms that have typically marked colombia’s social and political realities).

reyes talks of different approaches to city governance and planning as differences between hairdos and haircuts: “one is homogenous by giving everyone limited movement while the other is homogeneous by allowing every hair to spin and sponge”.

ABCDFQ

if you can, head down to queens for the abcdf exhibit at the queens museum of art. luchadores, quinceañeras, tragafuegos, boings, and other infraexotic goodies from my exhuberant hometown:

"one day the title came to us: abcdf. immediately thereafter the project became a dictionary, a repertory of images that referred to mexico city, organized from a to z...we began to build a list of words that, after several months, numbered more than 900."

you'll find francisco mata rosa's happy-nihilist depictions of "the last city" and screening-party to the apocalypse shots, stuff by maurycy gomulicki, the genius between the all-electric-pink sexshops of the mexcity erotika chain, and the poorlittlerichgirl portaits of daniela rosell, along with works by lourdes grobet, pedro reyes, pablo león de la barra and others...

yepa yepa

architecture bloggers, rejoice!

not since ricky martin shook his cute little bonbon ass to america have i been so excited about crossover...

POSTOPOLIS!@storefront