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Stephen Willats Travelling with the Good Connector, 2019 Watercolour, ink, Letraset text on paper 27 1/8 x 54 in

The time tumbler is itself an unknown object and a speculative means of slotting new variables into lived reality. Although Willats’s British Museum project was ultimately never realised, and his time machine has not yet seen the light of day, an intriguing series of drawings emerged from these conversations. In diagrammatic works such as Passing Through the Time Tumbler and Re-mixing the Fragments, the time tumbler represents a function that triggers subjective and collective deviations from the dictates of linear time, scrambling and reordering the chaos of fragments that compose everyday experience. In our planned, clockwork world, we are all stuck inside time boxes which organise these fragments in a particular way, composing a normalised image of the present. But, at the same time, we are all potential time tumblers. – John Kelsey

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September Orange Pavilion (part 2 of 7), 2023 Ink, graphite, photoshop file and png export Dimensions variable

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Returning to the city after so many years away. From the train we watch the old graffiti go by. Most has faded and some has gone almost to nothing - these people are my age too. Where are they now? What do they do instead of writing? 

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William N. Copley, Ship of Fools, 1989, Courtesy of Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Eric Tschernow, Berlin. © William N. Copley Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Courtesy of the estate.

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Kit tube amplifier built by Byron Smith for the Sono Tone Sound System in the late 1960s in Kingston, Jamaica, around the same time that Smith invented “versions,” giving rise to dub music. Sono Tone brought the amp to London in 1971, before relocating to the Bronx in 1974 where they ran their sound until about 1979. (via Boo-Hooray)

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via DJ Food

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Cay Bahnmiller

Artist's Book, n.d. Mixed media on clothbound notebook 13.5 x 10 x 1.75 in.

Courtesy of White Columns

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Dexter Sinister (David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey). Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language. 2012. Exhibition catalogue (back cover), 224 pages plus insert, edited with Angie Keefer. With 13 “bulletins” by Andrew Blum, Pierre-André Boutang, Chris Evans, Angie Keefer, Bruno Latour, Louis Lüthi, Graham Meyer, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt, Dexter Sinister, Ian Svenonius, Benjamin Tiven, and Jessica Winter, and an essay by Laura Hoptman. Courtesy The Serving Library

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RADICAL MATERIAL SIMPLIFICATION, 2022 Single sided nylon appliqué flag with grommets 36 x 60″ Edition of 3 + 1 AP

Available here.

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Somewhere between a minimalist mantra and a dire warning, “radical material simplification” is a phrase coined by historian Chris Wickham in his book The Inheritance of Rome to describe the declining standards of living after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. It is an eloquent euphemism for collapse, which necessitates a gaunt turning inward, a taking stock of what can be salvaged and what can be done without. Wickham notes that not all parts of the Empire felt its disintegration at the same time or to the same degree—one generation may have been educated in Latin or experienced the imported bounty of the North African provinces, while the next was never taught the language or rarely tasted Numidian olive oil.

In our own time, the past decade has roughly marked its beginning with the popularity of the KonMari Method and “you-will-own-nothing-and-you-will-be-happy” tech utopianism, and its end with runaway inflation, a housing affordability crisis, and supply chain failure. The privilege of minimalism in the first part may presage its necessity in the next, and while any comparison to classical antiquity may be trite, Wickham’s phrase echoes in our ears with fresh relevance.