#dean kissick

[lligkv]

I'm always on-guard against conservatism in my thought. I think of myself as left in my sympathies; I also know I'm at the age where youthful commitments morph, or break under the weight of compromise. Like the ones involved in life in the American professional-managerial middle class. Entry into a certain income bracket, the structure and demands of day-to-day life, the pieces of practical work, like the management of bills, that are necessary to stay afloat, and the many entertainments you can use to while away the hours you don't devote to a job—they all serve to narrow one's horizons; it's so easy to end up stranded in the cul-de-sac of your stupid individual existence. I also have some very rudimentary, instinctive associations I've carried with me since youth. Just as conservatism is bad—because retrograde, oppressive, contingent on baseline assumptions about the self-interest of human character to which I'm not willing to commit—"avant-garde" is good, because it challenges that conservatism. So it was interesting to come upon Dean Kissick's contribution to the feature "What Happened to the Avant-Garde?" in the latest issue of The Drift and think that, based on my last post, he'd probably put me in the arrière-garde—which favors what is past because it's a means to reject the present and future—while he locates the avant-garde in online communities at which I mostly look askance: "schizo-affect" Substacks, the work of Honor Levy, and other venues that seem to thrill to the possibilities that AI and machine learning technologies might hold for art and human subjectivity.

In these communities—products of an era of the Internet that's a little after the one I occupied, as a millennial closer to the middle than the end of that generation's span—"individual subjectivity," as Kissick puts it, "was forsaken in favor of pseudonymity, the impersonation of others, collective authorship, and collaborations with software." In isolation, I'm cool with each of these things except for the last one. Of course, there's no guarantee that any of them make for good art or lasting contributions to it—the title of Kissick's entry is "Senseless Babble," and he himself grants that "there's a fine line between nonsense doggerel and aesthetic innovation here, [as is] always the case with avant-gardes." And it's really too simplistic to say that the avant-garde generally is automatically good. Avant-gardes can be regressive; ours is pretty likely to be, as John Ganz wrote last year:

They pride themselves in being retrograde or blithely unaware along a number of axes, from declaring, as a last ditch Bohemian provocation, their fealty to conventional bourgeois values; their preoccupation with adolescence; appropriation of lower-brow or conservative religious themes; their affectation of not being the product of arts education but rather the native denizens of the dark underbelly of internet message boards; their deliberate cultivation of a sense of mental debility or confusion with results that less like Dadaist or Futurist experimentation and more just senseless chatter and maudlin ecstasy....

There's something akin to an accelerationist's empty zeal, too, in Kissick's piece, in claims like the one that the timeline has surpassed modernist poetry as a document of the collective unconscious and human subjectivity within it. A love for what is novel and ostensibly a challenge to what is simply because it's novel or a challenge. A love for form that disregards content. And a love that likely mistakes a mere turn of the wheel for something truly new and unprecedented. Turn the dial back ten or fifteen years and you'd find people saying much the same about alt-lit—though likely less effusively, jadedness and alexithymia being characteristic of that style and its partisans where volubility, profusion, and mania seem hallmarks of this one. We're saying something new, we thought then. And uneasy in the background hung the question: who knows if it's meaningful. (The answer, predictably: not very.) (But at least the question was there.)

Still, we're all here trying to articulate—to make something new, as in valuable, because it speaks to what only we can speak to.

But then there's Lisa Robertson in her novel The Baudelaire Fractal, which I just finished. The novel is another Künstlerroman, the story of an artist's formation, and over the course of her literary apprenticeship, the protagonist decides that, as she puts it, "I was no avant-gardist; I had no interest in abolishing grammar. Rather, I studied it, in a casual way..." Perhaps that's where my own allegiances lie—in working with the world as it is rather than abolishing it; exploring the possibilities it holds without tipping into what I think will degrade it, such as technologies like AI; most crucially, tempering the excitement of the new with some sense of what the new might be worth... Robertson's narrator, for her part, determines that her literary project will entail work with the sentence: "By what profound calculations," she wonders, "could the contours of the sentence be transformed, and what would I then become?"

[grandhotelabyss]

I like Dean Kissick and I like this little essay in The Drift, but how the hell did he get from "movements on both 4chan (anonymous, nihilist trolls) and Tumblr (radicals deconstructing identity)," "the 'Vibe Shift,' by which I mean the strange ways of writing that appeared in 2021," and the "paranoid derangement, hallucinatory solipsism, and monomaniacal esotericism" of posters on his Twitter feed to "ordinary people"? No "ordinary people" are involved in any of this; if they were "ordinary people" they wouldn't by definition be hallucinating strange deconstructive nihilist trolls.

"But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad." "How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here."

The avant-garde fantasy of dissolving the individual artist into the aestheticized community—a kind of communist or fascist overvaluation of the collective as applied to art production rather than to political life—relies on this pretense of a "mad" aggregate, when in fact the "madness of art" characterizes only the individual or at best the small group, never the anonymous masses. The anonymous masses are streaming reruns of Modern Family, not schizoposting.

His side of Twitter, for example, isn't a hazy cacophony but a battle of shaped personae, each well-known username an artifact of individual cunning, however pseudonymous. As for the "vibe shift," he names Honor Levy—a well-connected Bennington grad—while the people he doesn't name like Angelicism and Charlotte Fang are (not to doxx but their identities are open secrets) similarly well-placed with academic or tech backgrounds to do what they did. As for 2010s 4Chan and Tumblr, I concede Kissick's almost got me there, but it's well within the realm of possibility that one FBI or CIA guy wrote every inch of that shit from 4Chan's election-swinging "God Emperor Trump" odes to Tumblr's litany of 58 genders—the true genius of the 21st century.

P. S. I've analyzed one or two of Honor Levy's stories/poems before—see here and here—and confess I had no idea they were written with "A.I. chatbots and other text processors," as Kissick asserts. The collective formed by Levy and artificial intelligence also has nothing to do with "ordinary people" (this really—I'm sorry, Dean—is a demagogic phrase) but what about ordinary machines? What if machines are the true volk? All the more reason, I suspect, to uphold what machinic academe has always polemically regarded as the myth of individual creativity.

[spilledreality]

What drives Denethor mad? A dearth of hope, the visions of doom that are leant to him by the palantir.

Tolkien, then, believes in the infohazard—believes there are some notions, some memes, that are dangerous—dangerous insofar as they drive men out of hope and into despair.

Dean Kissick reflects, in the final entry to his running column "Downward Spiral":

What if all this discourse about how terrible everything is, these essays and shows about how awful our lives are, how hard it is to be a person in the 21st-century first world, only contributes to the illusion that our world is so broken, so without hope or rays of light? What if this is all a terrible downward-spiraling illusion we’ve conjured around ourselves together? An illusion that is formed by the culture that describes it. An illusion we’ve forgotten we made and now mistake for reality.

Indeed. What if!

[corndoggod]

A Review of Matthew Gasda's "Zoomers"

“Do you know a white rapper named Small Boss?”

“I don’t.” 

“That’s my cousin!”

I overheard this standing in line for the bathroom at Matthew Gasda’s new play Zoomers, which took place dramatically in a Bushwick boys apartment and literally in a north Greenpoint loft called “The Brooklyn Center for Theater Research,” a new LLC. The bathroom line snaked through the kitchen and determined the length of intermission (I held my pee). I was eyeing the $7 Stellas in the fridge when C whispered in my ear, “The playwright’s dressed like Holden Caulfield.” 

It was obvious he was the director/writer from the way he swished around softly commanding attention and obedience. A scarf nuzzled his neck and rimless glasses telescoped his discerning eyes. This was one of the earliest performances and Gasda watched the play a couple seats away, laughing with and without us, piquing my curiosity when he laughed without us.  

Dean Kissick was there with his high cheekbones and ugly Asics seated in front of me. We met one of the actor’s friends in line, they worked together at a sushi restaurant in Williambsurg, and this was his first play in New York. I thought I saw Christian Lorentzen too, but Google suggested this guy with bulging eyes was crowned with too much hair. 

The set, true to its twentysomething adrift tenants, was shaggy and minimalist: nothing more than a couch, bong, cluttered coffee table, TV and Nintendo Switch. The opening action took place in Nintendo’s multiverse as Luigi and Kirby faced off in Super Smash Bros and the two Bushwick Bros bantered, “Kirby’s a bitch.” After a summerlong hiatus I was back on Smash, drumming King K Rool’s belly with war, grief, and eternal life, and it was charming to see the quotidien fabric of life, as useful and smelly as a tube sock, dramatically staged. 

The Switch acted as a far-reaching lighthouse in Gasda’s referential fog of New York life as a recent transplant fresh out of school. The play is crowded with such touchstones: polyamory, food delivery, Venmo requests, ambition softened by the city’s edge and the fear that “taking a break” isn’t catching one’s breath but a tombstone. Amidst this sea of uncertainty, Smash served as a kind of narcotic not just for New York but for everyone everywhere. 

While Gasda was quite skilled at identifying these nodes of tribal identity, he had more trouble making sense of them and the issues those tribes faced. Based on the title and the Switch, I thought it was a pandemic play. But the play was actually a romcom occupied with casual and toxic relationships, the rude reality of life post-Ivy, a feast of anxiety and floundering for deeper connectivity. 

The play made emotional sense but it had no depth. It wasn’t for a lack of trying either, it’s just that the attempts to get there bordered on the cliche, as when the “adult” character, an architect who viewed boundaries as a blueprint for happiness, says to his more-than-a-decade-younger lover something like, “I’m afraid if I dip my toes in this current it’s strong enough to drag me away,” to which she replies, “I’ll sail with you.” But then there were other lines like, “Love is young people growing old together,” which I liked and could probably find on Etsy. 

The writing was strong overall (I’d like to see and read more of Gasda), but the acting was gnarly. I don’t want to be mean so I won’t say more. But I will say it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the play too much. 

I came to Zoomers curious from the hype around Dimes Square that launched Gasda into the headlines. I was ready to be skeptical, but the writing was impressive and so was Gasda’s whole enterprise: the LLC, the workshops, the afterparty, which he seemed to treat as an opportunity for further observation, perhaps fishing around for his next play. I respected that he was actually doing the work. It made me want to convert my apartment into a soiree to show my friend’s art and workshop each other’s work, to host plays choreographed specifically for our sunken lime wash jungle of a living room. I could start a shell company to squirrel away all our hidden artistic treasures and shored up dreams.

[chasematt]

Dean Kissick, Spike Art Magazine

[3dsmall]

Very good article, makes you almost nostalgic for when contemporary art was all about object oriented ontology instead of straight idpol all the time

“We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.

Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.”

[goldenfiddle]

[fettesans]

Top, Shirin Neshat, The Fury, 2022, Two-channel video installation, HD video monochrome. Exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, January 26 - March 4, 2023. Via. Bottom, Hans Haacke, News, 1969/2008, RSS newsfeed, paper, and printer. Part of the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 at LACMA, February 12 - July 2, 2023. Via.

For the 'Prospect 69' exhibition in the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, Haacke drew up a concept he elucidated as follows: 'A telex machine installed in the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle prints all the news communicated by the German press agency DPA. The printouts will be put on display for further reading one day after being communicated, and on the third day the rolls of paper will be labelled and dated, then stored in plexiglass containers.' Via.

--

Baudrillard, by contrast, suggests we are no longer immersed in the society of spectacle that is governed by images shaping reality but in the ‘contagion of the virtual’. I would argue that images can no longer be explained or apprehended using the mirror formula to offer a clear distinction between reality and phantasy. Their overwhelming presence in mass media, virtual reality and social networks shapes identities and the perception of the self. However, individuals are not merely passive consumers of these images. They have also become active spectators, interacting with images and using them to perform their identity.

Basia Sliwinska, from The Female Body in the Looking-Glass: Contemporary Art, Aesthetics and Genderland, 2016. Via.

--

Around this magical time of the year, Brad Troemel used to post an Instagram advent calendar of his most popular memes. He doesn’t do that any longer but does regularly post carousels of found stories that are a brilliant portrait of our present and a rich resource. I also enjoyed, and was moved drunkenly to tears one night by, the closing montage of his “Cloutbombing” report, made by Jak Ritger, perhaps because I appear in it myself. I also enjoyed Crisis Acting’s carousels of found videos, which form a more uplifting image of humanity and the world – it’s amazing that they’re able to find and put these out every day – and their longer edits with music too; I like this one ascendant, completely illuminated cut of Hyperballad, made I don’t know by whom; and another cut of an old German comedian lying in a shallow stream while Aphex Twin plays, which I’ll probably never find again; and this video of Chinese musicians, found via Sean Tatol; and these guys that play ambience on the street across Lower Manhattan; and this clip from Connor Clarke, with Ice Spice.

Dean Kissick, 👍 Video carousels, for Spike Tops and Flops 2023.

[abwwia]

Contemporary Art and Female Artists in digital age; 2014 reminder: From plastic surgery to public meltdowns Amalia Ulman #amaliaulman is turning instagram into #performanceart | By Dean Kissick | 24 October 2014, 2:55pm

Amalia Ulman (born 1989) is an Argentinian artist and film director based in New York City whose practice includes performance, installation, video and net-art works.

In 2013, she was in a serious Greyhound bus accident that left her with a permanent #disability.

As of 2020, Ulman lives and works in New York City.

Her work deals with issues of class, gender, and sexuality. Ulman is particularly interested in middlebrow aesthetics.

#socialmediaart #womensart #artbywomen #PalianShow

[grimesapologist]

"I think nightlife in New York is pretty epic right now. The literary, arts, and music scenes are  interwoven downtown right now and a lot of wacky stuff is happening. My friend Blaketheman1000 wrote a song called Dean Kissick. I DJ’d a Forever Mag poetry reading in a hotel for 20 minutes. I saw a Frost Children ambient emo show in an art gallery. Kevin Carpet is everywhere." - Harrison Smith (The Dare)

bhwfjhfjew i wanna move to new york

[stronghours]

skim/read that Harpers article The Painted Protest by Dean Kissick, mostly about how identity politics have subsumed and destroyed contemporary art - found that article when I checking out an author's twitter profile because he's publishing a book I probably want to read, his praise along these lines: "an evisceration of ID politics, a eulogy for postmodernism's cannibalistic bulimia, the amputation of a mother's legs" - this author is being published by Expat Press, a publisher that seems to collect and and generally rub shoulders with other writers/publishers (hobart, etc) that have been vocal about or against the domination of the id politic in art spaces - I go to the Expat contributors page out of curiosity (well who else is there, who are they, what are they making) and I end up clicking on this guy listed, Sterling Bartlett - I scroll a little to see the output - he retweets a guy who posted "crazy that the balding guy with hair look has gone away because no one has testosterone anymore" - I go to that guy's page (not affiliated with expat to be fair, joe nobody) and his little 'about' box just says, pardon, "Retard Strength America"

[grandhotelabyss]

Well said. Strange to see people my age trying to turn 2006 or 2012 into some lost paradise of culture. Culture is better now! Of course, in 2006 and especially 2012 I was shut out of the gate-kept institutions they mourn—I wasn't hip enough, I guess—whereas now I can undertake cultural endeavors (like this or this) that wouldn't have been possible then, and do so for an increasing and increasingly remunerative audience. So you might say I'm biased.

[jrmilazzo]

The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.

Great art should evoke powerful emotions or thoughts that can be brought forth in no other way. If art merely conjured the same experience that could be attained through knowledge of the author’s identity alone, there would be no point in making it, or going to see it, or writing about it. If an artwork’s affective power derives from the artist’s biography rather than the work, then self-expression is redundant; when the self is more important than the expression, true culture becomes impossible.

[yorkshireword]

Elsewhere in the same essay Tatol writes about “The Painter’s New Tools,” a group show at Nahmad Gallery in New York in the summer of 2022, and says: “It all looks like the kind of art that computer programs can make.” This is a low-information assertion, given the variety of art that can be made with computer programs. Would a critic ever say that all the work in an exhibition “looks like art that can be made with paint” as if that means something? In Tatol’s defense, the exhibition’s curators—Eleanor Cayre and Dean Kissick—aren’t helping him or any other viewer understand what’s going on here. “What are the painter’s new tools, and what can be done with them?” their statement asks, rhetorically. In the following paragraph they enumerate these tools—“software, CGI, code, AI, printers, tablets, phones, and other image-making technologies”—without venturing to describe what’s done with them, or what kind of meaning might be drawn from their use. All we get is a statement of fact that these tools have been used. It reminds me of how a decade ago people would say that “all art is post-internet art now.” A phrase like this sets aside any attempt to understand the specificity of any artist’s use of digital media. It preempts actual analysis and judgment.

[bedlessbug]

oldie but a goodie