#i guess the presence of a live audience makes the artsy things they wanted to do difficult

[junhyeontual]

hello guess who finished watching rtk2 final stages

[limejuicer1862]

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.

The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Wendy Klein

Born in New York and brought up in California, Wendy Klein left the U.S. in 1964 to live in Sweden and later, France and Germany. She came to England in 1971 and has lived here most of her adult life.  Failed actress and retired psychotherapist, she began to write poetry seriously in 2002 after completing an undergraduate diploma in creative writing at Oxford University, Continuing Education, Kellogg College. She has been mightily helped to hone her skills by two spells at The Writing School in Sheffield, run by Ann and Peter Sansom of Poetry Business fame. Winner of a variety of prizes (Ware, Buxton, Cinnamon Press Single Poem. She is published in many magazines and anthologies. She has two collections from Cinnamon Press: Cuba in the Blood, (2009) and Anything in Turquoise, (2013), and a third ‘Mood Indigo’ from Oversteps Books. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s early death when Wendy was nine months old, her own nomadic years as a young mother, her mixed heritage (Russian secular Jewish immigrants and East Coast artsy-literary Bohemian) and subsequent travel. Brought up in a left-wing family (father a member of the Communist Party during the 1930s), her family experienced terrible stress during the McCarthy witch-hunt, and she never felt comfortable in the U.S. She renounced her U.S. citizenship a few years ago, only to find herself back in the midst of a resurgence of ring-wing populism. Nowhere to hide!

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

Poetry has been part of my life for as long as I can remember.  My cousin and I used to compete with one another memorising poems and reciting them from almost as early as we could read.  Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll were our original favourites, before we moved on to Dorothy Parker and Edna St Vincent Millay.  It wasn’t long before I tried my hand at writing, but I have always been rubbish at end-rhyming, so my early efforts were filed in the wastepaper basket before they saw the light of day.  My mother, who died when I was 9 months old, was a playwright who had had two plays produced on Broadway, so I wasn’t about to try to follow in her footsteps.  My stepmother and my father both wrote short stories, so I tried my hand at fiction first, but they were both such stern critics that I almost gave up writing altogether, though the odd maudlin adolescent angst began to appear from time-to-time in my sporadic journal writing.  Eventually I began to excel at book reports and, at university, essays, but writing fiction was my first choice until I attended the first-ever under-graduate poetry certificate group at Oxford University, Continuing Education, Kellogg College.  The course was broad-based, and we were required to complete assignments in writing plays, writing prose fiction and writing poetry.  As I was working on a semi- autobiographical novel centred on the first two decades of my life, I chose prose fiction for my first assignment.  My efforts were demolished in my first tutorial with the prose tutor, Angela Hassell.  I was determined not to spend another hour in a room alone with her, so after that I began to choose poetry assignments, starting with a theme-linked sonnet sequence.  I had never written a sonnet, or wanted to, but it didn’t turn out too badly, and I didn’t have to face Ms. Hassell again very soon, so I turned my face towards verse.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

Well, I guess that’s a toss-up between my grandfather who bellowed Kipling’s ‘If’ at me when I was a naughty nine-year-old and bought me the entire works of Shakespeare in single Modern Library editions, bound in red, when I was 12, and my father, who bombarded me with poems from the time I enjoyed having words read aloud to me.  He had memorised a lot of canon poetry from Shakespeare, Keats, Tennyson to Dylan Thomas and would hold forth on any occasion when he had an audience from one (me), or twenty plus at birthdays, New Year’s Eve parties, picnics, hikes – anywhere, and a poem for anytime.  He was a high school English teacher, and when he was teaching, I was treated to whatever was on the syllabus.  He wrote quite a lot of poetry himself, which I realised later was not all that good.  In the latter part of his teaching career, he began to teach adults and to read more modern and contemporary poetry. It was then I was presented with his favourites:  Carl Sandberg, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, and subtly steered away from the likes of Marge Piercy!

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

I don’t think I ever experienced a dominating presence of older poets.  By the time I started writing poetry I was already an older poet myself.  I was daunted by the talent of much younger poets and peer poets who had been writing longer than I, and I had huge admiration for the likes of Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Sharon Olds, who is only a little bit older than I.  No, no dominating presence, though perhaps I was naïve.  I wrote a lot of prose before I began to poetry, and when I did begin, poetry seemed like more fun, and I thought I had nothing to prove.  I soon learned that the poetry world was just as competitive as the world of short-story writers and rookie novelists, and that I really didn’t know very much at all.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I have drifted away from having a very regular routine.  I keep a notebook, of course, which gets more and more haphazard, and I usually have a poem on the go that I am picking away at.  Revising an earlier piece will sometimes start me in the direction of something new – a germ of an idea in the notebook.  I have a few exercises which I have used to stimulate writing, but more recently this has felt a bit like cheating to me.  Poems that stem from exercises like these tend to feel forced, so I have pretty much stopped ‘chasing’ poems and am more inclined to wait until they find me.  It is perhaps easier to say what is NOT part of my writing routine.  I do not ‘journal’ daily at home, though I have kept travel journals over time which have yielded up a lot of useful material.  At home at my own desk, I can get bored trying to think of things to say. or gloomy going over past difficulties, conflicts, relationships, etc.  Equally I have never found free-writing exercises particularly useful, though I have taken part in them during writing workshops before I became inhibited about reading back first drafts.  Before I was retired, fitting in time to write was difficult.  If I was writing, I was neglecting something else I needed to do, whether it was to do with paid work, house work, tasks relating to offspring, etc.  The fact that I was neglecting something I ‘should’ be doing made writing seem a little naughty and subversive – something I had to sneak away to do and hide afterward.  Once I was retired, I had too much time and found I tended to squander it.  Initially I began to try to shape a writing routine by taking weekly poetry writing classes, which involved having prompts/assignments which were ‘due’ once a week.  That challenge made it necessary to produce at least one poem a week, which I could manage quite easily.  I had a marvellous tutor in the poet, Susan Utting, and her feedback and peer feedback was so useful.  As I began to get some approval from tutors and fellow students, I began to send things out, so part of the time I spent writing was devoted to putting together submissions.  This latter task always takes me way too long, and I get grumpy when I use up my writing time putting together submissions.  Taking time to read the work of other contemporary poets is an essential part of my daily routine, too, and going back to long-term favourites.

5. What motivates you to write?

That’s simple; I don’t know how not to write.  Every job I have ever had I have managed to turn into a vehicle for writing.  As a social worker, my secretaries vied with one another to type up my case notes because they were so interesting – like stories.  They were not meant to be, and I fell foul of my managers.  When I became a psychotherapist, I adopted the ‘narrative’ practice of the Milan group of systemic therapists and the Australian therapist, Michael White, and wrote letters to my clients between meetings reminding them of our ‘conversations’ and slipping in ‘interventions’.  I feel uncomfortable when I am not working on something – a poem, or a poetry project, though I try to forgive myself when it is just not happening for all the wide varieties of reasons daily life demands.

6. What is your work ethic?

What?  I actually had to look this up, a definition that worked.  I fail to see how to make it relate to poetry.  I have just about enough discipline to keep going, and I am dedicated to making my poems as good as I can make them.  I try to behave in a sensible and cooperative manner with other poets even when I feel they may be completely off the planet in what they are trying to achieve.  I enjoy reading and critiquing the work of others, but don’t ask me unless you want on honest opinion.

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

I think the greatest single influence from my reading when I was young was Emily Dickinson.  She showed me the whole underbody of what a poem is.  Looking at her short pieces full of her characteristic dashes for the first time was startling, a little bewildering, then finding the sting of her truths, uncovering ideas before I was old enough to realise how subversive they were.  I am always concerned that my work is too ‘obvious’.  Dickinson reminds me that it is a good thing to challenge readers enough to make them think, but not so much they become irritated and close the book.  I try not to care too much about simply pleasing readers, to care more about stimulating thought and engaging.  If poems do not engender thought or entertain, on some level, why would anyone be interested in reading them?  Why bother?  Poetry is a great form of communication; surely it is the poet’s responsibility to make that communication possible.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I still admire Sharon Olds, and more and more as we get older.  Her T.S. Eliot winner ‘Stag’s Leap’ was a tour de force in her particular skill:  a hardcore candour that hunts down details and does not spare them.  I know she is loved and hated equally for this quality.  I love her.  I also admire the audacious Kim Addonizio, another U.S. poet:  poems that sizzle with energy, fearless politics, and plenty of ironic undertones.  For a poet who almost always uses form and end-rhymes skilfully and thereby gets away with it, I think you can’t beat Alison Brackenbury.  I love Mark Doty, too.  He gives me permission to write poems about dogs, but for his self-deprecating humour that, in the words of one reviewer ‘reconciles trauma with grace’.  And oh, the late-lamented Tony Hoagland who says he came to poetry out of a thirst for truth-telling!  Oh and Anne-Marie Fyfe for her rare mixture of clarity and mystery.  This is only a very short list with room for Anne Carson – her sheer daring weirdness!

9. Why do you write?

Because I cannot not write.  Much as some days I wish I could stop writing poems, in particular, I know that I don’t really know how to do that.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

I think I would ask them first why they wanted to become a writer.  It’s so damned hard, frustrating and brutally lonely.  If they seemed determined, I would say ‘just write and write and write and show it all to peer writers and more established writers and listen to their  feedback and use it, even if at first you don’t believe it; treat it as an experiment and see where it takes you. Once you are under way, find a critical group or a mentor you trust.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I have been in the process of moving house, or trying to, for nearly two years, and I am very involved with the care of my two youngest grandchildren:  1 and nearly 3, so I never have enough time to write as much as I think I would like to.  On the other hand, maybe that’s just an excuse for not generating much new material at present.  I have three short pamphlets recently finished, which I am trying to place, individually or as a three-section collection if I can unify it under a ‘Three-of’ title.  I am working on a ‘Selected’ for High Window Press, but not entirely convinced that it isn’t too soon after my last collection ‘Mood Indigo’ (2016).  that’s enough to be going on with for the time being, I believe.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Wendy Klein Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

[ismael37olson]

I've Been a Sinner, I've Been a Scamp

A lot of musical theatre fans love Anything Goes, but consider it a guilty pleasure, the artsy equivalent of Mississippi mud cake, just a mindless, old-fashioned musical comedy confection. They register great surprise when I describe it as a sharp satire. But it is. Musical comedy had dealt in gentle social satire since the beginning, but Anything Goes was the first successful Broadway musical comedy to build its story on two parallel threads of fierce, pointed satire. This time the plot came out of the satirical agenda, rather than the satire being just a fun side joke. I've written a lot about the neo musical comedy, which emerged in the 1990s as one of the dominant musical theatre forms. A neo musical comedy involves the devices and conventions -- and usually the full-out joy -- of old-fashioned musical comedy, but with a more socio-political, more ironic, and often more subversive point of view. Think of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Bat Boy, Urinetown, Heathers, Something Rotten, The Scottsboro Boys, Cry-Baby; but there were a few examples even earlier, like Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, The Cradle Will Rock in 1937, and really, The Threepenny Opera in 1928. And arguably, Anything Goes in 1934. Anything Goes was a dead-on satirical chronicle of That Moment... which also happen to be This Moment. Maybe we're just too used to Anything Goes at this point, to see it as it once was. But this is a show that includes a mock religious hymn to a (supposed) murderer, skeet shooting with a machine gun, a love song that mentions snorting coke, and a parody religious revival meeting featuring a song with a slyly sexual hook line. If you doubt the double entendre of "Blow Gabriel, Blow," this is the same songwriter who wrote in the title song, "If love affairs you like with young bears you like..." That meant then what it means today. And notice in the scene leading up to the song, most of the confessions are sexual. Reno is presented as an explicitly sexual presence from the beginning, so her spot as lead singer / evangelist, and with her randy angels as back-up, it's hard not to read the song as sexual double entendre.

In comic counterpoint to that, the language of the "Blow, Gabriel" lyric is Religious Symbolism as a Second Language. This is an amateur, or more to the point, a religious outsider, leading this revival meeting -- with the help of the fake-minister "Dr. Moon." It's obvious neither of them are really believers, and that doesn't seem to bother the crowd a bit. And by the way, why do we want Gabriel to blow his horn? The Bible says that "an archangel with the trumpet of God" will announce the Second Coming, and people have assumed that's Gabriel, particularly since Milton made that connection in Paradise Lost. During the Depression, many American believed that they were living through the "great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be." (Matthew 24:21) So riffing on that, Reno and her angels (I think we're supposed to assume this is one of their regular numbers) pray for the archangel to signal the end of the tribulations (Prohibition, the Depression) and announce with his trumpet the coming of Christ. Reno assures Gabriel she's ready to "trim [her] lamp," a Bible metaphor meaning she'll work at and maintain her faith (to keep oil lamps burning brightly and consistently, you have to trim the wick back), that she's mended her ways (we can only guess what those ways included), that now, "I'm good by day and I'm good by night." Of course, that line assumes that Reno hasn't always been "good by night." But these "sinners" aren't asking for forgiveness or anything; they just want to "play all day in the Promised Land." It's a remarkably crass take on the Book of Revelation's thousand years of peace and righteousness. And all this to jazz music, until recently considered the devil's music... In one section, they all chant:

Satan, you stay away from me, 'Cause you ain't the man I wanna see! I'm gonna be good as the day I was born, 'Cause I heard that man with the horn! Do ya hear it?

Once you really pay attention to this lyric, you realize this section is all about the End Times. They want to be good, because Jesus and Judgment Day are coming soon! One of the more subtle jokes in the show is in this song, when the women take the melody and the men sing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in counterpart, also a song about angels taking "me" to heaven. Since this is the male passengers and crew singing this counter-melody, are we to read that as spontaneous, that religious fervor is taking them over? Since this is always a big, involved, full-company, Broadway musical comedy dance number, it lays on top of our fake revival meeting an even more cynical layer of comment -- religion really is show business. But there's even more swimming around in Anything Goes. When the show opened in late 1934, Prohibition had ended just a year earlier, but the Depression rolled on, and the Dust Bowl kept destroying lives. The FBI was at the height of its notoriety, but the public loved some of the gangsters on the FBI's Most Wanted list (which is the whole point of "Public Enemy Number One"). Importantly, the FBI -- standing in for law and order in general -- is not on board the S.S. American. In fact, they arrest the wrong guy at the beginning of the show, and leave the ship! They're not up to the job. They can't/won't protect us. Was this a comment on how hard it was for law enforcement to catch America's celebrity criminals, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie & Clyde, et al.?

Here on the S.S. American, we are in Shakespeare's metaphorical woods, away from laws and civilization, where two things will happen. First, love will get "fixed" as our characters de-couple from the wrong partners and re-couple with the right partners. Second, with lots of liquor and very little "law," these passengers are free to act on their impulses, to chase after various forms of vice, to be their "natural" selves. And notice that the ship is called the "American" -- this place of no rules and no law is 1930s America, where (until a year earlier) lots of Americans broke the law by drinking alcohol. When that many Americans broke the law, when they stopped believing in the institutions that failed them, America became functionally lawless. By calling the ship the S.S. American, the show's writers were underlining their social commentary. As a comic microcosm of our country, these passengers showcase the worst of the American inclination to make celebrities out of criminals and show biz out of religion, an inclination as prevalent today as it was in the thirties. But the satiric aim is more pointed than just those two overarching themes. So what else does Anything Goes satirize? A lot. Even though economists will tell you the 1929 stock market crash did not "cause" the Depression, it was still the starting pistol, and most people in 1934 believed rich Wall Street types were to blame. Notice that in Anything Goes we have two representatives of Wall Street -- the drunken, horny, nearly blind Mr. Whitney, and the shit-disturbing rogue Billy Crocker. The name Crocker comes from the French for "heartbreak." In this story Wall Street is decidedly undependable.

Richard Whitney had been the very famous president of the New York Stock Exchange and during the 1930s, he was famed for steering his clients through the treacherous waters of the Depression. But his success was a scam of the proportions of Enron and Bernie Madoff, and he was finally caught in 1938 when his firm collapsed. Still, as audiences watched Anything Goes in 1934, Whitney was the hero of the rich, so naming Billy's boss Whitney -- and making him a drunk -- was a pretty subversive reference. According to Wikipedia:

On October 24, 1929, Black Thursday, Whitney attempted to avert the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Alarmed by rapidly falling stock prices, several leading Wall Street bankers met to find a solution to the panic and chaos on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The meeting included Thomas W. Lamont, acting head of Morgan Bank; Albert Wiggin, head of the Chase National Bank; and Charles E. Mitchell, president of the National City Bank of New York. They chose Whitney, then vice president of the Exchange, to act on their behalf.  With the bankers' financial resources behind him, Whitney went onto the floor of the Exchange and ostentatiously placed a bid to purchase a large block of shares in U.S. Steel at a price well above the current market. As traders watched, Whitney then placed similar bids on other "blue chip" stocks. This tactic was similar to a tactic that had ended the Panic of 1907, and succeeded in halting the slide that day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average recovered with a slight increase, closing with it down only 6.38 points for that day. In this case, however, the respite was only temporary; stocks subsequently collapsed catastrophically on Black Tuesday, October 29. Whitney's actions gained him the sobriquet, "White Knight of Wall Street."

It is a little weird that Mr. Whitney's first name is Elijah, coincidentally (?) named after the nineteenth-century inventor and arms manufacturer... The Harcourts (and Mrs. Wentworth, in the '34 version) stand in for America's "cafe society," the 1% of 1934. In the original version of the show, the Harcourts' family business was in serious trouble and needed saving, which was the reason for the arranged marriage. Is it any wonder Billy and Hope both would like to escape this culture? According to an article on the PBS website:

The Great Depression was partly caused by the great inequality between the rich who accounted for a third of all wealth and the poor who had no savings at all. As the economy worsened many lost their fortunes, and some members of high society were forced to curb their extravagant lifestyles. But for others the Depression was simply an inconvenience especially in New York where the city’s glamorous venues – places to see and be seen – such as El Morocco and The Stork Club were heaving with celebrities, socialites and aristocrats. For the vast majority the 1930s was a time of misery. But for many American dynastic families, parties helped to escape the reality on the street and the grander the better.

Parties and trans-Atlantic cruises. Many stories of the Great Depression show us the shattered and disenfranchised turning to religion in their time of need. But church attendance grew during the Depression only about five percent. Notably, no one aboard the S.S. American in Anything Goes has that spiritual need, and so for these people religion becomes show business, entertainment, the latest fad. Though the content of "Blow, Gabriel, Blow" is basically reverent, the song's rowdy, fast, jazz music quickly and comically short-circuits any hint of real religion fervor. This is religion as party. The only genuine symbol of religion we see in the show is the comically clueless Bishop Dobson, who's banished from this community (i.e.,mistakenly arrested) before the ship even sets sail; and all we're left with is the fake religion of fake-minister "Dr." Moon, and the gambling "Christian converts." Genuine religion (and conventional morality), the Baptist tent revivals and religious radio shows of the 1930s, are all missing from this place. Here there is no moral control -- it's Shakespeare's woods. In the 1930s, the 1960s, and also today, Dark Times bring forth the most pointed satire. Anything Goes opened halfway through the Depression, which also begat brilliant satires like Of Thee I Sing, Let 'Em Eat Cake, and The Cradle Will Rock.. The 1962 revival opened at the start of one of the most divided, angry decades in American history. The 1987 revival opened on the infamous Black Monday, the day the stock market crashed again. None of the show's targets feel dated, because we're struggling with all the same things now. Still today, religion is often repackaged as slick, high-budget show biz. When America's evangelicals strongly support the womanizing vulgarian and sexual predator Donald Trump, religion in America is on life support. And still today, we make celebrities out of criminals, and depending where the various investigations lead, Trump may be the best illustration of that too. Cole Porter's songs have all the bite, the sophistication, and the smartass humor of Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg, but Porter's songs often bite a little harder, his lyrics closer to how people talk, instead of always just building toward a funny rhyme. Like those of the great George M. Cohan, Porter's lyrics sound like they could actually come out of the mouths of the characters. If his songs can often be transplanted from one show to another, that's only because many of his shows were about the same kind of people -- smartass, subversive, sexual, clever, ironic, complicated, and contradictory. Just think for a second about all the characters in Anything Goes that have contradictory impulses. Porter wrote both in contemporary slang and in genuinely elevated, powerfully poetic language when the moment called for it. His songs can be emotionally shattering and they can be icily cynical, about the most intimate insecurities or the most macro satire. Porter and his co-writers were writing old-school musical comedy, but they were also chronicling our times -- then and now -- most insightfully. It's so much fun working on this rich, crazy material. Long Live the Musical! Scott from The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre http://newlinetheatre.blogspot.com/2018/01/ive-been-sinner-ive-been-scamp.html

[caveartfair]

Alex Da Corte Gives Slim Shady an Art-World Comeback

Alex Da Corte, Bad Land, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

It’s the morning after Alex Da Corte unveiled his new exhibition, “Bad Land,” at Josh Lilley, London. There is an amiable but difficult conversation going on about neighbors disturbed by the opening night. But inside the gallery there is no sign of chaos. Like all of Da Corte’s work, “Bad Land” is a display of technical and aesthetic perfection; wisps of odorless, atmospheric smoke fill the air, the colours are popping, the neon glows seductively, ambient sounds embrace you, and thick, plush carpets, smelling like a showhome, take you down the stairs.

The exhibition is a continuation of Da Corte’s fascination with Marshall Bruce Mathers III, a.k.a. Eminem, a.k.a Slim Shady. On opening night, several Eminem-as-Slim impersonators showed up, as part of an anti-performance (inspired by a crowd of faux Slim Shadys that Da Corte saw back in 2000, as they were on their way to swarm Radio City Music Hall for the rapper’s iconic performance at the MTV VMAs).

Alex Da Corte, Bad Land, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

Alex Da Corte, Bad Land, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

The artist first began impersonating Eminem in his work after another chance encounter: A friend sent him a picture of the rapper at the Louvre, thinking that it was Da Corte. It got him thinking about the human figure beneath the stage character, Eminem’s violent, misogynistic, alter ego Slim Shady, and how he might be able to empathize with a person he felt so totally politically opposed to.

Eager to identify with his lookalike, Da Corte began, as he does in his sculptural works, with the surface: the clothes, hair, and mannerisms. He already closely resembled the rapper, albeit a taller, slighter, brunette version. In previous exhibitions at Wake in Detroit and Joe Sheftel in New York, this exploration manifested as a psychological study of the contemporary American icon, an imagining of Eminem as vulnerable and flawed, outcast and misunderstood.

A key example of this work the 2013 video in which Da Corte, impersonating Eminem, locks eyes with the camera while eating a bowl of cereal. The work is influenced by Jørgen Leth’s video portrait, Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger, from the 1982 film 66 Scenes from America. As Da Corte explained in a panel talk with Leth at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2016, “to watch someone eat is to see someone at their most vulnerable and basic state.”  

Alex Da Corte, Bad Breeze, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

Alex Da Corte, The Breather, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.  

A viewer could easily see Da Corte’s work as cynical, from its delectation in surface and use of familiar objects to pop culture references and kitsch-cool. It’s the kind of Insta-pop that millennials go mad for. But that’s not the artist’s intention. “My work is not cynical at all,” Da Corte tells me when I find him, as it happens, eating pasta in a tiny Italian restaurant near the gallery.

“People think my work is very fast, because the colors are hot, and the images are accessible; it uses the language of advertising,” Da Corte explains. “But it’s really slow; it’s about slowing down.” It is, also, critical: There is a profound criticism of our way of seeing, knee-jerk responses and judgmental attitudes, especially among the privileged classes, to things that are perceived as “bad taste.”

At “Bad Land,” the audience walks through four rooms, arranged as scenes, that the artist conceived as a 3D film, a narrative led by colours and mood. Each room is centered on a series of objects: a giant white Adidas sneaker; a table laden with bong-sculptures fashioned out of Sprite cans; and plastic products we’re used to seeing at the supermarket, like Clorox and marshmallow Fluff, which represent the borders of class and taste. The neon crown that hangs on the wall in the next room is a reference to Pat’s King of Steaks, a famous cheesesteak joint in Philadelphia, which is across the street from a rival establishment that is known for being racist and homophobic. It’s these borders that Da Corte wants to confront. “How can we create empathy when we live in a world of trash?” he asks.

Alex Da Corte, Bad Shoe (In two parts; shoe and tongue), 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

Alex Da Corte, Bad Shoe (In two parts; shoe and tongue), 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

No doubt his own experiences and upbringing have informed this desire to understand difference. Born in New Jersey, Da Corte’s early years were spent in Venezuela, but his family later moved to Pittsburgh (the home of Heinz ketchup) and later the suburbs of Philadelphia. He now lives in the city, which he says is “the best,” but he still has a conflicted relationship with the suburban environment, which is explored in his art. “All of my work is about suburbia,” he offers.

Da Corte’s work is undoubtedly, also, about empathy—about understanding the things that repulse us—but he does it through objects, rather than people. “I’m more comfortable with objects than with people,” he admits. “I’m a loner, not anti-social, but I guess I’m more in my head.”

The only human presence in the exhibition can be seen in the three video works of Da Corte as Eminem. The videos loop on screens installed on the gallery floor, in the corner of each room. In one, Da Corte as Eminem smokes from the bongs that appear on the table, and then convulses with laughter and seems to contort as though being tormented by inner demons—hardly the bravado of a seasoned stoner that usually accompanies the image of a rapstar.

Alex Da Corte, Haymaker, 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

Alex Da Corte, The Gossips (Xreep Shade), 2017. Courtesy of Josh Lilley Gallery.

Not typically a weed smoker himself, Da Corte seems slightly traumatized by the experience of making that video. “It was terrifying,” his studio manager agrees. The last video chapter of the trilogy, in which Da Corte covers himself with mustard, was shot an hour later; you can still see the high lingering in his eyes.

We might never find out who the “real” Slim Shady is, but if we shun everything that isn’t the same as us, Da Corte seems to suggest, we end up living in the madness of times like these.

from Artsy News