Thing 1: RIP Ace.
My earliest record-buying memory goes back to the fall of 1975 and a Phoenix grocery store chain called “Smitty’s Big Town”. Long before Costco, Smitty’s figured out that people might want to buy their groceries, a tennis racket, a toaster, and a bike all in one place; hence, it’s a Big Town. For Sixth Grade Me, that meant one very important thing: Big Town’s small — but magical — record section tucked between the last of the food aisles and the sporting goods. I first saw KISS Alive! rifling through their tiny ROCK section, but I already heard about the record. And certainly the band. The rumors were already circulating at my middle-school (and probably yours, too): were they Satanists? Knights in Service of Satan! Did they even actually play their instruments? And certainly Gene Simmons had a cow’s tongue sewn onto his own. I asked my mom for the album, but she scoffed — maybe because double albums cost more, maybe because she just didn’t want that noise in her house. Her official reply: “You don’t like acid rock, so go put it back and meet me up at the cashier’s.” I said: “OK.”
(Photo credit: Chalkie Davis).
Thing 2: Richard Prince — Early Photography 1977–1987.
I caught Prince’s Gagosian show built around this book last spring in New York. What I love about Prince—pictures or paintings—is how approachable the work feels, which, I know, sounds ridiculous when you consider that thing called appropriation. But that’s the point for me, same as with Warhol and Duchamp: it’s less about how “easy” the work seems (I can do that!) and more about the reaction it provokes. I love watching people grow furious. That energy becomes part of the piece. And being at the gallery and standing in front of these prints really tightened it all up—Prince’s deadpan humor, the re-framing, the way an image shifts when you simply say it’s art. Because it is art, and no…you couldn’t do it.
Thing 3: Scot Southern.
I’m pretty sure I met Scot Sothern’s Work and Scot Sothern The Man at the same time—at his These Days show a handful of years ago—and I’ve been a fan ever since. I love his writing as much as his photography as much as his art. His voice, the imagery, our shared idea of the human condition— it hits me the same way a terrific Bukowski poem or one of Vollmann’s Tenderloin stories or some of Mikailov’s toughest photographs. In fact, I like Scot’s work so much the synaesthesia press will be publishing one of Scot’s short stories in the not-too-distant future.
Thing 4: Sofiya Loriashvili — куряче крило.
куряче крило means “chicken wing”, and the fine folks at Paper Work just published Sofiya Loriashvili’s book in an edition of 100. I didn’t know her work; I did know Boris Mikhailov’s Case History—and the second I saw Paper Work’s advert for Chicken Wing I flashed back to the remaindered art book store near the Pompidou in Paris well over a decade ago. (It’s since closed.) It’s where I pulled a copy of Case History for 10Euros, and it’s been rattling around in my head ever since. Loriashvili isn’t doing Mikhailov, exactly, but his influence is there: the toughness and tenderness of looking straight at a place and its people without flinching, and then letting a small, ordinary moment do the heavy work. Which is a fancy way of saying the photog is limiting their audience. Which is a fancy way of saying Chicken Wing ain’t for everyone—bleeding heads and shootin’ dope and panties bled through—or, in other words, young Ukrainians barely holding their own in their (our) fucked-up world. I’m in for two copies.
Thing 5: Stephen Shore — Early Work.
If I could trade creative lives with anyone, I think it’d be Stephen Shore. I’ll digress: as a kid I watched my mom work her Canon AE-1; as an adult I found my grandpa’s color slides from the late ’40s/early ’50s. So yeah, I’ve always wanted to be a photographer—maybe it was even in my DNA? But I never wanted to be “that guy.” You know. The one with the camera flung around his neck asking people to hold still. Call it imposter syndrome, call it low artistic self-esteem. Call it not wanting to be perceived as creepy. I picked up a camera now and then during the 90’s (mostly then), but I never pushed it. Shore did what I couldn’t; and then, as a young man in the mid-60’s, he walked straight into the peak of Warhol’s Factory. With a camera flung around his neck being that guy. I’d almost sell my soul for that. (Maybe not.) What I love about Early Work is how assured his young eye already is—the quiet strangeness of ordinary life most people miss. It coincides nicely with Prince’s Early Photography: two photogs figuring out what pictures can do—one by re-defining images that already exist, the other by noticing the world most of us miss.
Regarding the Prince photos being “easy”. The great poet William Stafford once read some poems to a student audience. A student shouted out “that poem is so simple I could have written it. ”
Stafford replied “But you didn’t. “