December 31, 2011
October 19, 2011
New, Better Banalities. Occupy Wall Street.
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I drove back to New York from North Carolina on my birthday weekend to stand with a sign in Zucotti Park. Its symbolic power-of-place alone was enough to get me there and over any aesthetic or philosophical misgivings I might have with Leftist trope, which was definitely laid on pretty thick. But, hey, this is important… Hopefully, something that will crystallize into a popular critique of financial power roughly analogous to the 17th- and 18th-century critiques of political and religious power; critiques that sparked what some historians call the Bourgeois Revolutions— the English, French, and American. For it to be really effective though, it must be popularly understood; capable of strong, perfect platitudes. Platitudes that rightly delegitimize the “earnings” of billionaires as a latter-day form of divine right. Platitudes that understand money as a form of power; rather than as tokens given out for good behavior. Platitudes that understand taxes not as prices or fees but as an active counterbalance to the overconsolidation of financial power.
September 5, 2011
June 27, 2011
May 2, 2011
March 14, 2011
March 12, 2011
Down on the Bikini Line
Down on the Bikini Line from Brandon Joyce on Vimeo.
Friends, here’s a little commercial I did for and with my friend Jonny Corndawg (with cameo appearances by Billy Grant) to help raise some cash-moneys for his new album, Down on the Bikini Line, on his kickstarter page…. I think that narrative works best when we cull inspiration from our daily experiences.
March 6, 2011
Philosophical Research Group: “On Cellphones.”
Brandon Joyce writes:
I have long hungered after a Philosophical Research Group on Cellphones… and for obvious reasons: that topic is dripping rich; almost too rich for a single session. But, finally— whew— we made the attempt in my new Brooklyn homebase, with hot chocolate and some deliciously effective Nescafé Clásico; stoking our fires literally and metaphorically. What I’ll try to do, as far as a wrap-up, is offer a dense little introduction; then the minutes massaged into a somewhat readable form that runs from the science-fictional to the slightly more humanistic. I warn you though: it’s a doozy.
October 18, 2010
October 17, 2010
October 11, 2010
June 29, 2010
Mutant Pop and the Living Image: August 20th, Malmö, Sweden.
JOE GRILLO SOLO EXHIBITION
MUTANT POP GROUP EXHIBITION curated by DEARRAINDROP and BRANDON JOYCE
AUGUST 20 – SEPTEMBER 20, 2010
OPENING FRIDAY AUGUST 20, 6-9 pm, Malmo, Sweden.
| Pedro Bell Brian Belott Mat Brinkman Jes Brinch Melissa Brown Larry Carlson Brian Chippendale Andy Coolquitt Joachim Cossais Sally Cruikshank Christian Cummings Ronnie Cutrone Dearraindrop Trenton Doyle-Hancock |
Jim Drain Viking Eggeling Erró Yamantaka Eye Öyvind Fahlström Devin Flynn Ian Flynn Leif Goldberg Billy Grant Laura Grant Joe Grillo Alika Herreshoff Marianne Hurum Todd James |
Lisa Jonasson Matti Kallioinen Misaki Kawai Kaws LoVid Cary Loren Jason McLean Taylor McKimens Are Mokkelbost Stanley Mouse Eduardo Paolozzi Gary Panter Erik Parker Peter Phillips |
Annie Pootoogook Steve Powers Ron Rege Jr. Prophet Royal Robertson Kalle Runeson Peter Saul Kenny Scharf Jocelyn Shipley Kjartan Slettemark Vu Thi Trang Karl Wirsum Yuichi Yokoyama and more… |
“The Image has a life of its own. A very real and insolent autonomy. There are images— and entire symbologies— that are as real and weird as our own mothers and fathers. They are not just copies of the world; but squiggly, faithful parts of the whole. A daimonic, demonic influence.
The image, the symbol, the icon— and the whole plane of pop-mythos— have power, dignity, and even a biology of sorts. Cartoons, afterall, have cells. Scrawls and sketches serve as little anatomies and dissections of the living image. And like human and animal life, the image can even experience a kind of image-death. Or an afterlife; a creepy kind of undeath as zombie symbols, afterimages, or free-floating spiritual beings.
Mutant Pop occurs whenever these symbols and symbologies outgrow their sources. When they take root and incubate in impressionable minds. When they turn weird and grow tails and even get worked into a full-blown mythos at the hands of the giddy. Happy, harmless spokes-things assume self-consciousness. Fleeting-or-forgotten cultural moments, like Max Headroom, like Count Duckula, like O.J. Simpson, live on and haunt us through an infectious and hysterical freak culture. And the life-feeling within these images will, at times, even take on mystic or animistic dimensions; as a way of seeing God in the television, so to speak. A new, though somewhat noisier, mythos.
For this, the inaugural show of LOYAL gallery’s new harborside space in Malmö, Sweden, we’ve gathered up fifty-some artists under the heading of Mutant Pop— many of them great influences on Dearraindrop— to display a sort of visual genealogy between older Pop-masters and their newer mutant progeny. Offered as more than just innocent fun or frivolity, this exhibition will underscore the very deep commitment to meaning-making running within the Pop-sensibility.
This is the premise; this is the show. Both of which will be wrapped up beautifully in a full-color book by the people at Loyal, and distributed as gospel among guardians of the Living Image.
Brandon Joyce, Philadelphia, PA”
(For those unable to attend, the book will also have a long essay of mine entitled Mutant Pop and the Living Image; which might get a few of you going. I’ll post ordering info as soon as I can…)
June 22, 2010
Nomad Monads
May 31st/ Graham Kolbeins and I walked the entire length of Santa Monica Boulevard in Total Silence/ Sunset to Sunrise/ Neither Introspection nor Conversation/ Purely the faculties of Perception/ Memory stretched tight over the length of the Boulevard/ Inaugurates a new era for Nightwalking in Los Angeles.
April 14, 2010
Ut translatio Natura: the Museum of Jurassic Technology
April 7, 2010
Footnotes.
1. The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Ut translatio Natura.
2. Clifton’s Cafeteria. Lynchian downtown oasis with questionable cuisine yet enveloping phantasmagoria. Author’s new office. See also: Coleman’s Nursery.
3. Chicha, an alcohol made from fermented corn, popular in Andean regions.
February 24, 2010
A rhapsode, at home in the Seven Cities.
I’ve grown fond lately of learning verse by heart. More often verse of a certain turn: that of the ecstatic. To chew up lines in your head, whisper them to yourself at night with your eyes closed, wildly mishandle their meanings— this is a true pleasure. Any poetic mood can be rewarding. Exacting bitterness, clean Apollonianisms, overblown panegyrics. It’s the ecstatic that expresses me though. For me, the ecstatic is an ultimate.
February 18, 2010
The New Weird
A dirge from the Lawrence Welk Show.
The Lawrence Welk Show is the favorite television program of both myself and my grandmother, but for completely different reasons. What we have here is a case of a single style, embraced by two widely divergent sensibilities. One set of elements apprehended from opposite ends.
February 1, 2010
November 8, 2009
The Dialects of Experience: on Drugs and Madness.
August, 2009. Shawn Kornhauser and I tried our hand at touring, roughly based on the musical model. I lectured. He showed a short film. We followed the tour through the South— Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennesse, and back to Philadelphia, testing the waters in various venues.
I in flight; the Institute, in phase change.
The plaster bust was a welcomed gift from Shawn Kornhauser
Yesterday was Halloween, with sheets of rain. Halloween: what an apt night for the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study to shed its earthly coil; leaving behind the bulk of its brick and mortar and planks and drywall. I sat for a while, in my office— my Studium— for the last evening ever; pondering a plaster bust of myself… Three years, nearly, given over. And yet, I couldn’t find room for sentimentality. I was only thinking in terms of release.