From 2006-2013, I curated what Art in America praised as “…one of the more innovative and quixotic curated art websites in the blogosphere,” Bright Stupid Confetti.
I took the title from a Sylvia Plath poem called “Years” where she writes:
O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
B.S.C. began as a personal blog, but quickly morphed into an art space where I collected and arranged images, writing, videos, and other provocative bits of strangeness I found around the web, as a type of collage.
Over the years, I experimented with other formats: Tumblr for a while, until I found it too restrictive; then Twitter, until troll harassment forced me to close my account.
Toward the end of B.S.C.’s run, I expanded the format to include guest curators and individual essays on artists written by writers.
Over time my interest waned and other responsibilities mounted so I drifted away from the project.
Lately, however, I’ve started feeling the urge to curate stuff again. Since I’m not sure I want to revive B.S.C., I figured why not share with the Entropy readers a slice of my head’s miscellany, to see how it goes over in this context.
So, without further ado…here goes…
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The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.
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Awol Erizku
“New Flower: Images of the Reclining Venus”
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“what we see is determined to a large extent by what we hear”
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DOOMSDAY STUDENT “Disappearing”
from the album “A Walk Through Hysteria Part“
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Queer heterotopias are sites of empowerment. They always exist in relation to heteronormative spaces and are shaped by them. Queer heterotopias exist in opposition to heteronormative spaces and are spaces where individuals seek to disrupt heterosexist discourses. They are sites where actors, whether academics or activists, engage in what we might call a radical politics of subversion, where individuals attempt to dislocate the normative configurations of sex, gender, and sexuality through daily exploration and experimentation with crafting a queer identity.
“Queer Heterotopias: Homonormativity and the Future of Queerness”
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[Experiência espacial] [medida meteorológica] (2014)
vídeo de júlia milward e mateus andrade
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a savage melody airily repeating pinto pinto pinto
until he never fades in a demon-packed world
until he orders me about with the chicken essence
of a medium beheading a rooster & smearing
its blood on his seropositive body
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COSMIC ASS – Marilou Poncin / Fannie Sosa
“This Radical Thesis On Twerking Will Change Your Whole Outlook On Life…”
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Weird things happen, but it turns out they’re not real.
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In the end, it turns out it was all a dream.
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In the end, it turns out it was all in virtual reality.
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In the end, it turns out the protagonist is insane.
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In the end, it turns out the protagonist is writing a novel and the events we’ve seen are part of the novel.
“Stories We’ve Seen Too Often”
By the editors of Strange Horizons
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How much did it—I wanna backtrack a little bit. You guys said that you don’t read for meaning, right? What do you mean by that?
I do. But it’s, I question it once I get there. What I meant by that was, I don’t, I don’t read necessarily, um, looking for one simple meaning, or “These poems are about trains,” you know? Nothing like that. Um, I, I read, I’m looking kind of for what’s, you know, maybe I’ll get literally what’s happening, but maybe it’ll be more of a, like an emotional thing, or, or, something like that. And that’s what—I started reading this and I wasn’t, I mean I definitely—my first reading of it, you know, um, I didn’t feel clear on specifics but I was picking up on—I was just paying attention to the imagery and trying to feel what that was maybe, um, you know, just trying to feel what that was supposed to make me feel, or what I thought that was supposed to make me feel.
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“I communed with my darkness, and read.”
on Butoh dancer Moe Yamamoto’s notebook
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Online Symposium: “Teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen”
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“I Am Not a Feminist, But…”: How Feminism Became the F-Word”
Toril Moi
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“AI is the defining industrial and technical paradigm of the remainder of our lifetimes. You are, I am, we are all bound up and implicated in the future of artificial intelligence.”
“Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence”
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POEMS INSPIRED BY BERNADETTE MAYER
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Performed by loadbang ensemble, “A Baby Bigger Grows Than Up Was” is an alphabetized story by the Baltimore-based writer Michael Kimball, that has been set in its entirety by composer David Smooke. Video by Margaret Rorison.
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“Chaos isn’t the absence of a pattern; it’s a pattern too complex to discern.”
“Chaos Theory: The Glorious Unpredictability of Young Thug”
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Christian Wolff 1/4″ Tape Archive 1966-1980
via The Bregman Studios and Labs at Dartmouth College
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“To think that painting has some inherent optical nature is ridiculous.”
Robert Morris “Anti-Form” (1993)
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“Petals” – Basenji feat. Scenic
Directed by Chester Buchanan
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If the concept of the artwork as an ontologically distinct category emerges only in the immediate aftermath of the Kantian separation of aesthetic judgment from judgments of the good or the agreeable, a separation that is in turn conditioned by the coercive power of the state and of the market — a double thesis that would take more than a digression to establish — then art in this sense does not pre-exist capitalism and will certainly not survive it, but rather presents an unemphatic alterity to it: art is not the before or after of capitalism, but its determinate other.
Art after Art after Art
Nicholas Brown
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Haruomi Hosono – Philharmony (1982)
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Q: What is the “post-genre approach?”
A: A thing becomes boring when it doesn’t do anything. Or maybe it’s not just that it doesn’t do anything but that what it does is so expected, so much already done. So I like a thing when it does something that I didn’t know it was going to do. Like using a hammer to arrange flowers and calling the hammer “scissors.” What do those flowers look like?
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My fundamental thought, therefore, is that the ontology I associate with de Kooning is, let me say it, a true ontology—one that reminds us of how being in the world always has been and always will be—while the Mondrian-esque style has to be seen as thematising a certain stance in the flow of becoming, a particular tactic of being in that flow which resists a recognition of the flow by attempting to step outside it, and which can be associated with dualist projects of domination of matter and the denial of time. And a general point I want to make here is that we have been dazzled by Mondrian. Instead of seeing dualist detachment and domination as a move, a tactic, a ploy, a very specific way of living, in the flow of becoming, we tend to mistake it for the world itself.
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Anthony Braxton – Alto Saxophone Improvisations (1979)
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If music and the visual arts have their own “noise makers” – Rothko, Stockhausen, even hardcore music’s Gallows -, then what does poetry have? Is there an equivalent – has poetry ever done “noise”? Is it even achievable and, if so, what would it look like?
“Poetry as Discord? Lessons from Noise Music”
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What are our present rhythms?
What kind of radical new subjectivity can we reveal?
Can we have some third term beyond objectivity and subjectivity?
“Notes on The Innovative Lyric”
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EN: So when critics try to read significance into your work, parsing it for symbolism and allegory, that’s really beside the point?
JS: My work is about seeing. Ultimately, it’s about a way of looking at the world. I’m just painting what I’m seeing; I’m just trying to connect the dots of my own vision. Every time I stumble across something that’s worth a look, it stops me in my tracks.
“Julian Schnabel on Why Making Art Is Freedom”
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Dada/Surrealism is an interdisciplinary journal publishing critical essays, bibliographies, book reviews, and primary documents on the Dada and Surrealist movements.
Number 20 (2015) From Dada to Infra-noir: Dada, Surrealism, and Romania
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Hedda Sterne, Antro II, (1949), Oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 51 in
10 Female Abstract Expressionists You Should Know
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The narrative classical conceptualism is anchored on has sought almost to a dogmatic degree the presentation of the void—the ultimate (non-)referent of the monochrome, from Kazimir Malevich to Ad Reinhardt, from Aleksandr Rodchenko to Chabet—as an emptying gesture that redirects attention from the object to its social env’t.
“Materializing Free Time: Notes toward a New Constructivism”
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Here’s my question for the world: How do we begin to discuss race and gender with people (from a very young age and into adulthood) in a way that allows them to self-reflect, understand themselves, understand themselves in relation to other people, and understand other people’s experiences?
Navigating boundaries as a biracial agender person.”
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The times I’ve tried to make a baby with a person that I loved we either couldn’t or I changed my mind somewhere along the way. It’s not your business when that was or who was buried. A person is a person is a person is a person and that includes you and that includes me and you can’t stop where we are now. Which is where again? Which is where again. There is so much of me to touch and so much space.
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You should read Harmonium no
my malice speaks in amulets jade mostly
static under the states at the bar Florida body
kings tell me what to read or mostly fuck off
in breezy khakis
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Lynn Harrell plays Anton Webern’s “Drei kleine Stucke” (Three little pieces), Op. 11
Live at the Eli & Edythe Broad Stage, Santa Monica California (2010)
