Kia Boys

“It is the city which should be judged though we, its children, must pay the price.”

 – Lawrence Durrell. Justine.

“We should admit that our world is dying and we should love that. We should not expect anything for ourselves from this engagement in favor of such a hostile future. It must be a pure engagement. If we apprehend such high art, such “ars moriendi,” then the terror of current times will become an “adventure”: the experience of the beautiful. And curiously, we may thus live again.”

 – Vilém Flusser. Post-History.

Cover Art: RTM lilsixx - high speed music (official audio)-320

15.

Alexandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) is composed of a single shot that floats through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, following an unnamed first-person narrator and a character who stands in for the Marquis de Custin, both transposed out of time—our narrator from the present of 2002, and the Marquis from the nineteenth century, when he penned his La Russie en 1839. As the camera moves through the museum, time shifts with it, as we see the building transition from housing the tsars and tsarinas of centuries past, as well as their art, into a contemporary where powerful oligarchs walk its halls alongside the common public.

In one telling moment, the Marquis accosts a well-dressed teenage boy in the present of the early 2000s, who stands admiring El Greco’s Saint Peter and Paul (1590-1600) without any idea as to who painted the work, or who its subjects are. If the film were set a decade or two later, one could imagine the teenager wearing Gosha and Vetements instead of his stiff black coat, redolent of the decade immediately following Glasnost. Earlier, the Marquis had asked the oligarchs, “Are you interested in beauty or its representation?” But now, to the youth he asks, “Do you know that those are the apostles”, to which he replies, “I was looking at them because it gives me joy. One day, all men will become like them.”

14.

Amir did another bump in the back row of the theater and thought about how novel it was. The first time he had this thought was during a screening of Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950). Ketamine wouldn’t be synthesized for another 12 years after the film’s making, meaning that few, if any, had the bodily experience that he was having. He felt so special. People always forget about how cinema is an embodied experience, he thought while sinking deeper into his chair, drifting back into a time where he stared at an El Greco, attempting to look past the physical reality of the painting itself and “into” the questions of why it was there, why it deserved this premier status. The Holy Family with Mary Magdalene stared back. 

It had been a single piece on loan to a local art institute advertised as an entire exhibition. He couldn’t make sense of it at a time when “going to the art museum” had become a euphemism for dropping acid — there was safety in the quiet and the white walls, you were just another teenager with their headphones plugged in, who didn’t have to say anything to anybody. A$AP Rocky playing. That made sense. RIP Yams. Chief Keef and Lil Uzi Vert modeled a much higher threshold of fame, adoration, and understanding for the average youth than the painters of eons past; he was bringing them into the museum with him. Soon after, institutions would accommodate popular culture on their terms: the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s Virgil Abloh: “Figures of Speech” and the Brooklyn Museum’s KAWS: WHAT PARTY being indicative exhibitions of recent years.

He takes another bump, now there’s a ball in the museum, but it isn’t even a museum yet, they’ve drifted further back into the past. Today they call them Galas. The MET. Urbit Week. Whatever. He was still stuck on the El Greco and the space of the Museum, stuck in his past. The present was much less interesting, arguments about politics, another cycle of crisis. Barry Schwabsky in The Nation:

This shift in the sense of what art should be may represent a passing generational blip or, quite the contrary, a sea change of the sort that has not been seen for a couple of centuries. And it poses a considerable challenge for museums, which can no longer present themselves as neutral arbiters of the world’s wealth of visual forms.

Museums were a 20th-century institution, at least the ones open to the public. Of course they were in crisis. The ball had been happening for an eternity before the camera finally drifted to an open doorway, then out into the Russian winter. The credits started to roll. He opened his phone, and went to the bathroom, and then cut a line. Time to get up.  

13.

Last Night's Dream (06.01.22) (Embed)

INT. KGB BAR. Upstairs. Red Room. Somebody playing the Piano. The camera moves into a group mid-conversation.

AMIR

—the Saint Peter and Paul at the Hermitage wasn’t El Greco’s only painting of the two apostles; it was a theme to which he frequently returned. The iterative nature of the artist’s practice mirrors strategies of the emergent NFT space where individual works might riff on a single theme or idea, but exist unto themselves. Naturally, unlike cryptoart images “stored” on the blockchain, paintings belong to our physical world, a condition exemplified in the recent saga of Salvador Mundi, savior of the world. After the Leonardo or Leonardeschi’s original was re-discovered after long being thought lost, it was purchased at auction by Prince Badr bin Abdullah of the UAE for a then-record sum of 450.3 million USD. The Prince had allegedly acquired the work for Abu Dhabi's Department of Culture and Tourism, to be showcased in the Louvre Abu Dhabi, plans which never came to fruition. Following the purchase, rumors began to swirl that bin Abdullah may have been a stand-in for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and that the work was being stored on one of bin Salman’s yachts awaiting exhibition at a yet-to-be-completed Saudi cultural center.  It has also been said to be housed in a freeport in Switzerland. The work lives not in a museum, but in limbo, its image ubiquitous yet its physicality belonging to one individual. [Public-private, how does this relate to blockchain registry, transparency]  yet a blockchain registry art does not suggest the answers either. In his recent book Prophetic Culture, Italian philosopher Federico Campagna writes—  

CUT TO BLACK. Title Cards Come in. Like Cocteau meets Tony Cokes:

​​Delicate electronic hardware degrades fast, and its maintenance proves impossible without today’s hyper-complex system of extraction and supply. Digital content corrupts even faster, dragging out of existence the possibility that any echoes might remain of the world from which it sprung. When the material conditions keeping its hardware operative will have collapsed, the digital archives to which this civilization has entrusted its cultural legacy will also vanish. As soon as the storages of contemporary culture will be deprived of a seamless supply of rare metals, electricity and skilled labor-force, they will become inaccessible once and for all – as absent as if they had never existed. More fragile than the papyri of the ancient world, the immense wealth of digitized culture hangs to a thread, depending for its survival on the continuation of the techno-economic settings of this civilization. The treasure of this society, obsessed with data, will be the first victim of annihilation, once its historical body will have exhaled its last breath.

INT. Guggenheim Bilbao. A camera floating through Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time. A group of schoolchildren running through it but there’s no diegetic sound.  

VOICEOVER

Returning to the oft-derided Abloh and KAWS exhibitions is a reminder of how their work extends far beyond the boundaries of the art preservation industrial complex, into the homes of people who have purchased OFF-WHITE clothing and rugs and plastic KAWS figurines, plastic which may very well end up decomposing slower than anything else in a post-human world. The end of time(s) recalls Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, as well as many other steel sculptures which also should survive longer than the vulnerable facture of the output of the 1500s,  such as Salvador Mundi. Looking beyond the thousands of years into the range of millions of years, Ben Rivers’s I Know Where I’m Going (2009) — a film at one point watchable on Youtube that has now been relegated to Mega folders, torrent groups, and rentals from and for art institutions — features a voiceover from a scientist who believes the extinction of the human race is not a question to be answered over the course of the next few centuries; instead, he is concerned with its traces in the strata of the earth, whether human civilization and its impacts will mark themselves in geological time to be discovered as fossils for future researchers.

The camera eventually moves in on someone scrolling their phone in the shadows of the sculpture.  

12.

Campagna views our present moment as one of learning how to “die well.” The way in which he suggests doing so is through the urgent creation of works of “traditional” culture, which opens up the opportunity to lie, to create whatever minute scraps may survive past our time, which will then inform the cosmogonies of those that discover them in some capacity. In January, HOUSING Gallery exhibited Faith Icecold’s Beetlejuice, a show whose works spanned ceramic tiles painted to depict infrared hurricanes and angel numbers, textiles with embroideries of Coltrane’s music theories, and pyrophytes are plants which have adapted to tolerate fire, a sculpture whose title refers to the conflagrations of climate change to come, evoking apocalypse while using traditional materials: beeswax, eucalyptus oil, wick, flame, water, magick, and dried lavender in addition to the glazed ceramic.

In an interview with EVGrieve, a blog mostly known for documenting the gentrification of Lower Manhattan, Icecold describes their practice as being “about making diss tracks to help myself feel better under global anti-Blackness.” They go on to remark that most people forget new art movements get their start as diss tracks,  For Icecold, the only original works of art are cave paintings and craft objects made by Black people; everything produced since is a matter of “remixing,” especially today as. “non-degree,” or non-academic “Black art determines the flow of all art movements globally.” Icecold invents within the dictates of this flow through what Campagna calls “Worlding”:  [quote Campagna on this or remind us again - did not sink in enough in big block quote] Rather than exploit Blackness, as the traditional culture at hand, for its material realities, eschewing exploitation as materiality creating a show of work “without rendering Black bodies for non-Black consumption, or using the poor Black experience as materiality, or using Black suffering as materiality, or using [their] family as materiality”. Icecold writes a World apart from our present iteration where the effects of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism echo through the traumas of our present, substituting “the existing narrative of ‘time’ and ‘world’ with a redeemed version that never was and shall never be.”^[1] 5 star show like frfr you have to go. Pull up nowww we finna get busy.

– Roberta Smith

11.

Now the city is falling apart…it may be too late…Stuck somewhere in a casualty ward in a hospital called Redevelopment. And the notice on the wall says: “Sacrifice a piece of the past for the whole of the future.”

Reece Auguiste’s Twilight City (1989) documents a London in its infant stages of gentrification, blending readings of letters from an unnamed narrator to her mother in Dominica with shots of the city’s streets, documentary footage of the city’s rubble following the Blitz during World War 2, and talking head-style interviews with cultural theorists and academics including Paul Gilroy and Homi K. Bhabha. One of many impactful works that emerged out of the Black Audio Film Collective movement of the 80s and 90s, its soundtrack, designed by Trevor Mathison, evokes Hype Williams’s Gucci Streams 2 and recalls the chant Dean Blunt led at a 2016 Babyfather concert that eventually became the title for a bootleg compilation of tracks: No More Parties in E8. My favorite track off of the tape was DBArca1, which reworks Jagged Edge’s Walked Outta Heaven with Arca crooning in Spanish, but I could never place the sample until it was sampled again, this time in ‘Dolls Till Die’ – a song by Shiznitty and BeastBoyBPD, two members of the NYC collective ‘Burn All Sex Dolls’, that can best be described as Deftones meets Drill. But I spent the most time with the opening track, as long as ropes unravel fake rolexes will travel, looping it through various moments of life, but now it reminds me:

“The Chinese without ever assimilating Western customs, have become a very Western custom with their Chinatowns. How conditions of the land, the disposition of the people, and the experiences they encounter over the course of their evolution (war or peace, famine, plague, prosperity...) create such varied human organisms! When there is hardly anything in common, with such varied ways of being human, the strange production of cohabitation can seem like inter-galactic encounters.

What is between the Financial District and Soho is a veritable zone of the third world which has been uprooted by some economic wind and dropped here, where it keeps on happening and adapting in its crazy new climate. They rightfully sell us faulty electronics, colorful plastic knick- knacks and fake designer items instead of live pigs and chickens, but how implacably indifferent they are to us! It's an unbeatable ambiance that seasons the already tasty flavors of shark fin soup, roasted duck, crab in black bean sauce, and whatever else is on the menu. The Chinese don't care: they fort out loud in public. It's not gross or rude or funny.” — Reena Spaulings

“As for the order under which we lived, everyone knew what it was: Empire was staring you in the face. That a dying social system had no other justification for its arbitrary nature but its absurd determination - its senile determination - to simply last. That the world police had been given a free hand to take care of anyone who didn't walk straight. That civilization, wounded in its heart, no longer encountered anything in this endless war but its own limits. That this headlong race, already a hundred years old, had produced nothing but a series of more and more frequent disasters. That the human masses had grown used to this order of things, with lies, cynicism, exhaustion or drugs, no one could pretend to ignore it.” — Reena Spaulings

“As a child, PKD was haunted by a recurrent dream of being in a large bookshop looking for an old sci-fi story titled The Empire Never Ended, but was never able to find it. Eventually it came for him, he found him self living in it.” — Jonathan Ratcliffe. Divine Invasions. Sûm Journal #17: meta-futures

“The London you left behind is disappearing perhaps forever, and I don’t know if you will want to return to the new one.” — Reece Auguiste. Twilight City.