The spectacle Joseph Beuys pulled off in Frankfurt was pure, uncut confrontation dressed up in mystical horseshit, and that’s exactly why it mattered. You walk into that theater in ’69, Europe’s still got the psychic stench of the war clinging to everything like cigarette smoke in an underground bar, and there’s this German shaman motherfucker […]
Continue Reading →There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself. Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn […]
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The real work happens in the stuff everybody else is throwing out. That’s it. That’s the whole goddamn secret. Most people file that stuff under “ignore and move on.” They’re right to do that, if they want to stay functional, keep their jobs, not alienate their friends. But if I’m trying to make something that […]
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This burly son of a bitch with hands like a steelworker’s is down on his knees in some Parisian apartment in 1926, making cork-headed wire dolls dance for Duchamp and Mondrian, and somehow that’s not the punchline. That’s the actual art. He’s got corks for heads, clothes pegs for performers, scraps of yarn, basically whatever’s […]
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I watch people. I mean I really watch them. The way you move through a door when someone’s behind you, the little apologetic shoulder-hunch you do when you’re taking up space, the whole elaborate dance of who-goes-first at the intersection. These tiny rituals that nobody talks about but everybody performs like their life depends on […]
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What went down 50 years ago at the Château de Ferrières on December 12, 1972 wasn’t just some party. It was the kind of decadent, surreal fever dream that makes you question whether you’ve been living wrong your entire life or whether these people had simply lost the plot so completely that they’d achieved some […]
Continue Reading →What we have here is a middle finger in epistolary form, three guys in 1943 Brooklyn, broke as hell probably, telling some poor bastard at the Times that his confusion is the whole goddamn point. And they’re right, which makes it even more dangerous. This isn’t a manifesto, it’s a divorce […]
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