“Trismegistus” 2012, oil on canvas over board (in three parts), 49.375 x 49.625 inches.
I’m very excited to be participating in a group show opening Saturday, November 21st at the newly opened Stout Projects in Brooklyn, NY. This will be their second exhibition and I am in incredibly good company with the likes of Karen Baumeister, Jonathan Cowan and Debra Ramsay. The exhibition opens Saturday, November 21st from 2-4 pm and will run until December 20th. There will be an artist talk on Saturday, December 19th at 2 pm.
Jannis Kounellis “Untitled (12 Horses)” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, June 2015.
I first came across Kounellis’ work while I was in Art School in the mid 90’s and it profoundly changed the way I thought about both material and context. There is an elegant simplicity to much of his work that makes what is incredibly straightforward also increasingly more complex, loaded, and mysterious. I am still inspired by many of his works, long after first discovering them, and in all truth I’d never really even considered I might see this particular work in person, but here we are…
I’d heard GBE was moving up to Harlem, but didn’t pay too much attention to dates or other particulars, until I found out that for the farewell to the space they were mounting a very short run of Kounellis’ iconic Untitled (12 Horses) from 1969. I’d also heard about a growing line to get in on Friday, so knowing that Saturday was the last chance, my wife and I made sure to show up early. We saw the empty space getting prepped before the horses arrived, watched as the other curious parties started to show up, and then watched as the artwork arrived. All neatly packed into a trailer. The grooms walked them into the gallery in twos, and afterwards the staff tried to corral the growing crowd into some semblance of order, which was met with far more resistance to very simple instructions about lining up than should be necessary for a group comprised mostly of adults. They had a second line for people with small children, which was really smart, as nobody would have wanted to be stuck in line with a child that was melting down. We stood in line for probably just under an hour before getting in. I’d basically already waited 20 years to see this work of art, an experience that I didn’t think would ever actually happen, so an hour was not terribly relevant at this juncture.
Visual Art, as we have come to call it, is a terribly incomprehensive description of how we understand and navigate the useless things and ideas we place into the space of this world. While we are heavily reliant upon our sight, we don’t often take note of how our other faculties play into “reading” our surroundings. The power of smell to drag memories deep out of one’s consciousness, the scale of a physical relation, the sounds of urban life. There is a whole set of kinesthetic understanding we tend to ignore or overlook regularly. However, when there is something active inside a space, it is charged with a significantly different energy than when you are in a static room. You can feel it with the hairs on your forearms. Your senses are tuned in, even if your head is not. That’s where the power of this particular work resides. That’s the impossible nuance that is created by an artist who understands these things, and is given the opportunity to share this experience with us. This was really something.
Thank you, Jannis Kounellis. Thank you, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Thank you, Cheim and Read. You have created something beautiful, something temporary, something that we cannot take with us.
Posted in Other Blackness on March 18, 2015 by drawingsubscription
I’m very happy to be working with Michael O’Rourke again as well as Daniel Lukes and Radical Matters Editions Label on another Black Metal Theory Symposium being held in Dublin on Friday March 20th. It is titled Coloring the Black and will be live-streamed by RMEDL and can also be watched via youtube:
Info and schedule is as follows:
Organized by Daniel Lukes (USA) and Michael O’Rourke (IRE)
Dublin, Friday 20 March 2015 (venue GalleryX)
Coloring the Black will be a one-day symposium on Black Metal Theory to be held in Dublin on Friday 20th March, 2015. It will be the latest in a very successful series of events which have focused on black metal music, contemporary theory, philosophy, art, aesthetics, and music. The symposium has three primary aims: firstly, to challenge the potentially ponderous and serious nature of black metal theory, secondly, to question the black/white binary which dominates theorizing about black metal music and aesthetics, and thirdly, to foreground diverse, marginal, and intersectional black metal voices, readings, and practices.
It is our sense that Black Metal Theory runs the risk of taking itself far too seriously with the unfortunate result of taking the fun out of talking and thinking about black metal. More worryingly, it may end up establishing a KVLT BMT which would police or limit the potentialities of Black Metal Theory. In response to this we wish to open up the more comedic, playful, camp, ludic, carnivalesque dimension of black metal and black metal theory. In so doing, we set out to “pink” black metal by questioning its more nihilistic impulses (“blackening” and more “blackening”) in favour of more affirmative approaches and utilizations of BMT.
In “pinking” black metal/theory (and we are thinking here of critical and ironic BM-related gestures such as The Soft Pink Truth, Pinkish Black, Zweizz, Deafheaven, not to mention the influence of My Bloody Valentine and “pink noise” on shoegaze, post, or “hipster” black metal) we also hope to queer it by decentering the cisheteronormative and patriarchal underpinnings of both the black metal music and philosophy scenes. We wish to further BMT from a range of feminist, LGBTQ, and intersectional perspectives, including disability studies, crip theory, animal studies, and cute studies. Our interest in a more rainbow approach to black metal would also seek to consider and destabilize the racial normativities of black metal musical and theoretical traditions.
Our second sense is that there has been an almost exclusive attention to black or to black and white (in readings of corpsepaint, or noise for example) which has the effect of instantiating a binary which even a focus on “green” black metal has done little to disturb. In our coloring of the black we wish to open up Black Metal Theory to a broader spectrum beyond the black, a more prismatic and multicoloured BMT. Inspired by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recent collection of essays Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green (which includes essays by two contributors to black metal theoretical discourse in Ben Woodard and Timothy Morton) we hope to widen out the color spectrum of BMT to red, blue, pink, orange, green, gold, brown, violet, ultraviolet, grey and others.
Coloring the Black will bring theorists, philosophers, artists, musicians, and aestheticians together to have a black metal party.
Participants: Andy Curtis-Brignell, Vincent Como, Laina Dawes, Caoimhe Doyle, Drew Daniel, Daniel Lukes, Jonathan Mayhew, David Murphy, Darragh Ó Conchobhair, Ian O’Rourke, Michael O’Rourke, Stanimir Panayatov, Christophe Szpajdel, Dara Waldron.
12.00-12.20 Daniel Lukes + Michael O’Rourke, “Introduction”
12.20-12.30 Jonathan Mayhew, “Blink”
12.30-12.50 Dara Waldron, “Model Environments and Reality for Itself: Russell and Rivers’ A Spell To Ward Off the Darkness (2013)”
12.50-13.10 Christophe Szpajdel, “Title tbc”
13.10-13.30 Q + A
13.30.14.30 LUNCH
14.30-14.50 David Murphy, “The Aggressive Ludic Welcome of the Serbian Black Metal Scene”
14.50-15.10 Laina Dawes, “Listening to Difficult Music: Navigating Racial Identity Within the Black Metal Scene”
15.10-15.30 Vincent Como, “Devotion Has a Price”
15.30-15.50 Ian O’Rourke “’Black Was Never My Colour’”
15.50-16.10 Q + A
16.10-16.30 BREAK
16.30-16.50 Daniel Lukes, “Pink Black Metal”
16.50-17.10 Michael O’Rourke, “Pink, Punk, Pussy”
17.10-17.30 Stanimir Panayatov, “Sad Rainbows”
17.30-17.40 Drew Daniel, “Putting the Fag Back in Sarcofago”
17.40-18.00 Q + A
18.00-18.30 BREAK
18.30-18.50 Caoimhe Doyle, “Omphaloskepsis”
18.50-19.10 Andy Curtis-Brignell, “Safe Spaces/Unsafe Sounds: Black Metal’s Political Arms Race”
19.10-19.30 Q + A
19.30-20.00 Darragh Ó Conchobhair interview with Daniel Lukes + Michael O’Rourke
Vincent Como “Procession of Dust (Entropy, Ontology, and the Hubris of Mankind) 002”, 2014, Frame with Dry Pigment and Double Sided Tape. 16 x 20 inches.
For those who demand immediate gratification, we’re very excited to unleash a new ‘Zine project with the Occulting Modernity coloring book. Each one comes with black crayons! only $15 + s/h (domestic only, inquire about international).
**Please note: Paypal is not set up to facilitate multiple copies in a single shipment, but we’re more than happy to generate a specific invoice for that, just contact the studio: studio(at)vincentcomo(dot)com
Vincent Como “The Temptation To Exist 002” 2013, Acrylic on Canvas with Wooden Shelf
I’m very excited to be participating in the exhibition: The Heroic Object at Parallel Art Space opening Saturday April 5th and running through May 11.
The exhibition will be comprised of “A collection of works from Vincent Como, Joshua Johnson, Peter Lapsley, Raymond E. Mingst, Russell Perkins, Kara L. Rooney, Magdalen Wong, and Frank Zadlo that hone in on the art object, traversing realms from the mythic to the prosaic, deploying, by turns, allegory, commodity, manifesto, buried gold.”
Vincent Como: 1x12 Drawing Subscription 