Author: Eileen Townsend

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Art Exhibit M

A Die-In at the Brooks Museum

CREDIT: Andrea Morales

Andrea Morales

Memphis Arts Brigade protestors at the Brooks Museum

This past Wednesday, a collective known as The Memphis Arts Brigade staged a die-in at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art during a mayoral candidate meet and greet, hosted by the museum and ArtsMemphis. An hour into the candidate event, a member of the Brigade who was costumed as a police officer grabbed the mic and shouted, “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!” Twenty-four protestors then fell to the ground, covering their bodies with signs bearing the names of each of the 24 people killed by Memphis police in the past five years. 

The protest comes on the heel of local actions surrounding the death of Darrius Stewart, an unarmed 19-year-old Memphis man who was shot and killed by police officer Connor Schilling in July. 

Paul Garner, one of the protest’s organizers, said, “We were at the mixer to use performance and art as a way to direct the conversation to include police accountability and police violence.” Garner also said that reactions to the protest were mixed: “The performance was met with applause, but that faded quickly and people went back to schmoozing. There were people stepping over people to get cheese and crackers. There were some who appreciated the message and others who didn’t understand.” 

A die-in calls for protesters to lie prostrate on the ground as if dead. The form of protest gained popularity during the Iraq war and has recently become one of the most visible symbols of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Brooks Director Emily Neff commented, “Art museums like the Brooks are a great and safe place for conversations to be happening about contemporary social, cultural, and political issues.”

The Memphis Arts Brigade said that, though they don’t usually announce their actions beforehand, they have more protests planned for the near future. 

Memphis Arts Brigade

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News News Feature

A Beginner’s Guide to the WWE.

CREDIT: Ian Harkey

Maybe you are good Southern rasslin’ kin, strong of gait and wild of tongue, versed in all things WWE. Maybe you were raised ringside, held high upon your father’s shoulders as he shouted, “This is a total schmoz! Get those mid-carders out of here!” You are the sort of man or woman who knows The Rock from a rock. A dead man from The Deadman.

If the above is true, stop reading now. This article is meant for those gentler readers who heard that the nation’s largest pro-wrestling franchise (now worth over a billion American smackeroos) will be in town this weekend and thought, “Wrestling? But isn’t that, like, fake and stuff?”

The short answer is yes, wrestling is fake. Vince McMahon, WWE’s ancient but somehow totally ripped CEO, declared it to be fake in 1989 before a New Jersey court, in a successful effort to get the sport deregulated. But to call it fake is to gloss over how much of pro wrestling is real: lives lost, noses broken, careers ruined or made. Sure, the punches are choreographed, but the forces that drive that choreography are a Shakespearean negotiation between gimmicky theatrics, audience participation, and “legit” athleticism. The fights aren’t fake so much as they are actively symbolic of an ever-shifting compromise between public desire and what “the Authority” thinks will make money. You know, like politics.

Ian Harkey

Except wrestling is far more pure than politics. It is about nothing but the celebrity of the wrestlers. The sport does not involve famous people; fame is the sport. Wrestling isn’t about celebrity. It actually is celebrity, inscribed in symbolic physical form. To quote the essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The purity of that!”

For your guidance, here is a brief and randomly selected glossary of professional wrestling lingo.

Ian Harkey

Kayfabe: The pretense that anything in professional wrestling is real. Wrestlers used to have to maintain their beefs in the ring and out of it, but now that we are in the “reality era” of wrestling, what’s really real is communicated as much through reality shows, social media, and podcasts as anything else. Reality proliferates.

Legit: Pro wrestling that is actually real. You could say current superstars Brie and Nikki Bella are “legit twins” rather than make-believe siblings, as is the case with many in-ring alliances.

Babyface: a good guy; someone the crowd is supposed to like. (See: John Cena, the cherubically corn-fed world champion who recently appeared alongside Amy Schumer in Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck.)

The Spanish announcer table: The table that wrestlers most commonly destroy mid-match. It has been broken so many times the WWE calls it “The Spanish announce table Massacre.”

Jobber: A wrestler who routinely loses matches to up-and-coming stars, in order to grow those stars’ credibility. “A jobber to the stars” is sort of a glorified jobber.

Crimson mask: A face covered in blood. A face covered in blood! If someone purposefully bashes their head into barbed wire for greater dramatic effect, is the pain still real? As infamously pain-insensitive wrestler Mick Foley (aka Mankind) once said, “It’s not like I sit at home and miss being hit by chairs. It’s just something I think I do well.”

If you’re going to start somewhere with wrestling, you might as well start with The Undertaker. There is little to no chance that the veteran wrestler — known variously as The Deadman, The Master of Pain, Dice Morgan, The Punisher, American Bad Ass, The Commando and Texas Red — will appear this weekend in Memphis. But he unquestionably has one of the best gimmicks of all time, as a zombified Big Man whose longtime manager was a histrionic ghoul named Paul Bearer (get it?), and who regularly drags opponents into the beyond. His last major appearance was during WWE SummerSlam, where he faced off with Brock Lesnar, wearing eyeliner and shaking with posthumous strength.

Pro-wrestling freshmen, go back and watch The Undertaker fight Jake “The Snake” Roberts (a man whose tortured life is well-documented in the 1999 documentary Beyond the Mat). Then watch him in a Casket match, a Body Bag match, a Buried Alive match, a Rest in Peace match, a Hell in a Cell match, and a Last Ride match. Then, gentle reader, ask yourself: Are we having fun yet?

Categories
Art Art Feature

Talking Punk, Politics, and Pirate Radio with Joshua Short

This past June, San Francisco-bred artist Joshua Short came to Memphis to build a pirate radio station, a task that he describes as combining his two favorite things, “self-defense/reliance” and “sticking it to the man.” Short built the radio station — a mix between a mock-up bomb shelter and truck topper — in the back of Crosstown’s Amurica photo studio. When he wasn’t living inside the station (“I was this kind of weird hobo living in this weird sculpture”), he welcomed local bands in for interviews and concerts.

This month, Short was back in town to complete a mural, also at Amurica. We sat down to talk about his past work, which includes fake plane crashes, off-the-wall installation work, and an ongoing fixation with cars, dinosaurs, and Cold War ephemera. Short, a tall man in his early 40s, had just finished pasting some final pieces of cut paper (“garbage”) to a radial wall of quilted colors. We talked about gender, punk, politics, and Memphis.

Flyer: Do you consider your art to be political?

Joshua Short: I used to be more overtly political. San Francisco has always been kind of a political town, especially for artists. In the early 2000s, street art and doing things in the service of anti-gentrification, and, at the time, anti-war was a huge part of the conversation that artists were having. You’d associate with the movements you aligned yourself with — whether it was being queer or a part of an anti-war movement or a pro-Chicano movement. That’s the school I came from, but at some point, I sort of hit my end with being that overt.

Why?

My art was really reactionary for a long time, and then I kind of got to a point where I was like “I don’t know why I am doing this, actually. Why do I care about this? Is this my fight?” During grad school, I sort of unravelled a lot of that.

I’m a Cold-War kid. I came from this fear. This fear-mongering about there being a great enemy out there. Destruction was imminent. Nuclear war was gonna happen. The other thing was that I had a rough upbringing. I was abused. My mom was abused, and I was raised by a single mom. I had a slew of men in my life, and none of them were good father figures. So I gravitated toward martial arts growing up. There were a couple things that led to that. One was this fear I had, like “Oh, fuck, I gotta learn how to take care of myself. I’ve gotta defend myself.” The other side of that was trying to find a masculine identity that worked for me.

Do you see similarities in your martial arts practice and your art practice?

It is definitely there. I think being a good artist is about discipline, but it is also about endurance. There is a quote that I really enjoy that talks about misery and malcontent and suffering on all human beings, you know? Is this the world we live in? Endurance. The fact that you can endure and you can survive is a true expression of what it means to be human. Being able to get up and take care of yourself and not be dependent on other people or let yourself become dependent on other people.

What about your more recent installation work, your 3-D drawing with string and assembled parts.

I started off drawing, because those were my influences. My friends were all super drawers. We were interested in comics and horror movies and junk like that; underground culture. I do draw a lot, and it is a tool in my tool box. Maybe sometimes things need to be drawings straight up, and sometimes they don’t. I am more interested in making art that does something, that has a life beyond its objectness.

What brought you to Memphis?

I’ve been in San Francisco too long. I get all mad when I am there and I don’t even know why anymore. Coming to Memphis has been really great, because I’ve just felt so loved here. I’m in this place in my life where I want to build a little bat cave. Memphis feels like the kind of place where you can do that.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

To talk about Brokeback Mountain today is to bring up two separate things: Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning epic about forbidden love in the American West, and “gay cowboy movie” memes. It is unfortunate but not surprising that Brokeback Mountain is more memorable for its sound clips (who hasn’t said “I wish I knew how to quit you” to a slice of pizza?) than for its cinematic achievement.

Brokeback Mountain is a movie about gay cowboys, but that’s sort of like saying Titanic is a movie about boating hazards. Brokeback is a love story, told with the simultaneous drama and reserve of Annie Proulx’s original short story. Proulx describes the mountain where Jack and Ennis meet as “boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone.” Lee’s cinematography likewise describes the men’s love through focus on the natural; their entanglement as uncontrollable and unpredictable as a summer hail storm.

Heath Leger as Ennis Del Mar

Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhall, Michelle Williams and Anne Hathaway all brought incredible performances. This is a big reason that Brokeback stands out from the crowd of mid-2000s movies with gay storylines: Transamerica (2005), My Summer of Love (2004), Far From Heaven (2002), and Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006.) All good films with good actors, but none that carried the emotional heat of Ledger’s “Jack, I swear” or Gyllenhall yelling, “This is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation.”

Politically speaking, we can see that Brokeback unquestionably presaged the current visibility and successes of the gay rights movement. But with visibility and political actualization, there is a loss of some specialness, the “otherwise” character of gay life. It is possible to read Brokeback Mountain simultaneously as a break-out moment for gay rights and a movie that said gayness was most palatable from straight-passing, white cowboys.

Jack Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist

Regardless, Brokeback is an incredible film, work of art deserving of the accolades it received. It did something important to undermine Ennis tragic mantra: “If you can’t fix it; you’ve got to stand it.” 10 years on we can say with more honesty than ever before: you do have to stand it, unless you don’t. 

Throwback August: Brokeback Mountain

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Hackers

The internet sucks these days. It really sucks. Did you get to this blog via Facebook? Yes? That is because the internet sucks. Being online in 2015* is like attending a mandatory marketing conference held inside a military boarding school where your only job is to “make content” and “use Helvetica.” 2015 on the internet: fun is dead.

In 1995, Hackers rollerbladed.

But it wasn’t always that way! Join me, if you will, on casual rollerblade ride into the year 1995, when Angelina Jolie and Jonny Lee Miller starred in Hackers. In 1995, the internet was made up of forums, wifi didn’t exist, floppy disks were all important and if someone wanted to steal your personal data they would have to hack into the FBI. Hackers were not scary mouthbreathers who wanted to share your Ashley Madison profile with the world. Hackers (or, should we say, “keyboard cowboys”) were cool and attractive teens whose biggest obstacle in world domination might just be their mom!

The film follows well-adjusted computer genius Dade, i.e. “Crash Override”, as he begins his final year of high school in New York City. There, he meets the elvish Kate, i.e. “Acid Burn” (Angelina Jolie), along with a gang of psychedelic weirdos. Dade hangs with the group of burgeoning hackers at their favorite ravey internet cafe, Cyberdelia, where everyone exchanges top secret tips about how to do illegal things. Let us take a moment to grieve how the internet used to be a social activity, back when phone lines connected the world. Anyway. Trouble starts when the Secret Service begins to target the group for crimes they didn’t commit. From there, it’s a race to the finish: to whom do the glittering towers of data really belong?

All Your Base Are Belong To Them

There’s a lot in Hackers that is by-the-book ‘90s flick: a group of underage underdogs unites to outsmart the bad guy (Fisher Stevens as network safety analyst, “The Plague”), managing to have fun along the way. But the script doesn’t feel pat, despite lines like, “There are worse things than death and I can do all of them,” and “There is no right and wrong; there’s only fun and boring.” The visuals also hold up well, despite the obvious camp factor. Imagine a world where a “garbage file” looks like a holographic acid trip. This is the world of Hackers.

Angelina Jolie disrupting your face.

2015’s version of the tech elite is so much less sunny. Tech itself is less sunny. Just compare Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo with Angelina Jolie’s Acid Burn. Lisbeth is the sort of lady who knows what the underbelly of the internet really holds— child porn, hate groups, drugs and maybe occasionally some government secrets. If Acid Burn were hacking today, she’d probably not be on the same team as the boys. And, realistically, no one thinks computer geniuses are hot anymore.

So it is with longing for times gone by that I recommend the cast of Hackers as the best nostalgic group halloween costume for 2015. But first you are going to have to learn how to hack a payphone, you “hapless technical weenie.”

Throwback August: Hackers

*this is the only remaining good site on the internet. 

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Here is Your Weekend Art Itinerary, August 21 – 23

CREDIT: Still from "The Secret of Kells"

Lawrence Matthews, ‘Vote III’


FRIDAY

Lawrence Matthews, i.e. Don Lifted, “In a Violent Way” at Crosstown Arts (6PM — 9PM):
You may have seen Matthews perform as his alter-ego, Don Lifted, without knowing that the emerging artist is also a prolific painter. For this exhibition, Matthews reimagines famous images of the civil rights struggle.

Nick Pena’s “Crosscut” at Christian Brothers University (5:30PM—7:30PM): 
Pena’s paintings are meditations on the fissure of The American Dream. If you haven’t seen Pena’s work before, this is a great chance to check it out. 

CEREAL at GLITCH (6PM—10PM):
A group show featuring work by Lance Turner, Derrick Dent, Ariel Claiborn and others. There will also be music from C – Stilla, Dick Solomon, Purplecat Jane and Sleepy Barksdale. 

SATURDAY

Animated Film: The Secret of Kells at the Brooks (2PM)
This seems promising: “Young Brendan lives in a remote medieval outpost under siege from barbarian raids. But a new life of adventure beckons when a celebrated master illuminator arrives from foreign lands carrying an ancient but unfinished book, brimming with secret wisdom and powers. To help complete the magical book, Brendan has to overcome his deepest fears on a dangerous quest that takes him into the enchanted forest where mythical creatures hide. “

Still from ‘The Secret of Kells’

SATURDAY AND SUNDAY

Second Terrain Biennial, all day, around the city: 
Artists Terri Jones, Lindsay Julian, Melissa Dunn, Between Worlds Collaborative, Greely Myatt, Johnathan Payne, Terri Phillips, and Lester Julian Merriweather created work to be shown in yards around Memphis. A map is available at the Rhodes College website. Rhodes is hosting the event to kick off This Must Be the Place, a year-long exploration of art’s relationship to place, presented by Clough-Hanson Gallery.

Categories
Art Art Feature

“A Kind of Confession” at the Metal Museum.

There is nothing creepier than a useless machine. I don’t mean an obsolete or a broken machine. I mean a machine that clicks and whirs pointlessly, full of complex mechanics that achieve nothing. We count on our machines to provide simple solutions to clear problems. A pointless machine unsettles both question and answer.

Metalsmith David Clemons, a medical illustrator-turned-craftsman, is expert at creating functionless machines. His sculptures, on view now as part of the Metal Museum’s “A Kind of Confession,” are threatening and oblique in equal measure. Works such as 2007’s Sensoscopia draw from the visual index of antiquated medical devices and futuristic weapons. Senescopia is almost a gun, almost a microscope — true to form but completely neutered of purpose.

Clemons, who is black, places his artistic concern in “things that deal specifically with racial identity and construction,” whether that identity is formed from within or without. Sculptures such as Blood (2004) and Polyps (2013) deal with identity on multiple levels — not only African-American identities forged around a long history of brutality, but also to the industrial history of steel and wood. Clemons’ materials are not a casual footnote in his work; he uses steel’s material vocabulary to pose an ontological question. Taken apart, the shiny joints and levers of Senescopia mean nothing, but imagined together become an identifiable (if purposeless) system. Clemons’ machines ask: At what point do we identify a series of isolated characteristics as a definite something? Or someone?

Metal is an apt material to communicate America’s violent history of racial injustice. The artists in “A Kind of Confession” use the tropes of metal (its association with jewelry, weapons, medicine, farm tools) to re-envision the history and meaning of the material’s use. “A Kind of Confession,” curated by Grace Stewart, presents work by 11 black metalsmiths, divided into three categories: work that addresses African roots, colonial history, and contemporary issues. The title is drawn from a James Baldwin quote: “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.” As featured artist Helen Elliott puts it, these works are an attempt to “tell the truth and shame the devil.”

Shani Richards’ Bulletproof

Shani Richards’ Bulletproof, a chainmail hoodie made out of soda tabs, references teenager Trayvon Martin’s death at the hands of George Zimmerman. It is displayed spread across a low pedestal, sleeves slightly askew. It is a clear memorial, simple and moving. Richards communicates, in one piece, something that a million photographs, news blips, and think-pieces couldn’t: Violence is quiet and senseless. We are left trying to make up the difference in hoodies and soda tabs.

Other stand-out works from the exhibition include Tanya Crane’s Which Side Do You Pick, a chain made out of a hair pick and plated gold; Joyce Scott’s beaded statuette of a woman, titled He’s My Husband and He’s My Baby; and Sonya Clark’s Roots & Branches (In Hair and Copper). In a time when much contemporary artwork feels tone-deaf to political and social realities, these works are tuned in. Their success is immediately related to the way that the artists consider their materials.

Taken together, the work in “A Kind of Confession” is the most challenging contemporary art Memphis has seen in recent memory. I’ll follow critic Ben Davis in saying that we need a “more organically political character for contemporary art” and that this can only be achieved through artists focusing on our country’s complex history of injustice. We need artists and curators who can see the pointless machine, piece for piece.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Throwback August: Back To The Future

I’ll preface this by saying that I had never seen Back to the Future before last night (I know, I know.) I loved it. I am basking in its glow. I wish that every movie made in 2015 was erased from time with the help of a flux capacitor and replaced with Back to the Future.

Usually in time travel movies, funny or serious, the characters return to their own time with some sort of overarching moral lesson gained from the time where they have been. It is an annoying failing of most time travel-y fictions that they are basically nine parts “A Christmas Carol” and one part science fiction. “Wow,” says every character ever, “my harrowing trip back to the Middle Ages sure did teach me the true JOY of life.” Gross.

Down with moralizing and Dickensian visions of time travel! Up with fun! Up with Christopher Lloyd! I was cautioned, going into my first ever viewing of Back to the Future that it is “a perfect movie.” I agree. It feels remarkably new, probably because no one has yet figured out how to make fun of 1985 better than Back to the Future did in 1985. When is that ever true? Have we learned nothing from Back to the Future? How do movies like The Lake House, the magic time-bending mailbox movie from 2006, even get made?

National treasure Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown in Back To The Future

Maybe it holds up so well because we never tire of a good Oedipus story. Or maybe it is because Christopher Lloyd is an alien genius sent to earth to help us all. But probably it is just because of the moment when Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) asks Doc Brown, incredulously, “You made a time machine out of a DeLorean?” (Doc Brown responds “If you’re going to build a time machine out of a car why not do it with some style?”)

The most stylish time machine ever built.

I love the vision of the dopey, middle American family who bakes a parole cake for their uncle. I love how, when Marty returns to 1985 from 1955, he immediately runs into a bum and an erotic cinema and exclaims, “Great! Everything looks great!” Back to the Future gets the formula right: to make a movie that is both funny and heartfelt, you need not waste your time figuring out characters transformative emotional journeys or any of that yada yada. You just need 1.21 gigawatts of honest-to-god Christopher Lloydian imagination, and you will be good. 

Throwback August: Back To The Future

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Wednesday Coffee Break: Follow These Memphis Artists on Instagram

Are your social media feeds full of Content™ but low on original artwork? Yes? We are here to help. Follow these Memphis artists on Instagram. 

Sweet Spot #nogimmes

A photo posted by @mae_aur on

Wednesday Coffee Break: Follow These Memphis Artists on Instagram (3)

Mae Aur’s (@Mae__Aur) clothing collaborations with Ben Moss (@Flare_Le_Slurp) take place in a 1960’s girlhood bedroom acid dream. 

Wednesday Coffee Break: Follow These Memphis Artists on Instagram (5)

Weird body combines by Frances Berry. The beach, Marilyn Monroe, red nail polish. 

Wednesday Coffee Break: Follow These Memphis Artists on Instagram (4)

The Collective (@thecltv) are visual artists and activists who post pics from awesome art shows and networking events. 

Coming soon… Finger necklaces! #porcelain #ceramics #babycreep #finger

A photo posted by babycreep (@neekralah) on

Wednesday Coffee Break: Follow These Memphis Artists on Instagram

This is Nikkila Carroll, i.e. Babycreep, i.e. @neekralah. Her babycreepy ceramics are sold at Five in One on Broad Ave, and she posts in-progress shots on her ‘gram. 

Categories
Art Exhibit M

Here is Your Weekend Art Itinerary

Tonight (It’s Friday!)  

6PM – Go to the Metal Museum for the opening of A Kind of Confession, work by 11 African American metalsmiths. This show is great. Four of the exhibiting artists will be on hand tonight to speak about their work. If you stick around, you can have a glass of wine and watch the sun set on the Mississippi River. Opening thru 8PM. 

David Clemons, ‘Senescopia’ (2007)

7PM – Go the opening of David Lusk Gallery’s Price is Right. There will be reasonably priced work by Tyler Hildebrand, Greely Myatt, Jared Small and Veda Reed, among others. For midtown folk, you don’t have to go out east anymore— Lusk has new digs on Flicker Street. Opening thru 8PM.  

8PM – Memphis-native and current Florida resident Nathan Yoakum has work at Jay Etkin Gallery on Cooper. Opening thru 9. 

9PM – Go home and read Ben Davis’ 9.5. Theses on Art and Class. I’m an evangelist for this book right now. Or you could go to sleep, you philistine. 

[jump]

Saturday

12PM – Go to Burke’s Books and browse their art book collection. Then go across the street and adopt a cat at House of Mews. All the better to read your nerdy art book with. 

All day – Stop by Crosstown Arts for Micheal Chewning’s Themeless (430 Cleveland) and, if you haven’t already seen it, Jay Crum and Kong Wee Pang’s Walking Eyes, in the main gallery.

8PM – Go to the Brooks Museum to see When Marnie Was There. The Brooks shows awesome films, new and old. Their team does a good job of filling Memphis’ art house cinema void.   

Sunday

…is the Lord’s day. So take an afternoon stroll through the Dixon’s gardens to see meditatively crafted ceramics by Jun Kaneko.