Thursday, February 21, 2013
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Year of swords, conclude! (Neither peaceful nor monumental version)
Acrylic on drop cloth, 6x9', 2013
Bachelor machine, from behind and below (Breed monsters by inserting in ass of any poem whatsoever version)
Acrylic on canvas drop cloth, 6x9', 2013
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Drawing is my boyfriend
(Originally, I wanted to sit down with a bottle of whiskey
and a tape recorder and see what rapturous or cantankerous speech developed as
I laid out my thoughts about drawing. Below is an approximation.)
Generically, drawing involves a pencil and paper. When examined
any further—i.e. common sense notions submitted to critical reason’s process of
elimination—drawing’s identity is as pockmarked with conditions and disclaimers
as most other visual arts media. But I’d also venture that an attempt to define
drawing as a medium, to delineate its essential characteristics, would not
result in the kind of agonistic discourse in which painting embroils its
practitioners and critics: maybe head-scratching détente or giggling free
association, instead.
Drawings, historically, were made in the service of
realizing other works—paintings, sculptures, architecture. Now drawings may
also lead to performances or installations, films or videos. Drawings were and
remain studies, sketches, notes, plans. Today a drawing might also claim some specificity,
autonomy even, but it is never really only itself. The ingrained habit remains
of assuming the idea communicated by the drawing will be applied elsewhere. Drawing’s
boon or bane, whichever, is to be always already “conceptual.” I don’t think it
would be too preposterous to claim that it is the perfect medium for our
post-medium age.
My relationship to drawing is intensely bound up in having given
up painting about five years ago, subsequently focusing exclusively on the former.
The switch triggered an avalanche of previously blocked content: stories and
histories, fears and desires, small and big ideas. I concluded that painting’s
voice is too loud, drowning out the sound of virtually everything else. The
voice of the artist typically provides 1% of the content for any given
painting. The remaining 99% consists in painting talking ceaselessly about
itself: its history, materials, conventions, the current state of the field, etc.
I hated painting for a while, the way one sometimes experiences grief over a
failed romance as strong dislike for one’s ex. Now I realize that we weren’t matched
well, we wanted different things. I’m fine now. Drawing is my boyfriend.
Maybe a drawing actually cannot achieve beatific self-reflexivity:
the world is always sneaking in, getting stuck in its craw. Drawing might fundamentally
be always about something. It’s essence might be that it is the bearer of
content, whether political program, erotic fantasy, or personal grief. I’d also
add, though, that a drawing’s content is always held at arm’s length, not only
because of the structure of representation, but also because of the
aforementioned promise of application—in the future and elsewhere, in real time
and space, in life. This is drawing’s link to magic: drawings, to quote
Burroughs’ riff on prehistoric art, are “FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things
happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein’s formulae.”
P.S. I think they ought to be called “cave drawings”
instead.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Gayhouse
Hey all, I just completed work on an issue of GAYHOUSE, a french zine that collaborates with a different queer artist for each issue. It will debut at the NY Art Book Fair. I think it looks really beautiful. It is dedicated to three of my great, recent loves (platonic and otherwise)—Mark, Doug, and Roberto. I am excited for folks to see it. Blurb below. For more information about the project, go here.
GAYHOUSE is a graphic and visual review that invites artists to share their personal, singular and affirmative vision of gay identity— whether this vision by joyful, poetic, worried, ironic, humorous, pornographic, modest…Taking over the review is similar to inhabiting a house. The invited artist is free to select a layout, its decoration, and the guests. Ultimately, the review will present an image of his or her world.
“For the issue of GAYHOUSE, I wanted to combine colored pencil and ink drawings with photographs related to my daily life. The tensions I wanted to explore were between abstraction and representation; real and imagined; depicted and actual; whole and part; the world I yearn for and the one I move through on a daily basis. Desire is also key: the sigils are abstractions of desire, of course. The other thread of the issue is that it is very much a meditation on death, symbolized by the Aztec god of death, Mictlantecuhtlian, and an act of mourning for my friend Mark Aguhar—a young, genderqueer artist who committed suicide this past spring—who makes an appearance on the back cover. Altogether, you could say that the issue’s subject is the intertwining of desire and loss in daily life.” Elijah Burgher
Elijah Burgher (b. 1978, lives and works in Chicago) aims to contribute to the strain of countercultural queer mysticism exemplified by figures such as Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, and Hakim Bey. His works, mostly drawings, have their sources in imagination, found stories, historical artworks, but take root into the artist’s daily life and personal history. Beside figurative drawings, where men are engaged in ritual activities, he creates sigils, magical emblems conceived after an historical method of spell casting developed by early 20th century occultist Austin Osman Spare, in which the letters spelling out a wish are combined into a new symbol. Thus he creates icons that utilize the language and history of abstraction.
Elijah Burgher’s GAYHOUSE #5 will be available on the booth of Septembre éditions at THE NY ART BOOK FAIR, 28 – 30 September, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, Queens.Signature: Saturday 29 September, 5 P.M., official book-signing table in the lobby of MoMA PS1.
About: 210 x 297 mm; 3 colors printing; 200 copies numbered and signed; each copy comes in a blue aluminum envelope with a b&w silkscreen sticker. Price: 25 € / 32 US$
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