Poetry

Masked men prowling in the bushes and not touching anything but satin, dandelions and flesh.

...As the Moth is lured to the candle's flame, so it is that a group of misfits enter a dark house to converse with shadows amid the dust of Time.

—Mike Kuchar

Peter Schjeldahl (b.1942) began writing his “poetical criticism” for Tom Hess at ArtNews in the mid 1960s. He has since written for both popular and specialized publications including The New York Times, Art in America, and The Village Voice, among others. In this interview from 1982, Schjeldahl discusses the critic’s relationship to the artist, the audience, artwork, and the professional community of art critics. He also reads some of his own poetry.Currently, Schjeldahl writes for The New Yorker and various art journals.

In a fragrant garden warmed by the sun, a young man inhales the atoms of the world and exhales thoughts that probe the very essence of his existence. 

Embraced by a gentle breeze in that tranquil place kissed by the sun, he embarks on a journey inward to that spiritual and sensual state best described as the "cosmic consciousness", - the "quest" to "understand" and "accept".....to have "peace of mind".

As a "Post-Mexican” performance artist operating out of the US for over 20 years, one of my conceptual obsessions has been to constantly reposition myself within the hegemonic maps. Whether this map is the Americas, the larger cartography of art, or my personal biography, one of my jobs has been to move around, cross dangerous borders, disappear and reappear somewhere else, and in the process create "imaginary cartographies” capable of containing the complexities of my multiple and ever-changing identities, voices, communities and performative bodies.

See a boy turn into a tiger. See the lad vomit colors of the rainbow. Watch him toss marbles onto wet bathroom tiles while holding up a green skull. See him squirm on warm bedsheets, wearing only soiled socks on his feet…… This kid has a mouthful of flowery words to spit out to you !

This title comprises Witchery (2008), The Tiger (2009), Swan Song (2009), Medusa's Gaze (2010) and Opal Essence (2010) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Fluid Frontiers is the fifth and final film in the series entitled The Diaspora Suite, exploring Asili’s personal relationship to the African Diaspora. Shot along the Detroit River, Fluid Frontiers explores the relationship between concepts of resistance and liberation, exemplified by the Underground Railroad, Broadside Press, and artworks of local Detroit Artists.

Flesh and blood souls breathe forth the colors of doubt, guilt and a hope for "peace of mind" in a world without moral directions... This video is about strength and weakness, done with human forms assembled and lovingly digitized.

This title comprises The Poet's Battle (2016), NightSchool (2015), Ascension (2013), Lost Blues (2014), and A Rented Space (2015) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

Breder painted the words of Donald Kuspit’s poem in white on scraps of paper and then floated them down Old Man’s Creek, the site of many legendary Intermedia performances near Iowa City. As the water soaked through the paper, the words became legible.

Sections 31-60 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.

Here are two short movies with one tall boy who is sometimes happy, sometimes sad and always reflective… He has something to share with you…..Watch and you’ll understand.

This title comprises The Boy Upstairs (2019) and The Guy Next Door (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

A rumination on Time, with a capital "T". Time and its ravages, which really just means its progression, its nature. Set off by an "old" poem, a T.S. Eliot poem that's literally haunted me for 30? or 40? yrs
... even before I became an old man myself.

(It's an old man's rumblings, and it never fails to move me. I used a quote from it in a film I made 25yrs ago, and the book still calls to me from its place on the bookshelf, its pages yellow, dry as bone.)

Part Two of Secret Spaces. A sensitive soul with skin receptive to the World's natural elements and who has a mind open for expansive contemplation, embarks on an 'inner journey' towar the New Age of awareness.

Take a trip into and out of the body to ponder Time’s endless depths where Earth spirits roam and inner Demons lurk, and find secrets that hide behind the "self". Its here for you to see.

This title comprises Moon Lit Vows (2017), Boy in the Mirror (2015), Celestial Horizons (2019), Book of the Angel (2017) and Floating on the Currents of Consciousness (2019) which were compiled into this form by Mike Kuchar in 2022.

The Source is a Hole poses a web of loose connections and liminal associations to sculpt a treatise on transexual mourning. As a series of love letters, stories recount the authors own inception at the 1982 world’s fair, his attempt to remove a lodged tampon, his cravings for bottomless eros, and a barrage of tangential encounters, spanning the everyday, to performance reenactment, to science fiction cinema analysis and drag.

The dog in dreamland? Or at least one of us is…

–– Ken Kobland

Get ready for a smorgasbord of mishaps perpetrated by misfits choking on missteps in life… Add to this a dash of bitter memories sprinkled with love affairs gone stale, and you’ve got a heap of slop for mental indigestion. 

This movie is food-for-thought you can choke on; an eye-filling, ear-stuffing digital dish that induces gasps and quite a few giggles.

This video is an unabashed fan letter to poet Eileen Myles. As in Laurie, my desire was to romanticize the poet, but not through her writing so much as through her reputation as the natural born child of the New York School and the Beats. I shot the movie as I imagined Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie shooting Pull My Daisy, a film that left an impression on me chiefly of the struggle between form and formlessness, plan and improvisation, sketch and story.

This sumptuous Valentine sent by Miss Philly unfolds with the lavish lushness of love for HIM whom she adores.

In the early 1990s, I went to a reading by Leslie Scalapino at Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. I could not understand the writing, which can seem difficult and unwieldy to a reader unaccustomed to language poetry, and understood less the more I tried. After a certain point in the reading I stopped trying to figure it out and I let the words seep in. My reward was an effortless understanding of how her poetry works.

People black and blue with life’s bruises, People who glow red with hot passions, or turn deep purple with spiritual purpose are here, boldly rendered in the widescreen format. Sit back and witness the event… See the faces, observe their bodies and hear them speak with their own colors.

A playful and dark conversational study—wrapping prose poetry into the recognizable conversational form and allowing both connections and missed meanings. First the ladies visit, the image—a roving camera lovingly viewing a still image—calls up both the progress and stagnancy of their talk, then they go to watch a play—on a television, in a snow garden. In many ways the play references the cadence of the ladies' conversation—the tedious animosity and lack of attentive or appropriate response.

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

In this interview American filmmaker, poet, and lyricist, Cecelia Condit gives shape to the contours of her work process. The artist describes the influence of her relationship with her mother, her long-term investment in the macabre, and her ongoing desire to confront death through art. While covering a broad range of topics, Condit’s discussion of her work and interests returns to several defining themes: aging, grotesqueness, and the notion of movement, both in terms of her own past as a dancer and the notion of the body in decay. With a particular emphasis on the production and context of her videos, Annie Lloyd (2008), and All About a Girl (2004), this interview offers insight into the artist’s fascination with aging, sweetness, and storytelling, while also articulating her joyful sense of discovery within the art-making process. No longer working with scripts, Condit presents herself in the interview as a scavenger–much like the crows she incorporates into her work–assembling videos which straddle the line between strange and silly. – Faye Gleisser

Earthglow is a poem written for the character generator and switcher that conveys a writer's internal dialogue through both subtle and dramatic color changes and through movement, size, and placement of words. The ambient soundtrack evokes the confluence of past and present perceptions.