Dreary Modern Life Issue iii

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STITCH THIS SECRETLY INTO SOMETHING THAT ISN’T YOURS

DREARY MODERN LIFE



Performativity Issue


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The Exhibition is the Museum’s Dream (2009) Daniel Michael Satele Anthropology as human science is nowadays the foundation of every single discourse pronounced above the native’s head. An apocalyptic aestheic regime; museal bodies; spectral embodiment; art as technology as magic; authority via citation; quotes as mausoleum-like remnants; – surfacing / curated / (m)aligned / misappropriate / mis-assimilation; tricksterish technologies; (breath) held in prophetic anticipation of FIRST CONTACT. AFTER I am drained I am exhilarated I am becoming older with new information that begs a quick spread to my (“extended”) family: a firing of network-connections, a frisson bolting across kin-relations, from root to limb and back over again from limb to root. The M(A)US(OL)EUM has become the enchanted site at which the dead re-visit, like Christ on the third day. My dead returning in a rush, a flash, a surge of time; land; family-narrative; death and birth; ocean; hair; bone; a red garland; a foetus. Anthropology is finally better defined as “gossip” (we speak together about others) than as “conversation” (we discuss a question), a definition that dates back to Aristotle. This profuse, idle talk between kinsmen (from the Old English godsibb) comes into being through boredom and the need to chat … Scientific gossip, therefore, often unveils itself as none other than a form of institutionalized indiscretion. So I narrate here not the exhibition: for particular (-)storical reasons the impulse is to evade the question that valorises the “anthropophagous” or “cannibalistic” practices that draw blood. The impulse is to form crucial protective speech: to deploy the lie as a strange strategy, as a technique for strange survival, necessarily employed by one ‘presumed culture bearer’ almost admitted into the Anthropological ‘equations of


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deceit.’ So I speak not of the exhibition but of beholding it. What is described as a rush, a flash, a surge. It is an unspeakable bodily process of material incorporation: surface feeding onto surface. So it is that the text that is the exhibition is a drug. The drug is the magic technology (potion – position – poison) is the dream of the museum is the text. The exhibition is the museum’s dream. If I live long enough I shall weave one just as fine, just as efficacious: Magic haunts technical activity like a shadow; or, rather, magic is the negative work,

contour just

as,

of in

Saussurean linguistics, the value of a concept (say,

‘dog’)

function

is

of

a the

negative contour of the surrounding

concepts

(‘cat’, ‘wolf’, ‘master’).

So it is that the end, the limit, of History is embodied in and through the narrative of “first


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contact” which in turn haunts the museum as a temple to enlightened discernment and advanced(salvaged-)knowledge of the savage. The implied, foreshadowed, reader of the museum is preterhuman: the supremely-evolved, imperialistic conqueror writ large – gone mad. So timetravel and science-fiction genre writing come to bear on the Anthropological text: Future is to Language as Technology is to Anthropology. Although ‘sex play’ was common, her first serious sexual involvements came, as they did for most young people, later during the time of moving between gangs. A far greater ‘passion’ for her during this time was a powerful interest in twentiethcentury history. ‘MUSEUM’ is the sign of conquest’s limit, a marking of boundaries, a delineation of spaces. It is the magic point at which the divide of animal from human, and of human from machine, and of machine from animal, and of animal from machine shall ever be transfixed – yet also where this taxonomical project will never cease to fail. This explains why and how I encounter my dead great-grandfather’s blood written onto the museum wall (becoming again Daniel as de-cipher-er: the one who reads writing on the wall). As Derrida puts it: the other’s death, not only but especially if it is someone who you love, does not announce an absence, a disappearance, the end of some or other life, that is the end of the possibility for a world (which is always unique) to appear to some living person. Each time death declares the end of the world in totality, the end of any possible world and each time the end of the world as a totality which is


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unique, therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite. Deborah Root adds: Museums are founded on several extremely eccentric and questionable assumptions about life and death and about the relation of these to representation… Life and death: Death is displayed as life, or rather, is transmuted into life by the objects that vivify the people and animals they display and impersonate. MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN – the writing of a disembodied hand has foretold the fall of an empire. I do not wish blood to spill. I am very afraid of Anthropology. Living race and gender, I see a double, a doubling. If I live long enough I shall weave one just as fine, just as technical, standing as if at ‘the point that each of a pair of Melanesian dancers knows himself to be a man, but when he looks at his partner he can see a spirit.’


Select a maximum of 5: Men

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Exhibition

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1 on 1

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Mixed

Pig Play

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Transexual/Transgender

Safer Only

Hey, what’s up? Not much, just at Uni thinking of heading home soon. Oh yeah, what do you study? Fine Arts, gahhhh. *rolls eyes* What about you man? Cool, I study fashion at AUT. Awesome! I love clothes! What year are you in? I’m in my final year, almost finished. Exciting! Do you have any plans for when you graduate? I’m hoping to move to Berlin and set up my own mens label. That’s really cool man. Gah getting tired, might head home soon. Yeah, I’m feeling pretty tired myself. Might go chill on my bed. Nice plan. Yeah, you can join if you want ;) Oooo. Temptations lol. Where do you live? I’m Tommy btw. :) Wakefield Street. I’m Sam. Oh that’s just up the hill from where I am! Yeah ;) Do you have anymore pics?


DNSNDRS 20 yrs Average 6’2” White



Esta De Jong






i like to think i am the limit of food potential anything less likely than me to be eaten will almost definitely never be food which makes me some food who is trying very hard to love and be honest a very grounding thought i am walking around the city looking for a gallery i respect to go do a shit in their toilet i have an adequate self worth which is reflected in my attitude toward my toilet behaviour my work is best viewed before or after a shit, a fuller experience

Hamishi Farah, Balance (2013).


i see the vlc logo quite often in real life usually in construction around the city i would like my city to be striving for vlc’s brand of openness and file compatibility this could be a very profound metaphor but probably not according to what it says in the newspaper i don’t even read the newspaper

Hamishi Farah, Multi Culture (2013).




i notice my own frame rate as i walk to the shop to buy bread and melon i am in the store and touching different loaves, looking for a cognitive and visceral connection but these breads are giving me nothing catch a glimpse of my obvious latency and say hey boy your lag is cute i am old I’ve got those 1991 ankles and thighs i have these outdated fingers and an outdated neck my physiology is a classic 90s throwback in the 90s rappers were hyper aware of their own mortality, a trend i found very beautiful and redeeming chasms of emptied clairvoyance, dead michael jordan even though your balance is zero you can still shop with paypal

Hamishi Farah, Brownness (2013).


Ted Whittaker








a girl with a suit of pinpricks

let us we tend to this work as we would, say, a garden first let us pull long strings to clear the way, to shape a section, pulling endless roots, pushing fingers into the earth, turning over chunks of ground, marking garden space from earth space, all the while let us watch as worms carve out their own vermicular space it is about fortuitous groupings of sun, clippings, rain, peels, moonlight, larvae this work is also a fortuitous grouping, milieus of lines gathered momentarily into small ecosystems dripping from flat planes, lines wriggle and writhe through space they vibrate, undulate, fracture forming seeds, grains, pulses; lines swim and sprout into fish, insects, animals; becoming hair, eyelashes, dashes of rain, heated touches of tongue on skin with a fine needle mark out a line on the inside of your arm, the most tender part see through holes, look to the garden as a compositional entity, where there is no center only perforations, follow as lines dance in here somewhere there is a recipe for a feeling for a skin that sees


georgette brown, your environment, 2014


limbs world limbs

. to sliming flowering the bones liquid radiating, bones sliming over the becomes of dewy, surface surface lube sliming liquid radiating, wets world limbs world limbs the the lube tips .

so so a a

. shoulder, river from so so a a exposure, the eyelids a skin exposure, glacier, finest atop eyelids a river in exposure, from shoulder, your glacier, moisture .


idklykcelebrityhellholenightmaresifeellykicnrelate2kstewsumtymsbutimlookinatpicsofhernwatchndariathinknishldapply4mtvbreakslmaothothtwldbfunirapgamekatyperrykstew4chanelladydieequalsjudithcollinstransethnic Pages 1,2,3, and 6 By H P A Gd4bb

mbe being stoned makes her less emotional hence the acting

bein stonned makes her more likable imo. marina abramovic 5 yr performance as kstew has rly touched my heart tbh

vis arts wrld h8 craft, they want sum kind of ‘authenticity’ wen th vis artist stges a perf event it shld nt hv n e degree of artifice tht cn b percieved as ‘real’ but lmao wut iz real n e way http://www.culturebot.org/2011/11/11663/visual-art-pe rformance-vs-contemporary-performance/ this is freaking me out yall..im spooked.. i sumtymz feel lyk kstew nd i r lyk kindred spirits ths is me w/out makeup lookin gr8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= clebritiez r j lyk us lyk kate middleton is

actuly marina abramovic sh rly lyk rly wantz 2 stay relevant


communisits r aliens lyk kstew is a communisits circus performer

this one tym i saw an alien on k road


omg ew celebz use airport luggage carts

museums subjug8 concerns of the viewer’s bod 2 thngs lyk sight lines, the prod of meaning thru juxtaposition, th ‘interaction’ among isolated works of art.


we wer al ancient alienz. imagine if kstew had a fight w fka twigs fka twigs is a divine being so sh wil b ok agonst kstew hu is mutated vampire hoe “i am actualy kstew 4realz tho i am kirsten stewart n m sik of bein so cold” -kristen stewart

the photograph substitutes 4 reality.

evry1 keeps tlkn abt th breach of celebrity privacy cz jlaw pluz rhirhi hv photoz of them naked n such on the internet but rly sex scandals r gd n help win academy awards #fact http://shechive.files.wordpress.com /2014/07/kim-kardashian-selfie-krisjenner-your-sisters-going-to-jail.gif


Dreary Modern Life Issue iii Curated by Hana Aoake and Zach Williams Designed by Alessandra Banal Cover by Ruby Joy Daniel Satele Dan Sanders Esta de Jong Hamishi Jama Farah Zach Williams Ted Whitaker Georgina Watson H P A Gd4bb

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