Joseph Nechvatal
Joseph Nechvatal is an American artist currently living in Paris. March 14th Pentiments is releasing his Viral Tempest double vinyl LP and his book Immersion Into Noise will be published in a second edition by Open Humanities Press in April.
Letter from LONDON: RICHARD WRIGHT: Turner Prize 09
By Joseph NechvatalViewing 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright’s pareidolia-like no title (2009) sets in motion a collection of considerations about the contemporary condition of art. Something prime is shifting.
BEAUFORD DELANEY
Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color
By Joseph Nechvatal
An initial question intrigued me on visiting the American modernist painter Beauford Delaney’s Parisian show Resonance of Form and Vibration of Color: How did a black gay painter remain so full of light and joy during the struggle against racial and sexual bigotry taking place in the 1960s?
Hypnose
By Joseph NechvatalThe exhibition Hypnose (Hypnosis), curated by Pascal Rousseau for the Musée d’arts in Nantes, is a chronicle both compelling and comical. Although submerged in a stream of spiritual consciousness tied to artistic principles of universal connection, the exhibition also flirts with certain kitsch clichés, most notably the iconic hypnotic-disc that by spiraling supposedly sucks suggestible cerveaux down a somnambulist whirlpool.
Pierre Huyghe The Menagerie Entertains
By Joseph NechvatalThe Pompidou Centre is currently presenting, in retrospective form, about 50 relational art projects by Pierre Huyghe that span more than 20 years. This retrospective is further augmented upstairs in the permanent collection that includes his two-channel video “The Third Memory” (1999), where John Wojtowicz tells his story of the robbery portrayed in the movie Dog Day Afternoon (1975).
Bernar Venet: 1961 & 1963: les origins
By Joseph NechvatalVenet’s current show, 1961 & 1963: les origins at Ceysson & Bénétière Paris, puts him back into that post-Duchampian / Yves Klein context with early minimal works that ponder the power of black and the pull of gravity through an inter-disciplinarian methodology.
Christo: Show Cases, Show Windows & Store Fronts, 1963-1966
By Joseph NechvatalChristo’s exhibition, situating art as a material process, presents a selection of his historic covered cases, all hidden behind a covered vitrine.
BIOGRAPHY
Flawed Composition
By Joseph Nechvatal
Draw a Straight Line and Follow It purports to be a definitive biography of the famous but elusive avant-garde American composer La Monte Young (born 1935) and thus of particular interest to those involved in transcendental black metal, experimental electronica, psychoacoustic drone, and difficult noise music.
Noise’s Nectar
By Joseph NechvatalUnofficial Release is a brimming book that captures the key cultural philosophies of self-released music and sound art, emphasizing activities within the cassette network—that was so exciting to partake in back in the 1980s (a k a cassette culture).
In Conversation
JAY MURPHY with Joseph Nechvatal
Artaud’s Metamorphosis: From Hieroglyphs to Bodies Without Organs (2017)
The Art of Nietzsche
By Joseph NechvatalThe Three Stigmata of Friedrich Nietzsche: Political Physiology in the Age of Nihilism is a terribly expensive but mesmerizing book of contemporary interdisciplinary theory that comes across as a chaotic-black velvety luxury item of immense merit.
Abigail Susik’s Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work
By Joseph NechvatalBinding Surrealist automatism to workplace sabotage, the book raises issues for deliberation that benefit opportunities to review the premise of the life-as-art/art-as-luxury-lifestyle aspiration as nothing more than a consumerist enterprise equipped with cloaking theoretical elements that have artfully ducked anti-capitalist and anti-art critical postures. This fever-dream history of subversion as sex machine invites you into a contemplation of your intimate erotic life, put in relationship to its oppression.
Gustav Metzger’s Writings
By Joseph NechvatalIncluding versions of his Auto-Destructive Art Manifesto, the moral content of this collection is unashamed melancholic rage at the state of the world. Metzger’s writings, at times naïve, can still mess with heads in right-wing America.
Hal Foster’s Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg
By Joseph NechvatalThis eloquent book attempts to inaugurate a positive appraisal of what the author identifies as “positive barbarism.” However interesting the brutal aesthetics of sloppiness might be to a modern art historical exegesis, Brutal Aesthetics arrives at the grim doorstep of an offended world in the wake of endless uncouth brutalizations made by a mendacious macho American president.
