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Jessica Loudis
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Eclectic Armory
by Jessica Loudis March 8, 2010
Among these, a personal favorite was John Reynold’s “1001 Nights,” a DIY-style staircase whose 1,001 cardboard cubes featured lines from the Scheherazade collection on one side, and excerpts from Robert Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilisation” on the other. (One block read “The land of the Persians” on one side, and “The Green Zone” on the other). In an inadvertent act of irony, the piece was only several booths away from Reed Seifer’s “Spray to Forget”: a performance-cum-design project that hawked “a beneficial editor for one’s consciousness” at the unbeatable price of $25 a bottle. Surprisingly, “Spray to Forget” wasn’t the exhibition’s lone conceptual work, either: at Cape Town’s Michael Stevenson gallery, free manicures were offered to anybody in need; and later in the afternoon, a small brass band took up residency next to the aforementioned cow.
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Anti-Intellectualism is the New Black
by Jessica Loudis January 21, 2010
The ads, which are plastered all over downtown Manhattan, feature large block text paired with images of people doing defiantly stupid things. In addition to angering elephants, Dieselites start bonfires on beaches, don traffic cones as hats, and have an inexplicable proclivity for mooning cameras. Accompanying text boldly celebrates the cult of stupid with cryptic, tautological phrases: “You can’t outsmart stupid,” “smart had one good idea and that idea was stupid,” and of course, the eponymous urging: “Be stupid.” (If French Connection is any indication, a line of “Be Stupid” t-shirts would be a big hit among wealthy Euro-hipsters). True to form, slogans require that viewers don’t think too hard, instead channeling the energy of a drunken frat boy rallying a crowd before leaping off a roof.
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Shiftless and Otherwise: On Dyer and Houellebecq
by Jessica Loudis January 13, 2010
For all their obvious differences, Dyer offers a much-needed addendum to Houellebecq’s vision of bourgeois shiftlessness. In Dyer, shiftlessness takes the form of transcribed procrastination and backpacker storytelling; it means another trip, another essay, and a jumping-off point for casual criticism and philosophizing. In Houellebecq, it emerges as a symptom of societal decline, a natural byproduct of Western culture and a platform for advancing grand theories explaining it.
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The First/Last Newspaper at Port Authority
by Jessica Loudis December 4, 2009
Ultimately, though, TF/LN succeeds in a far more important regard—by publishing writing that’s highly intelligent and equally entertaining. Sidestepping punchy headlines and stale ledes (a typical headline is “They Came to See Who Came”) the writers are given space to wander across subject and genres, and usually to the reader’s benefit. In this sense, the real success of the project isn’t in staging the birth and death of a newspaper (there’s no shortage of that these days) but in reminding readers how content should carry a publication beyond its form.
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Farber on Film
by Jessica Loudis November 21, 2009
Against these white elephants – which include Truffaut, Antonioni and Welles – Farber celebrates termite art, which has no “object in mind other than eating away at the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Grounding his criticism in a kind of highbrow populism, Farber recognizes the blood in the medium, and reserves his highest praise for films that evoke a visceral, as well as intellectual, response.
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Michael Robinson at tank.tv
by Jessica Loudis September 29, 2009
The film opens on a barely visible night shot of a tree, with static hanging in the background. After a moment, the static gives way to radio tuning, and the viewer is lifted out of the scene and dropped into the Technicolor landscapes of an 80s video game. The music gains coherence, and stills from the games are punctuated by flashing screenshots to a hypnotic, hallucinogenic effect.
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