Love in the Air
by AMANDA MANITACH February 18, 2013
On Feb 16, 2013, at 11:45 AM, Amanda Manitach wrote: Hi Matthew! I don’t know you much and was wondering if you’d fancy a drink, to hang out sometime and talk art, writing, whatever? Amanda
On Feb 16, 2013, at 12:02 PM, Matthew Kangas wrote: amanda. i’ve got a problem with you being an artist and a critic. is that true? things are v. tight and busy right now. fill me in about your conflict. are you reviewing shows? matthew
On Feb 16, 2013, at 12:06 PM, Amanda Manitach wrote: I’m not a critic. I do write about art…I think there’s a difference. I’m fascinated by experimental forms of art writing. I never went to art school, have a degree in literature. I do make art. Tell me more about your problem. What is your experience with conflict of interest? A
On Feb 16, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Matthew Kangas wrote: hi! thanks for getting back to me. i don’t have a problem! good luck with your attempts at art writing! cheers. have a good weekend. matthew
#NAZIPROBLEMS
“If Jen Graves calls you for a comment about me just teller what everyone else has said…Charlie Krafft is a nice guy, but I’m a lot nicer because I’m not a nazi.” I got an email from Charlie Krafft a few days before Jen Graves’ Stranger exposé on him blew up. He was in India at the moment, bathing with 30,000,000 Hindu pilgrims in the Ganges to cleanse their karma. “I’ll be one of them.”
It’s a little surprising that many people have found all this to be shocking. Maybe I took it too much for granted that Krafft’s political views haven’t exactly been kept secret. That people collect his work because they’re titillated by its transgression. They were tittering. Now they’re gasping, blushing.
Whatever your feelings about Krafft’s questionable political perspectives, is it possible that Graves’ piece of writing is libelous (someone suggested)? In most conversations I had about Krafftgate this week, artists were quick to point out the problem of a critic making fodder out of personal/political aspects of an artist’s life. When is it necessary to cross that line? When useful? In other news, Krafft is working on a children’s book that’s coming out soon. I’m curious to see it.
*BLUSH*
I don’t visit Canoe Social Club very often, but after Wednesday night I’m thinking maybe I should. The annual Valentine party was full of porn readings, champagne corks popping off, oysters and noisemakers, and at one point artist Jed Dunkerley deep-throating a chocolate-covered banana. Tessa Hulls delivered a perfectly weird, original piece of erotica inspired by human-on-porcupine action at the zoo. Actress Gretchen Krich (she was in Guy Maddin’s Brand Upon the Brain!, among others) cooed an exceptionally sexy reading of one of my favorite erotic texts, the opening paragraphs of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye.
During the party, someone who works at the Mayor’s Office mentioned the city had pulled all the Charlie Krafft from its collection.
CECI N’EST PAS UN DILDO
Thursday night was all candy hearts, girls in red dresses and lots of Capitol Hill gallery openings. “Sex is Good. Sex is fun. Sex is everything,” says Kelly O in a succinct statement about her Valentines Day show at Vignettes called XXOO. “I like to mine the gutter. Because that’s where all the gold is….”
Kelly O has been photographing and writing for The Stranger for years and is a fixture in many a Seattle scene. Her Vignettes exhibit showed off some recent photographs: a picture of perfectly plastic boobs dripping red syrup (or something), a Britney Spears porn star lookalike, a double-ended dildo resting on a stool. It looks kind of like a baguette. Throughout the course of the one-night exhibit, people crowded onto curator Sierra Stinson’s bed for make-shift photo booth snaps with a blow up doll and flesh-colored dildo. Here’s a quick Q&A:
How did you get into shooting erotic work? Eight years ago, a filmmaker friend of mine submitted a film to the very first HUMP!—The Stranger‘s, now annual, Amateur Porn Film Festival. His submission won the grand prize—$1,000 and a free trip to the AVN Awards and Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas—more commonly known as just the “AVN/AEE Porn Convention.” There I shot a ton of photos and a short film—a viral (3+ million views) YouTube short called “Jesus Goes To The Porn Convention.” That first year in Vegas, I met Larry Flynt, Sasha Grey, Belladonna, and James Deen. I also kissed one of the Princes of Dubai, Sheikh Maktoum Bin Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. But that’s a whole other story…. I ended up going back to the convention two more years in a row, because the people were so incredible. Who’s your favorite porn star and why? Belladonna. Without question. When I briefly met her in 2005, she had a shaved head. Most all of the other lady porn actors have long, extremely high-maintenance (and/or fake) hair—but Belladonna had NONE. This really struck me. She was Riot Grrrl fierce. Pro-woman, pro-woman-in-control. This is not an easy task when you’re a woman who specializes in “anal.” What do you look for when you go to porn conventions?Just like the “Drunk of the Week” column I’ve been doing for The Stranger since 2003, I look for people who are genuinely happy and loving the seemingly fucked-up situation that they’re in—no regrets. There’s a bliss in being drunk. And there’s a degree of happiness and healthiness in porn too. Many people refuse to believe that the latter can be possible, but I believe it is. Is a dildo just a dildo? What does it mean to photograph ‘em the way you do? Every teenage girl should have a dildo. Every adult woman should have a dildo. The goofy word cheapens its existence. I don’t really seek out dildos to photograph, but they seek me out. Once you start noticing them—they’re everywhere.
WORK FUCKING A SPACE
Also Thursday night was another of Eric Fredrickson’s artist lecture series at Henry Art Gallery. Oscar Tuazon spoke to a packed auditorium. “Don’t worry, people in Seattle still aren’t interested in the arts,” artist Steve Sewell leaned over a few seats away and said out of the corner of his mouth.
Tuazon is sexy in a grungy way, like white trash that lived in Paris for six years (which he did). He walks up to the podium in blue jeans, fitted black V-neck t-shirt covering heavily tatooed arms, black logo-less trucker hat covering chin-length locks, a leather jacket.
His work isn’t as sexy. His particular way of responding to space is intentionally wasteful, ugly, nonfunctional—which is to say, it borders on a privileged kind of soliloquizing, without much overt political message except to vaguely mourn a decadent culture filled with so much waste, failed monuments and existential torpor. Yet some of his pieces cut through a room or a landscape like a calligraphic stroke, surprisingly graceful despite being constructed from vulgar materials like unfinished wood and concrete.
The lecture dips in and out of scripted monologue. It’s pleasurable, as far as artist talks go. “A poet is someone who can fuck people just by speaking to them,” he says early in the lecture. He would like to be a poet, to have that immense power. Sometimes Tuazon’s purple prose slips into self-referential poetry about being a limp cock. He’s emphatic about impotence and effort. “The work is fucking the space. The work is about sex problems, sex positions. Work and space engaged in mutual absorption, inseparable.”
The curator Harald Szeemann said he wanted to create exhibits that were like “poems in space.” I kept thinking of that while Tuazon talked of fucking space.
Maybe it has to do with the nerdy pleasure I derive from writing about art, but the slippage between text, the artist and art object nearly amounted to frisson at times. Tuazon’s desire to invade space with sculptural gesture, mediated through his own writing, eventually became indistinguishable from the poetic penetration he described. If the object is impotent, the language wrapped around that object, at least, is potent. And how! The perfect valentine for art nerds.
PS.
Kangas, if you’re reading this, I’m still down for a drink!
(Top image: Kelly O, Put the fun between your legs)