See You on the Other Side
Election eve special with Gretchen Bender, temporary autonomy in Chelsea, and a soda celebrating American democracy. Plus classic '90s psych rock from Mercury Rev
I know what you’re thinking but of course that photo has nothing to do with any upcoming events. Caring about or even acknowledging elections is so cringe! It just so happens I went to see Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice (1986), on Halloween at Film Forum, where it’s running through Thursday. This movie’s got it all—water, fire, apocalypse, Jesus and witches, the terminal conflict between art and science. Highly recommend if you’re looking for some light entertainment.
While I plan on spending election night in a bunker at an undisclosed location watching Melancholia, but the art world can’t resist an opportunity to gather anxiously for our constitutionally mandated national hurricane party. The most salient choice for viewing election returns has been made by the proprietors of the ever-astute Carriage Trade gallery, which will be broadcasting the apocalypse via Gretchen Bender's TV Text & Image. The piece exists in various versions made between 1986 and 1991 made for various locations; MoMA, for example, has a twelve-screen version made in 1990 for the Donnell Library Center across 53rd Street, while the Smithsonian American Art Museum has a 1989 one-channel version. The monitors comprising the piece show live TV feeds, their screens interrupted by text placed dead center of the image. One screen in the Donnell version, for example, features the phrase NARCOTICS OF SURREALISM, another MILITARY RESEARCH.
Kicking off the evening at Carriage Trade from 6 to 9 pm will be a book launch for Read My Lips: Political Advertisement 1952–2024 by Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, published by the venerable Autonomedia. The volume documents the duo’s ongoing video project of compiling campaign ads into a quadrennially expanding work. The video itself is on view in the gallery’s current exhibition On Television, through December 15.
It's a big night in NYC for Autonomedia—ironically enough, given its anarchist politics. Its old bard Peter Lamborn Wilson graces the mission statement of Remember to Dream, a election-day-to-night literary/music extravaganza at the Carrie Mae Weems exhibition at Gladstone Gallery. From 3 pm to midnight, Weems’s immersive video installation hosts an event described as “a refuge, an oasis, a temporary autonomous zone in the spirit of Hakim Bey,” an unexpected citation of Lamborn’s most famous nom de plume and his attendant speculations on ontological freedom and “poetic terrorism.” No matter how much I like the book and admire the concept, the throwback always evokes for me the rave in Matrix Reloaded. Do your antipatriotic duty and buy a copy from Autonomedia, a freakier, more misfit, less aesthetic cousin of Semiotext(e), the desert-dwelling Spike to Semiotext(e)’s wry and urbane Snoopy.
Remember to Dream is organized by Precious Okoyomon, Vincent Katz, and Brian Degraw, with an all-star lineup of participants including poets like LaTasha Diggs, Ariana Reines, and Anne Waldman, musicians such as Ka Baird and Ryan Sawyer/Sam Newsome, belletrists Bob Nickas and David Rimanelli, and, oddly, Nancy Spector, plus many more. Rirkrit Tiravanija + Co. and Spiral Theory Test Kitchen will be providing food, and Weems’s video will intermittently screen.
Beverages
Mountain Dew Liberty Chill. Money, cola, lemon, “blue raspberry,” Mountain Dew, cane sugar, vanilla, red dye #40, asphalt, generic Robitussin DM, soft batch chocolate chip cookies, gas station soda fountain, adderall, 0% juice, Monster energy drink rehab peach tea, Red Bull Amber Edition (Strawberry Apricot), cool ranch, bubble gum vape juice, Beatbox—The World’s Tastiest Party Punch, stale coffee, toothpick, vomiting in your mouth a little bit from eating too much candy, half-pumped seltzer, fresh AA battery, stepmom stuck in washing machine, NuGrape, “fat free,” asexuality, aluminum screws, Home Depot parking lot, desiccated orange, apricot with rotten stone, mélange, nightshade, distillate, shatter, dried basil, GERD, chapstick, Galaxy Gas, clingwrap, Mars, the moon.
Music
The criminally underappreciated Mercury Rev met at the University of Buffalo; founding member Sean Mackowiak studied for four years with Tony Conrad (offering insightful reminiscences about him here and here not long after the sorely missed polymath passed away in 2016). The still-active ensemble produced inimitable, melodic, flutey, scratchy psych rock throughout the 1990s, the kind that expresses its tweak less with effects than via jumps in logic and texture, elements related more to the unpredictable drift and yearn of consciousness. Think Butthole Surfers but jazzy, forerunners of Animal Collective et al. See You on the Other Side, from 1995, is my personal favorite album. Hang the title on a banner at your election party and at my funeral.