Notebook is a section where I share candid thoughts and personal reflections on various topics.
I thought I’d do something different here and start sharing a few of my influences. To be sure, I’ve been inspired by many authors, but perhaps most impactful of all have been the artists who use text in visual or performance pieces. I’ve been fortunate to share space with some of these artists and their work in real time.
One of these is the Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist. The image above shows an exhibition postcard I saved from his 2012 show WORDS ARE PEOPLE at the now-defunct small uptown gallery Alex Zachary Peter Currie. I can’t look at the title of the show without hearing it echoing in my head in Holmqvist’s monotonous, lilting yet powerful tone. Like one of his poetic predecessors John Giorno, Holmqvist has a distinctive oracular style that is bracing and hypnotic at the same time.
I have two personal anecdotes about Holmqvist. The first is that for the show in question at AZPC, Holmqvist was doing a special performance night, and the gallery (in typical form for galleries), rather than rent professional equipment, asked around for friends who might loan some things. A friend of mine was working at the gallery at the time, and asked me if they might borrow a microphone for the performance. Starstruck, I eagerly obliged.
The night of the performance arrived and we all gathered in the space (a converted townhouse with terrible/amazing echoey white wall acoustics). Holmqvist was in a trance-like state, stooped over a drum in semi-darkness. He slowly began chanting into the mic – “Discipline…discipline…DISCIPLINE…” – with growing intensity, in a rendition of the eponymous Throbbing Gristle song. Soon he was hammering the microphone directly into the drum over and over again, flattening it. When the mic was finally returned to me in the following days, I had to replace its mesh grill, which was completely destroyed. Luckily I took it as an honor.
The second anecdote is from the same time period. I ended up getting the chance to interview Holmqvist for Art in America’s website. We met at MoMA, in the room where one of his text works was installed as part of a group exhibition there. Having little experience, I was so nervous to do the interview, not to mention to meet him. But he was incredibly kind. As we sat in the gallery and I stumbled over my first question, not quite getting the words out, he just blurted out “What?!” in his strong Swedish accent, laughing. He thought the situation was so funny and couldn’t understand why I was so nervous talking to him. It was refreshing that he didn’t take himself too seriously, and I think this sense of humour also comes across in his work.