My take on Bruce Conner’s traveling retrospective now out in The Brooklyn Rail:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/10/artseen/bruce-conner-its-all-true

I’ve loved Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe since the late naughts. I was honored to read this profile a while ago, which suggests that they got a little inspiration from my book, The Dada Cyborg (2009).

http://international.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/825225/fever-dream-a-tour-of-jonah-freeman-and-justin-lowes

Here is the part of the article that seems relevant:

Welcome to the scene behind the mise-en-scène of the next Freeman/Lowe installation extravaganza, “Stray Light Grey,” opening September 13 at Marlborough Chelsea, in New York. Today’s tableau is meant to evoke a private club in Weimar-era Berlin, where three groups of characters — monocle-wearing, cigarette-holder-puffing aristos known as Crème Brûlée; half-naked femmes fatales clad in wire-and-circuitry bustiers and their androgynous male counterparts, called the Dada Cyborg; and Haitian voodoo street gangsters capped with papier-mâché animal masks, called the Shade — engage in a polyamorous bacchanal before an industrialized war machine snuffs out their pleasure palace. “You can think of the Shade as the Hells Angels at a Leonard Bernstein party,” Freeman says. “It’s this hedonistic, nihilistic scenario.”

As for Weimar Berlin, “that was the beginnings of the Dadaist movement and the concept of the hybridized identity — cross-dressing, androgyny, and really the first inklings of the man and machine merger,” Freeman explains. “One of the main themes of this show is hybridized identities, spaces, environments, cities.” It’s Otto Dix meets cyberpunk, with Carnival-going thugs “reenacting their colonial oppressors at a ritualistic food banquet.”

I loved Stray Light Grey, 2012, when I saw it at Marlborough. Little did I know….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzJwIjktmwE

 

 

 

 

Mad Man