A Lie Before Its Time

This interview ran over a decade ago in Art in America but I noticed it was no longer online. I love Aldrich’s work and I know many others do as well, so I thought I’d keep it alive here on Substack. Enjoy.

Jonathan Meese MONDPARSIFA, from AR March 2018 Simonini Jonathan Meese usually refers to himself in the third person, as if he were a character in the wild and tumultuous opera of his art. He is, of course, the protagonist, but there are plenty of supporting roles: Wagner, Hitler, Napoleon, Nero, Nietzsche and an ever-present, ever-erect phallus.

In a time when jazz is barely a smudge on the cultural radar, the marriage of improvisation and popular music continues nowhere more apparently than with the Vermont rock band Phish. Other artists may be touring and improvising—and they are—but they don’t sell out Madison Square Garden for three nights in a row and continue to host a series of annual, one-band festivals that draw upward of seventy thousand people, all for the adventure of musical improvisation.

Humans want to see time, to give it shape. We imagine time as a relentless force. We bargain with it and race against it, and as the visual beings we are, we want to look our rival in the eye. We want to transform this abstract idea into reality so that we might heal our endless anxiety about the future. Science views time through physics. Newton described it as a container and Einstein folded it into space.

"I Want Everything to Happen at Once” Courtesy the artist Anthea Hamilton’s art speaks the language of design. Her work is often a reconsideration of classic forms: tables, rugs, boots, tiles, wallpaper, kimonos. For her Turner Prize exhibition in 2016, she exhibited a doorway in the shape of a man’s ass, an idea she lovingly poached from the designer Gaetano Pesce.

An interview with Thom Yorke (from the archives) published in The Believer, 2008 (In Rainbows era) At the turn of the twenty-first century, when Radiohead became the new gleaming hope for innovation in rock and roll, the band began renovating the dismal state of the music industry.

Skip to content Materialists are compelled by the things of the world. Usually such things are understood to be luxuries—cars, clothing, jewelry—objects they accumulate for the sake of worldly status. In artistic circles and leftist political ideologies, these sorts of materialists are often derided as the shallow kind of people you should avoid at all costs. The philosopher Jane Bennett provides a more generous concept of materialism.

Olga Balema, Manifestations of our own wickedness and future idiocy, 2017, Rowlux paper, steel, photographs, 254 × 518 × 203 cm. Courtesy the artist; Bridget Donahue, New York; Croy Nielsen, Vienna; Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles The work of Olga Balema is a satisfying defiance. She maintains a fluid approach to every aspect of her art: titles, forms, expectations and materials, which are occasionally actual fluids.

Last year, I developed the unexpected habit of blessing my phone. I now do this ritual any time I answer a call, send a text, or enter the drooling state of the scroll. I do it even if I’m not feeling particularly grateful for my device, because blessing isn’t a way of worshipping technology—what many people are already, unknowingly doing—but the opposite: a method for transforming a false icon into a portal of possibility.

Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary writer and thinker on existentialist horror. Most of his work has taken the form of short stories: haunting, supernatural landscapes that privilege atmosphere over narrative. He has also written essays and a philosophical text on the history of pessimistic thought, from Buddhism to nihilism to antinatalism. His work simmers in the dark, unpleasantness of nightmares, usually without any catharsis.