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Tavi posted this trailer on Saturday and she's absolutely right. Something to make you smile every time you watch it.…

Miscellany for today

Recent things I've obsessed over include:

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) 1961-63 Installation view, Magnetized Space, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2011. © Projeto Lygia Pape and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

Lygia Pape – her Livro do tempo, her Trio do embalo maluco … if you've not seen the Serpentine show, you really ought to. It closes February 19. I often wonder if artistic experimentation can ever be what it was in the first decades of this century. Video works, installations, happenings from the 60s still now have an awesome – and I use that word literally – quality to them, an aliveness, a rawness, a sense of fearless discovery that feels unattainable now. Seeing Lynda Benglis's work first in a Le Consortium catalogue, and then at the New Museum last year was mad exciting. More so than any other shows I'd seen for a long time. I really hate nostalgia, that cramped, stifling feeling of being stuck or wanting to be, so it isn't out of some longing for things to be as they were that I say this, but rather out of sheer astonishment that these works still retain this power over me. That it is still possible for them to astonish, to excite – to make me imagine I'm experiencing a similar curious searching and trying out while looking at these works as the artists did when they made them.

Lynda Benglis, Blatt, 1969. © Lynda Benglis. DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2009. Courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

Benglis is here next week for the opening of her first solo show in London at Thomas Dane, on February 9. Something else not to miss. And then there's Yayoi Kusama at the Tate. A basic google image search for Kusama is enough to send you spinning. The dots are only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, a portal into this most intense of worlds.

  

Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli's Field (Floor Show) (1965)

Relentess, undaunted, open, unfazed by trend or money or the lack of it. Benglis was born in 1941. Kusama is in her 80s. And both are still making work that is fiercer and more out there than any student shows I've seen in ages. Like Patti Smith on stage, or Tina in 1971, or Björk. Here: 

Dasha Shishkin

Speaking with Dasha Shishkin for this month's Nylon was one of the greatest pleasures I had before Christmas. She was courteous and gracious and really funny. And it just made me want to dive headfirst into her work and follow her mad-crazy protagonists. We spoke about calendars and stickers and the thrill of marking important dates in some way, things to look forward to and to work toward. The piece is in print. But you can read it here too. And make sure to see her show, if you're in Ohio, at the DAC from March 3. 



















Some Things Just Got to be True, 2011, mixed media on mylar, 228.6 x 320 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Zach Feuer Gallery, NY


Dasha Shishkin is a maker of surprising and explosive things. The Russian-born, Brooklyn-based artist weaves a world of sinuous lines, kaleidoscopic colors, and psychedelic imagery. From large-scale wall drawings produced in situ to tiny etchings, her work vacillates between figuration and abstraction.
Since completing her MFA at Columbia in 2006, Shishkin has shown her work extensively and is present in major collections, from MoMA and the Whitney in New York City to the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently preparing her first solo museum show, opening at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati next month, she’s locked into her intuitive, organic working process.

“It becomes like an exquisite corpse game where someone else—the material—is suggesting something to me,” says Shiskin, of the trigger for her new work. Though grounded in figuration, she avoids any idea of narrative: suggestion and open-endedness are key.

The ideas at play in the making of Shishkin's work only become apparent to her once a show is hung. “Whatever is obsessing me is not only on the surface of my mind but also something subconsciously present and bothersome.” Shishkin's work has been compared to that of Matisse, Egon Schiele and Marcel Dzama—artists for whom considerations of form are always intrinsically weighted by intense human emotion. Equally though, her process brings to mind artists including Yayoi Kusama, for whom abstract form itself takes on a life of its own, one seeped in the artist’s inner turbulence. “Often a motif will keep reappearing, say a circle, and it becomes like an obsessive compulsive thing," she says. "It isn’t always a conscious decision to work with certain imagery, but more like something you have to get out of your system.”

Plan B talks to Miranda Sawyer

Just read this interview by Miranda Sawyer with Plan B, done just before his appearance at Glastonbury. What powerful, brutal empathy. 
"I'd never call myself that [a role model], that's for other people to say," he says. "Anyway, if you're a kid with a good life, I'm the worst role model in the world. I drink. I don't have a problem with drugs, apart from hard drugs. I'm no good for you, if you're from a good background. But for kids with bad lives, from bad homes, the fucked-up kids whose parents are alcoholics, who are abused, whose lives are shit, then yeah, I'll bring you up. I'll understand. Listen to my music – I'll help you through. You can rely on me."

Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan

When I was 19 I taught languages at a rich kids' summer camp in the woods in French Belgium, and made an everlasting friend called Dave who gave me a bunch of things to listen to that I treasure to this day: Bedhead,  Latin Playboys, some Hawaiian guitar tracks, and Yo La Tengo. Return to Hot Chicken burned itself into my brain and despite ten thousand listens – far too many to count – a few notes of that album, and that titular song in particular, and everything is ok. For 26 years, Ira, Georgia and more recently James have been doing their thing with a singular lightness of touch, and intensity of focus. They are broad and generous in their sound, capable of building a song – like one might a ship – to take you away forever. I think their music is what I want the inside of my mind to sound like – the space I need, or the air I long for. Nightfalls on Hoboken, Last Days of Disco, Tiny Birds, Green Arrow, Big Day Coming, Decora, Sugarcube, Living in the Country, Pablo and Andrea, And the Glitter Is Gone, their covers of Gentle Hour, of By the Time it Gets Dark, of Nuclear War … as many songs that I sink into and long for them never to end. They hit a groove, they ride a particular beat with an organ or a guitar and it's mesmerising, magical, a sound for sore ears of which you wouldn't want to lose the slightest fragment. And then they throw a curveball, some Kramer-style madness or a witty little video about names and that bursts the bubble and reminds you you're listening to pop music, this is the real world, they are just musicians going about their day. And that is the beauty of it. When I first heard And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out I was so overwhelmed by it, I wrote to thank them. I'm not sure quite why but the best way I could think of at the time to describe how perfectly the album had filled me with joy was to refer to CS Lewis. Ira wrote back on the back of a Slinky postcard – he noted the irony and that made me smile. I spoke with him for The Quietus last month, ahead of their Meltdown session, which to my greatest annoyance I couldn't go to. He said not to worry, they'd make sure to do a second-rate show so I wouldn't miss much.

Oh how I love this band.

You can read the interview here. And you can listen to all my favourite YLT tracks here:

Gil Scott Heron, rest in peace

Gil Scott Heron, the man with the voice to break your heart, died yesterday afternoon in New York. What a beautiful, mesmerising figure. I'm watching I'm New Here and fighting back the tears. There's gravel and ancient pain and a world of things witnessed woven through his voice, etched on to his face. And any recording you listen to is one you don't want to hear come to an end. But it has and that is wretched. His music moved me so deeply. I wish I could thank him for it.

Conflict, 2003

I just don't know where I've been. 

I'm watching Conflict parts 1-4 on YouTube for the second time in a row wondering where the hell I've been and why I've not paid better attention. I've had Wiley's Zipfiles – almost 100 tracks – on my phone for ages now, but this is making me realise quite how much I've missed by not listening to them all and a gazillion other tracks since 2003. This early grime is incredible. The energy of these MCs – Wiley, D Double E, Dizzee Rascal, Crazy T, Lady Fury … – the sheer onslaught of their flow, is mesmerising. It sounds like what watching Ed Colver's artwork for Black Flag's Damaged being made would have looked like, if Rollins had literally put his fist through the mirror instead of faking it. You can't touch me, I'm untouchable, you can't touch me, I'm untouchable, you can't hug/hold (?) me, I'm unhuggable, you can't stop me, I'm unstoppable. Fearless, clenched-fist and coiled-spring creativity. Makes you want to jump from one building top to another like a true traceur and run until you collapse, your lungs emptied of all breath. Makes you want to make things and give them away because there's no time to be worried or shy or self-obsessed or protective. The urgency of it all, damn. It's beautiful.