Slow Reading Club at Damien & The Love Guru

Artists: Slow Reading Club with works by Gregory Polony and Eleanor Ivory Weber

Exhibition title: Soft Cover Soft Cover

Venue: Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels, Belgium

Date: January 11 – February 27, 2020

Photography: all images courtesy of the artist and Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels

Note: Exhibition sheet is available here

The strange meeting might be enfigured as an ampersand, which is a kind of eaten-away Möbius strip, in-completely delivering impossible contacts, inefficiently flooding, dumping, jamming, breaking out, collap-sing, gesturing, speeding up, distending, suspending, petering out. The “pity” of war emerges like goo from these pits, but it is also the force that creates its own distended tissues and pitted surfaces.

McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (Poets On Poetry) (Kindle Locations 257-260). Kindle Edition.

AN OBOL FOR MY OBELISK

An obol for my obelisk
An obol for my baselisk
A bitter coin to bite on
as it turns itself to rock
Now one song, one hit of vintage
half-remembered, half-anticipated
unwinds on air
as it starts its petrifying
from the ankles up. Its claws contract
like Alexander McQueen booties
the shape of quotation marks
or the bodies at Pompeii
arrayed for shipment to the afterlife
who never embarked
They hug their own shorelines
and keep watch for the ship
I want to weight my own lids with heavy money
pecked from the seam of the rock
perform the eyeroll that means misery
my thick curls husbanded in a
masculine flock
I want at best to cluck
around the obelisk
removed from the airspace
and inserted wholly
into my dock
At all costs weight my tongue
with an obol
Black with ash
it wants to fly around the room
on leather wings and lace the air
with ore-like seams
through which dark matter can rip
wrecking all passage
to the afterlife
ocean liner
lusitania
dingdong
the brain hums on
with its frantic cartoon dialog
Bring your rock down on my control panel
Break me out of this looney toon
I want to baselisk, to glare it
In the glare of 500 million animals burning up, burnt fur
and wing and scale
rise as fume to fill day’s red upended chamber pot
or cranium emptied of brain
I’m like the sky
solid with rage
I want to mask
my grief
by wearing a mask of it
so that it starts to signal
and not be
A peach stone,
all enfolded,
genital and cerebral,
hides in the mouth of the ephebe
Get it out of there at once. It is exonumismatic
It is an example of exonumia and will not get you into the
underworld
no matter how well you ride
the wrecked raft of your life for the
exit, ersatz Keats
Good for, admit one, redeem
I reck all runes
A choir of mockingbirds deploys their final tune
imitating human alarums
as they burn up in their tree
which enplumes
while the MGM lion
rests stone paw on paw
on the steps outside the libraree
Its heavy mane tugs its head skyward, pulls its eyes to slits
and draws back its lips from a maw the size of a lyre
And now it opens up its lyre
And says, Get me out of here at once

TEXT BY JOYELLE MCSWEENEY

Dear Reader

We’ve come to understand this exhibition as a collection of defence strategies. But defence against what? In order to jam a wireless signal (cell phone signal, radio signal, GPS signal) the two main tactics are 1; to blanket a frequency band with noise so the signal can’t pass through it, or 2; to scramble the incoming message beyond the point of device legibility. In such a process invisibility is thus equal and opposite to visibility, i.e. a refusal that must be active and technologically equivalent to what it refuses. Maybe reading is an analogue to this too; reading to actively rewrite, reading to disappear, reading to jam.

It’s also an exhibition about attachment and about binding, and these themselves are defence strategies and modes of invisibility. The show is bracketed on two sides by the works of friends, which spoon the space from two directions (strange meetings in the necropastoral). Continuous Pattern Camouflage means the wearer disappears by continuing the visual patterns of their en-vironment, which in a forest might mean patches of green and brown and black, but in a discourse taking place across multiple cities in multiple centuries might need something more.

We are, as ever, the soft cover to your soft cover,

xSRC

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Gregory Polony, Eleanor Ivory Weber, Soft Cover Soft Cover, 2020, installation view, Damien & The Love Guru, Brussels

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Death Grips Loop Hole Code Poem, 2020, Satin ribbons, gross-grain ribbons, thread, 132 x 190 cm

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), TTTTTTTTTTTTTTT (book), 2020, 15 long sleeve t-shirts, fabric pen on canvas, heat foils, clothing rack, Size: Large

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Video Brace, 2020, Independently authored videos*, wooden structure, transfer lettering, pirated pdfs, zip ties, 116 x 41 x 85 cm

Henry Andersen, Video Brace, (video excerpt), 2020, Independently authored videos (Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen), wooden structure, transfer lettering, pirated pdfs, zip ties

Bryana Fritz, Video Brace, (video excerpt), 2020, Independently authored videos (Bryana Fritz and Henry Andersen), wooden structure, transfer lettering, pirated pdfs, zip ties

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Video Brace, 2020, Installation view

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Dog Tag Fanzine Saddle Stitch, 2020, Satin ribbons, photo prints, keychains, thread, 144 x 125 cm

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Lap Dog Bone Marrow Jet Lag, 2018, Transfer lettering on woven satin ribbons, concrete, heat-transfer on fabric, clasps concrete installation: 180 x 21 cm; fabric: 105 x 42 cm; strap: 350 x 5 cm

Slow Reading Club (Bryana Fritz & Henry Andersen), Jammer Poems, 2020, Plotter print on plastic sleeves, bookbinding thread, dyed glue, 22 x 17 cm

Gregory Polony, Age Return, 2020, Tulle aymond mini, aluminum rail, cigarette vending token raling : 830 x 197 x 7 cm; curtain: 490 x 240 cm

Gregory Polony, z, 2020, Boonie moskito hat, aluminum rail, socket, half chrome light bulb, electric cable, 167 x 150 cm

Eleanor Ivory Weber, Daily news (“All the News That’s Fit to Print”) [10.01– 28.02.2020, SCSC], 1887–, The New York Times International Edition purchased each day the exhibition is open to the public, paper pedestal, 35 x 26 cm

Eleanor Ivory Weber, Seven poems [O-R-A-L-I-T-Y] or “I would say (write)” [Ong], 2019, A5 prints from an unlimited edition, wheat paste individual piece : 15 x 21 cm; wall piece: 846 cm x 70 cm