Tag Archives: Cookie Mueller

ALTERED AFTER

ALTERED AFTER—a group show at Participant Inc featuring work by Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, General Idea, Jerry the Marble Faun, Leslie Kaliades, Kang Seung Lee, Ronald Lockett, Jonathan Molina Garcia, Cookie Mueller, Raúl de Nieves, Jason Simon, Manuel Solano, Gail Thacker, Julie Tolentino, and XFR Collective—incorporates “archives, archaeology, salvaged objects, material migrations, inherited knowledge, and bequests in response to HIV/AIDS.”*

The exhibition is curated by Conrad Ventur for Visual AIDS.

“I’ve learned that we have to find our own saviors. For me, I like to create a fantasy, and one of the ways I’ve found beauty is by stacking beads on top of each other. I usually work in circles and let time shape the work…

“I guess I choose shoes as a vehicle to adorn myself, to give off different identities… The shoes are very organic. I actually see them grow. It pushes me to want to learn more about weight and design, to push them into new forms. But I also want them to design themselves in a way.” — Raúl de Nieves

In conjunction with ALTERED AFTER, Anthology Film Archives and Visual AIDS present RECORD TIME, a free evening of films and videos on August 8, curated by Carmel Curtis and Leeroy Kun Young Kang.

The program includes SOMETHING FIERCE (1989)—Greg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto’s video for Gay Men’s Health Crisis—Colin Campbell’s SKIN (1990), Nguyen Tan Hoang’s K.I.P. (2002), Hayat Hyatt’s VILLANELLE (2015), Tran T. Kim-Trang’s KORE (1994), Barbara Hammer’s VITAL SIGNS (1991), and Jim Hubbard’s THE DANCE (1992).

ALTERED AFTER*

Through August 18.

Participant, Inc

253 East Houston Street, #1, New York City.

RECORD TIME film program

Thursday, August 8, at 7:30 pm.

Anthology Film Archives

32 Second Avenue (at 2nd Street), New York City.

Altered After, Participant, Inc, 2019, from top: Manuel Solano, Untitled, from the series, An Interior, A Sensation, An Instant, 2019, acrylic on canvas, courtesy and © the artist and Peres Projects, Berlin; Darrel Ellis, Untitled (from Thomas Ellis photo of child’s birthday party), circa 1990, gelatin silver print, courtesy and © the Estate of Darrel Ellis and OSMOS; Altered After installation views (3), including shoes by Raúl de Nieves; fierce pussy, Flag, 1992/2019, five photocopies on paper, courtesy and © the artist; Greg Bordowitz and Jean Carlomusto for Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Something Fierce (1989, 3:30 minutes, video), still, courtesy and © the artists and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries; Colin Campbell, Skin (1990, 18 min, 16mm), still, courtesy and © the artist and V Tape; Altered After installation view, including a painting by Darrel Ellis and a section of Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Garden) , 2018, 24K Nishijin gold thread on Sambe, ceramic (California clay, soils from Derek Jarman’s Garden, Nam San, Tapgol Park), pebbles from Dungeness and Tapgol Park, metal parts and dried plants from Derek Jarman’s Garden, courtesy and © the artist and ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul; Kang Seung Lee, Untitled (Garden) detail; Jason Simon, Untitled (Video Against AIDS), 2013. three facsimile cassette wraps and original printed materials designed by Hannah H. Alderfer, courtesy and © the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York; detail of Altered After exhibition catalog cover, designed by Jean Foos, image by Leslie Kaliades, still from Altered After, 1997, video, black and white, sound, 4:45 minutes; Altered After installation views (2); Tran T. Kim-Trang, Kore (1994, 17 min, video), still, courtesy and © the artist and Video Data Bank. Images courtesy Participant, Inc.

DAVID ARMSTRONG — POLAROIDS

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Shortly before he died in 2014 at age 60, David Armstrong supervised the production of one last book, DAVID ARMSTRONG—POLAROIDS, a small volume of friends and lovers.

(Cookie Mueller, above center, and Bruce Balboni below.)

David Armstrong—Polaroids (London: Mörel, 2015).

David Armstrong Polaroids. Image credit: Mörel and David Armstrong Estate, © David Armstrong Estate.

GOLDIN’S BALLAD AT MOCA

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A digital presentation of Nan Goldin’s original 35mm slide installation THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY is on view at MOCA as part of the exhibition REAL WORLDS—BRASSAÏ, ARBUS, GOLDIN.

“Nan’s Bowery loft had no windows or else they were covered and this made her parties long, hilarious, dangerous events. You had no idea what time it was or how light the sky was getting out there. Her guests departed when they could ingest no more and some didn’t leave even then…

“I remember the first telephone conversation I ever had with Nan. ‘I’m among the missing today,’ she said, and hung up.” — Darryl Pinckney, from his essay in Goldin’s exhibition catalogue I’ll Be Your Mirror*

NAN GOLDIN—THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY

REAL WORLDS—BRASSAÏ, ARBUS, GOLDIN, through September 3.

MOCA GRAND AVENUE, 250 South Grand Avenue, downtown Los Angeles.

moca.org/real-worlds-brassai-arbus-goldin

*See Hilton Als’ 2016 piece: newyorker.com/the-ballad-of-sexual-dependency

Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, from top:

John Waters and Cookie Mueller in Provincetown; Edwige Belmore in Edwige Behind the Bar at Evelyn’s New York City, 1985; Bruce Balboni and Philippe Marcade on the beach, Truro, MA, 1975.

Image credit: Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery.

BETTE GORDON AT CINEFAMILY

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Kathy Acker wrote her only produced screenplay for VARIETY, Bette Gordon’s pre-gentrification thriller set in Times Square. VARIETY stars Sandy McLeod and Will Patton, with cameos by Nan Goldin and Cookie Mueller, and features a score by John Lurie. On Friday night, June 9, Gordon will screen a 35mm print of her cult classic at Cinefamily.

On Saturday, join Gordon and filmmaker Lizzie Borden for an early evening conversation, followed by a screening of Gordon’s latest film THE DROWNING, starring Julia Stiles, Josh Charles, and Avan Jogia, who played Teddy in 10,000 Saints.

VARIETY, Friday, June 9, at 7:30 pm.

THE DROWNING, Saturday, June 10, at 5 pm.

CINEFAMILY AT THE SILENT MOVIE THEATRE, 611 North Fairfax, Los Angeles.

cinefamily.org/films/gordon-and-borden/#variety-w-bette-gordon-in-person

Sandy McLeod in Variety (1983), and Avan Jogia in The Drowning (2017), both directed by Bette Gordon. Image credit: Cinefamily.

COOKIE MUELLER

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“Two generations before, let’s say the Beats—Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso—they were still around and it was such a hard thing for writers to follow….It wasn’t until the generation of Cookie Mueller, David Trinidad, Tim Dlugos, and Dennis Cooper who really got on to something new….They broke away. They were relating to Frank O’Hara…[a] very urban contemporary, Apollinaire sort of thing tied in with the painters.” — Raymond Foye*

It’s easy to say that EDGEWISE: A PICTURE OF COOKIE MUELLER, by Chloé Griffin, is a twenty-first century Edie. They’re both oral histories of a New York underground, and there are some surface similarities between Edie Sedgwick and Mueller. Supernovas, especially when they’re women, tend to get lumped together. But Mueller was a better actress than Sedgwick, and—in everything from dieting to drug-taking—more disciplined.

And she could write. (Gary Indiana was her strongest early advocate.) High Times, the East Village Eye, Cuz, and Details published her art reviews and advice columns. Mueller’s first book—How to Get Rid of Pimples—was published by Anne Turyn‘s Top Stories, and Mueller co-wrote the play Drugs with the late Glenn O’Brien.

We’re lucky to have Mueller’s words and the memories of her friends in Chloé Griffin’s EDGEWISE. If traces of Warhol’s Sixties still blow through Manhattan, Mueller’s late Seventies avant-garde has dissolved into finer dust.

For those too young to know or remember, EDGEWISE is a voyeur’s dream, and an introduction to a world to be discovered—the stories and plays and photographs and music and films of David Armstrong, Bette Gordon, Sara Driver, Michael Oblowitz, Penny Arcade, Richard Hell, Eric Mitchell, Rachid Kerdouche, Lynne Tillman, Peter Hujar, Michel Auder, Amos Poe, and Cookie Mueller.

“Nobody could possibly be as solidly grounded in Bohemian glamour as she was. Just one of a kind, it was all her own. She was too cool to be competitive.” — Kate Simon*

Chloé Griffin, EDGEWISE: A PICTURE OF COOKIE MUELLER (Berlin: b_books Verlag, 2014).

WALKING THROUGH CLEAR WATER IN A POOL PAINTED BLACK, by Cookie Mueller, kicked off Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents series in 1990.

*Foye and Simon quotes from EDGEWISE. In 1984, Foye and Francesco Clemente founded Hanuman Books, and published Mueller, Trinidad, Allen Ginsberg, Eileen Myles, Herbert Huncke, and John Ashbery.

See EDIE: AN AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY, by Jean Stein and George Plimpton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). A year after publishing West of Eden (2016), her oral biography on five prominent Los Angeles families (including her own), Stein jumped to her death from her 10 Gracie Square apartment in New York City.

From top: Cookie Mueller, photograph by Nan Goldin, 1985; book cover image courtesy of b_books Verlag.; Mueller and singer Sharon Niesp dancing in the Back Room, Provincetown, 1976, photograph by Goldin. Mueller photographs courtesy of Nan Goldin and Matthew Marks Gallery.