Tag Archives: Glenn O’Brien

FOR GLENN O’BRIEN

At the Hammer Museum on Tuesday, Ernest Hardy, Jonathan Lethem, Andy Spade, and Linda Yablonsky will read from INTELLIGENCE FOR DUMMIES, the final book of essays and other writings by the late editor and author Glenn O’Brien.

Following the readings, Yablonsky and the book’s publisher Michael Zilkha will participate in a conversation and Q & A.

GLENN O’BRIEN—INTELLIGENCE FOR DUMMIES

Tuesday, January 14, at 7:30 pm.

Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

From top: Glenn O’Brien, PARIS LA 15 (2017); O’Brien (left) and Mick Jones of The Clash on O’Brien’s TV Party in the 1970s, photograph by Kate Simon; Dash Snow (left) and O’Brien at Margiela show, Paris, September 2008, photograph by Tamara Weber; O’Brien, Intelligence for Dummies: Essays and Other Collected Writings (2019), ZE Books; O’Brien, editor, The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground, Library of America; O’Brien. Images courtesy and © the author’s estate, the photographers, the publishers, and the Hammer Museum.

DASH SNOW — THE DROWNED WORLD

“Dash [Snow] and David Hammons are both artists with a witch-doctor feel to their work, which is important, because ultimately what is the value of art?… In an increasingly secular society, it’s even more important as people try to form their belief systems. If you’re not going the readymade route, then you look around for the tools available to make something of your own. That’s a big part of the artist’s job or the writer’s job…

“It’s found in the moment, not in an academic way. You find it in the practice. I think the academic and institutional part of the art world is a big problem. Artists often collaborate with them to their detriment, because they think they need the institution as a go-between, a translator for the public. Dash, like Hammons, understood that you don’t need the middleman. Cut out the middleman. Make him wait in line with everyone else. It has to be on the artist’s terms.” — Glenn O’Brien on Dash Snow*

The new exhibition THE DROWNED WORLD presents work from the late artist’s archive, including a selection of rarely seen sculptures.

DASH SNOW—THE DROWNED WORLD

Through May 12.

Participant Inc

253 East Houston Street, New York City.

*”I Don’t Believe in Masterpieces Anyway—Glenn O’Brien on Dash Snow,” Ursula 2 (Spring 2019).

See Nicole Miller and David Rimanelli on Snow.

Dash Snow, from top: Mixed-media sculpture, 2000–2009; The Drowned World: Selections from the Dash Snow Archive, 2019, installation view, Participant Inc, New York, photograph by Mark Waldhauser; Untitled, 2000–2009, Polaroid (Kunle Martins (left) and Snow); Untitled (Past, Present), 2006, mixed-media sculpture; Untitled, 2007, collage; Untitled (Her Kisses Were Dangerous), 2006–2007, collage. Images © Dash Snow, courtesy of the Dash Snow Archive, New York City and Participant Inc. Special thanks to Lia Gangitano.

COOKIE MUELLER

“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.