A couple of years ago I came to a realization: If I’m interested in those artists’ ideas that have fallen outside of the institutional, my only option is to try to carry them forward in some way. It’s about letting art escape from the mechanisms of art history and consensus. There are going to be parts that are invisible to most people. There’s something exciting about that invisibility to me—we live in such an entirely overexposed time. You talk about market forces; I’ve seen an emerging alignment between critical discussion, market activity, and museological practice in the past couple of decades. It comes as no surprise to me that anything that functions in any one of those forums functions in all three of them. At this point, the mechanism is so streamlined that it’s hard to imagine what you could do that would escape that dynamic. — Nayland Blake*
Join Marvin Astorga, Nao Bustamante, Ron Athey, Robert Crouch, Jennifer Doyle, Jamillah James, Young Joon Kwak, Marcus Kuiland-Nazario, and Bradford Nordeen at Zebulon for an evening of performance, music, and dance at Nayland Blake’s FIRST INTERNATIONAL INTERGENERATIONAL GENDER DISCARD PARTY.
The event marks the closing day of Blake’s ICA LA exhibition NO WRONG HOLES—THIRTY YEARS OF NAYLAND BLAKE.
DISGENDER EUPHORIA—NAYLAND BLAKE’S FIRST INTERNATIONAL INTERGENERATIONAL GENDER DISCARD PARTY
Sunday, January 26, from 8 pm to midnight.
Zebulon
2478 Fletcher Drive, Los Angeles.
*“Rachel Harrison and Nayland Blake” interview, Bomb 105, Fall 2008.
From top: Nayland Blake; Nayland Blake, Untitled, 2000, charcoal on paper; Nayland Blake, Untitled, 2007, graphite and colored pencil on paper; Nao Bustamante as Conchita, photograph by Austin Young; Nayland Blake, Kit No. 7 (Flush), 1990, rubber gloves, stainless steel cups, belt, hose, shelf, books; Nayland Blake, Equipment for a Shameful Epic, 1993, mixed media; Nayland Blake, Crossing Object (Inside Gnomen), 2017, mixed media. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographers, ICA LA, and Matthew Marks Gallery.
