Anyone know where my installation’s supposed to go?”

“Seth might.”

“Which one’s Seth? Hi. Are you Seth? Are you Seth?”

“Seth’s in the bathtub.”

“Installing his piece.”

“It’s about Dylan Thomas.”

“Who used to live here.”

This is three o’clock on a Friday afternoon in Suite 1024 of the Hotel Chelsea which is an old red-brick on 23rd with iron balustrade and high school hallways and hostel firedoors and long-stay resident artists and layers and layers of paint that remind you, as does everyone you talk to, that the hotel has seen layers and layers of artso: Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Robert Mapplethorpe, a bevy of Andy Warhol girls, Sid Vicious, Arthur C. Clarke, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen. Dylan Thomas. Suite 1024 is currently layered matte red, and serving at trim, a dozen late-twenty-somethings prepping for the DeSiRe exhibition, a showing of 25 emergent New-York based artists. Tonight, the suite will buzz with the artists, their plus-two’s, and supposedly, apparently, theoretically, hopefully, a press contingent. Tomorrow, all the friends and curious eyes 25 emergent artists can Facebook invite. But now, four hours before the big unveil, they work in quiet pre-show fremitus, everyone just trying to get their installations installed, everyone asking for Seth Embry.

Paul Baribeau covering Leonard Cohen’s Chelsea Hotel #2:

Who is not in the bathtub. Embry, the show’s ombudsman-omegaman, is in the reception room and the bedroom and the bedroom closets and the bathroom and the kitchenette. Black t-shirt with white horizontal stripes. Jean shorts rolled up above the knees. Arms akimbo. A quiet voice and a wry smile that hangs just very slightly at the side of his mouth. Seth Embry, by day a store designer, is in the bedroom where two women are arranging their clothing line on the bed, an assortment of animal fur and transparent lace. Nearby, a water jug sits on the nightstand. In it, something that looks very much like a bull penis. It is a turkey neck but it still looks like a bull penis even after you’ve been told. The dresser has been repurposed: two face molds sit atop, crying nail tears while plaster body parts scrabble their way out of the drawers. One of the women places on the pillow a plaster sculpture of a hand fingering the spread lips of a vulva, hesitates, repositions it.

Seth Embry, who on Facebook lists his UF ’04 college majors as Architecture, German, and Avant-Garde Partytime, is in each bedroom closet, overseeing hands ropebound downward in prayer and gothic bodypart miniatures in formaldehyde jars.

Seth Embry is in the reception room with a woman in army fatigues and biceps and triceps to match who is leaning over the coffeetable fitting footlong glass eyelets together. “They’re like, giant needles,” she is saying to an artist who calls himself Luke Harms, who is watching, grinning, a small duffle bag in one hand. Inside the bag, waiting for the right moment to emerge: polymer clay monster golem figurines. With his other hand, Harms polishes a small hexagonal showcase. Nothing like sebum to shine up an exhibit.

Seth Embry is at the corner table discussing a dinner scene installation with artist Sara Jackson. “It has a story behind it,” beams Jackson, hands hugging her sheer black dress. The scene consists of two candleholders which are plaster mutant-robot hand candleholders complete with eggshell skin, plus two soup bowls filled with hardened resin and chicken feet frozen in time. Jackson overturns a water goblet to complete the scene. During the course of the next two nights Jackson will tell the story of the mutant-robot uprising to varying degrees of detail, but now she tells Seth only the thirty-second version. The robot-factory workers, in the middle of chicken foot dinner, realize the robots are rebelling and rush out of the room. As we look at the upturned scene, the realization manifests: we are the mutant robots.

Seth Embry is rolling up the floor rug. On the floor, photographer Elizabeth Raab peels plastic backing off frames for two large portraits of large women, one in samurai garb, the other costumed as a medieval brunehilde. Both women’s gargantuan breasts spill out of their clothing in epic white voluptuousness. “These are big women…beautiful big women,” explains Raab. “So it takes a little Photoshop to get their skin like that.”

Seth Embry is answering a knock at the door. In the doorway, a huge canvas just barely covered by a queen-sized bedsheet. Eyes akimbo, Seth takes in the giant veiled canvas. Somewhere behind it, in dark jeans, flannel, and boots, is the artist.

“Hey! Nick Courage!”

“Hey! Seth Embry!”

“Okay! Let’s see it.” Nick Courage’s canvas will be the largest of the exhibit and as such, it gets one of the few nails in the hotel wall. Most of the other “flat media” will be arranged on chairs, the couch, the floor.

Courage steps into the suite. Undresses the canvas. On it, in heavily textured acrylic, is a cartoon-style girl with cat whiskers sipping a juice bottle through a crinkle straw against a black background with the words “hyper-chouette” rainbowing out from cartoon cat-girl’s head. Nick and Seth heft the canvas to the wall, trying to maneuver around the couch until someone says it’d be a lot simpler if someone moved the couch, which someone does, and Nick and Seth work on getting the canvas balanced on the existing nail. It slips to the right. To the left. Refuses to be still.

“This is rather inexplicable,” says Seth, as they slide the canvas back and forth along the wall. They take the canvas back down, think.

“Mind if I veil the canvas?” says Nick. Sara Jackson is still standing by her mutant-robot scene. Luke Harms still hasn’t unzipped the golem bag. Elizabeth Raab isn’t quite looking at anyone. The artists talk as they work, but they don’t talk about art. If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were intentionally avoiding it. In a few hours, the artists will shift into show-mode: Be witty! Be sharp! Be weird! Be interesting! Sara Jackson will tell the five-minute version of the mutant robot uprising. Elizabeth Raab won’t talk about photoshopping obese beauty; she’ll explain the anti-heteronormative stance of her photographic aesthetic. Courage’s canvases will be unabashedly unveiled. Everyone will be taking photo and video and wallowing in historicity. But right now, even though it is a roomful of artists, there are no egos on display, you don’t hear the “Well, I went to art school, so–” or “That’s a nice hobby. For you” or the feigned interest and feinted compliments that you’ll hear plenty during the show. In fact, very little of anything feels artso. In this moment, the artist is simply a technician.

Seth Embry is looking down at Nick, who is bent over the floor, pounding wire higher into the “hyper-chouette” frame. Hammer blows echo along the wood floor.

“Um, Nick.” The corner of Seth’s mouth is concerned. “We have to be extremely careful here about…It’s just the noise is…I don’t want to–”

“Oh, sure. Right. What if I wrap the hammer in like, flannel?”

A sudden crash of glass. Seth whips around. The woman in army fatigues leans over the coffee table, wincing. “Glass on glass has a tendency to be problematic.”

Seth says nothing. The corner of his mouth tightens uncomfortably. “Okay. I’m gonna work on my installation. God. I haven’t eaten anything all day.”

“Are you Seth?”

Seth turns around. A woman—mid 40s, the oldest artist in the show—is facing Embry. Is in Embry’s face. She wears a loose fitting, well-worn black dress. No bra. She has an imperious mien. She wants to know who’s in charge. Apparently there has been some mix up. There had been emails that clearly stated she was in the exhibit but this is news to Seth. Seth looks happy to accommodate, less happy about how he’s being spoken to.

“So can I set up my exhibit?”

“The thing is—”

“It goes in the toilet.” And it really does. Feathers. Lining the toilet bowl. And a handwritten sign: “Guys – Please sit to pee – do not lift the rim – Thanks –” This is the only part of the installation visible to the naked eye. “You’re supposed to pee on the feathers,” she explains. Tomorrow, the toilet bowl will be a mix of urine and toilet paper and feathers. It will be an easy installation to dispose.

“The problem is,” Seth begins, quietly reasserting his role, “my installation goes in the tub and I’m gonna to have to get all up in there to put it together and you probably don’t want me climbing all over what you’re doing.”

Embry’s exhibit is a canvas painted in geometric whites and blacks. That goes in the tub. Thick black yarn spiders out from the vents and to the floor, taped with electricians’ tape. It is intended evoke the ghost of Dylan Thomas, who died while a resident at the Chelsea, whose presence, Embry explains, still lingers in the walls and pipes. The artist with the toilet installation has no choice but to wait.

Which in the end isn’t a problem. In the end, with time to spare, the artists’ exhibits have come together. In the end, the cat-girl is staying put on the wall, big beautiful brunehilde is framed, the fingerbanged vulva is properly positioned, the golem figurines are in their hand-shined case, the feathers are in the toilet, the mutant robot uprising is complete, and Dylan Thomas wafts from the vents. There’s even a time for a beer run.

All that’s left, now, is the show.

(Chicken Feet photo by Lauren Jacobs)

• Group Show w/ Courage @ Chelsea Hotel
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins
• Film: Just One Thing (A Brooklyn Short)

• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• AMR Podcast #33 – “Leadership, Finally,” Says My Corpse
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

Also: new facebook page here!

• AMR Music Month
• Henhouse Letters (poetry/video)
• addiction (poetry/video)

• Painting: Progress (2)
• Painting: Progress
• (20)09: Retrospective

Press – uh oh – and +1s are going to be there the night before, and then the entire Saturday of the 22nd is for friends – so come show some love throughout the day! Seriously, I’ve been on painting downshift for a while, so this is probably going to be both my first real show and my last show for a while. Also, I haven’t met everyone who’s a part of this yet, but it looks like a massively talented, hyper-chouette group so… IT’S A THING! You can RSVP on FB here, and please share with any friendly friends you think might like:

• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins
• AMR Recommends: Summer Reads

• Painting: Progress
• Shark (Process)
• (20)09: Retrospective

• Painting: Progress (2)
• Shark (Process)
• Art News: Anticipating Desire

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

• Race Car Magic (1990)
• the monsters (1988)

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

• a day in the life (1991)
• the monsters (1988)

Hit play and then click somewhere outside of the slideshow to read sans buttons etc:

• a day in the life (1991)
• Race Car Magic (1990)

• addiction (poetry/video)
• Video: The Long Version (No Sexy Regrets)
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

the poetry machine:

• Henhouse Letters (poetry/video)
• Video: The Long Version (No Sexy Regrets)
• AMR Podcast #32 – The Rule Against Quoting Joan Didion

• Art News: Anticipating Desire
• AMR Podcast #30 – Be Your Own Tony Robbins
• Group Show w/ Courage @ Chelsea Hotel

It started out as a sort of spaced out lunch hour thought I had a few weeks ago in Madison Square Park. Not even a conversation, just a one-off that was in the right place at the right time – the midst of some ambient guilt about not doing enough, not making enough.

So I went home and ad-libbed/sang about this five second thought I had. And the music changed it entirely. And the cold I had. And the car skidding and crashing that got on the tape about half way through. It became about: assonance and immolating clarity. It became sort of legitimized, that thought, by the world it found itself in.

And now I’ve found two completely unrelated videos and spliced them together – just one cut down the middle, like the line on a v. pregnant woman’s stomach. And it’s changed again – completely and forever. Mounting context! It’s not even one thought any more, and my hand in it (vaguely, wildly curatorial) is almost no hand at all. It’s like a font. And not the typographic kind.

It feels almost self-indulgent to be actively self-effacing artistically, but I love watching an idea spin completely out of control even as I’m fleshing it out, because I’m fleshing it out. Or: I love feeling that way. And mounting context. Even/especially when it’s completely arbitrary.

• Shark (Process)
• (20)09: Retrospective
• skeleton (process)