Harland Miller, Narcissist Seeks Similar, 2021. Evening & Day Editions London.
It’s the time of year for resolutions and goal-setting, and naturally, this period sees a rise in journaling recommendations from our most impossibly productive friends. This brought us to The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, which operates on the simple idea of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning as a means to overcome blocks that stop us from being our most creative selves, and we are going to instantly take that rush and use it to spark the imaginations of several artists in our upcoming Evening & Day Editions Sale. One of the tenets of the practice is to keep the writing private, so we’re imagining the entries that may or may not have led to the works on offer. Grab a pen, turn off the distractions, and get to writing.
Keith Haring
Keith Haring, The Blueprint Drawings: plate 14, 1990. Evening & Day Editions London.
I’ve had a splitting and unpredictable headache for days and the only respite seems to be imagining myself with a worse headache. I’ve recently read that there was no consensus among artists regarding where to put the halo on beheaded saints: where the head should be or where it ended up. In order to take the mind off my own head case, I will offer it a solution:
- If the decapitated catches their head, it’s fair play and still there in a sense; goes above the stump as a mark of respect for services rendered to the club
- If the head touches the ground, the owner-operator must make an active move towards the head to indicate that the head is still calling the shots; if so, the halo goes to the severed head; if not, see below
- If the head and body are not able to meet again, the halo goes to the head only; the body is out of play and forfeits ownership in the material world; heaven is an away game and plays by different codes than New York
- In edge cases and extenuating circumstances wherein body and head are not in a natural sporting position (e.g. torture devices, the bellies of great beasts, tree branch thickets, and so on), an ecumenical council will determine its closest parameter and judge accordingly
All this because the 24-hour pharmacy is closed for rats. Find a new apartment and do not renew the lease here.
Ed Ruscha
Ed Ruscha, History Kids, from Mountain Prints, 2013. Evening & Day Editions London.
Visualize the mountain.
It is welded to the earth. It defiantly escapes its flatness.
Mountains do not move, they are moved.
They chip away, fall, consume themselves. In snow, in rock, in magma.
The air is thin at one end and abundant to those gazing in awe at the other.
Which way does one crane her neck?
We have read the sleeve of the book and two summaries.
We asked the machine to create a podcast to help us study.
We will deliver: by rote, by rote, by rote. We will deliver.
We will pass this test. For our applications. For our résumés. For our future.
Marcel Broodthaers
Marcel Broodthaers, Citron - Citroen Réclame pour la Mer du Nord (Lemon - Citroen Ad for the North Sea), 1974. Evening & Day Editions London.
The lowlands have always been at war with the sea – its collective psyche dreams of a perfect port, such that when they found one and called it New Amsterdam, they proceeded to go to war with the swamps and the forests and the natives and the other empires, and somewhere in all that an administrative clerk named Isaak made and lost his fortune before returning to the North Sea, where he spent his days thumbing sand from shells and repairing nets, and somewhere in all that Isaak, unbeknownst to him, discovered a new mollusk, one too small to not spoil before the market trip, and lacking value beyond its momentary novelty, was hurled back to the quarrelsome water, not to be catalogued for another fifty years.
No time traveler worth not immediately burning at the stake would bring back some technological trinket; they would simply describe to the king two-day shipping and be off to their estate.
Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst, Ellipticine, 2007. Evening & Day Editions London.
Itinerary for a spring day in London for Barry, 42, Essex
11am: Wake up, open hotel blinds to a cracking view of a Pizza Express
11:15am: Sausage roll
Noon: Meet Wazza, Trent, Higgsy, and Smithy for a round (or three; Higgsy the absolute legend, can’t get him out the pub like, never sees the bottom of them pints, him)
1pm: Taxi to the gallery, tube’s not what it used to be
1:30pm: Make up scenario to complain about traffic – map said it’d be twenty minutes, mate, come on, you taking advantage of tourists, yeah? Drop us off here, here, no I’m pointing at it, here, this corner HERE. Yeah, cheers, we’ll walk the rest of the way. Little thought experiment in case it happens, yeah?
1:32pm: Get to gallery, check coats
1:35-4pm: Contemplate the folding and unfolding of art as a phenomenological process through which one is simultaneously thrown and captured by the aesthetic realm; ponder how human tradition treats art as a tool, a medium, a message, and a technology depending on its function across different modes of power, cultural dynamics, and personal encounter, and even further as a manifestation of lack-of-function, of production as unproductive, and how this relates to meta-analysis in the wake of post-1968 schisms in poststructuralist thought, namely in the work of Jacques Rancière as it relates to The Intellectual and His People, and how this opens an avenue for commentary on the artist’s relationship to their own presentation to the world at large, and not just art in its self-containment; consider how exceedingly complex processes in pharmaceutical science must invariably be made so minimalist in visual delivery.
4:10pm: Gallery closes, sausage roll, taxi back to hotel area with the lads
5pm: Cry in shower
5:30-Close: LADS ON TOUR KEEP ‘EM POURIN’ KEEP US GOIN’
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol, Cow, 1976. Evening & Day Editions London.
Last night I dreamed I was a cow.
The farmer’s cries were out of earshot, himself visible only when his gestures violated the paling sun behind him. There his home and motivations were unknown to me. Here were the hedges of the eastern field; its flies and overgrowth smelled of the following day’s chores, to be done first in an order from far to near, to end the day with work closest to the porch and farthest from the barn.
The reined and hooved gathered here to speak about love. I slotted in among the others, like I knew I did on these evenings. The birds told us of a most beautiful cow, one thirty feet tall and perfect in every way from wither to pin. She shined between two great barns with smoking peaks that emptied into the sky above her like breathing heat into the cold.
It would be my turn to see her soon with the others. I would tell her I loved her more than anything. That I hailed from a soft field with ample grass. That the rain would fall on the children’s chalk drawings on the hard side of the fence and render them bloated, and we would watch them wash away and dissolve into warped smiles and soggy suns and oblongs of all manner. The chickens were always escaping and being chased into muddy tire gaps in the road.
It would be my turn to see her soon, and I would bring her back with me.
Harland Miller
Harland Miller, Narcissist Seeks Similar, 2021. Evening & Day Editions London.
Oh, this person you admired? As it turns out, they’re awful too! Isn’t that wild? Here’s the pitch:
Based on the novel of the same name, this limited series centers around man’s name and woman’s name, played by recent return to B list actress and unconventionally attractive actor (if gay or otherwise inclined, skip ahead to “alternative addendum” section of the pitch deck), two young HR professionals in American city that can be filmed in Canada who can’t quite separate their high-octane careers with their failures to launch romantically. Tired of the apps and quick flings, they meet at cheap to film and insure corporate event before embarking on a whirlwind romance that tests her personality flaw and his equal personality flaw, but not before her quirky adjective friends and his bro-y slang mates give their verdict – that’s right, our screen-crossed lovers have to have full workplace compliance approvals and training before going public, and all right before the firm itself … goes public.
Eight episodes. Forty-five minutes each, but don’t worry if you miss anything while scrolling on the couch – the shots are all perfectly calibrated as gifs for data harvesting app and are IKEA furniture-level easy to piece together. If we get second series funding, we have unlockable marketing deals with data harvesting app and Sabrina Carpenter.
Recommended Reading
Screaming Into the Void or Just Being Cheeky? >
At Play with Abstraction: What You See Is Not What You Get >