welcome, double agent

A request for a drawing, a drawing that qualified as both visionary and architectural. I had to ask myself what sort of visions was I capable of?  Marginal, dystopic, reckless, unsustainable phantasms that fleece you while they feel you. Those kind.

These visions generated in the lost structures I came across in the Mojave Desert when hiking with my father as a child- roofless adobes, handmade cattle troughs, carved stone pits used in ancient fertility rites, abandoned mines and crumbling homesteader’s shacks. On ridges overlooking the desert we sometimes sighted newer structures, hand built by drug dealers and sex traders, and bereft of any vegetation for hundreds of feet. The ground floors were windowless. It was related that once, in the wet concrete of a fresh driveway, ladies in negligees stumbled out, pressing their breasts and buttocks into fresh concrete.

Despite my inexperience, I could deduce that was I was seeing was no home; but what I couldn’t tell was whether what I saw was more fortress or dead house. I’d hazard now, that its denizens were haunting a space that was simultaneously crypt and fortified compound. For me, the conundrum of the dead house has transformed into a sly command with strings attached: Undo professional architecture but do not undo human beings. So, given that imperative, what built gesture points away from Negative Architecture (be it dangerously professional or professionally illicit)? What can operate within the unheimlich- a house unhinged from home, a genital unhinged from gender?

Given its formal properties (dimensions, materials, texture), the provenience of this object hovers somewhere between gravestone and doorstep. An impression of a modest penis (uncircumcised and flaccid) has left a trace on the surface of the concrete and serves as signature/epitaph/animal track. It is an artifact from the future past— a vernacular architecture, hand built and humble.

Snuff Architecture, a small concrete work was cast mid-January. It will be included in a book investigating ‘visionary architecture’ that accompanies an installation by Bua/Berkowitz at MassMOCA.

The Demon Seed of John Brown (A New Translation of Children of the Corn) will begin production next week. Angela Perez narrates. At completion, this stripped down version of revolt will be disseminated by roving radio transmitters.

(Library in) The Land of Fuck, a recording of 3 erotic tales, read by myself at age 10, is complete. I will build the library and a radio transmitter will broadcast the tales into the library, that is ‘The Land of Fuck’.

Sweet Cowardice, a radio play with five narrators, is nearly complete. Julia Shirar is mastering the sound in California. A description follows.

Sweet Cowardice, a radio play with five narrators, not only investigates how the purported ‘War on Terror’ continues to expand its field of vision to include environmentalists within the ranks of suspected terrorists but how the totalitarian opportunities insinuated by the act encourage cowardice in the director and those she comes into contact with. Additionally, dreams, collected during the reign of Germany’s Third Reich, are threaded through the play- as they, too reflect, a population’s internal reckoning with their own fear and collusion.

Here, “Night Visitation” appears on buildings, fences and on ’street furniture’ in my childhood neighborhood in Brooklyn.