MIKEROSCOPIC | lo-fi retrograde

24Jun08

Praise for Kuszyk, Black Liquid No. 3
by Michael Lindgren

To the newcomer, everything in New York might seem bigger, louder, and grander, but sometimes you have to look a little harder to find the good stuff. Our culture accelerates; attention spans decline; corporations tighten their grip; and art becomes an exercise in branding, where satisfaction is just a click of the computer away.

So: at the Affordable Art Fair last weekend, I took (for me) a nearly unprecedented action: I bought a painting. R. Nicholas Kuszyk is a Brooklyn artist who creates dozens of tiny, jewel-like paintings featuring the travails of a small, befuddled-looking robot. The effect is somehow both humorous and melancholy: the painting I bought depicts a jumbled pile of robot parts silhouetted against a bright red sky — sort of a 70s Philip Guston vibe, executed in miniature.

The allure of Kuszyk’s coolly ironic pop-dystopian imagery aside, I cannot help also mentioning that the artist’s prolific output allows him to price his paintings at $50. In an art world where “affordable” still runs into the thousands of dollars, this is very nearly revolutionary, or at least savvy.

It is still a lo-fi, retrograde kind of kick to run across an old-fashioned literary fanzine, with jumbles of text and imagery smeared across photocopied and hastily-stapled pages. One of these artifacts, called Black Liquid No. 3, found its way into my hands recently. Like most such documents, the quality of the contents is highly erratic, this one containing crackling poems by Jack Gattanella and Brynda Yates, along with some pretty clumsy stuff. As a bonus, an equally uneven 12-track CD is included, the high points being scabrous electric caterwauling from Vibrate Her and dense noise-rock from Arklight. The whole point of a crummy-looking little thing like this, though, is that the eclecticism and catholicity of its “content” (its very thrown-together-ness) comprises a nearly “found” (by virtue of its near-anonymity and, one presumes, limited circulation) object.

The “thing-ness” of it taken in toto has made traditional ideas of “literary quality” irrelevant, at least now, at least at this moment; it manages to be democratic, avant-garde, ephemeral, and permanent all at once.

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Tags: affordable art fair, arklight, art journal, artist, black liquid no 3, brynda yates, fanzine, jack gattanella, literary, lo-fi retrograde, mike lindgren, mikeroscopic, New York, painting, r nicholas kuszyk, robot, um, Urban Molecule, vibrate her