Quarantine Reading List | Jeff Ostergren
Quarantine Reading List | Jeff Ostergren
I'm not sure about everybody else, but I can't seem to manage to read anything longer than a few pages these days. Maybe it's partly being tired (childcare! home-schooling! too many dishes!) or distracted. But besides lots of news, I'm reading short non-fiction pieces, comforted in revisiting old favorites and excited to find new things that address what's happening head-on.
I also am, as always, very susceptible to earworms: songs that I haven't heard before that I suddenly and intensely latch on to. A number of these occupy me for days and then disappear from my playlist forever. Even before this, I often worked in the studio listening to the same song over and over for hours; it can allow me to find a certain rhythm or move into a kind of trance.
My recommendation: While reading each of the following works, listen to the accompanying song on repeat for the duration of text (or as long as you can tolerate it).
Jeff Ostergren, Vaporized (Landscape), 2019. Mint Juul e-liquid, Jolessa, Lunesta, Viagra, pigment, linseed oil, solvent on Kevlar ballistic fabric; 14” x 10”.
Cady Noland
“Towards A Metalanguage of Evil”
Cady Noland is quietly, uncannily, one of the best artists ever. It's so hard to explain her work and her writing. They are both so obvious and yet haven't ever been duplicated by anyone else, no matter how they've tried. This writing of hers from 1989 is a classic. I think you can substitute any number of ideas (capitalism, American society, etc.) for the word "psychopath" in here and get to a good understanding of how we arrived at this societal collapse happening now. Her "dropout" out of the art world makes her work even more mysterious.
Pair with: Low - “Congregation”
I don't actually like any other songs by Low, but heard this one in the opening of an episode of the recent tv series "Devs", and found it completely hypnotic, haunting, and engaging. And the idea of a "congregation" is now much more ominous.
Jeff Ostergren, Vaporized (Landscape), 2019. Mint Juul e-liquid, Jolessa, Lunesta, Viagra, pigment, linseed oil, solvent on Kevlar ballistic fabric; 14” x 10”.
Keller Easterling
I recommend reading more by Keller Easterling — an architect, writer, and Yale architecture professor amongst other things. She delivers hypnotic, engaging lectures that engage with issues of infrastructure, economics, globalism, and bodies. "Medium Design" seems to be an introduction of sorts of what will be a book published sometime coming up. It's a remarkable piece that wanders between issues of design, objecthood, and culture. Despite being written a couple of years ago, it has new resonance with our pandemic present.
Pair with Sleater Kinney - “Animal”
Last year Sleater-Kinney put out a great album, although shifting in some new directions that led to the band fragmenting and reconfiguring, but perhaps my favorite song from their final recording sessions is this single that came out separately. It's driving rhythm builds to a guttural rallying cry.
Jeff Ostergren, Death Mask, 2018. Strattera, Lunesta, Viagra, Loestrin, Albuterol inhaler, Luvox, Saphris, Hand Sanitizer, Green Superfood Powder, Mac ‘n’ Cheese powder, pigment, and cast plastic; 20.5” x 17” x .5”.
16 Beaver Group
Society of the Friends of the Virus, Volume 1 and Volume 2
I don't know how I came across this collective of artists/theorists/activists many years ago — I was in LA and they were in NY, so I never actually attended a meeting — but I've found their theory "playlists" to be very useful over the years. And now they have put out provocative texts as "Society of the Friends of the Virus." Without making light of this situation at all, they make a powerful point: this virus, a zombie-like, part-alive and part-dead entity, has taken advantage of the weaknesses our world has provided, and it is flaying open the massive flaws, inequities, and violence in our cultures that have existed for so long. For this, even as people are suffering greatly and dying, we must, in a strange way, honor it.
Pair with Grimes & i_o - “violence”
Post-anthropocentric music that perfectly sums up our current moment, but with a dance beat (and a music video with an eerie prescience for our new world of face masks)
Jeff Ostergren
Jeff Ostergren has exhibited work in locations around the world including Los Angeles, Vancouver, and the Czech Republic. Last year, his work was included in the group exhibition Perverse Furniture at Artspace in New Haven, as well as a solo commissioned installation “Science For a Better Life,” a site-specific project at City-Wide Open Studios in New Haven in which he explored the chemical and corporate history of Bayer Pharmaceuticals. He also screened a work in Video Snack 6 in Brooklyn in Fall 2017, which recently screened again as part of the Fikra Design Biennial in Sharjah, UAE in November 2018. He is a recipient of a 2017 Artist’s Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation. He also has a curatorial practice, including the exhibition False Flag: The Space Between Reason and Paranoia at Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA in 2006, and a BA in a double major of anthropology and gender studies at Rice University in Houston, TX in 1998.
These recommendations are part of the Quarantine Reading List series. See the call for participation here.
