grahamg.hamilton@gmail.com

Ser Serpas and other Americans in Paris

Ser Serpas at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton

A German friend offered a take, lukewarm at best: the Parisians are obsessed with American mythologies. It is hardly revelatory to read the PR of three new exhibitions in Paris as subtext. The Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas shows at the Bourse de Commerce Pinault Collection and Mark Rothko at Foundation Louis Vuitton profess themselves to be about just that: personal mythologies, and American one’s specifically. The French and the Americans share a love of mythologizing, in state and person. More interesting here is the success or failure of the narratives of ghosts and ghosting (haunting?) specifically alluded to in the Mike Kelley and Ser Serpas exhibitions at the Bourse, but certainly always hanging over Rothko’s evacuated oeuvre. In a toast at the pre-opening of the Mike Kelley exhibition one of the functionaries invoked Kelley’s spirit and his oft quoted wish to become a ghost; hoping that he was here with us. I don't imagine Kelley as a very friendly ghost, overseeing these ministrations of oysters with mayonnaise and bite sized entrecote, happily. When he said he wished to become our ghost I believe it to be in a more tragic sense. Wanting to stay and having to go, a way of insisting. A striking difference between Rothko and Kelley is that so many of Kelleys works are one-offs, unique pieces within a dramatic system. There is no scarcity here, or fear of losing one part of the expression in the field of the idea and feeling. Rothko on the other hand is something of an emotional capitalist (or pugilist, one wall text proudly quotes: “I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every square inch of their surface”), replicating states over and over, endless spectral horizons. There is not nothing there though. Rothko is still transcendent, if transcendence is what you're after.

Poetry after poetry readings

Life, isn't everything,

isn't everything,

isn't ever–th–ing...

its not personal.

Its rare to meet artists who can write well,

well we’ll see.

Sonnet to address, basic proficiency with language required for fucking,

seduction,

selection (Im hearing suction).

Se- prefix meaning: apart

depart, derange, digress,

now i'm just rhyming.

The best part of poetry!

The ethics or the sex?

What did she say, 'lay me poems'?

Strange digression into witches, ahem magicians,

who lose their power in sexual misadventures.

It feels like those (poets!) who are willing to air out the esoteric, new age and homegrown in our logic, do us service.

It’s there looming.

I heard my mother speaking when she spoke;

that soppy enthusiasm, it was belief speaking.

She brought us belief.

When belief enters the chat

it's a bit hard to bear, you should be prepared,

because it is out of the ordinary.

And everything is extraordinary now,

but is this moment sufficiently extraordinarily different?

In our representations of it?

In our representation of ourselves in it?

The world as I found, the world as I left it.

Press Release for Stefano Faoro: Students @ Caravan, Oslo

https://crvn.no/SF-Students.pdf

Decor and Dancing Divider at Reto Schmid's Studio Maria, organised by Ali Hassanzadeh

+ videos

A conversation with Stefano Faoro (in advance of his show at Carvan in Oslo)

18/09/2023

Graham Hamilton: Where are you?

Stefano Faoro: I'm at my brother's place in Bologna. I'm gonna stay here this week, then I'm going to my hometown to work a little bit in the studio. At my parents' place, I have a basement where I have some basic things, and I need to work a little bit on things there.

G: Do you have stuff already in the basement there? Is it kind of a steady studio?

A conversation between Amelia Stein and Graham Hamilton, 21 April 2023: painting and photography and printmaking

A conversation between Amelia Stein and Graham Hamilton, 21 April 2023

painting and photography and printmaking

AS: So, should we talk about photography? We started talking about how photography is different to painting…

Settlement

for one who loves counting, and daybreak is less precious than dusk:
a handful of rubies, or less precious red gems, or glass beads, or pomegranate seeds

for another, who loves dawn and has come to fear the evening, is afraid of transition:
a hemmed up bunch of lavender, wound with silk

in a box under the sink is a collection of wings of all genera - moth, butterfly, princess of taffeta and toile, unicorn - next to the box a bag filled with shavings of hoof and hand, small discarded scraps of bone.

also behind these a quite large collection of silver glasses...

in the next room there is a thing that is waiting, in a dark room with a large body hidden in shadow and not yellow nor golden eyes - it is ominous but not unkind, it is looming surely, but it is not bad or evil or death or wrong - a large presence

and somewhere or imagine: a room full of letters, and all the ways angels are metaphors for communication - or the other way around, letters like metaphors for angels, dispersed - to bless and protect, and to keep company in an infinite in-between, past and future

David Rimanelli Critic's Pick for Artforum - highlight of my year (!)

https://www.artforum.com/picks/graham-hamilton-90487

FULL REVIEW:

Graham Hamilton’s exhibition at Theta feels familiar yet off, like its title, “Dearly.” What a curious adverb. What on earth can you be doing if you’re doing it dearly? “Dearly beloved” evokes a wedding ceremony at the outset, though it’s a particular sort of matrimony for those loved very much; the minister might be Protestant but not fire-breathing; and it’s the ’50s, maybe the ’60s. “Dear” is so basic—that, too, is beginning to show its age, its staginess. I myself still address correspondence with the salutation “Dear,” especially when writing to strangers, but that’s all very affected, maybe counterproductive. And so Hamilton’s show is suffused with affection, with one thing married to another, even as it is so clever and cunning: contemporary retardataire.

Among the works on view—sculptures, silk-screen prints—is Parade 1, 2023. Its materials, right from the checklist, are “ink-jet print on cardboard, storage box, Gaudi bronze powder on water, kick drum pedal.” It’s a sublimely arty ensemble, so quotidian, yet shot through with the otherworldly, like Gaudi bronze powder: made from the metal of sculpture since barest antiquity; atomized, dematerialized, dispersed upon the air, or rather upon water (and a name, like Antoni, architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedral of Barcelona, industrialized Gothic that’s very niche modernism and very touristy all the same). The kick-drum pedal invites our participation, and with that summons certainly a few art-history courses, tripping from Dada and Duchamp through neo-Dada and Fluxus. I feel a little nervous saying this name but let’s just do it: John Cage. I’m thinking of Cage as he appears on the classic television talk/variety show I’ve Got a Secret, where he performed Water Walk, 1959. Beforehand, host Garry Moore says to the magus of dust and racket and silences, “These are nice people, but some of them are going to laugh. Is that all right?” Eliciting one of Cage’s best lines: “Of course. I consider laughter preferable to tears.”

While there are no obvious tears in Parade 1 or in “Dearly” overall, the show has a kind of barely there tenderness that is both cagey and Cagean.

- David Rimanelli for Artforum

Wonderful Flyer for Dearly by Julian Krause, and Party poster by Jordan Barse

www.juliankrause.net

my show "Dearly" in NYC at the fabulous Theta closes this week

theta.nyc

fr

Do you think everything happens for a reason? really - do you believe in the rapture? a functional forever? can you count the stars as sand like the blessings you’ve got - seven holes in your body and the possibility - to be fulfilled - devotion - someone by your side - do you know who you are?