Nathan Adler, pt 2 – Dec 31 1999, 10:15AM

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I boosted the audio on this one, the last one sounded soft.

 

Transcript:

As in any crime, my first position is to pursue the motive-gag. The recent spate, thru’ ’98-’99, of concept-muggings pretty much had me pulling breath for an art-murder. It was a crime whose time was now. The precedents were all there. It had probably its beginnings in the ’70s with the Viennese castrationists and the blood-rituals of Nitsch. Public revulsion put the lid on that episode, but you can’t keep a good down. Spurred on by Chris Burden’s having himself shot by his collaborator in a gallery, tied up in a bag, thrown on a highway and then crucified upon the top of a Volkswagen, stories circulated thru’ the nasty-neon of N.Y. night that a young Korean artist was the self-declared patient of wee-hours surgery in cut and run operations at not-so-secret locations in the city. If you found out about it, you could go and watch this guy having bits and pieces removed under anaesthetic. A finger-joint one night, a limb another. By the dawning of the ’80s, rumour had it that he was down to a torso and one arm. He’d asked to be left in a cave in the Catskills, fed every so often by his acolytes. He didn’t do much after that. I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch. I suppose you can never tell what an artist will do once he’s peaked. Round this same time, Bowie the singer remarked on a copula goons who frequented the Berlin bars wearing full surgery regalia; caps, aprons, rubber gloves and masks. The cutting edge. Then came Damien Hirst with the Shark-Cow-Sheep thing. No humans, palatable ritual for the world-wide public. The acceptable face of gore. Meanwhile in the US, 1994, I was in town on the night of the Athey sacrifactions.

Outside – The Diary of Nathan Adler

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Something special for you all today. I’m talked a bit about the story of 1.Outside – well, this is the first part of the liner notes. Enjoy.

 

 

Transcript:

It was precisely 5.47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old “Baby Grace Blue”. The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned with 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives, colouring agents, memory information transport fluids and some kind of green stuff. From the last and 17th, all blood and liquid was extracted. The stomach areas was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed, disentangled and re-knitted as it were, into a small net or web and hung between the pillars of the murder-location, the grand damp doorway of Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts, New Jersey. The Limbs of Baby were then served from the torso. Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory  info-transport substances, revealing themselves as little clue haiku’s, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids. The limbs and their components were then hung upon the splayed web, slug-like prey of some unimaginable creature. The torso, by means of its bottom-most orifice, had been placed on a small support fastened to a marble base. It was shown to warring degrees of success depending upon where one stood from behind the web but in front of the Museum door itself, acting as both signifier and guardian to the act. It was definitely murder – but was it art?

 All this was to be the lead-up to the most provocative event in the whole sequence of serial-events that had started around November of that same year, plunging me into the most portentous chaos-abyss that a quiet lone hacker like myself could comprehend. My name is Nathan Adler, or Detective Professor Adler in my circuit. I’m attached to the division of Art-Crime Inc., the recently instigated corporation funded by an endowment from the Arts Protectorate of London, it being felt that the investigation of art-crimes was in itself inseparable from other forms of expression and therefore worthy of support from this significant body. Nicolas Serota himself had deemed us, the small-fry of the division, worthy of an exhibit at last year’s Biennale in Venice, three rooms of evidence and comparative study work which conclusively proved that the cow in Mark Tansey’s “The Innocent Bye Test” could not differentiate between Paulus Potter’s “The Young Bull” of 1647 (exactly 300 years before I was born, incidentally) and one of Monet’s  grain stack paintings of the 1890’s. The traditional art press deemed this extrapolation “bullshit” and removed itself to study the more formal ideas contained in Damien Hirst’s “Sheep In A Box”. Art’s a farmyard. It’s my job to pick thru’ the manure heap looking for peppercorns. 

Site Update

~ abowieaday ~ Leave a comment

Hi cats,

Just an update here.
Feeling a bit unwell, and having to save my energy for work – and having to do the kind of blast programming I do for the blog takes a lot to get me to do it.

That and I’ve been on a massive Eurovision kick lately, and that would be a totally different blog.
That said, if I can find time to plumb through my hard drives, I think I might have something nice and special for you all, doubly so for those people who watch the show for my reactions – which is apparently a thing, apparently i have a good voice.

– ϗ