Humor and the Abject Podcast

It’s my big birthday week, babies. To celebrate, I caught up with an old friend, artist Beth Campbell from New York. She was visiting Austin this past week to unveil a new public art project as part of the Landmarks collection at the University of Texas. I got to see Beth do a great conversation with philosopher Timothy Morton, who also wrote a nice essay about her work available via the link below. During our own conversation, Beth and I discussed the arc of her practice over the last 20 years, which has won her a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Pollack-Krasner Grant, and has seen her work presented in venues including the Whitney, the Drawing Room in London, MoMA PS1, and tons of other places. We talk mirrors, audience expectations, the difference between installation and sculpture, emotional time travel, and a whole lot more. The outro music is “Mythmaster” by Lightning Bolt. Read Timothy Morton’s essay, and learn more about Beth’s Landmarks project, here: https://landmarks.utexas.edu/artwork/spontaneous-futures-possible-past

Azikiwe is finally back from his travels all around North America, so it’s time for another installment of everybody’s favorite podcast within the podcast, the DSA Podcast (Darcie, Sean, and Azikiwe). With the remake of “Pet Sematary” dropping this week, we thought it only appropriate to do a comprehensive review of the original film that is now 30 years old. We also learn a lot about different types of domestic pet breeds! Fuck it all, baby! The outro music is “Pet Sematary” by Ramones.

March is apparently Toronto month, because we’ve got artist Bridget Moser joining this week. Bridget is currently an artist-in-residence in Cleveland at SPACES, where she’s got a solo exhibition of brand new work, generated in-residence, opening up next month. Over the course of this episode, we got to talk about many important topics including: the slow death of mall culture; how ugly Toronto is; the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; reading Adbusters and making political art in college; why painting is so boring; learning performance art by just doing one thing for a really long time; prop comedy; obsessively rehearsing; accounting for time and tech; organizing a performance by color or other compositional tools; why everything in a gallery sounds like shit; and the lovely work of festival staff. The outro music is “Kids” by PUP.

Joshua Citarella has a phenomenal new book out, "UNTITLED (Post-Left Politigram)," that you can read an excerpt from via his website linked below. It’s a collection of his research, writing, and artwork over several years related to accelerated political identities in adolescent online culture. He joins from his efficiency living unit in New York City this week to talk about his involvement with historically notorious Tumblr art collective the Jogging, accidental audiences, the not-yet-readymades he designed with Brad Troemel for Etsy under the banner of Ultraviolet Production House, startling overlaps between rightwing doomsday preppers and rooftop gardening Pinterest libs, freelance purgatory, Deftones, not getting an MFA, the byzantine philosophies of politically-radical Instagram posters, reading “Ishmael” once, and photography. The outro music is “Hearts Frozen Solid, Thawed Once More By The Spring Of Rage, Despair And Hopelessness” by AFI. About halfway through the episode, you’ll hear the first Custom Sound Collage from October’s subscriber lottery, made for OK Fox and Lucia Love of the Art and Labor podcast. If you’d like a chance to win one of your own, back Humor and the Abject on Patreon for just $3/mo. Get excerpts from Joshua Citarella’s new book here: http://joshuacitarella.com/_pdf/Politigram_Post-left_2018_short.pdf

A science fiction set in the back of beyond, along a stretch of Interstate 80 in Northern Utah’s desolate Great Salt Lake Desert, where for decades the United States military has clandestinely tested its most volatile chemical, biological, and explosive weapons. Here, amidst blinding salt flats and far-flung mountain ranges, one local gig worker unwittingly crosses a top secret threshold, stumbling upon an alarming experiment that upsets the very foundations of our temporal reality. Originally published by Do Not Research: https://donotresearch.net/ Pre-Order the physical book, scheduled May 2022, with original drawings by Thomas J Gamble: https://humorandtheabject.com/store/backslasher