New York Times

by Alex Hetherington, 21 Jan 2008

Today I received 1000 print-run of a little publication The New York Times that I’ve been working on for a while; mainly from September and October last year from my research trip to San Francisco and New York and to follow through to the next stage in New York in February. This is a set of drawings that will feature in the gallery show at park in April, so it’s good to see them in print form, on glossy art paper, like a brochure, a promo for voicing authority, the press, newspapers, the like. And how it passes, and becomes archive almost simultaneously, how it becomes memory. So it appears and disappears, without thought unless it’s personal, or widespread or huge. This isn’t, it’s tiny and flimsy. It has appropriations of Rose Lesso’s text on my performance in September, and Mike Kelley ’s Memory Ware and Diane Thater’s film Jump that seems to follow me everywhere and some other clues to its inception, the Folsom Street fair being one of them, the leather man gay parades etc. It has some of my thoughts of a teenage gang again, Hunter S Thompson in Oakland with his biker gang that turned on him and smashed him to pieces when they found out he was a journalist, scraps of misinformation: LA Raeven, Lanvin, Amityville, frozen explosions, the powerrangers, curtains. “Curtain”. I love this. It’s the last line from House/Lights, it’s a kind of the end. So the drawings are full of curtain images, full of ends.