Alexandra Grilikhes (Philadelphia, USA): "Vacation"

death came to me drunk
wearing a new white island outfit
she’d bought that day. The men
on the road called us cunts.
“This is my dream place,” she breathed,
“I feel so alive here. Fuck me on this
bench.” On the half-lit porch,
the watchman taking a midnight nap
around the bend, I did as I was
told for a long time thinking I’d
please death this time at last. Later
she rolled away and in the morning
rose early and left. I bought
death many presents. She bought me rags.

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

Abby Heller-Burnham: from Art Odyssey: Artist's Statement

I use a combination of naturalism and spontaneity to represent certain aspects of what I have seen and experienced during semi-conscious dream states. My work portrays an ethereal luminosity that creates life-like spaces which the viewer can visually enter. My goal is to create increasingly complex compositions by combining multiple images from a vast collection of visual references. With a highly disciplined background in traditional methods and techniques as a base, I nevertheless strive to expand its boundaries to find new artistic approaches through continual experimentation.
I find nineteenth century naturalism to be particularly inspiring. Its simplicity of design, complex esthetic content, and distinct atmospheric quality all resonate with my artistic sensibilities. Klimt and Mucha, for example, have been important influences, particularly their unique blend of graphic patterns and textures with natural realism. I am always in the process of finding my own delicate balance between naturalism and other contradictory interests that also inspire me. I believe that a versatile and experimental approach leads to the resolution of this conflict, and allows me to reach beyond realism to more fully express my ideas. 
© Abby Heller-Burnham 2011

Interview with Jenny Kanzler: Orange Alert, 2007

Orange Alert (OA): How would you describe your work?

Jenny Kanzler (JK): Symbols for anxiety, fear, loneliness and loss or metaphors for invasion, like illness, infection, and infestation -- generally, preoccupations of nightmares. Many of my paintings focus on the struggle between empathy and disgust and the relationship of the viewer to the object or conflict. They present things that did happen, altered through a faulty memory, simplified to isolate some specific occurrence, embellished, rewritten and presented as some new story connected to the original only in essence. They are narratives, employing realism and storytelling to represent an idea.
OA: You seem to have a very interesting and at times dark subject matter, where do you draw your inspiration from?

JK: The Velveteen Rabbit (William Nicholson illustrations), the Twilight Zone, David Lynch (especially the Elephant Man and Eraserhead), Bluebeard, the Brother’s Quay, Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, Hans Holbein the Younger, Diego Velazquez, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, A Nightmare on Elm street, the Changeling, Rosemary’s Baby, the Little Girl who Lived Down the Lane, Saturday matinee movies, the playground – the girl who pretended to be a horse, the day Brian Flaherty and I threw up in the lunchroom, Aldus Huxley’s Heaven and Hell, Freud’s essay on the uncanny, my German grandmother, my beau Abe, my family and friends and the many strange and interesting things that they say, people I don’t know who sleep on the subway, the naked man at the end of the alley and all kinds of other surprising occurrences that a person might witness walking around Philadelphia at any time of day or night.
OA: I've noticed a lot of reoccurring colors in your work, do you have a set color palette? What is your intention in using these specific colors?

JK: The colors I use are burnt umber, raw sienna, raw umber, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, cerulean blue, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, and titanium white. Generally, I underpaint in earth tones, and then as the image develops incorporate more color. Since the development of the image interests me, I try not to hide everything that’s happened. Lately, I’ve been inserting jewel tones and placing them in contrast to muddy colors, presenting a clean/dirty conflict that relates to the empathy/disgust conflict.
OA: Earlier this year you participated in a solo show entitled "Creepy Sweet". In my opinion that really describes your work, a little creepy, but sweet and nostalgic. It's familiar, but uncomfortable at the same time. What is the intended purpose of presenting these images and what are some of the reactions that you have received?

JK: When others describe the work as familiar, as you just did, or say that it reminds them of something that happened to them, and then they tell me some personal story, or if they laugh, those are the best reactions. Occasionally I completely horrify people, and then we’re all upset and disturbed. The goal of connecting with others through an investigation of the human condition is lost. I worry that I have misjudged my audience and that my insertion has a negative impact on others. There’s also an embarrassment component. It’s as if I’ve said you know how sauerkraut smells awful but it tastes so good and it’s almost as if the reason that it’s so good is that it smells so bad, it’s like it’s the contrast or something...and the other person replies no - sauerkraut is disgusting.
OA: I have noticed a lot of great work coming out of Philly lately. How would describe the current scene in Philly?

JK: To me it seems small enough to be manageable but large enough to be interesting. My recent favorites are Hiro Sakaguchi at Seraphin Gallery, and Mark Shetabi at the Tower Gallery. Longtime favorites are local heroes Edna Andrade, Thomas Chimes and Sydney Goodman. Second Thursday at the Crane building is never disappointing. The building was formerly a bathroom fixture factory, which is now converted into artists’ studios and galleries including Inliquid, Nexus, the Icebox, and Kelly Webber Fine Art (formerly 201 gallery where I had the “Creepy Sweet” show). There’s a refreshing enthusiasm in the gallery owners. They present what interests them and take chances with younger, lesser-known artists. Plus, second Thursday visitors are greeted by a generous offering of food and alcohol.
OA: What's next for Jenny Kanzler?

JK: Other than making a Halloween costume? From October 8th – November 6th, I’ll have several paintings on view in the “Window on Broad” adjacent to the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, near the northeast intersection of Broad and Pine, Center City Philadelphia. October 19th – November 9th, i cannot remember, a four-person show of sculpture, video, and drawings with fellow artists and friends: Alison Nastasi (who curated the show), Theresa Rose and Mariya Dimov at little berlin gallery, 1801 N. Howard Street, near the intersection of 2nd and Montgomery in Fishtown, Philadelphia. Opening reception: October 19th from 6:00 – 10:00 PM with a performance by MFM. February 1st – 28th. Solo show of painting, drawing and sculpture at the Elliott Center Gallery at The University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Opening reception: February 4th, 5:30 – 7:30 PM.

© Jenny Kanzler, Orange Alert 2007

Alexandra Grilikhes (Philadelphia, USA): "Torment"

you know how certain people torment you as you
walk home in the rain on a day in february
feeling desolate,
saying to yourself, she torments me and I don’t
know why. She torments me. She is one of those
people who torments me

and you walk in the darkness, it’s raining,
you’re cold and feeling not unhappy
but not happy either and
she is always under your skin,
something you can’t describe

and you know if you say one word about it
you will lose it completely, that she torments you
and you want the thing about her that torments you
to keep on hurting

© Alexandra Grilikhes 1994

republished from the Insight to Riot chapbook The Reveries

Argotist Online (Take 2)

The Argotist Online poetry index was offline for a while. It returned briefly, altered and with new URLs. Here we have the document of the new AO poetry index, while the collection is fragmented. Have a look. Some of the links work, some don't. 

P.F.S.: Jenny Kanzler Pt. 2: Year of the Rat

I watched President Obama’s victory speech from Dirty Frank’s at 13th and Pine with a few friends. It was quiet in the bar; you could’ve heard a pin drop; and I was anticipating something, and someone, extraordinary. We all were; and when all we got was a bunch of tired, crass, generalized clichés, we made (I noticed then) a silent collective decision not to notice it. Broad Street was crazy that night— everyone was out celebrating. Aughts Philly had its levels of oddity and irony, one of which was that, for all our joie de vivre, the Republican regime in control of Washington and its attendant media juggernaut was a continual, joy-inhibiting bummer for us. Obama was supposed to deliver us into a new, politically liberated era; yet, that November night in ’08, I feared the worst— that we were looking at a different version of the same corruption and complacency, and that the change which had come to America was none at all. Obama, indeed, was perfunctory that night; and Dirty Frank’s and Broad Street were perfunctory for me, too. It was the culminating moment of my, and our, strangest Aughts year (2008); one which passed without a sense of distinction, and with a sense of Aughts Philly in general drifting out of focus and towards the sense of stalemate which ushered in the Teens. If I linger on 2008 now, it’s because I’m fascinated by my own inability to pin it down, define it, give it a determinate shape the way I can all the other Aughts years, including the 2009 which followed from it.
Among other things, it is the year I came closest to actual alcoholism (thus catching up, finally, to Mike, Nick, and Jeremy); my life at Temple was so full of drudgery and thankless compromises that just to get through the nights which followed the days, I’d have to knock back several Jack and Cokes. Some of the pictures taken of me at the time show me looking uncharacteristically soggy and fish-faced. When I moved, that summer, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch, it was a down-sized and down-sizing move; the new flat had low ceilings, an unpleasant view of parking lots, and I felt claustrophobic in it. Mary and I had broken up again in late ’07; yet we couldn’t get out of each other’s pockets, and when she showed her Eden portrait of us at PAFA that spring, I was very proud. I was also amused that the portrait seemed to suggest me on solid, balanced ground and Mary falling all over herself— that’s not how I felt. Abs was still showing on First Fridays and elsewhere, but she was off my radar at the time— I hadn’t yet noticed that she’d transformed herself into a first-rate artistic genius. She was also, I later discovered, flailing on other levels. Jeremy had disowned me completely— and when he began a reading series in ’08 called Toiling in Obscurity with some U of Arts foundlings, and affixed the tag-line even our minor accomplishments are overshadowed by our utter anonymity, I could sense there was a strange and ghastly crescendo issuing from all Philly Free School sides. Jenny Kanzler consolidated all these snafus in my conversations with her then.
When I think of my own 2008 as a complete gestalt entity, including risky (and confrontational) affairs I had going at the time, I think of Aughts Philly starting to go cock-eyed. Yet, everyone was still in the bars and in the streets, and a sense of isolation didn’t seem to be a problem, quite. 2008 was my first adult “bridge year,” with, in it, a sense of the liminal and of blinkered confusion. I wrote Chimes as I was moving that summer, in a great deal of emotional pain from the necessity of reliving my childhood, and with a sense of foreboding about what awaited me at Temple that fall. The White Album, also written at this time, showcased the funnier, Rabelaisian facet of all the grunginess, while Rubber Soul reveled in drunkenness. When autumn arrived, Otoliths was putting out When You Bit... and, as usual for that era, the reaction online was intense, while the crooked, vituperative Philly poetry scene continued to cold-shoulder me. That Philadelphia poetry world— of clowns, impostors, and henchmen— was not intriguing to me on any level. I was, as of '08, still having better poetry luck with Chicago, both online and in the flesh. The stint I did at Loyola that summer is a case in point. 
One night that May, on returning to Logan Square from a reading in South Philly, I was mugged at gunpoint, and had my wallet stolen. My assailant actually stuck the pistol into my ribcage— yet, I had an intuition he wouldn’t shoot me. The whole year was cock-eyed— I even (if you can believe this) saw an identifiably angelic being on 21st Street one July afternoon. If ’08 needs to be remembered distinctly for how non-distinct it was in the run of major Aughts Philly years, its because the weird evanescent character it has will remain frozen forever in what we created and disseminated that year, along with ricochets back of what has already been released. The most important facet of ’08 for me personally is that it is the last of my Mary years— one in which we were together, at least in spirit. After ’08, we kept in touch, but things could never be the same again between us. To see that cycle of death and rebirth turning, with some hindsight, is as terrible and beautiful as it was to live the agonies, ecstasies, and convulsions of the first time through.

P.F.S.: Jenny Kanzler

I met the painter Jenny Kanzler in 2008. I was sitting in the Last Drop one weekend afternoon in April or May, working, and she approached me and introduced herself. She was very pretty in a cherubic way, not unlike Abby Heller-Burnham. Over the course of 2008, we had coffee many times. I wouldn’t call these tete-a-tetes dates— Jenny was otherwise engaged— but we got to know each other with some thoroughness. Jenny, both in her paintings and in her life, had a fascination with “the stunted,” in general terms— stunted people, stunted situations, even stunted animals (she found tarantulas "exquisite.") She also had a fetish for violence and gore— the films she liked were violent, and the art. Jenny had been at PAFA along with Abby and Mary, but she usually declined to discuss them. I got the distinct impression that they were not among her favorite artists there. Mary’s The Fall was showing at PAFA precisely when I met Jenny Kanzler, in fact. She gave it a mixed review. There was some sexual tension in the air between myself and Ms. Kanzler, but she made clear that she was mostly a Platonic soul. Abby and Mary were floridly liberated, eroticized, and romantic in comparison, despite Jenny’s attractiveness. Yet, Jenny did have a singular mind and a singular vision. She made a strong impression on me. It seemed to me that the substitution, in Jenny’s art, of violence for love and sex was a deliberate one, but (this was my own prejudice) not necessarily a healthy one. Jenny’s penchant for violent, rather than sexual, smut, was what inspired Apparition Poem 1342, along with the sense, mistaken or not, that Jenny was sublimating so that the part of her psyche which wanted her to remain a stunted little girl would stay untouched, unchallenged, and inviolable.
The phenomenological import of the poem is a torque of Elegy 414— I privilege myself to do a break-in into Jenny’s brain, and have a look around. The problem with phenomenological break-ins is that it is difficult to ascertain whether what you are seeing is real, is really someone else’s brain, or if what you find is just a projection of your own fantasies. It could be that Jenny’s “slice of smut” is more involved in real emotion and intellection, not just a product of stunted adolescence, but there was no way for me to tell, as I was writing, whether this was the case or not. In fact, I believe the break-in in 1342 is brash enough, pompous enough, even, as a male narrator violating a woman, that this Apps Protagonist seems like a half-pig. If he is correct in his assumptions, however, his piggishness has still won him intercourse with a woman who has denied him conventional entrance. It is worth noting that I didn’t fight Jenny this way— no passes were made, nor did I have the experience of falling in love with her— but the bullying energy to understand her made for some strange, loopy mind games between us, and our gaming against each other on cognitive levels lasted a few years. 
To broaden the context— by 2008, the Recession era was starting to sink in, and much of the grandeur of Aughts Philly, the romance and the sense of freedom, were beginning to fade. For Jenny Kanzler to enter my life at the time she did, and for us to become sparring partners rather than lovers, was a sign of the times for me, an inversion of the odal early Aughts, and some of the hard-won victories of the mid-Aughts, its sense of carnal mayhem, too. A beacon of the impulses behind the composition of The White Album at that time. A beacon also, perhaps, inverse-shining towards a realization of the Great Recession, and what it was to become. It’s also germane for me that by 2008, an emergent, notable Philadelphia painter's generalized equation involved violence, gore, and the stunted to sexualized expressiveness; where all of America was headed was into a meat-grinder of violence, moral/ethical bankruptcy, and generally entropic conditions, and those of us who wanted the Aughts, which facilitated art around sex and romance, to go on forever, were to be bitterly disappointed.

Adam Fieled (editor, Plymouth Meeting, Pa): PICC (A Poet in Center City) #42

Competition, folks. It lurks there as a demon between males of the species, doing a sourpuss number on camaraderie and true brotherhood, making a mockery of ties which could bind with more authority, beleaguering situations which shouldn’t matter. “Bros before hos,” Larsen used to say, who was no misogynist but often stumbled around semantics. To be fair, Larsen’s girls were hardly hos, as the saying goes. They tended to share many of his stripes, as Trish Webber shared stripes with me— fetish/boutique stalwarts, underworld slants, heavy tempers, club-and-pub mentalities. It’s just that many of them were also gorgeous and, as I couldn’t not notice, and as began at the turn of the century, none of them had eyes for me at all. I wound up looking like a Larsen-flunky around them. Club-and-pub meant they often wouldn’t even look me in the face— they didn’t need to. So when I found myself, for example, sitting half-naked on the shag-rug in South Philly, looking at Anastasia, a stunning brunette from New Jersey who was famous for starting trouble with guys, in her bra and panties, it was with the exasperated sense of the usual wheel turning— not only no eyes for me, but also no sense that she could even directly look me in the face. But, to shade the painting diligently, with some respect to precision, it must be said that by late ’04 I had a sense of revenge going. It had transpired, in the spring of ’03, that I brought Trish Webber and Tobi Simon to Larsen’s studio for a visit. My ostensible reason was to see if I could match Tobi with Larsen. Trish and I were steady at the time. What happened was cacophonous— we all smoked a bunch of weed, some of it my plain jane stuff, some of it Larsen’s H-laced, cough-and-flu treasure trove. Tobi didn’t think much of Larsen, and vice versa. But, when we were all high as kites, I saw Larsen lock into Trish in a manner that expressed total enchantment. Trish’s long limbs, wide hips, and equally long, lank blonde mane could only be enticing to a Philly guy also entangled deeply with Europe, as Larsen was, who could be, in a number of different sectors, continental at any moment. Larsen locked into Trish, and began to flirt with her. Heavily. “Bros before hos,” huh? At first, I was amused. The level that this was Aughts Philly was a self-conscious one, which meant it would’ve been uncool to try and stop what was developing. At first. High as kites though all of us were, I started to understand that, willy-nilly, Larsen meant business. He really was going to try to fuck Trish right in front of me. Alright. So, gathering my wits, I made my apologies to Larsen and dragged the two ladies down the steps, and out again into the warm spring day. Larsen, on the negative side of things, had taken things too far that day. On the other side of things, I had him— a righteous cock-block of a dude whose girls were constantly cock-blocking me. It never moved, after that— Larsen had a hard-on for Trish Webber that, to his credit, he never really tried to hide. Even if South and West Philly weren’t working together well then. When I broke up with Trish the first time in late ’03, it was that South-to-West imbroglio which made it so that, as shocked me, Larsen made no move in her direction. And, I might add, continued to pine. Trish never denied there was an attraction there, but it was minor for her. Trish had a continental sensibility too, but wouldn’t have liked that Larsen’s self-presentation could be construed as Eurotrash. Then, the camera deadlocks everything, and pans back to Anastasia, stripped to her undies in late ’04, looking (I felt) at everything but me. This is where it remained, because Trish’s big ’06-’07 comeback did a predictable trick of irritating an old wound for Larsen. Yet, in the main, “bros before hos” did manage to rule the roost, and made it so that there was no extended alienation between Larsen and I. The way there was, actually, destined to be extended alienation between myself and Ricky Flint, for what he would always say were a bunch of calculated gambits when Heather Mullen showed up.
© Adam Fieled 2024