John Menick

Things that are happening or have happened or will happen include:

Starring Sigmund Freud is screening as part of the Rotterdam International Film Festival’s 2013 Spectrum Shorts program. The exact times can be found here.

In Istanbul most of How to Tell a Story is on view in a group exhibition at Depo. Appropriately, the exhibition is titled “How to Tell a Story.” It closes February 17.

Online, Frieze writer Mark Beasley was kind enough to list my book, A Report on the City, as one of highlights of 2012. Very kind of him, I think. An ebook, hopefully, will be available soon.

And next week there will be an online residency on a website called Morning Drawing Residency. Details to come as the posts and drawings appear.

This summer I will be participating dOCUMENTA (13), curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and on view in Kassel, Germany, from June 9 to September 16, 2013. I am participating as both a writer and an artist, the first time I have done so in a single exhibition.

My first contribution, A Report on the City, is a book collecting six interrelated essays and short stories, all of which more or less relate to the years I lived in Mexico City. Five of the pieces are previously unpublished; the sixth, the title piece, is available here. The collection is published by Walter König press and was designed by Leftloft. At the moment, A Report on the City is only available in Kassel, but it will soon be distributed in the United States by DAP, and throughout Europe by Cornerhouse Publications and Verlagsauslieferungen AG. An ebook, I hear, is also in the works.

The second contribution, Starring Sigmund Freud, is a new half-hour video looking at Sigmund Freud’s posthumous career as a film and television actor. Based on an essay I published in Frieze last year, the video is comprised of clips and audio from Freud’s several dozen appearances on the big and small screens. It will screen on June 7^th at 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm at Balicinemas, Kassel. Starring Sigmund Freud was produced by the Kadist Art Foundation and commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13).

Lastly, I’m showing Subliminal Projection Company, an audio work I made in 2009. The work takes the form of subliminal self-help CDs, and in the place of the usual inspirational subliminal messages, I’ve included texts relating private childhood memories. The work comes out of my ongoing research into the history of brainwashing and the fringes of psychological research. Subliminal Projection Company is on view, so to speak, on the first floor of the Fridericianum. You can purchase a CD version of the work here.

This month, The Secret Life of Things is on view as part of “The Eyes of the Soul,” a group exhibition at la Fundación Godi, Barcelona. The exhibition is curated from the private collection of French video art collectors Jean-Conrad and Isabelle Lemaître.

This month, Paul Dallas and Anthony Titus have curated a program of documentaries at the Maysles Cinema. From the press release:

STREET VIEWS is a new film series that explores our connection to the built environment through documentaries, narratives and experimental works.  The series creates a forum for conversation with invited guest artists, filmmakers and architects who join for post-screening discussions.  The inaugural edition, “Existing Conditions,” features works by international filmmakers whose close examination of the physical world becomes the basis for meditations on social space, transformation and the contemporary urban landscape.

On April 24th I’ll be a respondent to one of the films, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Abendland. The line-up includes a lot of great docs and respondents, mostly focusing on architecture and the built environment. You can view the full calendar of films and participants here.

My 2010 short documentary, “Paris Syndrome,” is now available on Vimeo and YouTube.

Through April 8, The Secret Life of Things is in a group exhibition in Mexico City’s Casa del Lago. The show, Duplicitous Storytellers, includes works by Roisin Byrne, Simon Fujiwara, Mario García Torres, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Stephen Prina, Walid Raad, Tyler Rowland, and Pablo Sigg. It was curated by Fabiola Iza.

The folks over at Paper Monument were nice enough to invite me to contribute to their latest book, Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. There are lots of participants, all interesting. You can read some of the contributions here.

After an early life of online downloads and iPod compilations, The Goldberg Variations Variations or Music For Insomniacs is showing right now in a group exhibition at Proyectos Monclova in Mexico City. It’s the first time I’ve shown the all thirty-two tracks of the thing, out loud, without headphones. You can listen to a sample track here.

Also, the latest issue of Frieze has a tiny piece I wrote for their 20^th anniversary issue. The issue has great contributions by Bruce Sterling, Vivian Rehberg, TomMcCarthy, Michael Bracewell, and others.

David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method, due for release in late 2011 (Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud)

A new short essay on Sigmund Freud’s overlooked career as a feature film actor.

Photo: Headbangers at El Chopo market. Source.

I look up and it’s three months later.

Some things happened in those three months — I’m sure of it. Some of those things involved words on paper, certainly.

Like there’s a new story coming out in the next issue of A Prior called “Consuelo’s Medusa.” It’s about art and Mexico and flying and someone named Consuelo. Medusa is in there, too. I’ll post it online as soon as the latest issue has aged a bit. The issue launches on March 22 at the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. In case you’re like me and won’t be in Oslo, you can find the issue at these establishments worldwide or order it online.

Also, at the Oslo launch Raimundas Malasauskas will be reading my most recent monologue, An Address Concerning My Supposed Existence. I’ll post the monologue here one of these days; give me time. I’m slow.

Then there are two little op-ed-ish things I wrote. They are both for architecture journals, though I didn’t write about architecture for either. One of them is about the El Chopo goth market in Mexico City (see the headbanging sweetness above), and is for Domus, a fine architectural magazine publishing in Italy. The other is for an architecture journal in Mexico City called Tomo. The Domus piece is online at the link just mentioned. The Tomo is not online, though they have a very fancy website.

Finally, there is a tiny thing I did for my favorite bilingual literary-fashion-culture magazine in Mexico City, Celeste. Not worth getting the issue just for me — I have a short reading list, of sorts — but it is worth buying it for all the other great contributors like Alan Page, Superflex, Alexandre Guirkinger, and Walead Beshty. That one is available in DF only, so get on a flight and go find a copy now.

[L-R] Author Clifford Irving, his wife Edith, artist Elmyr de Hory (seated, R, in sports jacket), Gerry Albertini and Bob Kirsh (R) (source).

I have a new work, a monologue called An Address Concerning My Supposed Existence, in the latest iteration of The Clifford Irving Show. The one-day show is happening on December 4th at Objectif Exhibitions in Antwerp. For more information, read below or you can download this highly informative PDF.

The Clifford Irving Show
Saturday December 4, 2010
A full night event from 6 to 11pm.
RESERVATION IS REQUIRED – send an email to info@objectif-exhibitions.org
Food and drink will be served. Doors close at 6.45!

Thank you for coming. I will try to keep the rant and rave tucked in and the available facts as lined up as possible. The first story I have to tell is not exactly true, but it isn’t exactly false, either. It’s a story about literature leaving the line and entering the plane, painting leaving the plane and entering space, sculpture stepping into the fourth dimension and finally proposing a ‘completely new art form’. Call these forms a secession of tricksters who violate the boundaries to keep them alacritous and productive, who view the walls not as a fence but a perch. For nobody knows himself, if he is only himself and not also another one at the same time.

Last seen in Paris, The Clifford Irving Show stays true to its founding principles: life-writing, truth-bending, stage-celebrating. An acclaimed theater director David Levine will present theatrical adaptations of “Manhattan’s Serenade” and “Neighbor’s Wife” – two brand new screenplays by Clifford Irving, in a gallery that will act as a backdrop and a character of the play. Interspersed with acts and artefacts by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, Marco Belfiore, Elise Berkvens, Pierre Bismuth, Goda Budvytyte, Celine Butaye, Audrey Cottin, Chris Evans, Mario Garcia Torres, Malak Helmy, Will Holder, Clifford Irving, Kevin Killian, Gabriel Lester, David Marcel Levine, Nicholas Matranga, John Menick, Elena Narbutaite, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Michael Portnoy, Vivian Rehberg,Carson Salter, Aaron Schuster, Benjamin Seror, Snowden Snowden, Lauren von Gogh, Adva Zakai and more…

Curated by Raimundas Malasauskas

“Phantom Rosebuds”, an autobiography of Clifford Irving, as well as “The Autobiography of Any One Being Including Every One Before”, both designed by Dexter Sinister, will be available.