Writings | John Menick

Letters from the Apocalypse

Video still from

Short essay on apocalyptic films published in the "Prophets of Deceit" catalog.

I was born during the first great era of American disaster and zombie films, the 1970s, and now, thanks be to Hollywood, I seem to be living through the second. I haven't seen the new Poseidon or …Dead films, but I'd be lying if I said that these kinds of disaster and horror films didn’t capture my imagination. Never thinking much of death-ray sci-fi, my attention turned towards films that take place after the rubble has settled—films set in the ruins of an asteroid crash or the aftermath of a deadly plague. Sometimes called "last person on earth" films, these urban Robinsonades are to me, more about architecture than science, more about memory than survival. They are a kind of pure extension of not only Defoe's literature, but also that of Charles Pierre Baudelaire. They are the closest things we have to true cinematic flânerie.

An Interview with Yvane Chapuis

Video still from

English translation of an interview with Yvane Chapuis
Originally published in French in Le Journal des Laboratoires n°6
September 2006

Yvane Chapuis: How did you start working on Occupation? Did you want to pursue an already started work or research, and adapt it to the Aubervilliers’ context? Or, is it the Aubervilliers’ context that orientated the definition of your project?

John Menick: When you first invited me to do the project, Aubervilliers was new to me, and since the work I did had to relate to the city in some sense, I was hesitant to bring too many preconceived ideas to the site. On the other hand, there's more to a project than it's supposed subject. Occupation involves many of the themes that are emerging in my work, such as ruined cities, urban isolation, and the mediation of our environment through cinema. That all came out later -- I only realized then how much this project had to do with a lot of my already formed interests. But early on, as you probably remember, I wavered between creating an essay video and making a narrative project, and quickly went through a lot of project ideas.

The Death of Syd Barrett

The death of Syd Barrett sent scrambled signals across the media, from which two channels could be tuned. The first concerned a rock-and-roll genius that succumbed to acid-assisted schizophrenia. The second was the post-recovery recluse, the Salinger of rock who lived in a quiet UK hamlet, tending his garden and living off the royalties of a truncated career. But a cryptic third channel also exists. Read more...

A Philosophy of Boredom

Review of A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Svensen. Published in Parachute 120.

The Art of Forgetting: Speculative Archive's It's Not My Memory of It

A Limitless Memory
It was sometime during the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and Sherashevsky sat with his fellow reporters listening to their editor assign the day's stories. The process was intricate, for it involved the names of contacts, directions to addresses, as well as dates and times of deadlines. Reporters dutifully took notes.

Andrea Fraser: Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, June 10 – July 9

The following review of Andrea Fraser's video Untitled appeared in Para_para, included with issue 116 of Parachute.

Real-Time Futures: Five Notes on the Work of Wolfgang Staehle

This essay on the work of digital media artist Wolfgang Staehle appeared in issue 113 of Parachute.

Salò Redux

Presented as part of Visitas, Centro Cultural Rojas, Argentina

In the fall of 2000, I naively attended a screening of a restored 35mm print of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City. The film was shown as part of a thorough Pasolini retrospective; several friends and I tried to catch every film we could. For Salò, I happened to go to the screening alone. I was lucky to get a seat. The audience was more than capacity, overflowing the theater's ample seating and standing room. It struck me as an oddly restless group. But there I was, surrounded by a crowd of some truly strange strangers with no idea of what I was about to see.

Undiminished Returns: The Work of Emily Jacir, 1998-2002

Survey essay for the catalog of Emily Jacir's retrospective Belongings. The exhibition is on view at the O.K Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria from December 5, 2003 to February 15, 2004. Other contributors to the catalog include Edward Said, Christian Kravagna, and Stella Rollig. The publication is in memoriam of Edward W. Said, Hasan Hourani, and Munir Sansur.

World Game

Published in Tank Vol. 3 Issue 7

Bucky facing the boat, the final words of his poem to the Intuition puzzled over. All of us watching and waiting, heads tilting up high, standing in a neat semi-circle around the white-shirted and black-spectacled man of pure domes and Dymaxion prose, awaiting his masterfully designed signal for the crane operator to begin lowering his 17-ton, 40-foot sloop into the troubled Maine water.

The Detective

Video still from

Statement on The Disappearance published in the GNS exhibition catalog

The detective as intellectual, polymath, rationalistic robot. The detective as tough guy, loner, alcoholic, anti-Red, unfeeling womanizer. The detective as mystic, interpreter of divine signs, holy seer. The detective as bureaucrat, as the incorruptible moralist who cleans up the crooked town. The detective as lover, as desirous romantic, as the seducer and seduced. The detective as a chain-smoking, ulcerated obsessive, voyeur, possessed with revealing an unintelligible truth.

The Susan Sontag Effect

Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
131 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $20.

Published on THE THING (reviews)

On February 5, 2003, during a press conference held adjacent to the UN Security Council, cameras flashed and tape rolled as Colin Powell patiently explained to a wary international audience the case for a war against Iraq. Behind Powell hung a baby-blue curtain that did more than provide a photogenic backdrop: it also served to obscure a full-scale replica of Picasso's Guernica. The sepia-toned tapestry had hung unhidden in that spot since 1985, when Nelson A. Rockefeller � no stranger to mural censorship himself � donated it to the UN. When asked, UN officials whispered ominously that the covering of the tapestry was due to "US pressure."

A Day in April

Except for its most dutiful votaries, the collapse of the '90s cyber-economy surprised few, but what is unexpected is how attractive the nostalgia has become for that minor utopian moment. In fuzzy hindsight, the era before September 11^th, Bush II, climbing unemployment and evaporated retirement accounts, is almost beatific. The nostalgia is easy, attractive, and like all nostalgia, mostly false.

Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet

Pinochet the traitor, Pinochet the murderer, Pinochet the prisoner, Pinochet the word of "dreaded syllables." These are among some of the dishonorable names that move through Ariel Dorfman's book Exorcising Terror.

The Occupied Imagination of Elia Suleiman

A review of Divine Intervention Directed by Elia Suleiman 2002, France
Published on THE THING (bbs.thing.net)

A discarded peach pit blows an Israeli tank into a slow-motion eruption of flame and steel. A kaffiyeh-clad, levitating Palestinian ninja makes quick work of a posse of cocky Israeli soldiers. A stiletto-heeled, brunette bombshell of a Palestinian struts defiantly past impotent checkpoint guards. A deadpan Elia Suleiman blasts the Egyptian singer Natacha Atlas's rendition of I Put a Spell on You to the Israeli parked next to him. The neighbor is not pleased.

Gunning for Columbine

"Bowling for Columbine" a film by Michael Moore
Published on THE THING (bbs.thing.net)

Perhaps trying his best to sound like René Magritte, Michael Moore has announced that "Bowling for Columbine" is "Not a film about gun control." You might find this puzzling. In its 120 minutes, "Columbine" rarely strays from its sole issue, guns, except when trying to explain why Americans are so fascinated with guns. Only then does it concern itself with other topics, such as racism, classism, welfare, workfare, Afghanistan, consumerism, the Civil War, 9/11, the '53 Iranian coup, the media, pollution, imperialism, terrorism, and again, for good measure, racism. But primarily, "Columbine" is an entertaining film about what is, to most, an incredibly unentertaining subject: gun control.

Sex, Our Hero

NYC Sex: How New York City Transformed Sex in America.
At the Museum of Sex
Published on THE THING

You may be relieved to know that according to the Museum of Sex, sex in New York has been tremendously liberated, intriguingly kinky, and happily promiscuous. As the museum tells it, if any harm has been done in the past one-hundred-and-fifty years, it's been done to sex rather than by it. What's more, sex, like Wonder Woman, the museum's favorite comic book character, has been unfailingly on the side of right, and always wins in the end. It's comforting to hear. One wouldn't have it any other way.

The Pinochet Case

Directed and written by Patricio Guzmán
First Run Icarus Films
110 min, 2001
Showing at Film Forum September 11th - 24th, 2002

Published on THE THING (reviews)

Victoria is looking through her bag for the picture of her son. It is a large bag, cluttered with medicine and makeup, with all of the things a woman's purse can accumulate over the years. She finds the laminated photo, kisses it, and warmly pins it to her chest. Her son, who went missing after September 11th, is her "saint," and for her the picture is a shrine. She is radiant with his memory, and perhaps one day Victoria will learn what exactly happened to her son.

The Grand Guy, Santiago Sierra

A review of Sierra's
"Nine Forms of 100 x 100 x 600 Cm Each, Constructed to be Supported Perpendicular to a Wall"
At Deitch Projects
by John Menick
07.13.02
bbs.thing.net (reviews)

In his 1958 novel "The Happy Christian," Terry Southern's billionaire protagonist Guy Grand uses his fortune to make people sweat. For Grand there is nothing that people won't do for a mountain of money: pedestrians eat his traffic tickets, skywriters scrawl obscenities over cities and people fish hundred-dollar bills out of steaming filth.

The Trials of Henry Kissinger

Directed by Alex Gibney and Eugene Jarecki
US/UK/Chile, 2002, 80m
06.20.02
bbs.thing.net (reviews)

While pushing his new novel "Nuremberg: The Reckoning" recently on National Public Radio, William F. Buckley Jr. was attempting to clarify why an International Criminal Court (ICC) would not be such a great idea. The unflinching ultra-con explained that an ICC would succumb to "opportunism" and therefore would fall short of any purported objectivity. The point is hardly original -- it has been vociferously argued for some time now by Henry Kissinger, who, as Buckley explained, is having a hard time "travel[ing] abroad because somebody will bring a war crimes trial to him."

Overcast Skies

a review of
"The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity"
by Tariq Ali
Verso 2002, 342 pages
06.07.02
The Thing (reviews)

Unfortunately, in the United States Tariq Ali requires a brief introduction. Born in 1943, Lahore, by late adolescence the almost congenital atheist and radical found himself disagreeing strongly with the Pakistani state, and in the coming decades, his dissidence earned him permanent exile.

Imagined Testimonies: an interview with Walid Ra'ad

03.25.02
The Thing (reviews)

It's said that when a car bomb explodes, the engine is often thrown from the vehicle and can land in the strangest places. On roofs, on balconies, in alleys, and sometimes, tragically, on innocent bystanders. In Lebanon during the Civil War (1975 - 1991) car bombings were frequent, and while covering the war, photojournalists began to engage in competitions to be the first to find the ejected engines.

Waiting for an Identity

The Thing (reviews)

He smokes a pipe and compulsively runs an electric razor over his visibly smooth face. He eats in fast-food restaurants on a daily basis, washes in public restrooms, and lives off the generosity of strangers. He receives a lot of mail -- close to one hundred pieces regularly -- and he keeps almost all of it. He has been the subject of a couple of feature films, a few documentaries, countless newspaper articles, and several scholarly essays.

Any Persons, Living or Dead: Notes for a Project in Nuremberg

Several years ago, after exiting the subway in Long Island City, I was confronted with the aftermath of a car accident. Near to where I was standing, an ambulance was diagonally parked in the middle of an intersection. Two cars lay in a crumpled contortion on a nearby traffic island. One of the cars appeared to be charred by a fire -- the accident must have claimed the lives of the passengers. The death image of the burnt-out vehicles followed me several blocks.

Positively Prince Street: Projects for Prada Part 1

Positively Prince Street: Projects for Prada Part 1
Projects for Prada Part 1 and the Prince Street Prada store by OMA/AMO and Rem Koolhaas
Published on THE THING

If it isn't well understood it's at least generally experienced that shopping has become an end in itself. Once, probably fairly recently, if someone needed a pair of shoes, he or she went out and unceremoniously bought a pair. Shopping was perfunctory, utilitarian, transparent in its function. Over the past half-century, multinational capitalism -- or some Disneyfied version of it -- has turned shopping into a form of entertainment to be enjoyed free from all the fuss of having to actually buy something.