Andriy Antonovskiy / Volodymyr Bilyk - Collaborative track

Great news! Andr Batonchik posted our recent musical collaboration. Music is by yours truly, lyrics are by Andriy Antonovskiy.

Check it out: https://batacat.bandcamp.com/track/paradiss-unknown

New poems at OTOLITHS

Great news! There is new issue of OTOLITHS and you can read some of my poems in there. That's quite an occasion as I'm barely did anything since the Detournement Crusade release. I'm working on Ukrainian book of poems, but nobody gives a shit about so why bother.

Anyway, more about the OTOLITHS pieces. These are the older stuff that I wrote 2015-2018. Mostly the stuff that I did when I got bored from writing Roadrage, which happened a lot because it was a boring book.

Some of the pieces took some time to flesh out, so if you try searching my past publication - you might find their earlier iterations.

https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2021/08/volodymyr-bilyk.html

Old-new Poems at Utsanga

Great news! My bilingual poem series Action Amain was recently published by utsanga.it.

https://www.utsanga.it/bilyk-дії-вкрай-action-amain/

Чудова знахідка!

Окрім зустрічі з Професором Білоусом, подорож додому також має таку знахідку. Ця антологія - одна з найрепрезентативніших в своїй сфері. За нею можна відслідкувати трансформацію стилю написання, зміни прийомів, еволюції тем з покоління в покоління. Як на мене на основі антології Зілинського можна підготувати хороше ознайомче видання для іноземців.

 

BOO!

 

New work in MAINTENANT #15

Finally! Got my hands on New Three Rooms Press Maintenant #15. I've got a piece there. It is one of the later Detournement Crusade poems. Aside of that - lots of great stuff.

I've been part of this magazine for 8 years and every issue taught me something about curating a magazine and creating a flowing sequence. I don't know how Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges manage to pull it off, but once you open it - you stop at the back cover. It take some serious engagement skills to do it that good. Thanks for including me.

NEW WORK IN Piotr Szreniawski's Anthology of One Letter Poems

 

Great news! One of my pieces was featured in Piotr Szreniawski Anthology of One Letter Poems.
It is one from the days of font collages (mostly documented in Eellogofusciohipoppokunurious book). 

The piece itself is stuck between two series I was working on back then - font collages and fontmen. The idea was to create some ideograms and eventually make an image-based conlang. However, the project felt too massive, so I went back to writing Roadrage. 

Probably need to come to back it someday.

 
You can also find the work of such vispo greats as Rosaire Appel, Tim Gaze, Andrew Brenza, Dennis Smith, David Kjellin, Michael Orr, Sacha Archer, Satu Kaikkonen, Andrew Topel, Stephen Nelson, Sven Staelens, Dave Read, Geof Huth. Lots of great pieces and even more inspiration.

You can see the rest via this link http://skr.comicgenesis.com/jednoliterowe.pdf

Detournement Crusade at Global Multimedia Poetry Stands.

let me share a link for an exhibition project I took part recently. It is Global Multimedia Poetry Stands. You can see a couple of newer pieces from Detournement Crusade on the screenshots.

Ironically, that's the second time I take part in this project. The first one happened in 2019. It used the early pieces from Detournement Crusade. 2021 exhibition uses the very last pieces created for the project. In fact, the piece "O lau Am Ha" is the final piece of the cycle.

You can look at the rest of the documentation here: https://www.oficinadoespirito.com/en/gmmps-21-exhibition/

new book - Detournement Crusade (Red Fox Press, 2021)

Great news! Selected works of Detournement Crusade are out at Red Fox Press. I want to thank Francis Van Maele for making it possible. It is a great honor to be featured in your lineup. Keep on keeping on.

You can check the book here - http://redfoxpress.com/dada-bilyk.html

Few words about Detournement Crusade. 

The idea behind this series is simple. Take some old stuff and make your own thing with it. I wanted to banish the sentiment of works of the past being sacred and seemingly untouchable. These works use old artworks, but they don't leverage on its cultural context and doesn't exploit its aesthetics. They are just made out of these things. 

Each piece is twofold in execution. 

The pieces were made out of various jazz covers, Bauhaus posters, penguin book covers, Lettrist publications, and other sources. Each piece was culled together from a dozen sources. However, the sources don't really matter due to casual defamiliarization. I'm not acknowledging or celebrating visual sources of the series - for all intents and purposes for this projects - they are just building blocks.

At the same time, the texts are pre-written at first and then augmented by interacting with visual sources. The driving principle behind most of texts is to write down the narrative and then condense it into a headlinese abstract sentence. Otherwise, it operates similarly to poems in Roadrage. 

The original text serves as the backbone of the piece. I've tried to work directly with the sources and write texts out of them, but it doesn't really come together. You can do freewheeling glossolalia that way, but not much else. 

Usually, I would anagram the words in the sources to find out what pieces to use to compose the base text. The process is a bit backwards as i need to match my text with the anagram findings. Sometimes i can further develop a poem that way, but it is a rabbithole timesink. Sometimes synonyms come into play, usually to keep things tighter.

Overall, the series creates abstract poems that leverage its visual component but not exploit the cultural baggage of its visual source material. 

Here are some more visuals from the book. Courtesy of Francis Van Maele. 

Strauss series in a new issue of Utsanga

There is new Utsanga issue online and as usual it is a total blast. I even have a new series in there. It is informally titled Strauss and it is about Strauss being awkward as told through redacted screengrabs of the review of the book about his epistolary conversations with Schiller.

The link https://www.utsanga.it/bilyk-works-2/

Thoughts on "Personal poetry"

A couple of days ago I've stumbled upon a Facebook post criticizing the so-called "personal poetry" and its seeming "overabundance" in the literary outlets. 

It was mostly a derogatory post dismissing the concept as some sort of "conspiracy of bland", but it made me thinking - why do some people have such a distaste for this kind of poetry while the others enjoy it?

So here’s what I’ve come up with.

Ramon Llull Boogie Woogie - Exhibition Introductory text for Andriy Antonovskiy

A couple of months ago I did an introduction for my dear friend Andriy Antonovskiy's exhibition. Here it is for your reading pleasure. 

***

Ramon Llull Boogie Woogie

What can a painting do? That's the question Andriy Antonovskiy asked himself upon starting this series of paintings. Really, what can a painting do as an object of perception? What makes it different from the rest of the objects one can perceive?

A painting can tell stories, create mood, stimulate the imagination... what else can it do? Can a painting go sideways of its purpose and offer something else? That's what Andriy is trying to figure out.

This new cycle of works is a series of possibilities that use painting as a means of showcasing its intent. What's its intent? Possibilities of perceiving an art piece as a sim of thought process, decision-making, and making an effort.

The series combines abstract expressionism of the 1940s, hard-edge stylings of the 1950s, and vorticism of the 1910s with the bebop rhythms of the bewildering urban environment.

It is less about what it is painted as it is about what painting had accomplished matter-of-fact - how the material has transformed, how the surface had changed, what paint was used, which colors, what was the color blocking scheme, how the composition came around and so on.

On the one hand, the paintings avoid fantastic exaggeration and rely on the relative realism of images. On the other hand, the images are near-abstract splashes of colors and geometric forms. You still can recognize what it is, but this particular instance is distinctly different from the accustomed version. The near abstract approach plays a neat trick with the viewer. The in-between state forces the recipient to go beyond the pattern recognition routine and reroute the perception the other way around.

In this case, it focuses on the mechanics of the painting, contextualizing the imagery through and reconstructing the content inside out. This way, the interpretation is more uniform - the recipient isn't left alone with the piece. They can't see whatever they can see in it - instead, the recipient is in the clearly-defined maze that does not offer a slightly different experience without the frustration of getting lost.

As a result, Andriy Antonovskiy manages to experiment with form and narrative while also avoiding an audience’s alienation. And that's quite an accomplishment if you think about it.

***

Рамон Люль Бугі Вугі

Що може робити картина? Таке питання поставив перед собою Андрій Антоновський на початку роботи над новим циклом картин. Справді, що може робити картина як об'єкт сприйняття? Чим вона відрізняється від інших об'єктів сприйняття?

Картина може оповідати наративи, створювати настрій, стимулювати уяву... що ще? Чи може картина йти всупереч своєму функціональному призначенню та пропонувати щось інше для реципієнта?

Відповідь на це питання шукає Андрій Антоновський. Новий цикл робіт - це перш за все мистецтво можливостей, яке використовує образотворчий формат для наочності свого наміру. Про які можливості йдеться мова? Можливості сприйняття твору як результату зусиль, прийняття рішень та мислення.

В цих роботах Андрій Антоновський об'єднує героїчний абстракціонізм 40х, аналітичний гард-едж 50х та вортицизм 10х з бібоп ритмом здичавілого урбаністичного краєвиду.

Мова не стільки про те, що намальовано, скільки про те, що було фактично зроблено малярством - як змінилися матеріали, як трансформувалася поверхня, скільки фарб було нанесено, яких кольорів, за яким принципом компонувалися кольори, яким чином визначалися форми, за яким принципом робилася композиція.

З одного боку, картини уникають фантастичного та подають цілком реалістичні образи, але з іншого боку, вони доведені до межової абстракції яскравих кольорів та геометричних форм. Неповність абстракції виводить картини на інший рівень сприйняття. На межі двох станів реципієнт не може вдатися до відпрацьованого патерну сприйняття, який концентрується на образотворчому елементі відокремлено від усього супровідного контексту.

Натомість, реципієнт змушений сприймати механічні елементи твору, контекстуалізувати їх та через них підходити до змісту твору. Такий підхід робить твір конкретнішим в інтерпретації. Глядач не у відкритому полі, де він може сприймати твір як йому заманеться, натомість глядач опиняється в чітко окресленому лабіринті, який не плутає, а надає досвід відмінний від повсякденного.

Таким чином, Андрію Антоновському вдається одночасно залишатися доступним та експериментувати з формою та оповіддю творів. І це велике досягнення. 

Great moments in history: Toulouse-Letrec pooing on the beach (1898)

Temporal distance and reverence dehumanize historical figures. It makes them seem beholding some kind of higher standard than everybody else. Which is not true. We're all human after all. Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec Montfa (commonly known simply as Toulouse-Lautrec) was a great painter with unique sensibility. As a trailblazer of post-impressionist age, he further explored the mundane moments in exquisite detail. But that's not what this post is about.

Toulouse-Lautrec was also quite an eccentric as confirmed by this infamous series of photos. The images document Toulouse-Lautrec in the act of defecating on the nondescript beachside. It is like one of those post-Fluxus performance documents except a 70 or so years earlier so it is way cooler. 

And it would have been great to leave these image as they are barren of context. But you would like to know how they came around - so here it is.

The year is 1898. It was a tumultuous year for Toulouse-Lautrec. For the last fifteen years he was to trying to break out in the Paris art scene. The results were middling, he had an occasional showings here and there but he was far from a bonafide success. But now it seemed like he was going to make it. 

Around this time, his lifelong friend Maurice Joyant, a gallery owner, had arranged an his exhibition in Goupil and Cie. It was supposed to be something crowning moment for Henri. But it ended up being a whimper. It definitely wasn't a success. Mostly because Toulouse-Lautrec wasn't considered a serious artist by Goupil and Cie crowd. Look at Henri from their perspective - that guy was a joke. He did posters for Moulin Rouge, that red scarf poster was garish, he was painting prostitutes and his nude stuff looked either ugly or weird. It didn't worked out. 

Remember that Van Gogh's big retrospective that put him on the map and started a chain reaction of reappraisal of various post-impressionist artists from 1880s-90s took place in 1901. Toulouse-Lautrec's show was too soon and the surrounding narrative had no drama to engage the snobbish crowd. 

The exhibition's lack of success spelled the end of Toulouse-Lautrec's life in Paris. Henri was sick and tired - lifelong alcohol abuse and syphilis took its tool. He was forced to move back to his parents, who also didn't happened to be fans of his works. But Joyant tried to cheer up Henri so that he would fade away completely.

One of the things they used to do was walking on the beaches of Le Crotoy in Picardie. It was a popular vacation place amongst French artists. One day Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Joyant were walking on the beach just like any other day. Joyant took a couple of photos of Toulouse-Lautrec fooling around, including defecation. 

At the time these photos went unnoticed. It wasn't until much later, after Henri passed away and became recognized as one of the greats that these photos came into prominence. So that's that. 

A bit later in 1898, Toulouse-Lautrec was sent to an asylum which perpetuated every singly distress and misery he had and added a couple of new ones in the process. Eventually, in 1901 the long-term effects of alcoholism and syphilis had a better of him and he passed away age 36. 

In a way, these defecating on the beach photos are his LAST HURRAH. Just think about for a bit. Let it sink in. Feels right, huh? 

Great SMM test task (featuring Wham+Slayer)

Here's one hell of test for social media marketing manager position.

Find a reason to post this mash-up song on the company's page. Yes, it is legendary Wham!\Slayer mash-up made by Bill McClintock.

You can do the following things with it:

• attempt to find parallel the song's combined content message with the company's messages;
• attempt to reflect the mood of the company at the moment with the song's content (propaganda death ensemble...) - you know - what if it was the company's theme song and so on;
• showcase your creative thinking. Mostly in terms of unconventional thinking and utilizing skills.
• Drop off the majority of candidates because this test task is ridiculous through and through.
• Drive to maximum absurdity and just ram it down because such creative test tasks are scary for many marketers as they are used to more conventional and template-driven thinking.

Found poem + some erasure pixel blur

So i was browsing discogs in search of 2000s blues albums and then i stumbled upon Entrance Band's Guy Blakeslee's solo album Ophelia Slowly. And I look at the tracklist and it struck me - there was a poem and i needed to let it out of that tracklist.

To do that - i went face pixelizer and tinkered with the tracklist screenshot. 

Now it is a combination of plain text, pixelized glyphs and some blurred timestamps and words.

MFT: Frenzal Rhomb - Not So Tough Now (1996) - parade of secret tracks

 

Frenzal Rhomb's 1996 album Not So Tough Now is not just really good punk rock album. It also has one of the greatest listings of secret tracks ever. Back in the 90s secret tracks became a commonplace and their vinyl-era mystique went away. 

So why not mock the entire concept? That's what Frenzal Rhomb did. Check it out:

Chicken Image on the Wall

 Last December we had a little trip to Chernihiv. It was great through and through. But that's not why I'm writing this post. 

The story goes - we were going through local churches and during one of the breaks - my wife was looking around and noticed something strange on one of the churches towers. Part of the wall's cover had fallen off (it was under restoration and there were numerous bits either peeled off or crumbled away). But it wasn't just a piece of the wall exposed - the exposed part of the wall had a very particular shape. It looked like a chicken.

Here's the photo:

I think this is quite fascinating piece of found art.

New Interview: Questions about Creativity (by Piotr Szreniawski)

Great news! I have been featured in the book Questions About Creativity by
Piotr Szreniawski

It is an interview about different aspects of the job. There are also some of my works featured throughout the text.

The link http://poemiks.comicgenesis.com/questionsaboutcreativity.pdf

New book: Gerry Ha Ha (Timglaset, 2020)

 

I have a new book out now - it is called Gerry Ha Ha, and it is a whole lotta ha's, and ha's to send to hell any worry, uncertainty, despair, or else - because why bother with stuff like that - we've got better things to do! Just read the page aloud, and it is all mostly gone. 

I want to thank Joakim Norling and Timglaset for making it real. Keep on keeping on!
The link - www.timglaset.com/produktsida/volodymyr-bilyk-gerry-ha-ha

Zur-En-Arrh Transmission: Heartbeat Series

So I was reading old Alien versus Predator comics and I've found this beautiful thing in one of them - Heartbeat going steady beat beat beat and then it stops.