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.