coll

Ⓐ

pse
contemporary

[ Blue McCall ]

I.

ARTIST
TALK
AS
VILLAIN
ORIGIN
STORY

II.

EARLY

WORK:
ARTIST
AS
COVER
STORY

III.

PROBLEMS

WITH
IMAGES

IV.

RECENT
WORK:
THE
VIBES
ARE
GETTING
INCREASINGLY
UNHINGED

V.       

TOWARDS:   
ARTIST    
AS    
CULTURAL    
CRITIC    

Hi  🫠 / 🙃
My artist bio is so deeply edited, I am
basically a catfish. Here is the real story. 

I’m an anarchist who’s work circulates in the worlds of heavy music, fashion, and cultural cricitism.

I’m a second generation punk princess. Born to teenage grunge musican parents in 1996. My dad’s band was called Flaccid, which is ironic. Gender trouble / genre trouble is my inheritance. I wonder, what does it mean to be a dissaffected youth born to disaffected youth? Disaffected².

We are the chaos entity known as Blue McCall. You may have met me under another name. It happens. The name is a placeholder or a proxy or a set of parenthesis. Blue is my middle name from birth, after the Blue Ridge Mountains where I grew up in a small cabin made of petrified wormy-chestnut on a lake in a mountain valley. This place has very particular sonic properties, and I actually hear the voices in the my head filtered through the spatial audio or “room sounds” of this cabin or over the lake in the valley.

My dad taught me two things:
1. The role of the artist is cultural mirror.
2. It’s important to create a life where your time is your own to waste. Form follows waste under capitalism in Amerikkka. Time is the ultimate medium.

I learned two things from my mother:
1. The role of the madman is to speak truth to power.
2. You will live longer and travel easily if you are very, very beautiful. You may even live to see 30, but there is no guarantee your mind will still be there on the other side.

My critical edge is informed by these shifting positionalities, this nexus of identities. I have survived trauma, but I don’t make autobio art about violence. (Boring.) I am queer, but I don’t make identity art. (Representation without rights is a trap.) I like to think about my practice on the level of history after watching my dad squander his shot at being an artist. He didn’t know that he was doing the most culturally and historically relevant thing a person could do between 1990–1996. He was simply making noise because he was angry, and had just gotten out of a prison school for children in Montanna for being an anti-state actor. But I know about the angel of history. I get the benefit of knowing. Flaccid used to do this performance piece called Art Professor. My dad would stand up on stage with a guitar and an art history textbook on a music stand. The band, which consisted of members Eck, Ugh, and Chunk, played a loud, de-skilled noise set while my dad would open the art history textbook to a random page, and then scream the words aloud. Tearing out pages and discarding them as the “song” progressed. My mom would stand behind him holding his hair back so that he could read, while pregnant with me.

Anarchist girls only want one thing.

                                                                          And it’s everything.

This whole endeavor is an act of rebellion.

And now here I am,
disaffected² 
becoming an art professor. 

I subscribe to Fred Moten’s notion of the Undercommons, and engage with institutions as such. I have wasted over $300k in fellowships and grants on designer degrees and projects that were meaningful to me and my community. If you ever need help grantwriting or an editor for proposals, I gotchu.

I am a split personality who ate their twin in the womb.

Kinda funny right? I got diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder, the thing that used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, just a couple years ago. Do you know any other artists with DID? I don’t really... but am looking. I am several different and distinct artists who share a body. We split back and forth across fugue states, and cannot be present at the same time without experiencing extreme neurological pain. We have different sets of memories, sexualities, artistic disciplines, gender expressions. Even different handwritings, heartbeats, and favorite foods. I have used my art practice over the last ten years to communicate between altered states by leaving traces. Most of my work is actually “made” in thehypnagogic state right before sleep. I then recreate the work later, when I have control of the body. 

All artists have many artist-selves who are in constant conversation in the studio. This is, in a way, a universal story about creativity. Although, I am living the metaphor.

I did my undergrad in sculpture and painting. I love material, but make performance. I want the objects in my performances to be good enough to be sculptures in their own right. So that the contingencies proposed by the performance work even if my body is not there. I want my paintings to circulate as tour posters and garments, and for my posters and clothes to be shown in galleries in painting exhibitions. Decentralization is a real solution for breaking down hierarchy. I can get a little nihilistic sometimes, but I really believe this. 

My cats are named Xerox and Risograph. They remind me to slow down. To rest, snuggle and play. They are all white twins both with two different colored eyes. Ditto and Ditto. Chimera and Chimera. Drag and Drop. Thing One and Thing Two. My living gargoyles. My angels with one eye for seeing the past and one for seeing the future.

I really like duets. And ensemble work. Group work is cool because the social relationships within the group become the text of the piece. I was trained as a dancer throughout childhood, and have worked professionally in the US and Russia. The best things I’ve ever been a part of (other than collective action and civil dissent, obviouly) are repertoir work by Trisha Brown and Pina Bausch. My body changed (for the better) when I had bottoms surgery in late 2020, and so changed the kind of dance I was able to make. 

I was able to get sterilized in 2020... using the transgender route... on Medicaid... during the Trump Administration... in a city that was militantly engaged in revolt. (okay, that’s my flex for the day.) Chasing some kind of limit experience, I immediately threw the body back into demonstrations in the streets and back into ballet at local company class. I threw the body into movement and movements. This could be another story, but I’ll focus on one type of movement in the name of good security culture. 

After experiencing a surgical intervention with a healing process similar to a gunshot wound to the belly, I was able to drop all of my formal dance training. My body became completely deskilled. Something clicked for me while performing a 9 minute long set with hyper-pop musician Jan Julius at the 2021 Improvisation Summit of Portland, hosted by the Creative Music Guild in a bar called No Fun. We performed for 9 minutes because it was all my body could physically bear at that moment, post-op. 

There’s this big debate that happens in communities surrounding improvisational art forms like contact improv or jazz; Can the artist actually achieve true improvisation, or are we always just reperforming a combination of the movements we habitually do? So many of the concerns of modernism sprung up around this question as artists sought to develop mental tools or aesthetic strategies in search of ‘the new’ or even worse, ‘the authentic.’ Contemporary art, a genre that holds modern art paradoxically at its center, is often a cult of authenticity. We are living in a time period that critics are calling the least innovative century in the last 500 years. 

I was always the nihilist at contact improv jam. Reconfiguring my habitual movements, and stuck in my years and years of training. But in throwing my body immediately into performance and into revolt before it had fully healed from the wounds of medical transition, I was able to achieve a state authentic and true improvisation. I found new forms. 

I found new forms by going before I was ready.  

By collapsing genre, pitting two scenes against one another through the force of your own making.

And also, nothing in that moment was new at all. I had been returned to making the same deskilled noise I was born out of, with my dad tearing out the pages of an art history textbook and screaming, with my mom holding his hair back.

I am still exploring what was discovered in that moment. 

I.

II.

EARLY

WORK:
ARTIST
AS
COVER
STORY

I.

II.

III.

PROBLEMS

WITH
IMAGES

I.

II.

III.

IV.

RECENT
WORK:
THE
VIBES
ARE
GETTING
INCREASINGLY
UNHINGED

Harm REDUX   

 AR Scan   
  Made During   
  Eviction of   
  “Queer House”  Copenhagen,
DK. 100-year- 
old Building   
  Demolished   
  Next Day   

Puffy Prada   
Provenance   

Alchemical   
Transformations   

  I Endure/   
Adore You   

Touch System   

Ablation   
Cake Sit   

Slip Wip:   
Factory Erotica   

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.      

TOWARDS:   
ARTIST    
AS    
CULTURAL    
CRITIC    

Coll

Ⓐ

pse
Contemporary:

In the
Group Chat

Sibohan x JJJJerome x Lindsay x Marvin Tate

...

Performance Lectures:

Cybernetic
Girl Dinner

Introducing:
Bambi Kunst

Welcome Tax Player, to the Center of Empire

From
Movement Prototypes:

DFBRL8R Fountain Dance Jam 

Flourosonic 

Re-Happening

EXPO Movement Intervention

Cupid & Psyche Enmeshed/In Mesh

[            ]

Noise Noise Noise Girls Girls Girls