petak, 26. travnja 2013.

Scott Treleaven - The Salvation Army (2002)

Sigil #111 by Scott Treleaven
Godless, Lawless, Nomadic: Scott Treleaven’s The Salivation Army

Dokumentarac o zloglasnom queercore zineu This is the Salivation Army. Treleaven je od onih ljudi koji izložbu mogu nasloviti Svetac koji je pio mlijeko svojim penisom (2011).

www.scotttreleaven.com/






Godless, Lawless, Nomadic: Scott Treleaven’s The Salivation Army

by Diarmuid

Scott Treleaven has just uploaded his 2002 documentary THE SALiVATION ARMY, onto the web. Now a cult classic, in this short film Treleaven talks about the origins of his infamous queercore zine “This is the Salivation Army,” finding its roots steeped in queer defiance and desire, and its unexpected decline a consequence of its popularity. The zine, he intones, began with discussions amongst friends, “about how we wanted to fuck anyone carrying a Molotov cocktail: the sexiness of the true revolutionary. I have seen the face of new radicalism – and it’s cute.”
I was introduced to “This is the Salivation Army” by a friend who pressed it into my hands with an enthusiasm bordering on the devotional. And I could see why: Xeroxed page after righteous Xeroxed page of manifestos and eye-popping collages, loudly affirming queer revolution and the violent, irrepressible force of sexual desire; denouncing equally the heteronormative status quo and sclerotic and commodified gay identity; beckoning you to follow. Anarchistic, pagan, subversively queer, a representative pronouncement from issue eleven declares with typical fury and imagination:
Lift the lid and see that the flowers in the dustbin have finally taken root: droves of Queer children in warpaint, roam the streets like packs of sex-crazed hyaenas [sic]. Like mandrake at the bottom of a gallows, we have flourished unchecked because they never do their homework. Beacuse [sic ] we have been ridiculed we are buoyed by the civilized world — getting stronger. We easily feed off the fat of the cities, dream to see them starved into submission. We have finally realised that the thief’s trick is not to trade, but to take things away. Starving people of beauty. Hoarding. Recording. (he taps on the lens of an old video camera and says: “this is an experiment.”) We have a history this time. Play - the first of the New Rules. Next…
When I first read “This is the Salivation Army,” the zine had already been decommissioned for five or six years but even then its words were potent, passionate, sexy in a way that made so much sense to me on affective and intellectual levels. However, Treleaven’s provocative call to arms, as this film shows, by mobilising the very forms of ferocious desire it affirmed, produced unintended consequences that the writer himself could not predict. Dreamy, poetic, honest – this film is a fitting tribute to its story.
Bugcrush (2006), a film adaptation of one of Treleaven’s short stories is also available online in one two three parts and is well worth checking out. A short film about a high-school boy’s attraction for the brooding, chainsmoking new kid with a sketchy past and the fucked-up turn their relationship takes, it is well shot and excellently builds suspense through greyed-out tones and suspenseful editing (though perhaps it’s too short to really achieve full effect). Carter Smith’s direction is reminiscent of new queer cinema and he comes across as a darker, more supernaturally-inclined twin of Gregg Araki. The release of his new short, Yearbook (2011) is eagerly anticipated. - oneplusonejournal.co.uk/

...The selection exhibited of the 9 issues of Scott Treleaven’s This is the Salvation Army (1996-2003) captures the memory, and conveys a sense of what for many is associated with the melancholy and fury of issues of self and identity. Here, in the exhibition, the Salvation Army is described as “a queer/punk/occult hybrid to operate as a focal point for a (hypothetical) dispersed underground group of ‘queers’ who felt restricted by both straight and gay concerns.” Drawn with pen and black ink and sometimes involving photocopied images, wolves and skeletal nudes are depicted. Some prose is included, in one instance lambasting Christian Fundamentalism, thus tying in with the double meaning of the title of the publication. This conveys the sense of liberation intended as the focal point for this group. There is sort of cool sensuousness to the artwork related in part to the stark contrast of the black and white. Overall, the examples exhibited appeal to the memory of adolescenct melancholy and identity issues, evoking responses similar to those drawn forth in many by the songs of Morrisey. Similarly subversive are the examples displayed of the twenty-six issues of File Megazine (1972-1989) by AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal. The most striking image is of a female nude crucified, wearing a gas mask. This is a black ink, printed photograph with the background coloured red along with the gas mask. It is quite a shocking image at first glance and calls up contradictory responses. On the one hand, the crucifixion connotes divine sacrifice and the elevation of humanity; on the other, the gas mask connotes fetishism and renders the sacrifice as a form of degradation. In this way it seems to impart the essence of misogyny. - Daniel Potts





"... Once And For All: There Is No Scene: There is no membership activity. We’ve all done our time with the punks, the Goths, the crusties, club scenes, art scenes. Galleries, grebos & factories. You name it. We’ve done the tattoos, the hairdos, the scars, and the steel till we all looked alike. Communist meetings, Anarchist rallies, potlucks, back rooms, witch circles; all the underground credentials you could want....Having now safely returned to the helm we can report: there wasn’t really anybody there. Despite genial perversions, bright markings and self-avowed mutilations, we were still starved for the compassionate ones. (he cums in my mouth, calls me a “good citizen” and then tells me a story about a junky). We were looking for the ones who wanted to begin. This circus is as far flung and varied as any cabaret. Infiltrating all areas. Infuriating people with a total inability to wear one disguise, to believe in one idea, or to take anybody’s word for anything. We truly cum & go as we please from one circle to the next, taking only what we need. Scavengers from a school far larger than any small-minded cult of primitivism, theory, dogma, decadence, or sham. We are ageless jacks-of-all-trades; dilettantes, masters, and examples. Please don’t be afraid: you will know each other by scent alone. We are the new circus. We are the envy of the fucking World."
(exerpt from Open Letter to the New Queer Radicals by Scott Treleaven. From This Is The Salivation Army, 1997)



Scott Treleaven Wikipedia

More on “This is the Salivation Army” (Zine wiki)

salivationarmycover (1)

We are the new circus.
There: let them stare. There’s no charge for the eyeing of our scars. There’s nothing they have that we want. Their children are already ours. (He whispers “no,” but shoves himself down on my finger up to the third knuckle) (wonder if I’ll get my ring back...) Our future is assured.
Lift the lid and see that the flowers in the dustbin have finally taken root: droves of Queer children in warpaint, roam the streets like packs of sex-crazed hyaenas. Like mandrake at the bottom of a gallows, we have flourished unchecked because they never do their homework. Beacuse we have been ridiculed we are buoyed by the civilized world -- getting stronger. We easily feed off the fat of the cities, dream to see them starved into submission. We have finally realised that the thief's trick is not to trade, but to take things away. Starving people of beauty. Hoarding. Recording. (he taps on the lens of an old video camera and says: “this is an experiment.”) We have a history this time. Play - the first of the New Rules. Next...
Once And For All: There Is No Scene: There is no membership activity. We’ve all done our time with the punks, the Goths, the crusties, club scenes, art scenes. Galleries, grebos & factories. You name it. We’ve done the tattoos, the hairdos, the scars, and the steel till we all looked alike. Communist meetings, Anarchist rallies, potlucks, back rooms, witch circles; all the underground credentials you could want....Having now safely returned to the helm we can report: there wasn’t really anybody there. Despite genial perversions, bright markings and self-avowed mutilations, we were still starved for the compassionate ones. (he cums in my mouth, calls me a “good citizen” and then tells me a story about a junky). We were looking for the ones who wanted to begin.
This circus is as far flung and varied as any cabaret. Infiltrating all areas. Infuriating people with a total inability to wear one disguise, to believe in one idea, or to take anybody’s word for anything. We truly cum & go as we please from one circle to the next, taking only what we need. Scavengers from a school far larger than any small-minded cult of primitivism, theory, dogma, decadence, or sham. We are ageless jacks-of-all-trades; dilettantes, masters, and examples. Please don’t be afraid: you will know each other by scent alone.
We are the new circus.
We are the envy of the fucking World.
Scott Treleaven, THE SALiVATION ARMY


Collage by Scott Treleaven


The ‘Other’ Function of the Orgasm

by Scott Treleaven

All art is magical in origin…(it is) intended to produce very definite results.” ~ William S. Burroughs
Two of my all time favorite publications are Simon Dwyer’s Rapid Eye books, and Vale & Juno’s classic RE:Search series. Together they exploded the lines between artistic, mystical, sexual and intellectual pursuits and featured one-of-a-kind interviews with luminaries like Derek Jarman, Brion Gysin, Kenneth Anger and Kathy Acker. To a Toronto boy who was spending his days hiding indoors listening to Psychic TV and New Model Army, Rapid Eye and RE:Search made the world seem like something that was going on somewhere else, so in 1996 I launched the first issue of my zine, This Is the Salivation Army. Having one leg in the art scene, one in the homocore movement, and both paws in the occult, it was my way of connecting these seemingly disparate ideas and desires in one forum. But it was more than just a zine – it was a love letter to a mythical gang that I was consciously bringing into existence. I’d decided that I would imagine a new home, and then move into it…and it worked. Less than a year from the Salivation Army’s inception, I found myself at the helm of a youth cult.
As the zine and it’s devotees flourished, so did the rituals and motifs associated with it; wolfboys, pirate skulls, petty theft, scarification, homemade porn, etc. The editorial rants constantly reiterated that the key element in making anything happen, whether it be magick, art or activism, was the undiluted commitment of one’s energy. Moreover, This Is the Salivation Armyunderlined the fact that art and magick are old friends, even if they do get split up and thrown in opposite directions from time to time: art usually goes off to suck up to bourgeois commerce, while magick curls up in the lap of an appreciative fringe culture. Historically speaking, this alienation never lasts for very long, and art and magick soon make their way back towards each other like salmon returning to spawn. The zine was so potent and prescient that it briefly attracted the attention of a major soft drinks manufacturer, who came sniffing around for a new demographic. They knew we were on to something – and if you want an up-to-the-minute example of this phenomenon, check out 19th century occultist Aleister Crowley putting in an appearance in the latest White Stripes video. Better still, at K48’s request I’ve included some notes below on how you can experience this coming rendezvous first hand.
Crowley defined magick as “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”. If that’s true, then this is the single best and simplest magickal tool I’ve ever come across for manufacturing the kind of reality you want to live in: SIGILS. A sigil, which rhymes with ‘vigil’, takes two of the best elements of youth culture and combines them into a source of wish-fulfillment: making cut n’ paste collages and jerking off. Like a logo, a cross, or a pentacle, a sigil acts as a point of focus for the compounded, single expression of a particular desire. I first learned about sigils from the visionary writings of divine pandrogyne, Genesis P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV). His anti-cult par excellence, thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, had adapted their technique from the writings of illustrator & mystic Austin Osman Spare, who in turn had learned it from his nanny, and so on. The method is easy and effective and whether you subscribe to the occult, or happen to be more pragmatically minded like me, the results will speak for themselves. Here’s how to make your own:
  1. Find a quiet time and place where you won’t be disturbed. Surround yourself with things that you find relevant to whatever your particular desire is: pictures, candles, incense, objects that have a personal meaning, etc. Some people find background music helpful, which is fine, just don’t use music that has discernable lyrics or words – words are intensely distracting. You’re also going to need something to write with, and something to write on.
  2. Now that you have a place to concentrate, take some time to relax. Chill out, breathe deep. Because you’ve created a particular mood and a safe space, your thoughts will flow more freely in the desired direction. Now concentrate on the intent of the sigil. This is the most difficult part – what is it that you want? What would you really like to have happen in a perfectsituation? Once you’ve focused on your desire, try to articulate it into a sentence. Don’t worry about ‘loop holes’ in the wording or being punished by some kind of ironic twist; this is for you, by you. Only you need to know what it means. For example, I could write: “I DESIRE MONEY FOR THIS MONTH’S RENT”. I could just as easily ask for emotional stamina, a phone call from a friend, a fuck, new clothes, travel, etc…the question is, what do I really want to channel all of my psychic, psychological, and physical energy in to? Use your intuition. And you can always make another.
  3. When you’ve written down the sentence (eg., I DESIRE MONEY FOR THIS MONTH’S RENT), go through the sentence and eliminate the repeated letters, rewriting it without any spaces between the words. So our example becomes: IDESRMONYFTH. Now remove the vowels: DSRMNFTH. These remaining letters are the building blocks of your sigil. You’ve made a code out of a sentence that only you understand. It’s a compounded version of that original desire. Just as logos function as condensations of corporate ideologies, a sigil is the same thing, a symbolic analogy. Except this one is all yours.
  4. Take the remaining letters (DSRMNFTH), and try look at them not as letters, but as shapes. Copy out these shapes into a pattern or symbol, twisting and turning them however you like, just remember to use them all, and try to make the resulting symbol look ‘magickal’. There is no right or wrong way to do this, once again, use your intuition. Decorate it however you like with collage images (without words), photos, different media, colours and textures. Whatever best represents your desire. Work on it till you’re content. Some sigils come together in a few minutes, while others may take days.
  5. Gathering up the power you need to make your sigil work is the most important part of the process, and it’s easier than you think. Sexuality is perhaps the most powerful drive in the human animal and, accordingly, it is also the biggest threat to established orthodoxy and control. This is why governments and religious organizations spend so much time attacking and trying limit it. They know all too well that sexuality is where personal liberation develops; hence, it’s key to the sigil-making process. Now that you’ve got your symbol in front of you, focus on it. While you’re doing this, start imagining erotic elements blended with your desire. In this example, asking for money, I might imagine having sex in a bank vault, or with someone who has green hair or a ‘$’ tattoo. As it’s specifically about making next month’s rent, I might imagine bringing a ‘$’ tattooed boy home to my apartment and fucking him. It all depends on what works for you, and what your intent is.
  6. Still focusing on the fantasy and your symbol, make yourself cum. Orgasm is the moment when your conscious mind short-circuits; all your psychological barriers come down and your ego is annihilated for that tiny moment. It’s an expressway straight to your subconscious – the place where magick happens. During that vital orgasmic moment, what’s inside is outside, and vice versa. You’re planting your sigil in your subconscious where it can thrive. After you cum, use your spunk or your vaginal fluids to trace overtop or decorate the sigil – this ‘blesses’ it with your sexual energy and makes it a special, intimate object. Think of it like this: a dildo is just a hunk of rubber, but the relationship you have with it makes it something extraordinary. Some people like to use blood and/or spit in addition to their sexual fluids. Whatever works for you is fine.
  7. So…THIS IS YOUR SIGIL. Take a good look at it. When you’re ready, tack the sigil up somewhere where you’ll see it regularly. Like a charm or a talisman, it doesn’t need to be in an overtly obvious place, just somewhere where you’ll be aware that it’s there and that it’s working all by itself. Some sigils bring things right to your doorstep with alarming speed, and some take a lot of time to unfold. Sigils always benefit from level-headedness – so, be patient. You can take the sigil down when you feel it’s done all it can, or keep ‘em on your wall as art.
During it’s 3 year existence the Salivation Army made dozens of sigils with incredible results (group sigils are especially fun), and while I still continue to experiment with them, I have no strict conclusions about how or why they work, all I can suggest is that you try one. And remember, it doesn’t have to stop with 2-dimensional collage. Grant Morrison, the famous comic book writer, is very vocal about the fact that his epic The Invisibles, is one huge, extended visual and textual mega-sigil. It took me ages to figure out that my zine was functioning in the same way. Even films and videos can operate as cinematic sigils, snowballing and propagating the energies of everyone who watches. So, like I said – TRY IT.
Scott Treleaven, Toronto 2003
www.scotttreleaven.com
Issues 1-8 of the original This Is the Salivation Army zine are available in compendium format from Art Metropole (www.artmetropole.com). ‘The Salivation Army’ film is available from Satan MacNuggit Popular Arts (www.satanmacnuggit.com)

Scott Treleaven, THE SALiVATION ARMY

Treleaven 2003

SUMMER SIGIL

by Scott Treleaven
when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride till I get to the bottom and I see you again...
The night before the Summer Solstice. The early evening fog is trailing down over Potrero Hill. Not the delicate summer mist moving on cat haunches that I'd read about in grade school haikus. This is an amorous, gauzy hand whose fingers worm their way into the streets with alarming speed. Like a hand, or a spider. Like the ones in the squat I'm staying in, kingdom of the spiders. The other punk kids ignore them, but the first day I moved in I killed dozens of them. I drowned an angry mother still spinning her globule of brood, in the sink where I was washing my face. Summer's little horrors. The cold Pacific wind comes in on the heels of the mist. Straight off the coast, driving the temperature down, the coolness wakes me up and draws me out. I head to Market Street to see a punk show. The streets in the Mission are unusually quiet. Just murky yellow ponds of light with occasional television flickers beyond. I start walking north and cut through a highschool parking lot. As I'm doing this I catch sight of an apartment window where a kid my age is lifting weights. The room is painted ice blue, and it stands out against the sandy ochre of the street lamps. It's like looking into a salt water tank, impossible cool blueness, his body doing it's oceanic repetitions. Without thinking, I stop and stare, standing there in the middle of the parking lot. Suddenly he puts his weights down and stares back at me. Caught, my heart starts to kick at my ribs. The kid slides his shirt off over his head, the sound of my own blood rushes in my ears - I wasn't expecting this. Nor was I expecting him to slowly make his way to the window. He stretches his hands up to the top of the pane, smiling, inviting me. So, this is San Francisco. I get freaked out. I'm not used to this kind of thing, so I slip out of the streetlights and into the darkness between. I head for Market Street, glancing back every now and then to see him pivoting himself, opening the window, looking for me. But I'm all in black and I've vanished.
do you don't you want me to love you I'm coming down fast but I'm miles above you. tell me tell me come on tell me the answer you may be a lover but you ain't no dancer.
The warehouse is filled with homopunk kids. I feel at home. The cover is next to nothing, there's free food and no attitude. Most of the scene is straight-edged so no one is drunk or stoned. There's an unwritten code of respect and concern for one another. Some of the punks have formed a pit and start thrashing around, whipped into a frenzy by the black punk drag queen on stage. She's speaking in tongues like a mad woman, screaming, "I smell the semen of the Lord!" I do, too: the air is almost palpable, thick with the comforting, earthy sweat of the great and glorious unwashed. Unbaptised. Unsalvageable. Unbelievably sexy. Two guys with foot-high mohawks suck face each other in front of the speakers. A cute dyke with bright pink dreads zips past me on a skateboard. Following the blur of her leads my eye to a man standing at the back of the room, tapping his foot, but not dancing. European features, long dark hair spilling down over his shoulders, all beads and hemp clothes, looking like a Digger's ghost. He sees me, too, grins. My fear was undone earlier by the boy in the blue watery room, so I just walk up to him. He smiles, big toothy Dionysian smile, he introduces himself with a Belgian accent as Francis. Asks me if I want to go to a Solstice Ritual tomorrow night. "You look like you'd fit in," he says, tapping the beads and bones I wear strung around my neck. Before I leave the show, he tells me that it's an all-queer, pagan gathering. There will be a few hundred people. Clothing is not allowed. Without fully getting what he's saying, I'm nodding and grinning back, and only thinking about him and me. I leave him my number and head back to squat. I think of him briefly, falling asleep so easily in the cold night air.
Helter Skelter Helter Skelter Helter Skelter.
Waking up with the covers sweat-stuck to me, my eyes stinging from the heat. In the harsh Californian dawn it hits me what I'd said 'yes' to last night. Weird middle-of-the-road moral values I thought were long gone ambush, terrorize and then half-throttle me. Panic rises with the temperature. The intense squalor of the squat upsets me immediately, everything seems filthy to me, I leave without showering and without food while everyone else is still asleep...save the dog, Cork, who always follows me around the house because I am the only one who pays attention to him. Sitting on a sofa in the back of a cafe, my head reels and I'm making up a list of all the terrible things that could happen to me tonight: Don't get killed. Don't drink anything you haven't poured yourself. Don't make eye contact with people. Don't bring your passport. What if someone steals your clothes? It'll be cold and your dick will look small. No one will look at a skinny little rat-boy like you. I consider calling Nayland, ask him and Phillip if I can crash there tonight, that way someone will be expecting me, just in case...and it goes on and on. I stop short of "what if I get aids?" because I have no intention of having sex with anyone. I’ve creeped myself out of it. Not even with the longhaired guy from the punk show. Francis. Saint Franciso...maybe I’ve met the patron spirit of the city? The more I think of sex, the more I think of it's sister. I remember reading about Pan and how, bored of fucking fauns and wanking, he would delight in whipping the shepherds into terrorized frenzies. I spend the rest of the morning in Mission second hand clothing stores, To make myself feel better I start slowly ditching my black wardrobe because it reminds me of death. Creep uphill to the Castro and look down over an azure skied city, it's villas stacked on top of each other in terra cotta Lego, brik-a-brak ways. I cower in a bookstore for a while, wondering when the gnawing dread of tonight will go away, but it just builds. I'm reminding myself that I came here for queerpunk shows not a bacchanalia. I'm just about to decide to stay home tonight when some red head guy behind the counter, with a goatee and wild green eyes, recognizes me from my zine. He intervenes, and we talk for a bit. He asks me if I'm going to go to another gig tonight. I say no. He smiles, big Priapic smile now, says "me neither." For the rest of the day, the longest day of the year in fact, I let thoughts of him and the longhaired boy soothe my mind. When night finally falls I head back to the squat to a phone message from Francis. He'll meet me at the Gathering. I cower in my room watching a red sun curdle the sky.
Will you won't you want me to make you I'm coming down fast but don't let me break you Tell me tell me tell me the answer You may be a lover but you ain't no dancer. Look out here it comes.
Eleven o'clock at night. Laying by the window, the first cold chill air comes over me and dances like electricity across my face. A rank, salt ocean smell arrives on it, it makes me unexpectedly hungry and horny at the same time. Alright, I think: I will allow my fear to step aside for my instinct…and it does. It steps aside, unbars the door and throws it open. I'm flush with purpose now. I am on my way to Guerrero Street when I meet the red headed guy from the bookstore again. We talk for a bit, then all of a sudden Rick strokes his goatee and says, "I'll see you later," and pulls a vanishing trick. The Summer Solstice is being celebrated in a huge Victorian style mansion. No point in lingering outside, Francis' phone message said he didn't know when he would arrive, so he might already be in there. I move on automatic, everything I do is deliberate but dreamlike. I wait in line at the clothes check. The last drops of trepidation come off with my clothing and go into a numbered bin. They write the number on my palm so I won't forget. I walk into the foyer and instantly everything comes alive. Upstairs people are drumming Afro-Celtic rhythms that permeate every inch of the house, unrelenting and jubilant. I catch glimpses of men wearing elaborate headdresses of rams' horns and antlers. A tattooed juggler descends the staircase, without missing a step. His taught arm keeps three pomegranates in mid-air, and brushes against me intentionally as he passes by. It's then that I realize that I'm not really aware of my nakedness. It is the height of Summer; clothing for some reason seems unthinkable here. There are huge tables overflowing with food and drinks, littered with fresh cut flowers and burning candles. Everyone is languid, stretched out on pillows. Everyone is wired, dancing lasciviously, and tripping out on mushroom tea. All the while the drums align every gesture with the same intent. The same Law as in the punk show applies here, Love Each Other. It is Rome before the fall, it’s Valhalla, Elysium, Sumerland, and men of every conceivable form and face roam through it all as if it this were their natural state. I peak into a tiny room - there is a hole in the floor and fireman's pole descending into its murkiness. Perhaps the Belgian boy is down there.
when I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride till I get to the bottom and I see you again.
Leisurely picking my way amongst the revelers and lovers, I eventually end up outside in an enormous back garden. The Pacific air is held at bay by a row of outdoor heaters and two hot tubs. Some boy has braved the coolness of the night, and fallen asleep in the crook of a peach tree. Circuitously I find my way down to a door that leads to the basement. The door is wide open, and once my foot goes across the threshold I'm hit with an unimaginable scent. The air is damped with it, pungent, musky and earthy. Stealthily it goes straight to my head and puts out restraint and reason, then sinks heavily like a mercury drop into my cock. The basement is a maze of hanging patterned muslin sheets. Stoned on pheromones I drift through dozens of men entangled in one another. It looks just like I hoped Bliss would. I have never imagined, in all of my Goth fantasies, in all my pagan mythologies, in all my twenty-three mid-Summer queerboy sweats, anything comparable to this. Here I am and I feel no trepidation at all. No fear in the nakedness, panic is gone finding its way back into satyriasis. Gog-eyed, I wander further, until someone catches my arm. I turn and expect to see Francis there, but it's the red head, Rick, grinning at me. For no reason other than it's Summer I just kiss him and kiss him. He gives me a message, tells me my friend will be late, and everything is just allowed to flourish into growls of approval. I bury my face in him, he smells like the earth, looks like a wild-eyed Pan and we're laughing out loud the whole time. With a dozen new hands upon me, a mid-Summer night comes crashing down around us. Nothing and no one is left standing. Nothing can every be the same. He pulls his vanishing trick again, and this time for good. I tacitly agree to carry this long hot Summer going forever.
Look out Helter Skelter Helter Skelter Helter Skelter Look out Helter Skelter Helter Skelter Coming down fast Yes it is Yes it is.
Scott Treleaven, 2000
(revised version, 2004)


THE RADIANT GUESTA book by Paul P. and Scott Treleaven
regular & deluxe editions

available soon from Publication Studio, Toronto


Artists Paul P. and Scott Treleaven have worked closely for over ten years. Behind their distinctly separate practices is a body of never before seen work, made as part of an intimate dialogue around their shared, and disparate, aesthetics. Bringing together photographs, drawings, paintings and ephemera that bind together the psychic and the erotic, travelogues, atmospheres, strange encounters and perceptions, 'The Radiant Guest' makes a glimpse of this fascinating, consistently beautiful, marginalia available for the first time.
The deluxe edition of this book contains 5 original, loose photographs hidden amongst the pages. The photos are selected from a possible 10, ensuring that almost every edition is unique. (72 p., paperback, glue bound, offset-printed, colour)


THE TWO EYES ARE NOT BROTHERS

Scott Treleaven Kiddiepunk & designer Michael Salerno are pleased to present a new zine by Scott Treleaven.

"Scott Treleaven's The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers is by far one of the most haunting and beautiful publications that the artist has ever produced. Drawing from his own decades-deep archive of small gage film, Treleaven unearths not the narratives, not the intended subjects of his films, but focuses instead on the chance glimpses, the ectoplasmic rushes of light through the open camera shutter, the abstracted single frame that has an uncanny life all its own. The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers is a gorgeous new installment in Treleaven's lifelong fascination with the soon-to-be-extinct ghosts that haunt the analog world."
VERY LIMITED EDITION OF 70 Copies
2 books, 40 pages, packaged in a custom-made slip-case cover. Risograph printed in B&W and Colour
available exclusively from Kiddiepunk
CALL + RESPONSETerence Hannum + Scott TreleavenCall & Response is a visual dialogue between Terence Hannum and Scott Treleaven. Over the course of one year the artists emailed back and forth, trafficking in images both personal and culled from their extensive archives. When the words were stripped away, what remained was a record of an excavation of their own peculiar belief (and disbelief) systems, overlapping and colliding throughout the conversation. Call & Responsepays homage to their devotion to underground zines, nefarious causes, cults, hours lost and gained, corrupted architecture, and youth pinioned in agony/ecstacy.  Hazy stills from videos and films carry over formal concerns and a similar tone of darkness that these two friends share, punctuated by drawings and scrawls, xeroxes and vellum.32 pages, 21.5 x 18 cm, paperback, staple bound. Colour. Hand numbered edition of 200Last remaining copies from Printed Matter


DEATH POSTURETerence Hannum + Scott TreleavenDEATH POSTURE is the latest zine collaboration by artist/musician Terence Hannum and artist Scott Treleaven. In a limited edition of 100, the zine includes a set of two pins in a hand-stamped envelope. DEATH POSTURE features a dialogue between Hannum's elegant gouache drawings and raw super8 film footage by Treleaven. A strange, organic kind warmth emerges in the subtle variances of grainy black and white film strips laid out against the intensity and starkness of Hannum's drawings. Towers of amplifiers, prostrated figures, and candles flesh out Treleaven's documents of a visit to an Italian ossuary, fighting dogs, and an anonymous figure. After the success of their first zine, CALL + RESPONSE, this new publication provides an even more subtle iteration of their on-going exchange of overlapping ideas and images.EDITION OF 100 Copies
44 pages, Vellum cover w/ black xerox on black paper inside, black & white inside pages, 8.5" x 11"
available from Printed Matter


COLLABORATION WITH DESIGNER JEREMY LAINGScott Treleaven has created some iconic custom prints for Jeremy Laing's FW 11 collection.the complete collection on Style.com
coverage in Interview Magazine
more infomation jeremylaing.com

K48 no.8ABRAK48DABRA

The eighth edition of K48 continues to explore contemporary culture with ‘magic’ as a central theme of the issue. Once again, deploying its well-known penchant for combining an electric mix of artists drawing from various disciplines, K48 unveils the unknown territory of the supernatural. Cover art by Scott Treleaven, custom inside covers by Brian Belott, and 196 pages of collaborations by Alex Da Corte, Joseph Whitt, Brian Belott, Dis Magazine, Gareth Long, Robert Bittenbender, Nancy de Holl, Chadwick Moore, and a custom R-U-In?S spread compiled by Kari Altmann called “Similar Image Haul” among others. The issue features an exclusive interview with the band SALEM and a full length CD mixed by BOOKWRMZ including original tracks made by House of LaDosha, Light Asylum, Brenmar and Mirror Mirror (see full track listing below).
Edition 1500, 196 pages

ORDER NOW
BLAKE BOOKby David LewisBlake Book compiles work from fourteen artists who were asked by David Lewis to make a piece in response to a two-part exercise on William Blake: "Take something from Blake and add it to the world, to form a new poet, a new artist, and a new world. Repeat until there is no more Blake." and "Add to Blake something from the world, to form a new Blake and a new world. Repeat until there is no more world."
The results are bound within this pink and black pocket-sized book, featuring contributions from Scott Treleaven, Hilton Als, Ida Ekblad, Oscar Tuazon, Blake Rayne, Paul P., Tobias Madison, Keren Cytter, Harris Epaminonda, Thomas Hirschhorn, Glenn Ligon, and Reto Pulfer.
56 p., 16 x 11 cm, Paperback, sewn bound, offset-printed, duotoneAvailable from Printed Matter and Lubok Verlag

CIMITERO MONUMENTALEScott Treleaven
Printed Matter has published a limited edition book of 47 loose, black & white, 35mm photographs by Scott Treleaven of sculptures and gravestones from the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan. This is a signed & numbered edition of 150 only, produced especially as a fundraiser for Printed Matter.Available from Printed Matter
PASSING STRANGEScott Treleaven
"...a photographic study of weathered stone statuary and androgynous young men lit by an intense sunlight. Treleaven includes an excerpted text on Giordano Bruno's embrace of heliocentrism among his photographs and photocollages, a fact that suggests that his real subject is indeed the sun, which has the power to provide clarity and illumination as well as to burn and fade everything it touches."24 pages, 21 x 15 cm, paperback, staple bound. Offset-printed. Summer 2009. Signed + numbered edition of 200Available from Printed Matter and Viafarini

IN NUMBERS:
SERIAL PUBLICATIONS BY ARTISTS SINCE 1955

Philip Aarons, Andrew Roth, editors
New York, NY: PPP Editions and Andrew Roth, Inc.. 2009
This comprehensive survey of serial artist publications focuses largely on the collection of Philip E. Aarons, whose interest in the dissemination of artists' work fueled this extensive research project. In Numbers features color reproductions and detailed descriptions, interviews, and essays analyzing and discussing more than 50 idiosyncratic artist publications. An essential reference book for scholars of artists' publications.
The book includes publications by:
Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, Hans-Peter Feldman, Eleanor Antin, K. Baumgartner, C. Hoeller, J. Schroeder and D. Castro, Terence Koh, Buster Cleveland, Art & Language, Frank Gaard and the Art Police, Futzie Nutzle, Spinny Walker and henry humble, BANK, Ray Johnson, Joe Brainard, Continuous Project, Stephen Willats, Les Levine, Wolf Vostell, Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Adam Dant, Josephine Meckseper, General Idea, George Maciunas, Martha Rosler, Dieter Roth, Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones, Barbara Ess, Scott Hug, Daido Moriyama, R. Bertholo, Christo, L. Castro and J. Voss, William Leavitt and Bas Jan Ader, Gilbert and George, Aleksandra Mir, LTTR, Patricia Tavenner, Daniel Spoerri, Maurizio Nannucci, Matt Keegan and S.G. Rafferty, Herman de Vries, Tom Sachs, Uschi Huber and Jorg Paul Janka, Robert Heinecken, Maurizio Cattelan and Paolo Manfrin, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Provoke Group, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Guenter Brus, Wallace Berman, Jacqueline de Jong, Matthias Hermann, Christian Hunt, Scott Treleaven, Roni Horn, Raymond Pettibon, Anna Banana and William Gagilone, Tom Marioni, and Nobuyoshi Araki. With essays by Gil Blank, Victor Brand, Clive Phillpot, Nancy Princenthal, Neville Wakefield, and William S. Wilson.
440 pages, full colour.

Available from Printed Matter
VISIONAIREissue #57
52 curators (including Nancy Spector, Beatrix Ruf, Klaus Biesenbach, Louise Bourgeois, John Baldessari, Ugo Rondinone, Maurizio Cattelan, Inez Van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, Dakis Joannou, Mario Testino, Marc Jacobs, Guan Yi, Christian Boros, Natalie Portman, Tilda Swinton, James Franco, Kate Moss, Zaha Hadid and Herzog & de Meuron) have each selected seven artists. Each artist contributed one image for a total of 365 images by 365 different artists, which are assembled as an electronic calendar that displays one image for each day of the year. Visionaire's first electric plug-in issue featuring art on a high-definition screen.FORMAT: Boxed, 8 x 15 in. / 365 color.
ISBN: 9781888645798 / ISBN10: 1888645792
PUBLICATION DATE: 01/31/2010
More details from Visionaire
SOME BOYS WANDER BY MISTAKEScott Treleaven (with Dennis Cooper, Jack Pierson, and Terence Hannum)A 100+ page catalog of Scott Treleaven's art, featuring a conversation with Jack Pierson, essay by Terence Hannum, and five previously unpublished poems by Dennis Cooper based on the work. Co-published by Kavi Gupta Gallery, John Connelly Presents & Marc Selwyn Fine Art. 104 pages, 30.5 x 21.5 cm. Paperback, offset-printed, sewn-bound. Unsigned/unnumbered.Available from Printed Matter and Art Metropole. For distribution contact Kavi Gupta Gallery
THE SALiVATION ARMY BLACK BOOKScott TreleavenAll ten issues of Treleaven's infamous zine bound into a soft black embossed cover and adorned with three black ribbon bookmarks and black gilt edges. The book features 345 pages of facsimiles of the zine, expanded texts, new collages, and prefaces by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle and Scott Treleaven. Co-published by Art Metropole and Printed Matter in asigned and numbered edition of 666.
SOLD OUT
Printed Matter


EMERALD TABLET
Scott Treleaven
One in a series of zines made by artists for the Friends of the High Line in New York City. Scott Treleaven'sEmerald Tablet is a series of black and white photocollages that portray the High Line as a modern-day urban garden of Eden, teeming with foliage and garbage, vines of wild plants and barbed wire. 20 pages, 19 x 13.5 cm, paperback, staple bound. Offset-printed. Unsigned/unnumbered.
SOLD OUT
Printed Matter

QUEERCORE (A PUNK-U-MENTARY)Scott Treleaven
By popular demand the seminal, and world's first, homocore documentary is now available on DVD from VTape. "A brilliant account of the thriving Homopunk scene; a document of gay & lesbian iconoclasts and renegades, the marriage of punk philosophy with activism." - MIX NYC21:00, dvd ntsc, colour/stereoAvailable from VTape

AnOTHER MAN MAGAZINESpring/Summer 2010 issueFeaturing a 14 page photo editorial by Scott Treleaven in collaboration with stylist Alister Mackie:
"Scott Treleaven is something of a new wave Renaissance man, working in film, collage, drawing and photography. But this marks the Paris-based artist’s grandest entrance into the fashion arena. Stylist Alister Mackie approached him about collaborating on a 14 page story for the spring issue of AnOther Man. The quasi-surreal pictures are inspired by 19th-century Paris’s 'Club des Hashashins' - a bohemian literary group that boasted decadent gents such as Charles Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas as members."

Also in this issue:
Jack White, Jim Jarmusch, Dennis Cooper, Mark Leckey, Sonny Barger, Paul Helbers, Paul Simonon, Gaspar Noe, Stephen King, David Cronenberg, Bill Hicks, Don Bachardy, Elizabeth Peyton, Maureen Paley, Scott Treleaven, Phil Hale

AnOther Man




The Dark Cube

by Sleek Team, Sleek , October 6, 2012

What do you think about when you think of black light? The UV lamps favoured by 1960s psychedelic culture, then later on in Goth clubs and more recently, in a reversal of its use as a representation of hallucinogenic drugs, as a means to discourage junkies from finding their veins in public washrooms. The show ‘The Dark Cube’ at Palais de Tokyo, curated by Francesca Gavin, exploits the UV effect by showing paintings, photographs, prints and sculptures in darkness, illuminated only by ultraviolet lamps. Alongside references to failed rebellion, this group exhibition touches on wider ideas around illumination and darkness, veiling and unveiling. It also aims to demonstrate the relationship of contemporary ideas and aesthetics with defunct or less used forms of technology.

Palais du Tokyo's White Cube Goes Black

by Ken Miller, Interview , October 3, 2012

Over the past few years, the London-based curator and writer Francesca Gavin has organized exhibitions inspired by psychedelics, rave culture and, now, black light fluorescent poster art. The root influence is obvious. “A lot of it has to come down to a fascination with my childhood,” she says. But “Dark Cube,” her exhibition opening Oct. 7 at the Palais du Tokyo in Paris came out of a different utopian experiment that was rather more Bertolt Brecht than Jerry Garcia.

The Dark Cube: Scott Treleaven

by Felicity Shaw, Dazed Digital , October 3, 2012

The battle between light and dark, good and bad, hidden and uncovered are themes that have been revisited since the beginning of time, but continuously manage to intrigue and further our inspiration. Curated by Francesca Gavin, the group exhibition ‘The Dark Cube’ seeks to exploit the effect of phosphorescent and black lighting. We caught up with Scott Treleaven to uncover what lurks in the shadows at the Palais de Tokyo this month…

Scott Treleaven

by Tom Breidenbach, Art Forum, May 2006

Leader of the Pack

by Catharine Tunnacliffe, Eye, April 11, 2002

Scott Treleaven

by Michael Workman, Flash Art, January/February 2005

Sleepaway For the Rejected Scott Hug and friends squat at the gallery

by Wayne Northcross, Gay City News, August 31 - September 6, 2006

Tip of the Week Scott Treleaven

by Michael Workman, New City Chicago, October 28, 2004

Join the Occult

by Nick Hallett, Interview Magazine, July 6, 2010

There's no shortage of people behind a museum exhibition—curators and artists, for sure, and installers, and security, and administrators. However, the exhibition of Brion Gysin opening tomorrow at the New Museum required more storytellers and historians of sub-culture, and so curator Laura Hoptman enlisted artist Scott Treleaven.

ARE YOU a ZOMBIE or a WITCH?

by Elijah Burgher, C Magazine #106, Summer 2010
Originally from Toronto, and now based in Paris, Scott Treleaven first achieved notoriety in occult and queercore circles for his zine This Is the Salivation Army. He has subsequently created a large body of work consisting of darkly erotic works on paper, hypnotic films......


Absent Monarch
My Ever Changing Moods
scene for the deserted palais I
Scene for a Deserted Venetian Palazzo
The Passenger
The Passenger


LOST
SCOTT TRELEAVEN
The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis
October 28 – December 18, 2011
RECEPTION:
Friday, October 28, 6-8pm
INVISIBLE-EXPORTS is pleased to present The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis, a solo exhibition of new works by Scott Treleaven.
* * *
Some things must be hidden to be found. In his new work, the first to embrace total abstraction, the celebrated Canadian collagist, filmmaker, and multidisciplinary virtuoso Scott Treleaven has subsumed his social- and self-critique into a suite of mesmerizing works on paper at once assertive and mysterious. In The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis, which takes its name from an obscure yogic practice for cultivating extreme self-control, Treleaven departs from the paradoxical code of explicitness that guides so much esoteric work. Rather than making public or even monumental the semi-ritualized struggles of marginalized individuals and communities, Treleaven uses the opacity of abstraction to deal with these themes obliquely, through obscuring veils—not to rescue marginality into public view but to honor it by keeping it secret and strange. Sometimes the most direct approach involves no path at all.
Treleaven first became known as the founder of an underground “queercore” movement, which was designed to dissolve in a fit of self-criticism, and for leading it to that willful dissolution through self-interrogation in the handmade zine and film ‘The Salivation Army.’ The two impulses remain imperative: he is an ardent advocate for the socially transformative power of marginal cultures (occultism, esoterica, collage, punk aesthetics) as both participant and critic.
In his new work, Treleaven expands the expressive boundaries of his practice, exploring new emotional terrain by combining his own unique personal history and lifelong study of the artifacts of marginal culture with the exploration of more traditional materials and methods: rather than romantic collage and video, now we find more intimate, stern, even uncanny drawings; rather than representational, pedagogic depictions of ritual, now enthralling abstraction with the ritual embedded in process; in place of the pastiche spirituality of disassembled commodity culture, now an effort to transform those ideas made overly familiar through images and genre repetition into something much more peculiar, vibrational, even homeopathic. In a bold complement to previous work that embraced esotericism as a kind of teaching, Treleaven has turned to the gesture, the incontrovertible mark on paper, and allusions to automatism and automatic writing as way to explore and interrogate those things forgotten or obscured in an era deluged by mediated opinions and endlessly cumulative consensus imagery—and yielding stunning meditations on mortality, intuition, the exigencies of the present, and transcendence. In doing so, he suggests a path out of the paradox of esoteric art, that figurative treatment may betray private practice, and offers instead an approach to secret knowledge at once flirtatious and Victorian, hiding content to revive the pleasure, and the meaning, of its rediscovery.
This new work is no less preoccupied with subcultures and hidden histories, but is now marked by fascinating nonrepresentational flights of color, gesture and form. In his acclaimed 2010 ‘Cimitero Drawings’ exhibition Treleaven brought dynamic expressionist elaborations to his collaged photographs of Milan’s Monumental Cemetery. In this new series of drawings, Treleaven buries his trademark collages, blacking them out with heavy applications of paint and pastel, so only the faintest outline of the photographic image remains—the imposing, almost brutalist structures giving way to swaths of electric color and line. At once visceral, immediate, mysterious and refined, these drawings are about the stuff of marginality itself—literally, what happens on the very edges or fringes of a structure. The disruption is done symbiotically: the main structures are never totally lost or destroyed, and the defacing marks resolve into positive forms, each work a map of haphazard balance both improvised and total.
* * *

Scott Treleaven was born in Canada, in 1972. His drawings were recently included in the popular Mapplethorpe group exhibition, Night Work, at Alison Jacques Gallery, London, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum Art on Paper Biennial, North Carolina. Other exhibitions of note include: Male, Maureen Paley, London (2010); Cimitero Drawings, Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angeles (2010); Silver Make-Up, The Breeder, Athens (2009); Where He Was Going, John Connelley Presents, New York (2008); and the Biennale de Montreal (2007). Most recently, a program of his films was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His work has been featured in Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, and Interview Magazine, among others. Treleaven lives and works in Paris, France and Toronto, Canada. - www.invisible-exports.com/
SCOTT TRELEAVEN | All-Nite Cinema
EXHIBITION:
SCOTT TRELEAVEN | All-Nite Cinema
* * *
All-Nite Cinema is predicated on the idea that drawing is a medium that never “ends”— unlike film with its fixed arc, or the object fetish itself-ness of painting, drawing always points elsewhere, promising meaning outside of the work. Projected into marginal space, glanced sidelong, here Treleaven returns us to the domain of true marginal cultures — sexual outlaws, fringe religions, psychedelic explorers and ritualistic communities — in which all practice is not immediately visible, acceptable, or available; in which meaning is hidden in order to be continually uncovered.
In Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, the author describes how certain Japanese artifacts (both religious and commonplace) were meant to be seen in subdued, indirect lighting, not the incandescent glare that characterizes more Western interiors, and how harsh lighting destroys their inherent nuances; in Huysmans’ À rebours, the character Des Esseintes discovers that a sensually colored room, painted by candlelight, became gaudy and uninviting in the light of day. And certain psychedelics, we learn from Terence McKenna, cannot function when ingested because they’re broken down immediately by the body’s defenses—other conditions have to be met prior to their absorption. These sorts of preconditions, Treleaven suggests, also apply to the absorption of certain kinds of information.
This exhibition features large-scale, multi-panel, mixed-media drawings, including a triptych that is the artist’s largest work to date. Within the intimate scale of the gallery, the work consumes the wall, heavy black squares shot through with flares of color; a chromatically inverted cinematic projection. These new works extend the inquiry into the power of hidden meaning Treleaven initiated in his 2011 show, The Holy Man Who Drank Milk With His Penis, making a new and paradoxical step deeper into abstraction and occlusion by embracing and repurposing lessons learned from his work as a filmmaker. The quadtych Do You Have to Have a Body?  was created on a long strip of cardboard, beginning with a layer of gestures and colors, then rotated and worked on in all directions, so every angle is given aesthetic cohesion. The last layer is a stylized phrase, an acknowledgement of the gestural similarity to language and automatic-writing. The sheet is then cut-up and re-arranged, each individual panel worked on again to create an aesthetically complete image able to be read from any angle.
Widely recognized for his explorations of subcultures, Treleaven departs from the paradoxical code of explicitness that guides so much esoteric work, turning instead to the textured opacity of abstraction to approach his themes obliquely—not to rescue marginality into public view but to honor it by keeping it secret and strange. His commitment to the principles and models of fringe culture arises from his intuition that these structures require immersive, rather than passive, participation—that they create institutionally complete structures unto themselves and as such tend to provide great insight into the mainstream structures they appear to oppose. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig has argued, those living at the periphery of any mass culture obtain by their very marginality a critical vantage point on the culture itself. Living on the margins is not a way of hiding but of seeking, and seeing.
* * *
Scott Treleaven (1972, Canada). Recent group exhibitions include White Petals Surround Your Yellow Heart, ICA Philadelphia (2013); Dark Cube, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); In Numbers, ICA London (2012); Recent Acquisitions, Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC (2012); AYE Dunkelblau, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2012); Night Work, Alison Jacques, London (2011); Male, Maureen Paley, London (2010). Solo exhibitions include, Kavi Gupta, Chicago; Marc Selwyn, LA; John Connelly, NY. He lives and works in New York.

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