Bozidar Brazda

How funny that my rescuers should be so unsightly. You would love them. They are ragged and intense and wear war torn clothes that are covered in crass slogans. Like latrine walls. My days are spent at this Selectric IBM typewriter, a gift from my new friends. And generally I spend my days as I please, writing and reading, watching films even (some are really quite good). At night however, I am bombarded with a brand of music which is abrasive and vile and yet somehow wildly romantic. Odd. Together we ingest many glasses of strong wine (possibly drugged) which produces a uniquely heavy state in which it is difficult to maintain a clear train of thought. Ironically, it is always at this time that they quiz me. They are singularly interested in Hegel (whom they often confuse with Herodotus) and his connection to their lifestyle and current politics. I cannot imagine of what interest my answers might be to them. Everything is politicized and garbled together. Layer upon layer, like a teetering cake! Sigh! More madness. But I don’t miss prison. The labor. The solitary cell with its shitty view (ha, ha). The warden with his pressed coat. Its tinny, gold buttons (one smaller brass replacement on the left sleeve). His stupid little cap. His big, dull face. How stupid he must have looked when I vanished in a whir of Black Flag’s TV Party. Did he drop the dog-eared copy of * that he carried around to clip us on the head with?

Listen, a word of advice. There really is no West, just further East. And the only good hippy is...

Yours, *

Haswellediger & Co. is pleased to present The Journalist, a multi-media exhibition by New York-based artist Bozidar Brazda.

In The Journalist, Brazda wonders if art, particularly in its most non-literal, openly creative form, can balance our perception of history alongside mass media’s explicitly biased accounts. The Journalist is a meditation on the artist as the embodiment of Charles Pierce’s “Community” historian. Brazda overlaps wide-ranging phenomena from his personal history to create a theoretical backbone based on this premise, which in turn informs the show’s underlying narrative. The narrative, which relates the story of a journalist freed from prison by a group of time travelers, uses its visual counterparts, including oversized punk flyers, white-washed Persian rug sculptures, a large prison wall and watercolor paintings, to express a new and unabashedly creative history. A history in which politics, propaganda and storytelling serve art and not vice versa.

Bozidar Brazda was born in Canada in 1972. His most recent exhibition was Legendary Yangtze Punks, The Jealous Cowards, Play East Berlin’s Café Luxusgüter, the Year is Indefinite at the Swiss Institute-Contemporary Art, NY.

Haswellediger & Co. was founded by Angela Kotinkaduwa, former Director of maccarone inc., and Samantha Tsao, former Associate Director of Thread Waxing Space. For more information, please contact: (212) 206 8955.

Pressetext

Bozidar Brazda
The Journalist