I met the amazing artists Dora Budor and Maja Cule when they acted as production designers on DUST, the film that Casey Spooner and I wrote and directed last month. The production team asked for submissions, and from the ether came a link to the work of these psychic sisters. Dora and Maja bust open portholes to alternate realities – fantastic other-worlds that they construct using generic and readymade objects (bananas, sponges, chairs, printed consumer fabrics). These temporary realities are meant to exist only long enough to be documented, then they are summarily destroyed. Fun, wildly creative, and serious like a Peek Frean – these ladies are worth checking out.

I really want to see their upcoming show in Salzburg where Maja will be giving Segway tours of an underground cave system and Dora will create a “spa” that will use vibrating cell phones as a spin on hot stone treatments. Their installations are so mind-boggling that at first I assumed they were drawings, the hyper colors and skewed perspectives confuse me in such a delightfully new way. I really want to hang one in my house.

My friend Viva Ruiz introduced me to Venus X and $hayne, the DJs behind the underground party and sound system called GHE20 G0TH1K. I first heard them at a Crystal Ark show and showed my respect by dancing like a wild thing all night. The combination of urban grooves, noise, Caribbean, Latin, Afro, house . . . it was the first time in a long time that I felt like everything I heard was fresh to my ears and kept me flailing away and getting low on the floor. They don’t like to record their sessions, preferring to keep it a special moment for the people in the room, a call-and-response thing you just have to be in the space for, but you can hear some of their mixes HERE. The party is up and running into the fall at a location in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Arriving this past weekend was like a New York flashback, looking around on the street for a non-existant number, asking other dressed-up kids on the street where to go, following them past an open gate through a parking lot to a building in a back lot, down the stairs and into the groove. Watch the full interview HERE.

Casey and I interviewed the polymath James Franco for our Ladies & Gentlemen series at Imagine Fashion. I think he is a solid actor; I also think it is great that he figured out how to deal with his creative frustrations by educating himself and developing more tools to make things. He seems to have a healthy point of view and I believe he operates in good faith. The trailer for the piece is below, but you can watch the whole interview HERE.

 

All taken June 29, 2011. A friend said that the final image reminded him of Georgia O’Keefe. I accept.

Last night I became officially engaged to be married to the man I have been with for almost eleven years, Casey Spooner.

It was an historic night. We went to see our friend Patrick perform in a silly gay play and the director announced before the show that the 32nd senator was rumored to be officially on board. After curtain call, he jumped on stage again and announced that yes, the bill had passed and that marriage would be legal in the state of New York. The mostly gay audience seemed stunned by the news. I don’t remember anyone cheering like crazy. It just felt unbelievable; more shocking than Obama getting elected, to me. My first thought was that I suddenly had a choice, that this was truly an option for me. I had been thinking about it more practically over the past few weeks as I participated in calling the senate leader and the New York state senators that had not made an official decision. Watching a friend deal with an impersonal and bureaucratic medical system made me think seriously about what would go down if anything serious happened to one of us. Who would be recognized as next of kin? Who would be allowed to make the major choices?

My decision to be with and stay with Casey was made years ago. In the first wild weeks of knowing him, I asked him to marry me while we stood in the doorway of my closet in Los Angeles getting ready to go out. He said yes. Then we joked for months about planning a huge, three-day wedding with multiple feasts and beasts baked inside beasts, everyone wearing elaborate animal masks. When we started to really talk about it a lot I realized that if I was getting married then I would need to invite my family, including my extended family. This made think more seriously about what I was doing and I put a moratorium on speaking about it. Firstly, we needed to get to know each other better.

Years passed, and once and a while I would think about it, but since there wasn’t anything official to be done about it, it seemed like a non-issue. I did start to get a chip on my shoulder about all these people I knew obsessing over getting engaged or married and the popular culture seems ever more obsessed with it. Truly, I am thankful that I was forced to define the dimensions and terms of my relationship without any official guidelines and goalposts because it made our union strong and personal. I choose to get married in order to legally protect our life together, not to define it for me.

So, last night, as we  walked the city letting the news sink in, we wandered into a silly gay bar complete with smoke and lasers and a remix of Adele screaming over the dance floor and he turned to me and said, “Adam Dugas, will you marry me?” and I said “Yes, of course.”

Below is a transcript of the interview Casey and I did with Marina Abramovic for our Ladies & Gentlemen series on Imagine Fashion. Watch the full interview HERE.

“Invisible Art” – MARINA ABRAMOVIC

I always ask myself how you know when someone is an artist?
And I think the same like you never question breathing,you just have to breathe, otherwise you die.
And the same way, you wake up in the morning with these crazy ideas and you have to do them.
That means the urge to create, to create - is like same as breathing, and this makes you artist.

You know, I was educated that I have to believe in a higher cause,
and I have to completely sacrifice my life to it, and my personal life is nothing,
it’s all about what you have to achieve, and it was all about control — and the big picture,
everything has to be big picture.

When I was sleeping as a child my mother would wake me up because I slept too messy.
I have to be ordered, I have to be perfect, because why should I sleep messy?
Even in sleep there was control.

The artist is a matter of life and death.
Maybe it sounds melodramatic, but it is true.
It’s really about completely 100%.
When you only give 100%, then that’s good enough.
Anything less — the public is like a dog, they can feel insecurity, they can feel fear,
they can feel the instincts are not good.
But when the thing is really pure, then it gets you into this magic.
And we are talking about performance, which is the most immaterial form of art.

This last performance, I really took it seriously. It took me about two years, actually.
First, when I got the idea I got completely panicked,
because every time I panic, it means I have to do it.
And all my friends were saying,
“Now you have reached the museum, go to the opening, have a nice dinner, go home, everybody happy.
You don’t need to put this extra energy.”
But when I got this idea, “The Artist is Present” - that’s what I have to do, that’s my mission.
My mission in this piece was to create this situation where performance,
was always alternative form of art, become mainstream art.
Because it’s never been mainstream.

Every time, hundreds of invitations you get,
“Oh, we’re doing an opening here and there, can you do a little performance?”
Performance equal entertaining, because you entertain people who will not even look at you
because they are standing there with a glass of wine and have conversation.
And performance for me is incredibly serious business, its never been entertainment.

I reached the point of pain, especially in the middle of this performance;
in the end, I could not even lift my hands to take my clothes off.
I could not even be massaged because all the body was like one pain.
But then comes the moment of the performance, and the pain disappears,
the body was kind of not there anymore.
But every time another person would come and I would change position, the pain was like shooting.
But at the same time to understand pain and control it and realize the moments how to get out-of-body experience,
it was important.

Another phenomenon, it was amazing,
the long duration of the performance and what you go through,
is more transformative than any other piece of work I’ve ever done before,
it really transformed something in your mind.
And also the public looking at you, because you create a kind of –
you charge the space with a different electricity or something happened differently.

And I am like a mirror, I trigger your own mind to get into yourself.
I’m just a trigger, triggering.
And people never have time to reflect on themselves because we never live in the present,
we live in the past, which happened, the future, going to happen.
But the present is no time,
that’s incredible when you enter this time or space of mind,
there is no pain, there is no thinking process,
you are connected with a kind of, how do you call it, universal wisdom.
Everything becomes clear and incredibly balanced.

So what it really is about is this invisible thing that is untouchable
and performance is so about this kind of space.
So how you can sell invisible art?

The idea sometimes is more important than physical matter.
It’s so easy to collect painting,
you have to just have the nail on the wall and place the painting.
But this entire mind of collection, of the museums, art as a commodity,
it has to change, because there are some more important things.

Ideas are precious,
like Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made idea is more precious than so many other object-related things.
They are just things, but ideas are immaterial,
and that’s what performance is about, it’s about immaterial art.