Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry Interview

A few weeks ago, when the Frieze Fair came to London town, Hollywood Superstar sat down (in the DM) with a radical and Instagram-powered neo-gallerist to talk about network painting and speedrunning shows with no nation. Here is the interview with Arden Asher-Tate, aka. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry.

Best group project since Reena Spaulings...it incidentally, or on purpose, has a overlap with the artists. Like Merlin Carpenter. They also don't priotise silly things like spelling, visual aesthetic cohesion, or neo-liberal graphics, much like the editorial over here in Hollywood.

Have you been asked to submit a project? If you haven't, maybe you need to be:

a) more underground

b) less commercially viable

c) worse at instagram

Access the project here.

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hello Percy Jackson's Mom. I am very glad you have liked exhibits. The project is anarcho nomadic space run by myself, sculptor Arden Asher-Taste.

After schooling I went to New York with very romantic idea of finding group of artists like Franco Polish Black Jean Porno Club.

I found painters who piss in corners and galleries in apartments, but you know these kids pay 3000 dollars now for an apartment? That was the case in New York. In Europe provision and scrappiness push against confines of bureaucratic rules but in Brooklyn my friends wanted art lifestyle outside capitalist careerism. I too wanted no rules but my Visa had run out and my money had run out. So now I am back in Berlin and there are painters who piss in corners here too.

HOLLYWOD SUPERSTAR:

What is there to be gained from nomadism in Today's World?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

hen you live nomadic you meet many artists and you become less of a tight ass because you need people to take you to bars and places to sleep. You take the train all over with university rail pass and never graduate and meet many artists and God forbid you see their artwork or you might puke. But you need these friends and they too are contours that help define your own taste.

HSR:

More than travelling between cities, which are all expensive and full of corners of piss- there is travelling through DMs. I have found you coming closer and closer as my friends excitedly report being asked to 'make solo show'. Pirates of the Carbomb Infantry sail the seas of the social fabric to make decisions about programmes? How do you choose?*

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I follow back artists if I like their work and usually I ask them to make show. Two hundred artists have been asked to do exhibit, and I wait on images from one hundred more. But there are no tags and sales and no open bar. So the whole anarcho nomadic project space continues as decentralised accelerationist system driven by desire to make show.**

HSR:

It’s iPhone realness. And perhaps a way to solve the problem of recording performance/art. You speedrun the opening: it instantly becomes a memory on an iPhone. It is a collective camera roll. One of the reasons why I admire the practice because it is just so lean. What do you say to the idea that The fat that gets cut out to make your lean gallery practice are the people. That it’s a non human and semi anonymous non event. In this case, you are looking for some purity, no? No messy human ‘buzz’ involved?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

I like very much the idea of a speed run. In the states there are massive conferences of streamers who run through video games as fast as possible. They find gaps in wall collision detectors and niche tech to skip cut scenes. Boys in bedrooms spend hours a day breaking the game and finding optimal routes to the endpoint. Reclusive artists like me can watch from my studio in Berlin, and live the route vicariously. I don’t romanticize efficiency programs, but I see value in breaking the game of exhibition and art career.

Now there is need to interrogate networking from the angle of social practice, and while the project cuts out the physical gathering, the event of the iPhone opening is intrinsically social, by means of distribution.

HSR:

One thing that brings your shows together is the printing out of things, the use of printer paper. Do you see any other patterns in what people present to pirates?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Yes. With printing there is cheapness and informality, but also a rich history of expediency. In the same way this space rethinks need for context and infrastructure, many of these artists are challenging material value structures, focusing instead on communicating. Screaming nonsense is also communication. That is the speaking of growing babies.**

HSR:

Do you want to 'break art career' of 'big' artists for a moment? Or is it more important for these 'small' artists to be together?

PIRATES OF THE CARBOMB INFANTRY:

Hito’s show was very good. Over a 10 minute rant the performer linked together Georgia Alliata’s POCBI selfie exhibit, Guzzler, bad Jake Shore work, and her own theoretical oeuvre. These social games of in-jokes, forgery, and trolling are the same strategies the Real Fine Arts artists were playing with Network Painting in the early 2010’s (I use Network Painting from Jana Euler, in how she uses for self/scene-referentiality in her work. Later it was used by Zach Feuer gallery in NYC for the show Context Message, curated by Real Fine Arts.) We are interested in not big or small, but a familial conversation. Everyone points up to their big sister and makes mocking face. That is a part of family love.