MARK GONZALES: Non Stop Poetry
In today's media landscape, a book review is often a slap on the back. A handshake among colleagues that says, “well done.” But we have never been afraid to offer critique when critique is due. In our print section Berlin Reviews, we've always tried to take the propositions of a book seriously and push them to their extremes.
Archive Berlin Review from our issue #28.
“We were all just tripping the fuck out.”
In Spike Jonze’s short film, How They Get There (1997), Mark Gonzales is “guy.” Anonymous and sincere, he drinks a schoolboy’s milk carton in the street. He saunters along, flirty, unkempt, playing a hyperbole of himself: a silent, inexplicable oddball. And then, all of sudden, the character is dead. It calls to mind one of Gonzales’s poems: “life is worth my whyle but death is more my style/ As my silowet became dry I felt invenceibaul.”
In the early 90s, the legendary skater found recognition as an artist through his corpus of zines. Printed Matter’s Non Stop Poetry: The Zines of Mark Gonzales (2014, edited by Philip Aarons and Emma Reeves) is dedicated to this ongoing legacy. Itself zine-like in nature, the book is a material reference to its subject. It is a highbrow publication with Xerox aesthetics, printed on varying shades of the Kinko’s rainbow. In one of the book’s interviews, Harmony Korine justifies the bizarre language and seemingly non-sequitur subjects of their collaborative zines, “Let me contextualize it for you by saying I was high most of the time ... We were all just tripping the fuck out.” With a clique that included Kim Gordon, Raymond Pettibon, Scout Niblett, David Blaine, Chloë Sevigny, and Cameron Jamie, Gonzales’s exploits scribble an eccentric path – Fear and Loathing without Las Vegas. As Korine recalls, “The idea that we would even live much longer was strange. It was all just an abstraction.”
Videos of Gonzales skateboarding in a bathrobe and black slippers echo this atmosphere of abstract absurdity. It is an outlook that translates to the page – a DIY approach to life and art. Gonzales scrawls his poems and sketches in childish writing, with black sharpie and all-caps lettering. In all of his work, Gonzales was experimenting with how far he could push the limits of crass and still be relevant, “I wanted it to be street and intellectual at the same time.” He is present within every kooky, misspelled, grammatically incorrect poetic moment. As Jocko Weyland describes, the poems are nuanced wisdom, an American W.G. Sebald for the skater set.
Non Stop Poetry: The Zines of Mark Gonzales is published by Printed Matter (New York, 2014). www.printedmatter.org
