Paul Levack

I Suicided

28.09 - 20.10.2019

It’s easy to forget that the North Korean who killed Kim’s half brother with the VX agent got arrested wearing that LOL shirt or that a one-time Clinton intern was backed into the store room of a Starbucks with her coworkers and summarily executed in a quote unquote robbery that took nothing. My own first breakup happened at a Barnes and Noble and I drove home crying, listening to the Bad Religion record about the (2000s) Iraq war. The cultists that attacked the Japanese subway with sarin gas had synthesized some small amount of VX as well. Way, way before jokes about Starbucks’ ubiquity were themselves prosaic, Shoko Asahara posited that they could use VX, or the sarin that Saddam had used to retake the Al-Faw peninsula, to phowa people, pop their souls right out of the top of their heads, straight to the Pure Land. By executing those opposed to the movement, the Clintons prevent them from accumulating additional bad karma. This is a component that’s usually not understood in the discussions of Seth Riches and pedophilic rites: a moral component to Clintonism, refiguring the entire secular dynastic thing as an aborted philosophical system, a “bad religion,” just like Aum Shinrikyo or Ba’athism, but one born to a time where events of great significance happen against the backdrop of corporate coffee chains, steeped in the grounds of the new monocultural banality. The indistinguishable dynastic silliness of the Bushes eventually prevailing over Saddamist Ba’athism can perhaps be attributed less to imperial military superiority and more to simple cultural fitness, the right stupid ideology for the right stupid time. Fifteen [ten?] years on, people are still wearing Chuck Taylors and flannels and the levers of power are still being depressed by other recycled 90’s jokes.

SAMANTHA HOLLYWOOD

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Paul Levack is a homosexual American photographer. When the artist was a child, his father (also a photographer) shot a promotional calendar for an Akron, Ohio strip club, The Platinum Horse. Due to this association (and a subsequent arrest for soliciting sex from a 13 year old prostitute) his father lost his clients.

All nine flat works shown at Haus der Kunst are original prints from the artist’s collection of 90’s amateur and commercial photography.

The video is assembled found footage from the YouTube channel “Rustyshackleford”, a drone photographer operating in the Caribbean isles.