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2 weeks ago | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
Life is not about finding yourself or finding anything. Life is about creating yourself and creating things. — Bob DylanEvery artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, or Jimi Hendrix cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona. For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent.
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3 weeks ago | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
Hi AllI released a new album a few days ago, on the spring equinox, which is also the half-birthday of my daughter and the day our Altadena land was cleared of burnt, toxic debris. Themes Vol. 1 compiles music I have been working on for many years, some of which goes back to the NewVillager days of 2009. This is the first of several volumes I will be releasing over the coming year.
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1 month ago | 
culturedmag.com | Ross Simonini
Portrait of Joseph Beuys by Dieter Schwerdtle for 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks), 1982. Image courtesy of the Documenta archive. “I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree... It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids.”On the morning of Jan.
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2 months ago | 
mcsweeneys.net | Ross Simonini
ON THE MEDIUM OF ARTISTIC PRESENCE- - -THE ACCEPTANCE OF PERSONAEvery artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, or Jimi Hendrix cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona. For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent. Writers, painters, and composers will have little relationship to an exterior self unless they actively choose to engage it.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
thebeliever.net | Ross Simonini
Ross Simonini THE ACCEPTANCE OF PERSONAEvery artist expresses persona. For performers, the public face is inside the art. The work of Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Ana Mendieta, or Jimi Hendrix cannot be separated from the undeniable power of persona. For artists who send their work into the world, persona may be less apparent.
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Dec 5, 2024 | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
The below article is featured in the current issue of Gagosian Quarterly:According to the philosopher Thomas Nail, “Everything in the cosmos is in motion.” In fact, for Nail there are no “things,” only motion. No static chunks of matter. No nouns. A chair is not solid, nor is it made of many tiny particles. It’s a whirlpool of energy that, to us, appears “metastable.”The totalizing motion that Nail describes is also completely indeterminate, which means it unpredictably zigs and zags, forever.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
1Isle, 2024milk paint and egg tempera on canvas69 x 63 inis featured in “How the Trees See the Stars” curated by Aaron Johnson at Gana Art. Opens this week, November 23rd, Los Angeles3fantasia, my collaboration with Kool Music, is up now on bandcamp. 4My interview with Icelandic artist, Oddur Roth, grandson of Dieter Roth, is in the current issue of Hauser & Wirth magazine, Ursula. Read the PDF or text below.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
The world of Carroll Dunham’s art is a faraway place, deep in the unconscious, where perennial myths and night terrors are born. His painted images go straight through the eyes, back to that lizard part of our brain—violence, sex, genitals, color. Dunham spends years cultivating small plots of his world, developing each glyph of his visual language with the sort of long-term, exploratory scope that a science-fiction novelist might use.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
Over the last decade, Maggie Nelson’s writing has become one of the guiding intellectual lights for artists of all disciplines. Her books on aesthetics, gender, violence, and, most recently, freedom, allow for the kind of open, generative quality of thought that suits the artistic temperament. In this way, she has not established herself with a series of spicy opinions or fixed positions, but through a celebration of the endless challenge of uncertainty.
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Sep 16, 2024 | 
rosssimonini.substack.com | Ross Simonini
This week, I published an essay on the yogi, Sadhguru in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday. In the piece, I write about both my uplifting and challenging experiences with Isha yoga and the Isha community. You can read it here as a helpful introduction to this piece. The below is a dialogue with the guru I conducted after visiting his beautiful, forested center in Tennessee and then practicing his protocol, Shambhavi Mahamudra Kriya for a year.
