I used to not like end of year lists for flimsy ideological reasons, but then, I realized I could put whatever I wanted on them. Coming up with a "top ten movies" or a "top ten albums" of 2023 is scary, and sounds like work. A ranking implies a heirarchy, and establishing a meaningful heirarchy in a field requires a rigor that I don't feel it necessary to give to a listicle. If I leave a good album off my top ten albums of 2023 list, I WILL feel bad, and I don't like doing things that make me feel bad.
The weird thing about listicles, though, is that the broader you make their scope, the easier they are to make. For me to have a top ten "things" of 2023 proceeds from an assumption that I am playing with an incomplete deck. I get the catharsis of telling you what my album of the year is without the whole album-of-the-year-ness of it all. Like, I already wanted to write little blurbs praising all of the things on this list, but publishing each of these little blurb reviews back to back would feel redundant at best and cloying at worst. Listicles are a good way to keep things informal.
However, for the sake of due diligence, here's a few things that would probably be somewhere on this list if I got around to hearing/seeing them in time:
-DJ E [Chuquimamani-Condori]
-Killers of the Flower Moon [dir. Martin Scorsese]
-Looking Out, Looking In [Shuvinai Ashoona]
(scale seems too important too her work for me to apply any sort of metric to it without seeing it in person. it'd be like including an album i only heard a 96kbps leak of.)
-Potential [Sunik Kim]
-TECHDOG [Patricia Taxxon]
(i got sent demos of a lot of these tracks as they were being worked on. when she first explained her idea for the rollout to me i was like "that's fucked. you're fucked." i still feel this way. extremely excited to lock myself in my closet and listen to this in one session.)
-WILD DESIRE [Tommy Bruce & Mark Zubrovich]
(similar story here as with Looking Out, Looking In. it feels wrong to put this on my list without getting to play corn hole with Tommy's corn hole. i got to see several of Mark's works in person at An Undisclosed Location earlier this year, and that was a signifigant life moment on its own. you can call that number 11 if you want.)
You and me, let's ride the tide together. Here's the ten things I got swept up in the hype for this year:
10. ham bag records
Blessed are the Bandcamp freaks, for they will inherit the earth. I was at first under the impression that this was one of those "Bandcamp labels" that was entirely composed of works by one person, but no. There's at least five different people who's works are represented here. How beautiful is that? The label owner feels it's necessary to tie each new project into an ongoing ham bag records story.
ham bag's careful visual world building simultaneously compliments and betrays the music itself. Defining the "sound" of ham bag records would entail listing off a series of disparate musical styles. I don't want to do this, because it would give off the impression that the label does not have a well defined sonic identity, which is simply not true. Look at your computer and the objects in your room for a good idea of the ham bag records sound. I will say that I've listened to about a dozen of the label's offerings and have loved each one. Each of these small ideas are being nourished and cherished. It's all very previous. When I click on a ham bag album, I feel like I'm dusting off a porcelain doll.
ham bag opened shop in 2021, but about half of their releases came out this year. I'm calling them a "new label" in the way the Grammy's call people "new artists," and I feel pretty good about that! ham bag is the 2023 state of the art as far as weirdo web art is concerned. The important thing is to get several people to care a lot, and then to keep caring a lot, and it'll be good. Long live ham bag.
9. Public Transit Love Story [ThroatSpit]
More than the presence of talking animals, what makes an artwork "furry" is its embrace of an atypical set of sensory experiences. The plight of most anthro characters is a battle against their own inate animalia. Micky Mouse is only a furry as long as he's picking pine needles out from his fur, or he's being swung around by his tail, or his whiskers shrivel at the smell of burnt bread. Once he is clean, and he has successfully reaffirmed his normitive manhood, he is happy, and the cartoon ends. Micky Mouse is not a furry. This is what makes Shrek successful as a parody. Shrek is more of a furry character than Micky Mouse.
Public Transit Love Story is a furry TF comic. This is redundant to say, because every successful furry comic is a TF comic, even if the TF happens offscreen, even if the characters were born as furries and stayed the way they were born their entire lives. I'd go as far as to say that Public Transit Love Story is a better explanation of what being a furry means than any instructive attempt I've seen (besides Patricia's video on the topic, which also references Public Transit Love Story). Simon says he wants to go back to being a normal cartoon, but he doesn't, and he knows he doesn't. Everybody knows Fiona's ogre design is better than her human design.
ThroatSpit's constantly on the X-Games mode panel layouts. There's so much movement and it's all completely legible. I love me some tasteful gradients. The thin, scratchy linework perfectly compliments the feeling of growing hair from places it shouldn't grow. Everything looks like it's made of hay, Topher especially. Drop dead gorgeous.
8. Asteroid City [dir. Wes Anderson]
I get the impression that it's going to take a while for people to fully process all the crazy shit this movie has going on under the hood. This includes me. I have no idea what this movie's about, and the more I think about it, the more confused I get. I love it! It's got all my favorite stuff in it (midwestern desert setting, mixed media, gay people getting hurt so bad).
The Wes Anderson thing works the best when the deadpan is working in service of a complex narrative. You see all the scaffolding and rail that makes up the ride before you ever set foot on it, and you still end up screaming. The Scene in this is the single best theatergoing experience I had all year.
7. I Stage Up Late [Zora Moniz @ Romance]
There's this series of box sculptures in this show, right. When you go into the basement of the gallery space, there's this armada of box ships and flat metal pieces arranged parallel to the stairs. They're not attacking you, you have to turn to see them, but they're clearly in motion. They lack any means of ambulating themselves, but their posture is active, aggressive. A few wooden panel pieces like the ones on the ground are nailed to the rafters such that, when you're staring the fleet head on, their presence lends the sparce space an acutely defined foreground and background. It's breathtaking. When you're looking them down, you feel a million feet tall.
The press release calls these box sculptures graves, which makes sense, given the undergroundness of it all. The complicating factor, then, is reentering the above ground space of the gallery and seeing a lone one of these box sculptures sputtering along the space's main fauyer, lit in stark, flourescent white. It feels smaller then the rest of them even though it's not. I feel my normal height. It's lonely in the land of the living.
I don't love every piece in this show. Several of them I flat out don't like. The wall mounted metal pieces don't do anything for me, ditto for the smaller pastel works. However, I wouldn't change a thing about this show. That's not true. I'd ditch a couple of the metal pieces, I really don't know what I was intended to look at with those. BUT. Even the pieces I don't fuck with in terms of being, like, good art on their own do a fantastic job of mapping out this network of fleshy temples.
Many of the pieces I don't like as much have nails bored across their surface, more than would be needed to structurally bind a wooden board to a backing component. See "messy girl" for an example. "one is sacred one is business (gray, ghost orchid)" is the big showstopper Georgia O'Keefe sci-fi sigil type painting, the piece you're most likely to gravitate towards when you first step into the space. It's an oil painting, normal stuff. I had to double take when I moved up close to it and saw circular embossings that mimicked the ones caused by the nails in the pieces on board. These were painted on canvas! Moniz used a hole puncher to embed little circles of paper into the base layer of paint to continue the circular motif that the nails lent to the works on board. It's such a small, risky detail. If Moniz had presented an otherwise ununified body of work, it'd feel cloying. Fortunately, Moniz is a good painter, and the easter egg feels like a cute, crafty way of adhering the centerpiece to the rest of the sad, crafty body of work.
While I'm reading off the press release, it's a smart choice to display these pieces made in low visibility conditions under this aggressive, electric lighting. This is the light that magical creatures shrivel under when they're strapped down to the dissecting table. Zora Moniz has colonized this alien world, and these are the odd samples of flesh she's submitting to the National Gallery (or the Carnegie Museum, take your pick).
6. Capture The Flag Across Japan
The Amazing Race could be the best game show ever made if it didn't constantly lie. The whole point of the show is that the action is taking place in the real world. Obviously, you have to make a TV show, and game shows have to have some kind of drama, but in this instance, if you're even once deceptive about the distance one team is from another, there's no show. Every other episode of The Amazing Race ends with this God awful sequence of the two final competing teams running towards the pit stop; the camera cuts back and forth between the team that will obviously be safe and the team that will obviously be eliminated, a cheap trick to confuse the viewer into briefly forgetting which is which. In obfuscating one team's position from the other, the producers create no meaningful tension and obscure the naturally occuring human drama being acted out by the winning and losing parties. That's just one thing. It doesn't actually matter whether or not the non-elimination legs are planned from the start of the season or not, hiding their placement from both the viewer and the contestants creates the character of a shadowy producer figure pulling the strings offscreen.
Maybe it's not true to say that The Amazing Race lies. Like, the contestants are competing for a cash prize on a major network television show. If any of them felt like they were given discriminatory treatment, they'd probably sue CBS, or at least get equiable hush money. What I hate about The Amazing Race is that it so often feels untrue. As a database animal, game shows appeal to me as documents of true events. The best game shows, Unbeatable Banzuke, Sasuke, etc., understand that their pathos lies in the action of doing in the face of probable failure.
In that context, it's insane that it took two decades for Jet Lag: The Game to appear on YouTube. Jet Lag: The Game is not spectactular because it's a verson of The Amazing Race that's produced like a vlog, it's spectacular because it's a version of The Amazing Race that feels like it's actually happening. The crew is the cast. The shadowy producer is too busy playing the game to pull any strings. The only thing that needs to be accepted at face value is that these people are sincerely playing to the best of their abilities, which is the main concern I had with the premise of the series going into it. However, the these guys understand that the best game show storytelling comes naturally as a result of people trying their best to play the games laid out for them. They know that it'd take more effort to fake an unsatisfying end product than it'd be to make something real and beautiful.
Of the four seasons of incredible material Jet Lag released this year, "Capture The Flag Across Japan" only narrowly edges out "We Turned New Zealand Into A Real-Life Board Game." While the New Zealand season has a more satisfying narrative arc, the gameplay in "Capture The Flag Across Japan" is so fucking cracked. The penultimate episode had me curling my toes, moaning and groaning, and so on. I'm definitely projecting somewhat, Jet Lag's success has been cathartic to see after seeing so many before fail to thread this exact needle.
5. Voir Dire [Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist]
Earl is the best rapper in the world, and this is his new album.
4. The Coconut Internet [Dani Arnica @ Triest]
The best jokes stay good after they stop being funny. I didn't see this show in person. I've only engaged with this show through Triest's fantastic documentation available on The Contemporary Art Library. Eagle eyed readers will be confused by this, since there were two similarly well documented gallery shows I excluded from this list since I haven't seen them in person. I'm also pretty confused by this. What is The Coconut Internet? Why do I feel like I've seen it just by knowing about it?
Each of Arnica's paintings describe their own creation. Part of undersdanding each work is understanding the steps taken to create them. "Untitled (First Night on the Island)" is a painting about a crab being drawn first and a star being drawn later. However, unlike a Twombly, I don't get the impression that Arnica is a world class craftsman attempting to access a beginner's mind. There's an intense, basic urge at the root of her work. When you're stranded on an island, you draw in the sand, you gather twigs and make them say SOS. There's little excremental about making a sand castle, and I definitely don't know who made the first one.
This is a correct response to the 20th century of western art making. The bright minimalists, through rigorous effort, showed that compelling work could be made from almost nothing. The industrial world, once flooded by new, confusing materials, was once again carved wide open. Ryman stretched a blank canvas for the world, and when most people are presented with a blank piece of paper, they'll write their name on it. You can complain that everything's already been done, or you can walk around on your island. You could study your base artistic impulses and map them out into a system of interconnected parts. Working will create new work, because everything new is new, and the work will be good, because you understand the things you're able to do.
The Coconut Internet is an intense celebration of the inner. It's a mode of artmaking I feel a strong sense of kinship with. I love The Coconut Internet, and I love the creatures that live on it. We sing and play games together. Great shades of brown.
3. Burrows
Moreso than everything else on this list, this is strictly a recommendation moreso than anything that could be mistaken for meaningful critique. It's impossible to talk about Burrows without giving away substantial details of its plot. The game's not tainted in any way if you know its premise, but, the experience of playing through Burrows' opening hours completely blind is something I'm going to hold with me for a long time, and I don't want to deprive anyone of that. If you fuck with the art style, aren't deterred by the content warnings, and are fine engaging with a story that isn't currently complete, give it a go. Burrows is number three on this list (mostly due to its incompleteness), but this is the thing that is currently taking up the most space in my brain besides food, sleep, etc. Burrows feels like it was made to ruin my life specifically.
Of the slight wave of western visual novels that followed Echo's rise to popularity in furry spaces, Burrows is the first one I've played that learned the right lessons. Burrows is about the actions you don't take. Playing all four stories simultaneously does nothing to diminish the palpable loss that comes from these four stories being incompatible with each other. To twist the knife further. most of the main roster of hot boys having genuinely unappealing character traits that are obvious right out the gate. Ken is a decidedly not fun kind of hard-to-get. All of Gabe's friends suck and having to having to hang out with them to talk to Gabe sucks. Mark's entire route is structured like one long horrible Grindr date. No matter where you go, it feels like you could be somewhere else, and Burrows is keen on reminding you of that. It's hostile. It's risky. There's a lot of risk in Burrows.
I was worried, too, like I always get with stuff like this, that they were biting off more than they could chew. My heart dropped into my stomach the first time I saw the interactive timeline of events (!!!) in the game menu. Little of the space zoned out in the game's universe for a large scale, time hopping, polyphonic, sci-fi narrative has been paid off in any concrete way, but the bits that HAVE been paid off, ouuugunhhgghhhg. It took until just this last update for me to flip from "do we really need Grey to have a psychic ghost friend that hangs around in his head all the time?" to "Grey absolutely does need to have a psychic ghost friend and I need to know as much about him as possible."
From what I can tell, this is the first time Nikko's worked on any project of this scale, and they're juggling art, writing, and music duties with grace and consistency (even their music's good!). Nikko's coming from a background of making porn comics, and it comes through in Burrows in the best ways. It's funny and horny in a way that lowers your guard and makes you extra succeptible to the horriffic shit that it'll frequently slap you with. And I mean, it's got all my favorite stuff in it. It's got hot men and bikesploitation and modern art jokes that actually land.
I am particularly succeptible to the things this game is doing, but I wouldn't be riding this hard for it if I didn't think it had merit beyond its ability to present me with iconography that I enjoy looking at. Give it a go and we'll talk later. If I do one of these next year, this'll be on there then, too. We'll talk then.
2. Homeless N*gga Pop Music [Jim Legxacy]
Pop music's over the hump. We've crossed from the disciplinary regime into the pharmacopornographic regime. The pop stars insist on taking up as much time and space as possible, which is normal, but there's a hollowness to it. We were at a stagnation point for a while, where it was theoretically possible for anyone to do what the industry pop stars were doing. The thing Jim Legxacy's done is actually, like, do it.
Like, this is a pop ass pop album, twelve once in a generation hooks back to back. This shit is doing laps around everyone (everyone!) else. It's kinda surreal to hear music in this style so intimately familiar with suffering and loss (refer again to the title of the tape). At the same time, the only subversive thing Jim does here is insist on the spot he rightfully deserves. Jim doesn't chop up Miley Cyrus as a diss, he finds a way, disconnected through time and space, to sing a duet with her.
I can't tell you much about this record that Jim doesn't say better than me, but I really do feel like this is a turning point for pop music as a whole. There ain't no excuse for just eating what you're fed now. Someone's doing it better than your fave.
1. Sparkle On Raven: The Life of DrillGirl
Like everyone else, I'm moreso an advocate for Just Making The Thing on paper than I am in practice. Every friend group has a Sparkle On Raven in them. Few are able to follow through.
With Sparkle On Raven, I never feel like I'm just being let in on someone else's inside jokes. I'm never patting these guys on the back and saying they must've had fun up there. It's not like an anime, it is an anime. It's an anime made by people who realized they could get away with making it and made it. There's no reason to make Sparkle On Raven unless you care more about Sparkle On Raven than anything else in the world.
It's so much fun starting to recognize each of the the animators' invidual art styles, and then seeing each of those artists grow more ambitious with each passing episode. Completely infectious energy, total memetic kill agent. Most of the funniest things I've seen this year are bits from this show. Sparkle On Raven makes me want to make shit, and it makes me like all of the other art in my life more by existing. It makes me thankful for the internet and the people who use it. It makes me feel blessed that I'm able to so easily occupy space with so many weirdass queers who are on the exact same wavelength as me. That's right, the real meaning of collective webart action is the friends we made along the way.
Happy holidays from our Door Gallery family to you.
Patrick's website