« ABA's Air SALON » air salon: Impressed
Iggy and The Stooges - Gimme Danger Gregg Bordowitz - Gimme Danger (lecture) [excerpt] Devo - (I can’t get no) satisfaction (from ‘Kidnapped’, dir. Eric Mitchell, 1978) DNA - Blonde Red Head (from ‘Downtown 81’, dir. Edo Bertoglio, 1980/2000) ‘Elvis Presley's Pink Cadillac’ (GWAT TV YouTube channel) James Chance and The Contortions - Anesthetic The Buzzcocks - Fast Cars Carol Jiani - Hit‘n Run Lover ‘Kidnapped’, dir. Eric Mitchell, 1978 [excerpt] Laura Branigan - Gloria Levi's 501 Jeans: Are They Worth It? (In-Depth Review) (Gentleman's Gazette YouTube channel) Sister Sledge - lost in music Atlantic Starr - Circles Voyage - Souvenirs Jimmy Ruffin - Hold on to my love Sharon Redd - In the Name of Love Diana Ross ~ Upside Down Diana Ross - Love Hangover Debbie Harry and Fab 5 Freddy at ‘Hip Hop Honors 2004’ (VH1) Blondie - Call Me (Acapella)
''You are listening to ABA's Air Salon on Colaboradio, broadcasting on 88,4 MHz in Berlin 90,7 MHz in Potsdam.'' My name is Lieven Lahaye, I’m an artist-in-residence at Air Berlin Alexanderplatz.
This is a radio show about the writer Duncan Smith, the introduction is an abridged version of ‘Impressed’, a text I wrote in 2021 and originally published in Catalog issue 17.
Writer Duncan Smith (1954-1991) excels at making wild connections.
His essay, ‘Everybody wants exposure’ builds on the speculative relationship between the process of developing photographs and fading denim jeans.
‘An interpretation of Elvis’ car-giving’ talks about exactly that: Elvis’ habit to give out Cadillacs and the interpretation of the name ‘Cadillac’ as a virtual rebus of events in Elvis’s life: ‘cad’: 50s slang for a bad boy, ‘ill’: ill and ‘lac’: lack.
Throughout ‘On the current symbolic status of oil’ he zooms in on the word ‘tar’ and the anagrams arts/tars/star, they “are crucial to the symbols that determine an identification in our culture.”
His work was published in issues of Artforum, BOMB magazine, Flash Art, the Semiotext(e) reader ‘Polysexuality’ (in the chapter ‘soft sex’) and the fall 1980 issue of FILE Megazine.
He wrote essays for the artist’s monographs of Peggy Cyphers, Brett De Palma, Alain Jacquet, and Roberto Juarez.
He wrote extensively about Elvis’ image and Elvis’ imitators – or ‘duplicators’ – in the book he co-authored with Diego Cortez, ‘Private Elvis’.
In an unpublished text, ‘Evil’ he wrote about disco lyrics and how they predicted the Aids crisis, as well as commented on it. He talks in particular about the lyrics to Electric Dreams, Gloria, In the name of love, Circles, Souvenir.
He played in the 1978 Eric Mitchell film ‘Kidnapped’. He appears throughout but does most of his talking around the 26 minute mark when he’s engaged in a conversation about speech, violence and ‘newness’.
He’s listed in the credits for the 1980 Eric Mitchell film ‘Underground USA’ as ‘the shrink’. He shows up in the origin story of the graffiti-centric ‘Fun Gallery’.
In ‘the city is our canvas’, Fun Gallery founder Patti Astor says “I always say that the beginning of the Fun Gallery was when I met Fab 5 Freddy in 1981. I was starring in my punk rock spectacular, ‘Underground USA’ […] Fab 5 Freddy dragged his homies, including Futura, to see the movie and, after that, we met.”
She continues in a 2012 interview:
“I think it was… I was really hung over, I remember… Duncan Smith, who was a poet-philosopher, was having a big party at his loft for the 100th birthday of Stéphane Mallarmé, the poet. He was serving vodka and cucumber sandwiches.”
With Edit DeAk, Duncan Smith interviewed graffiti artists Futura and Zephyr for the catalog of a 1983 exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.
He published a collection of essays, ‘The age of oil’
He died from AIDS in 1991. His work is not widely known. He, along with a generation, died, their development cut short, leaving a legacy that is often difficult to contain.
Much of the available information on Duncan Smith was gathered in an extensive article, written by poet and critic Raphael Rubinstein and posted to this website ‘The Silo’ in August 2017.
The first sentence reads:
“The near invisibility, online as well as off, of writer Duncan Smith (1954-1991) is a stark reminder of how thoroughly information can go missing, or never emerge at all”
ABA Air SALON is a radio format produced by Air Berlin Alexanderplatz, a Berlin based artist initiative dealing with the distribution and documentation of forms of collective and experimental knowledge production. The broadcasts come from different locations in Berlin where we organize salons. At these salons we meet with local actors, artists, scientists and other cultural producers to exchange around research based artistic projects and practices. You can find more information about our program at www.airberlinalexanderplatz.de
ABA (Air Berlin Alexanderplatz) e.V., is a research-oriented artists' initiative founded in Berlin in 2009 by the artists Susanne Kriemann & Aleksander Komarov. The programme focuses on ephemeral artistic research and collective and experimental knowledge production. ABA’s operations consist of the conception, curation and implementation of various presentational formats: The organization of salons in different locations across the city, the release of publications, the stewardship of a residency-program and the maintenance of a website as a central place for documentation and archiving of these forms of ephemeral knowledge production.