Jess Barbagallo Finds Pathos to Punctuate Pettiness in Morgan Bassichis's The Odd Years

At Artforum, Jess Barbagallo reviews Morgan Bassichis's The Odd Years. "Published by Wendy’s Subway—a nonprofit reading room and publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn—The Odd Years doubles as a chronicle of an artist vacillating between the ethical demands of radicalism and the acute anxieties of a late-Millennial queer who might be classified as an 'avoidant personality,'" writes Barbagallo. More:

Teasingly myopic, The Odd Years is essentially a comic’s workbook where jokes are quietly spun, considered, and embellished, bearing traces of a latter-day Jack Handey for those who remember his early-nineties “Deep Thoughts” sketches on SNL.

As the evening sky

faded from a salmon

color to a sort of

flint gray, I thought

back to the salmon

I caught that morning,

and how gray he was,

and how I named him Flint.

Presented as scrolling koans emblazoned against bucolic stock nature photos, these circular nothings could be said to embody what media theorist Matt Sienkiewicz describes as a pre-9/11 Kierkegaardian irony, “a view that approaches the world with the sense that all meaning is ultimately artificial and thus nothing ought to be taken seriously.” With all due respect to the existential Dane (note to self: get someone to explain Kierkegaard briefly), these silly poems still feel like an accurate reflection of the constant internal monologue one recites daily to amuse themself through the solitary chores that keep a body plugging along. What obviously sets Bassichis apart in this Zen tradition is a depth of social conscience, an embattled relationship to bourgeois imperatives, and a willingness to punctuate sweet pettiness with genuine pathos…. 

The full review is at Artforum.