Names P.1
Name Stuff. Hi, it’s Stephen.
If I was a skilled writer, I could weave Morgan Vogel’s The Necrophilic Landscape , which deals with borders and disguise into writing about Blaise Larmee- whose 3 Books (2015) disguises its author with inflated privilege, fame, controversies, art world money, before being called out ‘in real life’ by his publisher, two years later. 3 Books unsold copies were pulped and the label restructured. The new head publisher - a college student - resigned within two weeks; citing stress and suicidal thoughts. And leadership quietly reverted to Raighne, who founded the label with Maggie Umber in 2007, and legally removed his middle and last name after their divorce in 2016.
In 3 Books, Blaise’s ethnicity is obliquely referred to, or maybe White. His next - and to date last book - 2001 (2017) has a big red spot on the cover, a Japanese flag— Larmee is half-Japanese — the back cover is a South Korean flag — the country where the book was printed. *
“I could print an American flag too, somewhere”, an inside cover, “But I don’t think I want to”.
The flag play of 2001 flattens the author’s identity into a book; and blows the book up into the author’s body — stamping it with identity markers. 3 Books (2015) is the sex book. 2001 collects works which had mostly been shared online on various blogs over the past decade, collaging and integrating them. Young Lions (2009) is the debut; Mirror Mirror 1 (2016) is a helmed anthology of curious, evasive quality.
Larmee would claim in interviews that Young Lions was made sarcastically, to win a grant. Eleven years later, in an Amish restaurant, traveling with Blaise and Raighne to Morgan Vogel’s remembrance in Ashfield, Massachusetts — they’d recently reconciled — I learned that Michele Bernstein’s All The Kings Horses was its primary influence: a French novella from the 60’s publicized as having been written — sarcastically — to make money to fund the Situationists. Bernstein’s husband was the philosopher Guy Debord and her book a roman a clef, about a young intellectual couple and their extramarital affairs, with a couple even younger people. Smoking in cars on the way to the beach.
Vogel’s The Necrophilic Landscape is built from a rejected proposal to the same foundation that funded Young Lions; the now defunct Xeric grant. It’s about a society without women; where the basic division is between men and children. They’re identified and separated at birth. Children are sexless and only grow so tall and live outside the city in a feudal agrarian zone, while adults occupy the city. But children may pass over the border disguised as adults, by pairing up, one standing atop the other beneath trench coats. Once inside they form the city’s criminal and terrorist elements. An adult detective is tasked to go undercover into the child territories and to do so he reverse-engineers the disguise techniques of children; inventing a surgery in which he is to be split at the waist into two separate, shorter, sentient beings.
The term “young” is required for advertising purposes. And the kids, conscious of the beefsteak they're being offered, produce nothing but merchandise on demand.
— Michéle Bernstein, Potlatch 15
Watching Breathless with Blaise in the last year, his favorite movie, I recognize a scene in Young Lions. Towards the beginning, a tree-lined road, their shadows.
3 Books opens with a critical essay by a Pamela Lee. The essay takes the book apart as the closed book, as macho, and taking up space, opposed to an ideal open and feminine one. On a panel discussing appropriation that year, Kenneth Goldsmith, uncreative poet & director of ubuweb, congratulated him on getting Pamela M. Lee, a historian of late modern and contemporary art, to write the introduction (even if it was negative) and Larmee surprised Goldsmith by revealing that he fabricated the piece himself. Lee was selected for her Asian name. Re-calling earlier appropriations of Asian women, like Yoko Ono whose death occurs in Young Lions as an out-of-frame news event. And the Young Lions character Alice. Named after the character Alice Kim from Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings.
At Morgan’s remembrance, around a campfire, on the berry farm where she grew up, Noel Freibert showed Larmee a page from Adrian Tomine’s The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020), which came out that year, on a cracked iPhone; alerting Blaise to his own depiction in the book - “Is this you?”
“Did that really happen?”
“Yeah, basically. In the sense that I went to see him speak and asked a pretentious question during the Q&A which, was probably more of a statement”
Paging through Young Lions during the credits to Breathless, Blaise said “What’s the relationship between these two?" I could never figure it out — he’s me”, pointing to the protagonist performance artist Cody Campbell, “And her — I think of her as my mom” pointing to Cody’s closest companion, Alice Kim.
“Shrunk to the same age?”
“Yeah”
Vogel appears twice in Mirror Mirror. Under the name Caroline Hennessy she draws a barefoot Japanese school girl who exits a classroom and walks down a hallway. As she’s leaving the frame, another door opens and an identical girl walks after her. As Tracy Auch — a name made up for her by Andy Burkholder, probably derived from Lord Auch, the pseudonym Georges Bataille used for his first novel, The Story of the Eye — she writes about the phantom bodies that pseudonyms invoke.
In Yours (2017) a 2d title printed under Margot Ferrick’s given name — Sarah. There’s a drawn letter to an unborn child, a terminated pregnancy, which they address as Margot. We see the mother creature and the smaller one nestled within it as they’re given some time together. After Yours was published, the author changed their own name to Margot. Making marketing Yours in the back catalog a bit complicated.
The cover of the book says ‘Sarah Ferrick’ but Yours is by Margot; with metadata for online retailers and the 2dcloud shop reflecting that. In the 2dcloud office, we have a single copy which they calligraphically altered with a marker, crossing Sarah out with the tail of their current name.
Sarah becomes Margot, while Auch retains some shape as a mask for Vogel. The sold-out ashcan edition of The Necrophilic Landscape (2016) keeps Tracy Auch as its author.
Surviving copies of 3 Books - there are some, about 20 of them - used to sit out of sight, in a closet, and now sit on display in 2dcloud’s Chicago office like each other publication from the label. Although they’re not available for sale.
But the artist has a new piece in Compact Magazine (2023).
Morgan Vogel has two pieces in it. Clean Streets and Autobiographical Story. Clean Streets originally appeared in an anthology called Sock vol. #2, in the early 2010’s, edited by Conor Stechschulte. It’s printed in Compact Magazine with blue pencil construction lines and notes left in.
Autobiographical Story had been printed before only in Japanese! In an anthology called Kakku. English originals provide perhaps her finest lettering so we copied and pasted from them to write her name on the cover of The Necrophilic Landscape (2023).
If you’re interested in this work, the best way to support it is by buying directly from our shop. If you’re a shop and you’d like to carry our books, drop us a line at info@2dcloud.com
*Correction from Raighne: 2001 was designed when we thought it’d be printed in South Korea, but we ended up going with a printer in Malaysia. Blaise kept the South Korean flag because he preferred it aesthetically.
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