Kirby Ian Andersen

I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze (pt 1)

found album covers (The Window pt. 71)

Album: “I AM NOT AN X” by Joey I.O.

Joey I.O. (born Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin) performed in small clubs until his hair got sufficiently big. To pay for gas and food while he gigged his first album across the American mid-west, I.O. worked as an online hairbitrageur, sourcing golden tresses from Eastern European women and selling them to Big Wig. Sometimes he’d get stuck with locks he couldn’t flip, so he became a part-time perruquier.

He began wearing his intricate and very volumetric motel-made wigs on stage for performances, and found that the more humungous the hair, the more fervent the fans. So he scaled-up the wigs.¹ Fame soon came, as did critical praise. Reviewers and audiences began to notice the songs beneath the big bouffants, and obsessively parsed the meaning of his occulted and political lyrics, driven to manic divinations due to acidic choruses like “DragonmakerX in trojan tries to turn / offensive utopia into a chemical burn” (from “Unholy Crowley”). Meanwhile fashionistas, architects and Rupaul argued endlessly across the web about the structural integrity of his hair apparati. Which all served to exponentially increase his populariti. Everybody bought tickets to his shows, and streamed his electro-noir-pop songs in the billions. Especially in Brazil.

Album: “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified” by Kim Thee Dic

Because of the buzz surrounding his underground mix-tape, Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un immediately released a full album, called “Take Care, Nothing Was Certified”. The first single, a trap track entitled “WAD” and featuring Cardi B, went platinum. The follow-up single “I Don’t Pump Gas I Pump Hennessy” (featuring Kendrick Lamar and James Franco), a bumping diss-track aimed at Drake and Hugo Chavez, went gold. (The album stayed at the top of the charts for nearly a year, in part due to its extravagant cognac/cheese/car music videos²).

Album: “Yumi v. UAP” by The Sonic Psionic

Yumi snuck up to the roof of her Bed-study apartment building one summer evening to live-stream her new song. Views exploded when a glowing orb was observed circling the sky above her head. TikTokrs thought Yumi had somehow summoned the UAP through a combination of costume, psionics and sonics — her Venusian plushykitty attire, her ESPish lyrics, and her unusual voice (once described by professional commenter CelIn D as “in that gooch spot between an orgasmic groan and a goat’s scream”).

Scooter Braun jizzed out of retirement to sign Yumi and produce her sprawling anime-space-ballet-pop debut album. The recording got multiple Grammy nominations and she went on to a sold-out tour of the US and Sri Lanka. But that was it, that was all the music we ever got from Yumi, she never recorded again.

She did, however, have a second act. She changed her name (to Bobbi Clarke³) and started up the neurosonics program at MIT. The lab — funded by the Ravi Shankar VR Foundation and, separately, Ray Ban Meta — enabled Bobbi to invent the musical instruments the psitar, and separately, the eyelash theremin.

Album: “2,501cc” by Ross Lake

Ross Lake don’t talk the talk, he rocks the rock”. “2501cc”was voted best metal album in 1971, 1991, 2016, and 2031.

Album: “Mind the Gap” by The Gash

The Gash were an all-female band conceived and managed by impresario/provocateur bell de beauvoir. “I design the glam muses that deign the male gaze,” she famously stated in her third autobiography. “I sourced, styled and sold The Gash to 3 different record-label patriarchs in six months, and only one of them got the record.” de beauvoir produced the band’s debut album “Mind the Gap” and got song-writing credits on the pugnacious but pulchritudinous first single “Omigoshmigash!”. de beauvoir also designed the album cover, dressing the lead singer in a clear vinyl vulva-revealing dress, which, though banned from every retailer⁵, got The Gash massive global press. (The dress was later Photoshopped to have fake opaque “color”, which made the cover look more like a friendly Roxy Music screen-saver than an affront. This appeased everyone from Apple to Walmart, so both hard-copy and soft-cloud sales skyrocketed).

”bdb was a bitch, exploitive but extraordinarily entertaining,” lead singer and actress Andrea Menard (then known as Gush Gash) explained. “We were already a band by the time she came along, we had some songs but zero marketing. Her PR IQ was like crazy Mensa-level, kinda Kaczynski. We rejected the sushi idea, but said yes to the purses, and that broke up the band.” (Menard is referring to de beauvoir’s most outrageous merch idea, clutch purses and scarves made from the band’s own skin, sheets of it produced from harvested cells and surgical epidermal printers.) “I want the audience to consume their heroes,” de beauvoir declaimed. (This is how followers of the band became know as Fannibals.)

Menard sums it up: “We made far more money from the purses than the music itself, of course. Ever get the feeling you’ve been handbagged? Well, we did. We were. Literally.” She shrugs. “Sales and prices took off when people found out the clutches could be custom tattooed.”

Album “The Sunless City” by Robots R Us

According to Robots R Us, androids were invented in the 18th century by AI time-traveling back from the year 2102. Though in 1788 they were only able to create non-sentient bodies out of mechanical metal gears and wires, the technology and concept had to be seeded then because sufficient time — a few centuries — was needed for robots (AI) to tulpa souls by the 22nd century (souls being necessary for them to get into the afterlife when the apocalypse occurs in 2226).

So RRU wrote “The Sunless City” as the soundtrack for the above, using vintage Jacquard cards from looms (which were computer pre-cursors) to generate midi-sequenced melodies, heavily-reverbed EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, sounds found on audio recordings that are thought to be the voices of spirits or other paranormal entities), aurora borealis static, miscellaneous weather-sounds sampled from vintage Gothic video games, Kirlian synthesizers, the eyelash theremin, and other e-odds and i-sods, to somehow make the most ethereal, out-of-time, and soulful album ever.

CONT’D IN PART TWO…


NOTES:

  • Prints of all photos (unstaged) from “The Window” series by K.I.A. CONTACT for info

  • The posts on the K.I.A. blog here first appear on the K.I.A. art substack, subscribe HERE

  • Album covers done by artists : Takashi Murakami “Graduation” (Kanye West); Jeff Koons, “Artpop” (Lady Gaga); Banksy, “Think Tank”(Blur); Gerhard Richter “Daydream Nation” (Sonic Youth), K.I.A. “Boomhitech Alilttlebitwreck”(Shinjuku Zulu); Damian Hirst “Certified Lover Boy” (Drake)

  • ¹ For the final song of his last show in London, I.O. wore his largest wig ever: a full-scale replica of the O2 Dome. (Well technically… not a replica; he wore the actual Dome — he was structurally connected to it by Buro Happold Engineering, who also hung the thousands of 100-foot braids from the stadium’s ceiling.)

  • ² Seth Rogen declined to spit some bars for the recording but was… persuaded to direct-in-name every music video for the album, all of which were shot exclusively at YFO airport (‘cuz that’s where Kim warehouses his dozens of super-sized blocks of Swiss Emmental cheese, hundreds of copious bottles of Paradis, and over a thousand Ford Thunderbird sedans — all three indulgences prominently featured in the music video album).

  • ³ The name change was in honour of minimalistically-toothed hockey star Bobby Clarke, of whom Yumi is a fan, because he was once captain of her favourite team, the Philadelphia Flyers and, like her, is diabetic.

  • ⁴ 2500cc being the largest motorbike engine in the world. (Lake’s is 1 more).

  • Album covers with morotcyles: Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Purple Rain (Prince), Bat Outta Hell (Meatloaf), Girls Girls Girls (Motley Crue), Born They Way We Were (Barbra Streisand)

  • Other censored album covers: “Mechanical Animals” (Mariylyn Manson 1998), MM’s "breasts" were covered with a sticker and the entire package had to be wrapped in opaque blue cellophane. “Unfinished Music No.1: Two Virgins” (John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1968), wrapped in brown paper to hide their genitals, still blurred online today. “Nevermind” (Nirvana,1991), sticker placed to cover a swimming baby’s genitals. “Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”, a genital-adjacent word caused major retailers to not carry the album and governments launch lawsuits. Diamond Dogs” (Bowie,1974), yes, genitals again, this time on a dog’s body, which had to be airbrushed out.My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Kanye West 2010); a George Condo painting of Ye, straddled by a naked winged armless female creature with a tail, had to be blurred or pixelated for mainstream distribution.

  • ⁶ this music was the sound of the blitztanzer parties, the heavily influential movement that came out of Flin Flon’s underground club scene

  • ⁷ direct quote from the novel 1984 (George Orwell, 1948)

  • This is part 71 of The Window, which is a series of photos of real people in unstaged situations, captured by chance from looking 24/7/365/1 (the 1 being a single location, above a bricked road) over 5 years+. The work is presented as themed prints in sets interconnected with other sets, all of which are nested inside a larger single mega-meta-set. (TL; DR: it’s about passing through the labyrinth of 21st century):

Feelgood fatherhood

(not coming to an institution near you)

THE WINDOW part 71

Who needs to go when your heart just glows

You listen for their heartbeat, ear to partner’s warm stomach, but feel their highland-dancing (or maybe taekwondo) tummy kicks. You catch them and cut the cord and sleep overnight at the hospital. You fall in love with them.

You go out at midnight in a blizzard to buy medicine. You change diapers, wear a babybjorn barely embarrassed. You become hyper-hypervigilant of an allergy, of asphyxiation, of a bite, a burn, a car, a cut, a dog, a disease…

You read them that same bedtime story and never skip a page, even on the jabillionth time. You laugh and laugh, at farts and boogers and tickles and the tinsel that somehow got stuck on their butt.

You rock them to sleep at 2 am when you finish working and get up at 6 am when they awake (you do it oddly on your arm, because you know your collarbone is hard).

You carry and carry them, across the street, at the store, in the studio, in the snow, over the mud, up and down airplane aisles, at the parade, up 3 flights to the loft 4 times a day, crying, laughing, fussing, screaming, singing, sleeping.

You let them paint your nails though you know the Lichtenstein-ish colors will take weeks to wear off. You invent stories from their suggestions — a fish and a whale who are best friends — so you tell the tale of an aging goldfish with a bucket-list wish to see the Bellagio fountains (despite deserts etc.), and how the whale recruits his pals to re-create an even better version of it with their spouts (and flashlights) for her at home. And six stories later they still ask for another.

You work in and around and between all of it, mutate into a maestro of multitasking, become a blackbelt in bitwork, get your PhD in ADHD.

You speed them to school in the stroller in the sun, snow, rain; sprint home, maniacally-work, then dash back again.

You invent games and games and games to occupy them (comic-book exquisite corpse, and spontaneous animal/job charades where both start with the same letter with only one rule: no guessing until you see both performed — no not Snake Surgeon but yes! a Cobra Chiropractor) and you marvel at their minds.

You insist on making them (though grumpy) practice floating and swimming so they don’t die in the lake.

You play hall-ball with them, and dodge-ball (don’t worry about my face), and air-ball (aka Team Balloonia) where the Earth will explode if the balloon hits the ground, and every tap to keep it aloft is different than the last (foot, nose, knee, wrist, left-hand pinkie, twirl…).

On winter days you try (holding hands together) to catch on your tongues snowflakes spiralling down from the sky, then spend hours with them building forts and micro-hills for sledding, and making Saint Phalle-esque snow-sculptures to admire. On a windy spring day you go to the park to improbably catch mid-air those helicopter-seeds that fall from the tall maples, and in the autumn it’s dandelion fluff you all leap to seize.

You go to school performances that run longer than Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”. You played the recorder like a star!

You try not to barf when you see, on the side of their leg, their kneecap that somehow got pushed there after a basketball fall, and try to make them laugh lying on the gym floor until the ambulance arrives. You make them mad. And sad. For things you didn’t intend. You get into a different ambulance another time after the electrical accident on the roof. You sleep beside them at the hospital again.

You relearn math to help them pass. You push back on every single tattoo (as duty not aesthetically). You feign sleep till they come home at 3 am from the parties. You help them float, grumpy, in the ocean of the pandemic. You remain calm teaching them to drive!!! You invent jobs to employ them.

They go. You remember how sweet it was when they used to hold your hand. You fall in love with them again, and again, and again. You catch them and cut the cord (but you don’t).

NOTES:

Institutional exhibitions on motherhood (last 10 years):

  • “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood” - Hayward Gallery (London, 2024); explored motherhood through self-portraits, addressing creation, caregiving, loss, and women’s health issues like miscarriage and abortion

  • “Designing Motherhood”- MassArt Art Museum (Boston, 2022); examined the design and material culture of human reproduction, including objects like IUDs, breast pumps, and menstrual cups, highlighting reproductive health’s social and political implications

  • “Picturing Motherhood Now” Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 2022); explored motherhood through diverse lenses, addressing themes like family, gender, slavery, migration, and Indigenous matrilineal cultures

  • “Mothering: Between Stockholm Syndrome and Acts of Production” Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico 2022); this exhibition challenged romanticized views of motherhood, addressing gender equality and the tensions of being an artist-mother

  • “Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media” Foundling Museum (London, 2020); explored 500 years of pregnancy in art, from drawings to contemporary works

  • “Mother! Origin of Life!” Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark, 2021); explored motherhood through themes like fertility, sacrifice, and surveillance

  • “The Great Mother” Palazzo Reale (Milan, 2015) explores the life-giving creative power of mothers and the power denied to and won by women.

Institutional exhibitions on fatherhood (last 75 years):

  • “The Family of Man”, Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1955); photography exhibition with numerous poignant images of fathers and children portrayed globally

The Window is a 24/7/365/1 photo series by K.I.A. All photos are taken from a single location, and nothing is staged. The images are later arranged in sets as visual poems and narratives, interconnected and nested in a grand continuum, a single portrait of the times:

The Window, as arranged in a continuum:

(for father’s day)

Nebuchadnezzar, Never a Bricklayer

The Window photo series, pt 67

7:00 am. 3600 bricks to go.

Is the moon made of bricks? This morning, sunrise, there was a solar eclipse. Some advanced space civilization ages ago was like, They got microbes on Earth now, we better keep an eye on them, those motherfuckers’ll evolve and get dangerous sooner or later. Build a satellite for surveillance, use stuff from the planet to do it, make it look natural —round, grey and dusty is good. Place it precisely the right distance from earth so that it covers the sun exactly during an eclipse. They’ll eventually discover math and figure out that that wasn’t random, they’ll know someone’s watching, so they won’t misbehave. Also, what the hell, put some rings around Saturn.

I wish I worked on the moon, bricks’d be lighter. 450,000 lbs of bricks I’ll end up lifting this year. That’s Superman weight, just 4.5 pounds at a time. This road job, 50 bricks an hour, eight hours by nine days…that’s gonna be just over 16,000 lbs. Less if I crush a finger like No-nail Withnail. Goddamn glad he and his fugly mashed-plumb thumb are not on my crew, he’s barely on his knees, he’s always standing, arms crossed, talking. Ugh, this brick is shit and it’s only my second one. Into the clinker pile.

Some ancient bricks still aren’t clinkers. The Colosseum, it’s still standing. Even the ones they dug up in Jericho. Just mud and straw, and shaped by hand, but after 9000 years and trumpet blasts and all that, still intact. Thumbprints pressed into them still visible. Maybe one is from the hand of a way-great grandfather of mine, 440 generations back. It’s possible. People are bricks in an infinite road.

CONT’D. SEE/READ MORE IMAGE FROM THE “NEBUCHADNEZZAR” PHOTO SET FROM “THE WINDOW” AT K.I.A.’s SUBSTACK HERE: LINK

(INQUIRE to ACQUIRE limited edition signed numbered prints)

earthling's signalings (The Window pt 60 by K.I.A.)

Signs (banners, flags, trucks and tees) of the times (Part 2 HERE):

Earthlings then

women raptors pornstars men

compare yourself to the person
bruised never broken

you were yesterday matters state
status because of take

yeehaw my country you know
changed my life where to will you go

FOR THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND THE “FOUND TEXT” POEM “EARTHLINGS SIGNALINGS” SEE THE K.I.A. SUBSTACK HERE

SEE ALL 65+ OF “THE WINDOW” SETS AT THE SUBSTACK

One-frame Films (The Window by K.I.A., pt 59)

Titled Film Stills” series*:

“Arson, Incorporated”

“The Accidenter”

“Dazzle, Hero!” **

TO SEE THE REST OF THE “One Frame Movie” IMAGES IN THIS SERIES, (FOR TITLES/TEXT BELOW), SEE THE SUBSTACK SERIES on “THE WINDOW” HERE: LINK

“Assassin, Bikini, Cuccinelli”

“Two Clones Grown (One Gone)”

“Steven Dies Seven Times”

“Rock Paper Flowers”

“Hello, Halo”

“Wait When’s Payday?”

“The Last Temptation of Chris”

“The Second Last Temptation of Chris”

NOTES:

  • * artist Cindy Sherman’s first major photo series (1977-80, and acquired in 1995 by MoMA) was entitled “Untitled Film Stills”, where she staged herself in various stereotypical female lead roles (bombshell, fashion victim, schoolgirl and so on). In each of the seventy photographs her characters seem to be caught mid-narrative, just before or after an important event, and, just as in the movies, they never look directly at the camera ****

  • Sherman didn’t title her “films” because it would ruin their ambiguity (even though the photos are carefully staged with costuming and settings chosen to refer to existing films or genres, and are specific statements or critiques about culture and identity). The Window “films” above, because they are unstaged —they are real, ephemeral found moments — are titled to make them fictional and (even more) ambiguous as narratives, observations, or critiques. The subjects, unaware of the camera, also never break the fourth-wall (look directly at the viewer/photographer).

  • “The Accidenter” above is kinda like M. Night Shyalaman’s movie “Glass”, because three different characters show up in the one pic. The man to the left who is painting, the man bottom left holding the cardboard sign up, and the man on the ground at right have all starred in their own photos, i.e. sign man from Protest/Antitest.

  • Also “The Accidenter” is unlike “Glass” because Rotten Tomatoes reviewers like CelIn D couldn’t realistically say of the single frame “Too long, at any length”.

  • Tagline for “2 Clones Grown, 1 Gone”: Me, Myself, and A.I. Tag for “Wait When’s Payday?”: Always the bride, never the bridesmaid and for “Hello, Halo”: Heaven, we have a problem

  • Titlelists, aka professional movie-namers, can make — for coming up with great titles like “Back to the Future”— between $250,000 and $413,000 a year.

  • “Pacific Air Flight 121” was a very vanilla title that got changed to the very visual and visceral “Snakes on a Plane”. The movie flopped. When a team of marketing specialists were analyzing its financial failure, someone in their focus-group responded “Great title! When I read it I saw the entire movie in my head.” When asked why he then didn’t go on to experience it in the theatre, he answered “It wasn’t worth seeing a second time”. Samuel Jackson, who had suggested the title change, had to give back the $413,000 bonus he had negotiated.

  • The movie with the longest title (according to the GBOWR***) is: “The Sundevil and the Dragonmaker With Halo Duress Use Giant Sorcery, Magyck, and Dark Shroud To Turn Offensive Utopia Into an Eternal Burn, Part Two” (148 characters). Gary Busey came up with the title spontaneously (and sans bonus) when talking at the producer, insisting that the title needed to be too long to fit on a marquee. (The movie turned a minor profit, primarily from DVD sales in Norway).

  • Movies are often retitled for overseas markets. For example “Zootopia” was radically renamed for the UK market, and called “Zootropolis”.

  • ** US re-title of the hit Japanese movie “Power Man, Dazzle Stand!”

  • In Norway, the Sundevil movie was retitled “Sundevil og Dragonmaker Med Thor Bruker Gigantiske Trolldom, Magyck og Mørkt Likklede For å Gjøre Offensiv Utopia Til en Evig Forbrenning, Del To”. The local profesjonell tittelist made the full 4,574,149.95 kroner that year (4,317,000.93 of it because he snikja’d “Thor” into the title, which significantly boosted DVD sales, especially in Svalbard.)

  • “Untitled” was the original title for “Almost Famous”

  • *** Guinness Book of World Records Gary Busey Owns Word Records

  • After hearing about Samuel Jackson’s near-bonus, Gary Busey devoted the entire seventh chapter of his third biography to what he thought the title for “Snakes on a Plane” should have been. The chapter starts with: Snakes on a Plane should have been called and ends about 150 marquees-worth pages later. Had that sesquipedalian title been used, he would have gotten into both the GBOWR and the GBOWR. Busey has yet to be hired as a Titleist. He has, however, started writing his fourth biography. (The seventh, eight, and ninth chapters of which will be about what CelIn D should have included in their RT review of “Glass”).

  • the first found film series photos from The Window, including the box-office hit “Vampires VS IV”, Palm d’Or winner “Annie May”, and Razzie-awardee “Angel Raguel”, can all be seen here: LINK . All of the characters are caught just before, or after, a narrative event, and none of them (alien bride, cam girl, angel etc) look at the camera.

  • didactic panel: All photos in The Window series (unlike Sherman) are unstaged, shot 24/7/365/1 (single location), eventually grouped in sets as themed visual poems (w/ retinal rhymes), and ultimately interconnected as a recombinant installation explained in didactic panels.

  • *****

    Sets, L to R: Crosswalk I, Singing Pi, Horses They Fly, What’s the Point, Crosswalk II, How Far the Man

BONUS IMAGE:

****Untitled Film Still #71

Protest! Antitest!

Signs & Flags & Tees & Trucks of the times

FOUND WORD POEM:

We stand
as one — we will not comply;
from the river to the sea,
just say,
no, don’t believe the lies —
essential liberty,
hugs, temporarily blocked,
50% off,
can’t we just all get along
(subject to court injunction),
we will fight in the court. Hibachi

…cont’d at the link below

SEE THE REST OF THE IMAGES AND POST AT THE K.I.A. ART SUBSTACK HERE