Alex Da Corte shares his Top Ten

AMERICAN POP ART: 106 FORMS OF LOVE AND DESPAIR (MODERNA MUSEET, 1964)

This catalogue, created for an exhibition curated by Pontus Hultén (1924–2006)—director of the Moderna Museet between 1958 and 1973—was its own peculiar work of art. The show was a close read of seven then up-and-coming artists utilizing Pop imagery and populist subjects. This seemingly unfussy staple-bound book contained pictures of artworks that were printed, aside from a few tip-in plates, entirely in duotone. Imagine a world where we might know and remember Roy Lichtenstein’s or Claes Oldenburg’s or George Segal’s art in peachy pink and magenta, muddy green and gray. This volume offered up a subversive Pop idea—that these psychedelic reproductions depicting different paintings and sculptures could have (or should have) appeared this way in real life. It anticipates a world where images as we experience them are and are not what they seem.
PLAYING ONE SONG ON REPEAT

This habit started for me on Christmas morning, 1994, as I found myself rewinding my Walkman to listen to Mariah Carey’s ode to seasonal yearning over and over again while building my new K’nex Roller Coaster, complete with loop the loop, in my family’s mildewy basement. The ritual became a meditative exercise that I have employed throughout my life, especially while in motion, and especially on airplanes. I repeat Nina Simone’s “I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl” on my way to Kansas; the Cocteau Twins’ “Heaven or Las Vegas” on my way to Chicago; SZA’s “Love Language” on my way to the Dominican Republic, and so on. The song plays until it becomes all clicks and pings, like the sounds of an MRI machine, and I leave my body.
“KEN LUM: KLUMP!” (ULISES, PHILADELPHIA, 2024)

Lum is one of one—a supernatural creature, like a gremlin, who can multiply himself after midnight. Always revisiting and remaking the world through his own singular lens, Lum collaborated with Ulises, a radical and righteous bookstore/gallery, to look again at his 1989 photo-work Melly Shum Hates Her Job—a picture of the namesake woman, smiling and trapped in an overcrowded cubicle. It was first seen on the facade of Rotterdam’s Witte de With in 1990 as a temporary billboard, but public affection for the piece became so intense and enduring that it was made into a permanent fixture. The space even renamed itself the Kunstinstituut Melly in 2021. For his contribution to Ulises’s yearlong “Commodities” edition series, Lum put the beloved Melly—who resembles a character from an episode of The Office or a Cathy comic—on a coffee mug. He forces Melly to reenter the workplace and the drudgery of capitalist pursuit, forever hating her nine-to-five. She’s out there somewhere now, sipping from the mug bearing a picture of her own mug, spilling all the tea.
JEWEL CASES

Plastic is bad, but I love the wonderful houses that CDs live in. These fetish objects make the designs of an album’s liner notes SHINE and look valuable, reflecting the ways I often feel about the songs contained within. I’ve used jewel cases as palettes for mixing paint and as frames for collages. They are little TVs or proto–cell phones; a world behind a five-by-five-and-a-half-inch pane of plastic; a humble valentine to pore over and wonder about; a place where images become something.
“MARISOL: A RETROSPECTIVE” (BUFFALO AKG ART MUSEUM, 2024–25) AND THOMAS SCHÜTTE (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, 2024–25)

There were many signs of electric life in the career-spanning retrospectives of Marisol’s and Schütte’s art at the AKG and MoMA (organized by Cathleen Chaffee and Paulina Pobocha, respectively). Carved and cut, gnawed and broken; ripped, painted, and sewn; cast and collaged; leaning, laughing, screaming; crying and side-eyeing—their sculptures depicted everything, from big babies to small dictators. Witnessing all these portrayals of fragmented bodies in the round reminded me of a studio rat’s labor, fueled by a passion that runs hot. From today’s perspective, the work of both artists defies the compressions of life as experienced through the screen—their art asks us to be out in the world as flesh-and-blood beings, living, breathing, and sweating.
PHILLY

I saw a bumper sticker recently that struck me like a bolt of lightning. It read BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN PHILADELPHIA. It’s true! Have you heard about my hometown’s tradition of greasing the poles? We love being haters and have made some tired declarations, so what makes the City of Brotherly Love so . . . lovable? Here is a short list: “Go Birds!”; Wawa; the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s stairs and the Rocky Balboa statue; “The Soap Lady”; Tierra Whack; Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; Stephen Powers (aka ESPO); jawns; flags—not the old one, the newer gay one; electricity; hoagies; the Sound of Philadelphia; Jonathan Lyndon Chase; the Barnes Foundation; Alex G; Étant donnés; the Phillie Phanatic and Gritty; Terry Gross; the Philadelphia University of the Arts and Sid Sachs; serpentwithfeet; Sun Ra and his Arkestra; Horace Pippin; the Gross Clinic; Tastykake; Love Park . . . I can go on and on. And I will.
MANNEQUIN PUSSY, I GOT HEAVEN (EPITAPH RECORDS, 2024)

Sometimes you just have to scream. Or bark. Marisa “Missy” Dabice, the lead singer of this Philly-based outfit, begins her fourth studio album with a little hum and then a growl: “I went and walked myself like a dog without a leash.” Raw and at times unhinged, I Got Heaven feels like it’s balancing on a razor blade. Fiona Apple declared during her 1997 MTV Video Music Awards speech that “this world is bullshit”; MP’s latest record brings me back to that moment. I’ll take heaven wherever I can get it.
HOMEMADE HALLOWEEN COSTUMES AND JANE ASHER’S FANCY DRESS (OPEN CHAIN PUBLISHING, 1983)

My mom has always insisted that it’s fun to be scared. We created all kinds of costumes in our house: a ghost on vacation; a pile of laundry; a return-to-sender letter; a pickle. My brother and sisters and I would hide and try to frighten the living shit out of one another. It is something I still like to do. Get a roll of aluminum foil, gauze, a couple of sweatshirt sleeves, some string, and you can be a spider, a mummy, or a microwave. You cut a rubber mask of Bill Clinton in half horizontally and place the brow on top of a hat and, voilà, you’re Frankenstein’s monster. Stack another rubber mask on top of that hat and you’re Butt-Head. See Christian Holstad’s 2009 book, Fellow Travelers, for more brilliant costume ideas.
PATRICE: THE MOVIE (2024)

Philadelphia filmmaker Ted Passon’s latest documentary follows the life of disability-rights activist Patrice Jetter as she prepares for her commitment ceremony to Garry Wickham. The film captures Jetter and Wickham, who are both disabled, navigating the endless complexities of the United States health care system, and managing to find laughs in the process. I met Ted twenty-five years ago, and he asked me to make the costumes for his first movie, Robot Boy (2003), about a world built to alienate and obstruct anyone who seemed different. Like Mister Rogers, he envisions a kinder, gentler place for every one of our neighbors.
FRANK FILM (1973)

When I was a teenage art student, animator Howard Beckermann (1930–2024) showed me Frank and Caroline Mouris’s Frank Film, which changed my life. This wry and complex stop-motion animation, roughly eight minutes long—and made from thousands of hand-cut and collaged magazine clippings—tells the story of Frank’s life, narrated by Frank himself, on two different layers of audio. Frank speaks plainly about his hopes and dreams as a young artist while a series of words, mostly beginning with the letter F, serve as dance partners to a seemingly countless number of images rapidly passing by. The work is a graphic confection with endless depths of meaning. Frank Film taught me, at a young age, that you could make art about the things you like, or dislike, if you just stack ’em like a sandwich, then serve it cold.