The Lady is a Tramp: Klasika by Barbara Adler
Words by Justin Ramsey Photos by Paula Viitanen Long before his rise to prominence as one of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse was a something of a young aesthete. His doctoral dissertation examined the Künstlerroman, a literary genre that situates the artist in a struggle against her prosaic, everyday milieu. Arguing […]
Welcome to the Johnny Horton Remix
In this installment of Klasika, Barbara Adler gives us a taste of some of the music she’s working on as part of her year-long, multidisciplinary art project inspired by Czech tramping.
In Klasika, Barbara uses the Czech fascination with the American Wild West to explore themes of adaptation, appropriation, fiction and thievery. As part of this work, The Johnny Horton Remix project takes these themes and makes them danceable. For Barbara and her musical collaborators, Ten Thousand Wolves, the remix is an opportunity for music to […]
Hey you, it’s me
Story and audio recording by Barbara Adler. Photographs by Jirka Matousek and Míša. After posting “My Cowbojsky Boty,” Barbara Adler returned to Czech Republic, cast as a character in Czech Country, a documentary about Czech tramping which is also the subject of her year-long, multidisciplinary art project Klasika. Her return to Canada’s west coast brings […]
My Cowbojsky Boty
Or, "How to Own it When You Don't Own It."
Writing by Barbara Adler Illustrations by Brit Bachmann Photography by Barbara Adler and Ash Tanasiychuk Videos by Ash Tanasiychuk “A cowboy without a horse just wants to get to where they’re going.” This summer, I picked up that piece of cowboy philosophy by wandering – horseless — through the Czech countryside in a pair of […]