Category: Art

Pope Frank in Philly

Pope Frances elects to share his dinner with 300 homeless in D.C.
Think about this. What makes this so moving? I see in this, the power of religion … as essentially, the power of poetry. Of narrative. Of myth. Dogma and theology are its decomposition… not, as in: deconstruction. As in… of a corpse.
Fuck the hierarchy, the real estate empire of the RC institution–I see no validation of any of that in what he’s doing. But I can damn well feel and recognize the power of the narrative he’s living out before us… a pageant infused with life… or life, enriched in it’s becoming, pageant. This is theater, someone told me, to dis it.
If it’s theater–if that’s really what it is: theater–than we should fucking celebrate it.
I spent the afternoon walking around Center City, talking with people of the streets (I really dislike, “homeless”… a condition, is not an identity). There may or may not have been plans to round up these Philly citizens and incarcerate them for the weekend. There were at least rumors to the effect.
I wouldn’t rule out the possibility–but I think Pope Frank’s theater piece in D.C. made that way less likely. How could Nutter look him in the eye, if he’d okay’d that shit? The playback publicity would have crucified him.
At least I hope so.
I don’t buy your religion, Frank… but you’re damn good at theater… and making the best of where you are.
I tip my glittery hat to you.
Welcome to Philly. But fuck Saint Serra forever and ever.

Artists as… tricksters of the real

sumeria1
I came across this cleaning my room… from 2009: two years before OWS, and 3 years before I would begin making visual art again.

…poets and artists are the ultimate subversives. Not prophets and seers, as the Romantics thought, not hermetic guides blessing humanity with visionary truth, but…
tricksters of the real,

Marxists …
of Night at the Opera, destroyers of painted sets ripping away the masks of power, tearing down the curtains of the Corporatocracy–all that makes it possible to believe in the American Hologram–the artifice of the military/industrial/prison complex. By using the stuff of our collective illusions as raw material for… play,

for delight,
for life

—they…we… poke holes in the artifice that everyone might see, that the vision be not for the few, but for all.

#368, #369

22×25 Assemblage, trash wood wire aluminum paint
Collectively, my trash assemblages constitute a kind of post-disaster, post-human world. From the remnants, a new reality emerges. Sometimes I wonder about carrying this art trash theme I’ve been exploring too far… the assemblages, the jewelry, the pavement series… then I listen to Bach’s chromatic inventions…there is no end, till the last contrapuncta of the Art of the Fugue
#369 22x25 assemblage, wood wire alum paint

The end is always a beginning

#357

Working on another painting in my PAVEMENT SERIES.

It’s what I see as I walk. Beneath my feet, the crust of civilization, broken, breaking up–color and life oozing from the cracks. Not so different from my trash assemblages. People seem mostly not to get it… the sidewalk and pavement pieces.

I don’t give a fuck. This is my best work