Trash to Art to Trash

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What to do with it all? Climb up from my basement dungeon studio… stacking and organizing and picking out what to paint over, what to trash.

So much stuff.

Think I’m gonna start taking pieces to A-Space and leaving them in the take-it-free-or trash-it corner. A lot of early assemblages–a few have held up, but they were all experiments (big grown-up word for ‘play’); making them was fun and gave me courage to go on to do other things–but I have to do something with the clutter. The nicer pieces get coated with cement dust from the walls.

Really depressing.

This weekend. Take maybe a dozen or so pieces to A-Space. They’re all at least interesting, in a conceptual sort of way. Compositions of street debris: old can lids, stucco flakes, roofing tar, nails, cigarette butts… dirt. Glued, nailed, tied with string to trashed pieces of weathered plywood or composition board. Capitalism in decay.

What ever possessed me?

I’ve got the larger pieces and paintings stacked face to the wall. Keep them a little cleaner. Some nice pieces. Come see them. Make me an offer and they’re yours.

Mansplaining: Tribute to Charles Dana Gibson

 

To a few, “Gibson Girl” might ring a bell… but mostly, this artist has been lost to memory. (though if you search down in these images, you’ll see New Yorker Cover… 75 years in embryo)… I mean, the 4 women on the subway: the nun, the religious prude, etc… ) and a brilliant illustration of Mansplaining. Though the Gibson Girl was a commercial pin-up, she was a woman not to be messed with.images

And Gibson’s ink drawings are brilliant… crow quill pen and India ink. Think: Walt Kelly (Pogo), Bill Watterson (Calvin & Hobbes)…
My mother, who was a wonderful artist with pen and ink, had a book of Gibson drawings. I wish I knew what happened to it.

Gibson, as an artist, may have vanished from memory… but he was brilliant. I love his work. Check them out. There is nothing like the “Gibson Girl” in pop marketing now… she was fucking not to be messed with!

And his penmanship… excuse me, penship… was exquisite!

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5″ x 5″ Silverpoint, gouache highlights, on clayboard. I see where this is going… picked up a free copy of Gray’s Anatomy. (Click to Zoom!) Thinking–histology, microscopic structures of cell and tissues. I mean, really–look at these!
First art I was paid for–microscopic studies my professor in an embryology class had me do for him. Crow quill pen… all stippling. Took me forever, for $5.00 each.
It just occurred to me that THIS is what I was responding to in the patters I saw in broken pavement (HERE for instance).

#505 Silverpoint

View GALLERY HERE.

Galleries, Museums, and The Great Art Frameup

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It’s increasingly clear to me that the way museums display works of art (and most galleries), alters them as surely as if the curators took brush and paint and wrote messages of ownership across them. What we see in a museum is filtered propaganda, honoring the structures of power, wealth, and those who control it, drawing life from the art and using it like a drug to induce a state of awe and subservience, not for the art, but the invisible powers that assembled the display. How grateful we must be, that all this was gathered for us in the marble halls of these mausoleums–a gesture of largess from the wealthy investors for us to view. Where would we be without them! As though the artists (who in their lifetimes, would have been lucky if they could afford entrance), were mere labor, expendable, like the workers who tunneled under the Hudson… 14 of whom died in its construction…and not a one of them named, ‘Holland.’

As though this art would not exist, certainly not for us, but for these glorious prisons.

What is wrong with this picture, is not the fault of the museums and it’s keepers… they are merely playing the roles assigned to them–cleaner and less bloodstained, but comparable, nonetheless, to the police and soldiers, prison guards and executioners of this Empire of Money and Death.

Impossible to imagine in these cathedrals of art, that there might be an other way–where people don’t surrender their creative lives for adulthood, and art flows from the lives of the people, present everywhere and in everything we do and make. Where artists don’t have to compete for the one spot in ten thousand where they can live by their art, and everyone can have works of art beside them, not just the wealthy.

 

Capitalism controls our very imagination–that we cannot believe anything else can exist. How then, as artists, can we let ourselves serve these robotic masters!

No Revolution without Art! No Art without Revolution!