Tag: Art

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

#359

18×23 Acrylic on canvas.

I got a camera today. From New Zealand. From my favorite niece… I shouldn’t have favorites, but I do.

Passing a Passport I.D. photo place I was thinking… I should get a photo. And a passport. Who knows?

But reality is… I will never get out of the country. Never travel. Though this was a dream of my youth. And while I feel a bit of loss in this, it’s in no way a sense of loss of knowledge, or insight… I believe in Blake’s Minute Particulars. The universe is at your feet… in a grain of sand.
Maybe that’s why I’ve been obsessed with making art from patterns I find in the pavement beneath my feet. Mostly, unless they’re very colorful… people don’t get these pieces.
That’s ok. They’re the best things I’ve done.

#359