I got asked by a MKE gallerist to come up with something spiritually-themed for a show I don’t know much about, so I went down to the dollar store and bought these.  They make me very uncomfortable.  Because: while I shot them to snap into focus how “white” Xmas and spirituality often are when talked about in the abstract, does taking pictures of borderline racist kitsch implicate me somehow?  This is a question I am really asking: please chime in.

A lot of my recent work has dealt with hostility, force and violence.  This isn’t a coincidence when you think for a moment about the state of the world today, my interest in exploring masculinity, and the circumstances of my goofy life.  But pick “menace” as prompt for artmaking and you end up being able to easily make a lot of art that superficially doesn’t look alike but has a sense of things not being right.  I guess this is sort of approaching Freud’s uncanny, except the scales are tipped in this work toward the uncanny as (sometimes buried) threat.  My favorite pic is the knives one, because it’s so simple, and yet…

One of the reasons I enjoyed the late-career Warhol retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum so much when I saw it is it struck me how canny and deeply invested Warhol was in exploring the idea of display.  In the work that came before Pop, display was often an afterthought, the careful maintaince or theatrical staging of something already created elsewhere.  Warhol (I think) was just as interested in the display strategies of the supermarket or the classroom as the art gallery, though, so you can see that in the layers of his work, especially when religious imagery is mixed with motorcycles and price signs in large 15×20′ paintings in his later work and it still comes across as both cool-to-the-touch and sincere (if that’s a good thing).

Of course I am all up in the business of display; I recently ressurected an old project of taking pictures of antique stores and got/scanned an anatomy textbook–two different kinds of display that are meant for different aims but both of which ultimately echo the supermarket, vs. the gallery, in their strategy.

Image dump:

I realized this morning that every person I’ve known in a position of power in the art world who has befriended me and acted as a mentor and then ultimately betrayed me is part of a working system that actually has nothing to do with me.  It’s advantageous for people to be warm and friendly and make a lot of promises they have no intention of keeping; it’s a way of keeping a lot of plates spinning; the problem about continually getting burnt is that I’m autistic so I’m so naive that I (always!) take people at their word. 

Some people are great and you can trust them; but more often than not I’m just a tiny blip on the radar of most people, especially (cough) “busy” people, and that’s that.  What’s painful is that I keep having to relearn this lesson over and over but I did take to heart some advice I found in the (excellent) account of the US Iraq invasion, Generation Kill: “Don’t pet a burning dog.”  I need to write that shit down and pull it out and recite it to myself whenever anyone starts acting cagey toward me.  The world is full of burning dogs.

And so on to another image dump; this is all from a book I found where I work, a ’70s book on stage makeup.  I’ve spent the fall putting together a 40-image portfolio that is supposed to make the rounds but is not, but anyway the top image is from it and resonates nicely with some other photos I’ll post soon.

Also, I could not figure out the reasoning behind the makeup color charts at all, and I took a whole class in this shit in college; but I like the way they look.  

Also, as soon as you’re done reading this go buy and listen to Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone and put it on headphones loud and come back and read this blog and it (the blog) will make more sense.

So I’ve taken maybe 1,000 photos in the last two months, made a few dozen paintings and sculptures, and scanned in a whole bunch of other images from books to use as art fodder.  I’m hyperactive because I’m waiting waiting waiting WAITING WAITING FUCKING WAITING and I need to create the illusion of forward momentum.  Art: it’s like therapy, except your photos never judge you and you can make money off them if you’re well-connected.

Back a minute, I went on about pattern and decoration being integral to my work; this has come out very strongly in my Dollar Tree practice, because there is a nearly endless supply of shiny crappy shit you can buy there and make close, unfocused photos of.  Also down the way a bit in the strip mall where I work there’s a Joann Fabrics where you can and do buy a yard of this or that for similar experiments.

I’ll theorize more later (I hope to get back to doing this more) but for now, here’s a metric ton of faggy (Dean Sameshima’s term, meant in a good way) photographs of tawdry crap.  The first one and last two are my faves.

A conversational tidbit today:

My friend Tom: “Your problem is that you don’t have any money.”

Me: (hysterical, slightly unhinged laughter)

I checked out the adult services section of Craigslist this week ’cause I am that desperate but there was nobody trolling for any m4m.   So, sigh.  Otherwise I spend my time trying to curate art shows nobody wants to be in, and making new work, for which my whole m.o. now is: find something at the Dollar Tree, buy it, photograph it, can it.  I can’t even find any models for any portraiture ’cause everybody wants to get paid, now, even ugly people like me.  But whatever.  You just push push push push push and then something eventually happens or you die of exhaustion.

So here are some dollar store pics, plus bonus profanity.  Enjoy!   (This streak also has to do with Warhol; I will write about him soon.)

So here you go.  An art show (attended by a whopping 15 people) about heavy/scary/hardcore things would not be complete without a shibari demo.  Shibari is the Japanese art of erotic rope bondage, and what was going on in the gallery was not erotic but it was defintely something.  And no, that’s not me in the photos.

I’m worried that if I do raise the dosh to apply for an embed and the Army looks in to me they’ll find this and get scared off, but here you go anyway.

Sometimes, when you are an image scavenger like I am, you come across something just totally mindbending and, well, wrong.  As in, “this should not exist, and yet here it is.”  I’ve been doing a lot of image scavenging lately vs. the other kind (traditional photography) because it’s a nice switch-up now and then.  Mostly I’ve been scanning the covers of old westerns and blowing them up to very large scale but then I got an anatomy/physiology workbook and encountered within its pages the images below:

So, you say, that’s an anatomical drawing of a box of crackers?  Why yes it is.   Why does it exist?   Who can say.   But now it’s sitting digitally on my harddrive and will probably someday soon be a large color lightjet print, so that many more people can stop and look at and say what the fuck is this?, which is (I’m not kidding) one of art’s primary responsibilities: to jolt people cognitively out of their expectations.  You would maybe expect a photo of a box of crackers to hang on a wall as part of some sub-Shore or sub-Goldin project, but no: all you get is a large, clean anatomical drawing.  No easy explanation forthcoming.  It’s this jolt that I look for when I look at art, and I think it’s where a lot of the pleasure comes in when you make the non-touchy-feely kind of art that I do, because I’d stand firm behind my statement that my art’s just as pleasurable as some kind of gooey painterly abstraction.  (Which, now that I’ve painted big 6×4′ paintings, can I say I’m a painter, too?)

So I’ve initiated the process of going to Iraq by going about renewing my passport and getting a highly discounted four-month gym membership.  But that costs money, you say!  Yes.  Yes it does.  I have been making a lot of work with hopes of selling it in hopes of raising the $200 I need for a passport and gym membership and the $5000 I need to actually go to Iraq.  Below are some examples of stuff I’ve made; prices range from $250 to $1000, and most of the stuff is painting or drawing and most of it, expecially the explosion photos, is large.   Contact me if you’re interested, all six of you who read this thing.

There’s a big Warhol show coming up at the Milwaukee Art Museum and I’ve been thinking about Warhol a lot lately because my recent work and “subcontracting” echoes a lot of what Warhol did.  More on that later, but for now, some art.

untitled prints from the Mayhem series

an abstract painting consisting entirely of denim

FAIL

diptych of paintings, 16×20″ each

drawing of text taken from a news story on Pitchfork.com

Drawing from last year, though it works with the metal/heavy stuff.

Not sure if this is readable at this size.  Small drawing of fake metal bands.  If I ever start a metal band I’m calling it Evil Bakesale.

Large painting, acrylic on velvet.  The text is from the Coil album of the same name and the full title is Stolen and Contaminated (for Sleazy, after Christopher Wool).

Sleazy emailed me, by the way, if that kind of thing knocks your socks off.  I emailed him about using a Coil track in the metal show and he emailed me back and said yes and was very nice.  I nearly wet myself with hero worship joy.

I’m getting deeper into this “metal” thing.  Everywhere I look, I see something that seems to point toward the hyperextended masculinities of metal and horror culture.  Maybe all those CDs I’ve been listening to have been starting to pay off, even though now I’m listening to The xx, which if you haven’t heared them stop right now and go listen.

Okay.  So we can all agree about that how there have been three perfect pop songs this decade, and The xx’s “Crystalised” is one of them.  (The others are “Hey Ya” and “Crazy.”)  Back to extended masculinities.

The hands stuff below works for me on two levels.  First, it just fucking looks metal.  Actually, if you put anything a little overdrawn in white against a dark background I would say that’d be true, but especially for these diagrams, which show the articulation of the fingers, there’s a sort of uncanny/macho feeling to them that seems to link up with metal’s often hyperextended articulation of cover art, where the super-realistic meets the fantastic somewhere in a land of majesty, fantasy, and gore.

The other reason the fingers are metal is the mastery of the drawings themselves.  This kind of complete mastery, like the mastery over an electric guitar, seems like a trope of masculinized excellence that you only see in certain strains of jazz and metal.  That kind of mastery goes in and out of style, culturally, but it’s been a constant in representational drawing, which is something I know nothing about.  This is where biography creeps in: I “came of age” musically during The Grunge Era where mastery was looked with skepticism and the idea was immediacy and indelibility, and I think those are values that have crossed over into my art work, where “hard work” is less important than grabbing the viewer.   Which begs the question of the masculinity of something that’s opposed to traditional masculinity; I don’t think you just automatically get femininity, you get some kind of androgyny I’m still interested in exploring.

Hands: