ZINE #3
Fartsy
The Promenade of the Influential Critic Honoré Daumier, (1808-1879) Cartoon from ‘Charivari’ magazine, 24 June, 1865 (lithograph)
My Seattle studio, 2010
HYSTERICAL DESIRE
H
ysteria is a state of unmanageable emotional upheaval. Historically, it has been attributed only to women, due to turbulent uteri that their weak constitution could not defend against. Then again, around that time Plato believed a uterus was like a living creature that wanders throughout a woman’s body, causing myriad problems.
music hang aborted sorrowfully sticking to the spilled coffee on the floor.
Once in a glorious while, my hysteria expresses itself creatively. In the studio, I enter a fugue-like state, a series of non-words echoing in the hollow of my head, hand moving as in a dream through charcoal, pigment, or over keys. Paint becomes instinct and runs to My hysterical state mostly inspires my wishes nothing more. desires tied to the flesh. I feed, I flee, and I fuck at abandon. Is I’ve come to believe there is a desire a masculine or feminine certain sentience in this madness. affliction? It is passive bubbling up At moments, I am a raw nerve in from the muck of the psyche but the midst of a churning universe, also inspires action... maybe desire without control of my affect but a primitive intellect still burns which is intersex... is both creative and destructive, All artists are androgynous. In the as well as brutal, exploratory and studio we are impregnated and sexual. impregnator, at least we are self propagating. Our fatherless works outlive us or are butchered at birth. opposite: Scrambled/Transposed, 2011 Hacked canvases and shred sheet Enamel on metal, 24”x36”
BLACK ART
I create art, I am black, but do I make ‘black art’? . . . As any good American, I labor under the idea that conceptions of race are unimportant. Yet I am also not ignorant, I know that growing up in Los Angeles, California - a fairly integrated metropolis that I had the luxury of feeling this way. Indeed when viewing art, my thoughts are purely based on aesthetics before anything else. In many ways I feel if a work cannot stand on its own visual/literary/sonic merit without contextual details then its not really worth looking that deeply into. This universal theory of merit persisted in my mind until I reached college and I began to notice my critiques ended up focused more on race than my more lightly
pigmented classmates. It all came to a head with a mildly controversial video I made about stalking. I wanted to portray a stalker who was darkly who was funny due an over-the-top portrayal. In it, an unseen protagonist follows a (Caucasian) female friend of mind with a hand held cam
accompanied by Darth Vader style heavy breathing and an idiotically obtuse stream-ofconsciousness poem. I thought it was hilarious, my teachers and fellows did not. It became a poster child for cleverly worded Mandingo rape fears. I was surprised not only because of my distance from Jim Crow laws but also because the issue never entered my head. Time passed, I left college and traded its more overt questions of race in art for more subdued inferences. And I still wonder if, in the eyes of the greater art world consortium, can an artist of color make art with a capital “A” or only a capital “B”?
SALON DE
previous: Brutha, Brutha What’s Going On? Digital painting
L’OBSESSION
THE FINE ART OF FALLING APART
Here Lies the Painter Paul Klee: [...] Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.
RUBENESQUE
I
am addicted to flesh. When I see it exposed on the street, I am tempted to squeeze it, lick it, kiss it, bite it and expose myself to it.
I
t must be what attracts me to Peter Paul Rubens. His plump figures are heavy with promise on those old canvases. In his pastoral scenes, fabulously painted heavy hipped vixens frolic frozen. The effortless sfumato depicting their voluptuousness in pearly tones makes them at once earthly and ghostly - thought and form. And this is what I actually seek - an idealized flesh.
R
eal flesh, with i i t ’s dampness and unpredictability between my fingers lacks the romance of Peter’s pigments. This dream flesh envelopes my senses, it is an idealized imperfection.
A
nd such is the land of art and artists an escape from life that lacks the nourishment that dreams exhibit.
A MAN OUT OF TIME
A
t the end of high school, I discovered the Pre-Raphaelites, a painting movement from turn of the century Europe. It was founded by a small group of painters and poets who believed that only by returning to the styles and themes that existed before Raphael could art be saved. Along with the beauty of the paintings they produced, I was attracted to their anachronism. I mean here they were, in the midst of the industrial revolution dreaming of knights. Knights!
B
ut I knew this anachronism very well myself. I’d always felt a man out of time and was myself ensconced in a velvet dream of Keats’ poetry and making of antiquated portraits
SMELLY OLD BOOKS
Everything is praised here, from Lovecraft’s AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE humility to his virulent long-form mash racism, though the note from one sections on his financial troubles, self-imposed literary monster to a seclusion in service of long-dead writer of creating his so-called such. Over the course of ‘great texts” smack its little under 90 pages more than a little bit of of bite-sized essays, romanticizing poverty. Mr. Houellbecq probes the themes, biography and personality of H.P.. Lovecraft.
HP LOVECRAFT
A
WORK IN PROGRESS
THE LADY & THE MONK
P
ico Ayer displays masterful prose here that is furtive, searching and lush. In his cultural and literary journey he finds is a complex and contradictory culture that spurns the hopes of Westerner’s in search of Eastern epiphanies. Sprinkled with poems of monks and courtesans, Iyer never bores.
HIROSHIMA
MON AMOUR
I
’d bought this book some years ago in my favorite used bookstore in LA, but never read it until now. This slim collection of the film’s script, original treatment, and character descriptions definitely reads more artschool than Hollywood in the best possible way. Besides the beauty of the text, the book offers insight into a bygone era of French film making and postwar mind sets.
MEMOIRS OF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS
W
ritten by Daniel Paul Schreber in 1884 at a German mental institution. He believed that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a “crisis in God’s realm,” one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. A fascinating read and major influence on Freud.
one, 2011 Enamel on watercolor paper 4�x5�
two, 2011 Enamel on watercolor paper 4�x5�
OUTSIDER ART
Self Portrait #3, 2003 Oil and charcoal on linen 8�x14�
I WHO S ANYWAY?