The portrait of Ms Kate Worum and her photo of me in the studio the day I painted her.. Second Jpg. screen capture from promotional notice about book (Stu Mead my Man Bag partner is the subject of a new book about his art produced in Berlin). While the text excerpt is odd the bibiliography is fine. The photo taken by a professional erotic photographer the model holds our Man Bag Magazine in her hands her body a frame a context.Of all the pictures I showed in Mike Kelley's graduate studio class in Pasadena, this was the only photo to cause alarm. It is a very powerful piece, who made it? I claim authorship my Man Bag cover and a client I supplied with magazine. But it a larger sense it was where I felt I was most tangent to Marcel Duchamp's readymades. To the erotics of the accidental life,chance operations, so-to-speak. I say erotics because the piece is anonymous yet very personal to me and my small spot in a bigger picture.
Starts again - Over my life I have kept various correspondences some quite large ( a friend of mine said he had a grocery bag full of my letters another friend two bags full!). My interest in language is very intense for a visual artist maybe even more so since we have often less time to read because our craft can be very labor intensive. I was born and raised in Chicago I left the city in 1967. I've written many letters of a very diverse types, I've been trying to turn my blog into a letter because I can't write everybody anymore. Disinclined < as in how you going to keep him down farm now that he's been published all over? > ....Another artist I used to write destroyed all the letters I had written her except for where I wrote about her art. Now I feel life moving faster and letter writing seems so past tense. But we do send out ripples in the pond of time. Nietzsche wrote that one can hide in a spare manner or surrounded by too much, hidden amidst the pages. I have always been too much, sadly mania and forced speech run-on-sentences disconnected ideas lost threads this is my writing like all the shitty typewriters I wore out writing on and on. Is it different than birds chirping? More annoying because it has more content? So when you see my paintings what ever know a mind is at work. This isn't just wanking , or theory it's the art of the future tense. Will come to be - says - philosophical addict. Nietzsche is the drug of choice for lovers of Heraclitus!
Starts over - Politics the genderized variety was at work in that response . Very understandable too it's a very rude photo albeit thrilling aesthetically and enormously tangent to the Man Bag project which was very much intended to cross the boundary. Not just bad taste just enraging and for some a sign-of-our-times (even given the photo is 20+ years old.) I think of it as one of my little masterpieces, still offensive after all these years.
Secret for artists - You need to live long lives staying alive is the only way to succeed. If you live long enough you can see the future and how your work fits into things. Or what you finally acquire some humility in the face of your own extnction? Art is long and life is short, still. an infinite relation
Later still. "The relationship of language to painting is an infinite relation....Niether can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see;what we seenever resides in what we say. Michel Foucault