The Ides of March (or a profitable opportunity if Hallmark liked my ideas)

  I went to the Hallmark offices in midtown.  I showed them that I went to the internet and collected the best images in the spirit of the holiday. All they had to do was to commission their artists to make watercolors from the provided photographs and then print those on a good quality card stock.  They'd make a bundle and I only want 4% - after cost (I'm not greedy). I said, eventually once the Ides caught on, they could crowd source their content and the movement would fuel itself - they'd only have to exploit it.  

  After security escorted me out I had a troubling thought.  The behemoth of love and feeling that is the greeting card industry just might steal my idea and cut me out of the profit.  Watch for it. I'd bet everything on Hallmark using the "The apparition of Jesus in a Dog's ass," but that's just me.

All images courtesy the webernets-

The Ballad of Mr. Palmer (or when Objects Revolt)

This is a story.

This story could be true.

This story feels true.

This story reaffirms my views.

This story feels true because it reaffirms my views.

This story must be true.

This story is true.

This story and its trueness must be defended.

This is a story I’m heavily invested in.

This story will always be true even if it’s not for real.

This true story may not be real but I believe it is.

This is a believable true story.

This believable true story depends on my saying so.

This story has to be true.

Mr. Edward Palmer built the first stocks in Boston colony.  Stocks consisted of two hinged planks of wood set upon a pair of legs placed into the ground at an agreeable depth so as to resist the flailing of an active body.  The violator would be put in the stocks with his wrists and neck locked between to heavy pieces of wood, effectively hanging him (I say him b/c it was mostly males who were put into stocks, women faced much worse punishments such as branks (Google it)) by the most delicate of body parts and exposing him to public mockery. This punishment was meted out through bodily pain and community shame.  Palmer, from all accounts, was a professional.  He worked his trade and delivered his wares on time. When the Governors of Boston commissioned Mr. Palmer to build some stocks for the marketplace he obliged and charged them for his work.  They approved the contraption.  Not the price. 

So into the stocks Mr. Palmer went.

He served his time, one hour as justice demanded, and was released. We don’t know what happened to Edward Palmer after his parole – history didn’t take much notice of the unlucky carpenter after his brief incarceration. Life in the colony went on and the stocks were rarely vacant – Mr. Palmer did good work even if wasn’t at a fair price. 

This story has to be true.

This believable true story depends on my saying so.

This is a believable true story.

This true story may not be real but I believe it is.

This story will always be true even if it’s not for real.

This is a story I’m heavily invested in.

This story and its trueness must be defended.

This story is true.

This story feels true because it reaffirms my views.

This story reaffirms my views.

This story feels true.

This story could be true.

This is a story.

Life Jackets Float (but don’t keep you warm)

I met a man on the train and we talked about flooded tunnels.  What he would do in the event – what I would do in the event.  This man imagined his pickled liver as an emergency floatation device. He told me that his drinking drove off his beautiful wife and innocent children (a boy and a girl).  He called his daughter “the whispering angel.” He believed that his liver had prepared him to survive the worst of life because it allowed him to visit the worst of himself upon other lives. I considered what he said – it had a strange logic to it.  While I was corralling my thoughts to counter his point with my own - I realized this dude reeked; and I was the only other person in the subway car.  Every other rider had switched in between stops- and no one else had been getting on.  He kept talking and I eventually got home, but not before I changed cars.  I didn’t even excuse myself – I just walked away from the guy when we pulled into a station. Maybe I helped to make that liver more buoyant? When I got home I woke my wife and told her what this guy said.  And she told me to sleep on the couch.  “Why baby,” I asked.  “Because dear…you fucking smell.”

What’s Mine was Yours but now it’s Mine not Yours (or a Method for a Seamless Lifestyle)

On the occasion of What is Yours is Mine by Environmental Services currently on view at DODGEgallery in NYC.

Enviromental Services, owned/operated and staffed by Doug Weathersby and commonly referred to as ES, might be defined as a corporate entity masquerading as an artistic endeavor – or an artist playing at blue collar professionalism to justify artistic events that concluded when the client receives their invoice.  Talking about Weatherby’s project in the terms of “artist as company” is not interesting – and thankfully something the artist doesn’t pursue.  What is interesting about Weathersby’s ES is that his practice and product cannot be divided – and I don’t mean this in the boring the “artist is his art” kinda’ way – I mean it’s fascinating because ES as an entity is always open for business. The caveat is that thru ES Weathersby does not have to choose between work or play, the studio practice or the “getting of money to pay my rent” practice or any other dichotomy you could think up that typically divides an artist’s day to day routine.

When you step into the show at DODGEgallery you’re presented with a bunch of objects in a bunch of styles (to be perfectly scientific about it).  There’s photography, woodcarving, carpentry, painting and drawing – all very well done respectively. Weathersby knows how to make shit and he knows when to do something really well (a carved 8’ X-mas tree that resembles a cartoon tear or a really dangly severve head-cold like booger) or completely backasswards (cutting, what looks like, a 12” diameter, 1’ tall and then some, stump with dangerously unwieldy saw-zall) to get what he wants.  Each object in the show originated with other peoples art.  He visited the stable of artists at Dodge and gave them a very simple premise – let me use something of yours (whether it’s scrap or a finished piece) and I’ll do something for you.  His one rule was that whatever he took from those artists he must put to use – no waste.  This idea plays out in the gallery in two beautiful ways.

1. Can you be didactically didactic? Yes.  Does that mean it has to be explanatory and dry? No. Weathersby exhibits photos that have a bit of floating text describing his day’s activities, with dates and other pieces of vital information, such as money spent and hours worked - ES Logs as they’re called. Really these photos are not much more than someone’s diary except that each and every image is worth spending time with (they ain’t lazy pictures).  A video plays on a corner wall that recorded (from what I can tell) the fabrication of most of the pieces in the show.  You can pick out which artists made it into which piece in Weathersby’s exhibition but that has no bearing on its successes or failures.  This is why the show is so good -the source material is essential but it has no inherent value for this viewer.  Taylor Davis’ bits got cut up into a wall shelf/pedestal.  Weathersby decided to divide the material exponentially in half. He made cuts in her sheet goods by half every time – which results in this wave of squares that grows elegantly from the floor. Davis’ wood lost its brooding edge – Weathersby makes it laugh.  But the point is that it doesn’t matter that the material belonged to an artist – that’s just a neat factoid – gravy drizzled over the meat of the show.

2. If you throw it away does that means its garbage? Maybe, but not always.  What does it mean if I find things I really like in the trash? You’d be fun to hang out with.  The failure dumpster is largest sculpture in the show and appropriately titled ES Art Storage.  Imagine a large dumpster, so big it has one of those sliding square doors near the top and you’ll get the idea.  This dumpster contains every bit from every artist Weathersby involved and acts as a centerpiece for the exhibition.  Inside the dumpster one of the ES Logs is perched in a nest of shards and leavings. The exterior form of the object looks like a dumpster but because the walls of the thing are made from steel stencils and various plywoods and the “hatch” is a pitch-back (a little-leaguers device used to practice accuracy whereby a ball is thrown at it and netting strung in the aluminum frame bounces the ball back at the thrower – a one sided game of catch) and little green army men glued into platoons adorn the surface - this thing almost begins to resemble a fort.  Like a kid’s playhouse where everyone from the neighborhood came over with whatever they could steal from the shed out back and threw it together.  The fort-like appearance of the object makes a nice symmetry with the thrust of the show as a whole because in a way it is the analog version of the video that plays in the corner.  Point of fact Weathersby built ES Art Storage in the gallery with his leftovers.

Weathersby has designed a project that allows him to make art all the time – literally.  And then he is literal about display and putting this work into the world.  This could be very boring and dull and easily overwrought but Weathersby pulls it off.  And I know why he pulls it off.  Firstly he uses a wood-glue that cures to a perfect hue of safety orange and secondly there’s no nonsense. This dude, from the work at least, is not in the world throwing pigment in the air and quoting shit poetry while dancing in the dark.  The work is direct and clear and offers something very tangible to the viewer. Weathersby suggests that the creative moment is not isolated to a certain time of day or financial comfort and, thankfully, on the other hand he’s not proposing any romantic nonsense of art and artists.  This show works for all the right reasons.

Enviromental Services

J. 12 – F. 17 @ DODGEgallery 15 Rivington St., NYC 

Sense or Cents

"The world is a dangerous place and horrible things happen. There is no bad time or good time for atrocity – the vile nature of humanity may visit us in our homes, schools and places of worship whenever and where-ever – reason is not a prerequisite- this is a fact of life. So when I look at what happened at Sandyhook Elementary I am saddened but I am not defeated because a gun didn’t kill those kids – a person did. Guns had nothing to do with it.  Say we banned guns – then this guy would have walked into that school with a book of post-it notes and paper-cut 27 people to death. It’s obvious that guns had nothing to do with anything - it was this guy, and this guy alone.  Seriously folks, c’mon now.  Have you ever gone hunting? I have. I hunt for food – I mean, I eat what I kill, so you know I mean what I say, when I say “I hunt with my semi-automatic and fill that buck full of lead, “ it’s because I need to. Have you tasted venison riddled with shot? No? It’s amazing! Chomping down on a piece of metal with every bite - it’s euphoric.  It’s the way God intended. So when I hear that a 6 year-old has a hole in her head the size of a grape fruit all I can think is she shoulda’ been packing. Had she had her own 9mm straight shot, hair trigger, smooth bore, we wouldn’t even be hearing this story. I’ll go you one more.  Say little Susie didn't have a gun to defend herself she probably would been just fine if the Bible was there. If Susie could pray and be taught in the way of Jesus – God would have been there - he’d lay down an impenetrable shield of evil repellent like a quilt of kevlar righteousness! If we had prayer in school then I'd imagine those folks would have found the strength to resist the penetrating thrust of black powder and lead through Jesus. I weep for those kids, I do, but guns had nothing to do with what those folks experienced. It was the lack of GOD. All those folk who took Jesus away from these innocent lambs sacrificed them upon the altar of science. You can’t tell me guns and God are the problem – they’re not –it’s because Jesus wasn’t in that classroom and 6 year-olds can’t carry guns. No other reason. Some folks might say that that shooter had a chemical imbalance in his head screwin’ with his cognitive functions but you know what I say? My guns don’t lie – and neither does Jesus. I don’t need to hear no nonsense about mental instability or accessibility to firearms – it’s all lies. Guns ain’t never hurt nobody. It’s people."  

                            - overheard at Sloppy Molly's Bar and Grill

        
 - The events of the past week are deplorable and traumatic. We must remember that in the swirl of media coverage and political nonsense real people and children are dead.  Lives have been lost at the hands of an unstable individual. We will hear many things in the following weeks – most of them outrageous and absurd – so I would implore you to use your better judgment when listening to, or watching the news. And then I would ask you to remember that if you did not lose your child on Friday, that though you may be grieving, you are in a unique position to take action and make a change. I do not think mass shootings - as a perennial occurrence - should become an American staple (sadly the truth is, this might be so). Too much nonsense is spread around events like these - what matters are the people, the friends, the parents and siblings who survived but more often than not our attention is focused on the shooter. The trumped up politics around the issues of gun violence are just that - inflated rating fueled nonsense. The suggestion that certain things cannot be talked about because it isn't the right time is a lazy excuse used by folks with even lazier brains.  Every issue must be on the table, and by deconstructing and examining them - as rational adults - then, maybe, we can see a change in the culture. 

WWJB or (The motivations of House Plants)

Dear Lil' Guy,

The Universe is trying to kill you. Don't be scared - she's not mean or specific (she's not even aiming at you) - but you're in the crosshairs. When I say Universe, capital U, I'm not speaking of the cosmos, stardust, nebulae or cosmic particles - I mean to say existence - your Universe Of Being. And in that U.o.B. EVERYTHING is trying to kill you. Don't be scared. It's alright. Everything you know plans on your death - has designs on your demise. This is the truth. Even Jesus wants you dead - and most folk think of him as a nice guy. But your death has nothing to do with being nice or mean - the U.o.B. has no personality, it doesn't care about you. You're here absorbing material and secreting waste all over the cradle and enjoying everything you can. Who blames you? Existence is short and death is long. Take what you can get and don't look back. I'm with you. I live in a place where I can pull myself up by the shoelaces and job create - and when I've achieved a certain kind of freedom I have the option of buying whatever flavor enlightenment I care to taste. It's a good thing. If I can leave you with one thought (blame your parents for naming me Godfather), it is this: The plants in the room want to eat you alive – move faster boy.

Love,
Your bitter elder.

There be monsters here

There be monsters here. These great ferocious beasts, with wild teeth biting and sandpaper tongues lapping at our sensitive parts, circle and hunt our little clan of pilgrims.  I’ve been in their lair. I didn’t lead the way – I just followed the path of innocent dead.  I’ve seen things nonetheless – horrible things, and remarkable things but of course the desiccated bodies of dreams moaned in the gutter and sold me coffee.  In the lair of monsters there is no history there is only myth. I tried to find out though – I searched and asked and dug and shoveled and poked and prodded and pleaded and begged, but monsters must preserve the myth. That’s the only truth in the shiny cave of vanity –myth must triumph above all else. I asked my guides how they managed to navigate the land of beasts and they pointed me toward a box. A box divided horizontally many times and then divided again vertically many more times. They told me many stories about the vertical divisions and how those divisions also divided the mind. Expanding the compartments of impression and prejudice, taste and touch, sense and sensibility. You can tell the monsters from the skin-walkers ‘cause the monsters aren’t vertically expanded. I said “oh. I might not be coming back.” They said there are ways to deal with the beasts in their place of power – “vertically divide and you may be insulated.” I told them I am happy to watch the show but I won’t be staying for the encore.  The weather was there but I wish the monsters were beautiful.