"DEAR LEADER"

If you have ever been to an old school cemetery you probably came across portraits of the deceased printed and baked on enamel….Somehow, I dug up the technique and applied it to natural history as we know it, or what’s left of it…. Rest in Peace species…. 26 year old work…Gulp…!

Free is good and free I like, but sometimes it can be quite the; proverbial arse. The crowds, the hot urban muthas, in all manners of disinterest and fashionista, the laboriously fermented paragraphs dripping off and on the whitewash, seasoned with more than a whiff of bourgeoisie docent docent bag.
School of neuron-art effluvia; masters of curation, celebrity chef guru rug-rats, half and half and all confuse-a-bourgeoise; in all manners of enlightening vocalula-blubba-ephemera…. Some be it, I beanz to the SFMOMA.

But please don’t get me right, I do like most the art, and having been around quite a few of my art producing mecca bruthas I find them generally pleasant, fun, and not too terribly full of pretenses or flashy farts, that is if they are good ones, tis the mediocre ones who tend to be those you might wish to consider utterly insuffra-bla…

It’s not he art I grippe; it’s the para-ggraphs, the literary curatorial arts; inducin’ nausea, words of the talentless curatorial class, the scholarly rabble, nipping at the heals of those who for better of for worst, feel compelled to spend their lives making art, which is as we mostly know by now, broader than Chronos’s spatulas….and that’s not half bad a phenomena…

Being that the place was crawling with members of the sexes I like to have, dressed in all manner of interest, to my one and only salacious spineless vertebra; I, in desperation, duly copied words from afore mentioned museum whitewash; in the hope that I may purge these feverish words from me minds:

Scanned from no less than six short paragraphs:

” …..haunting, evince, frank, unflinching, carefully tended relationship, psychological terrain, balancing formal and aesthetic refinement, enigmatic evocation, uncanny, room-size tableaux, dreamlike, multicultural community, critical eye, unflinching gaze, favoring myths and legends, jewel-like, historical narratives, tableaux, seamlessly moves between, haunting and disturbing, juxtaposing, metamorphosis, pervasive concerns, alter egos, personae, metaphorical meaning, grapple, synthesize, cosmological narratives, thermodynamics, phenomena, overlap thematically, fantastical narrative, quantum mechanics, question the phenomena, weaving together, rainbow celebration, naive, exuberant, residue, formally, rationalism, obstinately strange, nonsensical, absurdist, anarchy poetry jam session, intimate spaces, repertoire, exuberant, reside, manifest, nourished visionary work, compel, upends, elaborates, speculative work, conceptual concerns, appropriation, translucency, ephemerality and permanence, relentlessly, coalescence, ephemeral, conceptualism….”

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My son Raphael and his brother Gabriel went back to their yankee grandmother’s home in Virginia and found old college work of mine somewhere in the basement……Raphael shoveled snow from a christmas winter storm and gave my ex-brother in law the cash to ship a box full of 25 year old work back to me, which I just received.

Back in 84,’ I was, as I am still, extremely fond of any kind of natural history displays and one of the first thing I do whenever I fly into a new city is seek out their natural history museum…
I remember calling the a biologist or zoologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City who cordially invited to come down and peruse their collection both back stage and in the Museum’s galleries without as much as checking my credentials (whatever a 19 year old might have had at the time).

At the time I thought that photographing dioramas as well as storage units in the museum’s research facilities was a swell and brilliant idea, not realizing that Hiroshi Sugimoto had beaten me to the punch…..
Intelligence I gathered, a few months later while visiting a camera store (whose name escapes me at the moment) in mid-town Manhattan, by gazing disappointedly at a beautifully printed large print of an ostrich and it’s chicks, hanging over the counter…. A diorama I had also photographed a few months back at the Museum…..

These Polaroids were used as reference shots to guide me in my selection of future large format black and whites…. To be continued…I have to pick someone downtown.