“Beneath the Underdog”
nature mort with dog’s head and lotus blossom ITIN 2005
It’s been a strange couple of days. The dog had surgery on Friday to remove a large and growing lipoma on her tiny stick-like legs. She’s been deformed and nick-named “lumpy” for months, but when the tumor kept growing at a rate that her skin couldn’t match, she had to go under the knife. Picking her up from the Vietnam Veternarian – she was stoned and wounded immaculate (with a ridicoulous smile on her droopy dog-eyed face). Seeing her helpless and lost sent me back in time to the two years when my dad was fighting cancer. It brought up the sad dissolution of that time: the passivity of watching some one you love in pain, or worse dying…
The body is a language sculpture. It is a thing built from a circular story – the double helix code that tells a stomach to be a stomach, the liver a liver, the brain a brain and the heart to be a heart. When the grammar of that language breaks down and the body starts to babble to itself, the body grows in chaotic, nonsensical ways. That is what cancer is.
Watching a loved one’s body language turn meaningless, can cause all meaning to evaporate for the viewer… Least wise, it did that for me. I went sort of crazy for a while after watching my old man die. Looking at the dog standing there in the middle of the snowy streets not knowing where she was, or what to do, or how to move forward, turned the water on in my eyes. It was pretty much my own state after the old man finally died. It was one of those Citizen Kane in the hall mirror moments…epiphany. The dog is my father, I am the dog and on and on. A rose is a rose is a rosebud.
The loss of meaning basically sent me around a bend and a sort of self destructive suicidal bender. I howled into Paris, where instead of dying, I fell in love with painting again and also ended up falling in love with writing again and photography, and film, and poetry and anything and everything else including my girlfriend. Anyway when you’re in love with all media thinking about paint and thinking about glue seems a jolly boring thing to do.
Andy Warhol
David Bowie
Marshall McLuhan
Tennesse Williams
signal 66
