Got sick of looking at these tentative figure things I’ve been doing… I just couldn’t imagine a time when I would like to look at them over a period of days, or months, so I blew up at them with ochre architecture… and speaking of blown up architecture, the Drawing Center is getting muscled out of “Freedom Tower”, because they may, MAY mind you, put up a show that might, MIGHT mind you, criticize America, or something. So the terrorists have won. I’m less afraid of people who want to blow me up, than I am of the bone heads clucking about the Drawing Center and even worse the politicians who listen to the them. These people claim to love America, but they love it the way Lenny loves rabbits. It sucks terribly that so many people died in the twin towers, but just because you’re related to one if them, doesn’t mean you get to be McCarthy…. just because you’re McCarthy doesn’t mean you get to be McCarthy… It’s just too ridiculous. Freedom? Freedom? That said, I never thought the Drawing Center should be there. It’s too great a little institution and I think that the whole project downtown is devolving into kitsch. The Center would have ended up all pumped up on steroids and lose its intimacy. While I’m ranting: How did this country let those idiots invade Iraq? 
Monthly Archives: August 2005
Wet Paint
Stairing
These two bigguns have been changing today….
The Point Of The Arrow (or You're being followed)
Or there is a mob at your back, I’m not certain
Which witch is witch is where…
But you are alone
Among many
you
I
streatched a wall full of canvas and drew another mob and large bridge scene. My studio mate just told me she is off to Israel with her husband.
When I first met her, she said, “My name is, “Dalit.”
“What?” I said.
“Delete,” She said. “If you want to remember me, Just think of what you do on the computer when you make a mistake: Delete.”
“Dalit… what is that Greek?”
“Israeli,” She said.
And I was thinking “Of course… the land of mistakes. A delete button would come in handy there.” I was also thinking it sounded ominous what with the numbers of Israelis and Palestinians being deleted all the the time, but I didn’t say that. I just nodded as she talked about how life in Israel is crazy and seems like it will never get better and so she is glad to be in New York.
I was thinking, “Life in New York is getting kind of crazy too.”
Anyway, She’s going to the Kibbutz where she was raised to retrieve old films for a mixed media installation she’s doing in September. The kibbutz is right near the Gaza strip area… The recent rocket attacks have been near her parent’s home and now there are mobs of conservatives protesting the scheduled transfer of land to the Palestinian Authority.
I told her and her husband to be safe and the husband said, “We should be safe, there are twenty thousand soldiers where we’re going. The problem is getting through the crowd of them,” and he made a gesture like swimming, or like Moses parting a sea of green.
I said, “Crowds of soldiers don’t seem to help much in Iraq.”
He shrugged.
That was what we were talking about as I drew this mob scene. It was hot and the G train went crazy and I walked half the way home to avoid the impossible connections. I felt like smoke rising up into the summer sunset…making the light just a little more violet.
Face Off (or A Crowd Gathers)
I went walking past the Hasidum in Williamsburg and fell into a fever dream of fire hydrants and silent film… something about their hats fills me with Chaplin and Keaton and their women dressed from the twenties and wigs and the brick and the city and the heat and the F-15 fighter bomber and trains and Friends back from Israel and I am struck by how Religion is very much like nostalgia. It’s nice to believe in history even if no one ever seems to learn shit from it. There’s David and there’s Goliath and they are standing in the naked street waiting for the paparazzi.
Upside Down Your Head
Spent yesterday streatching canvas in the heat of an enormous empty studio (building sold and no leases renewed and so the exodus starts). The canvas is 48″x 68″, so I looked like a dust covered wet rag by they end of it. Today on crossing over the gowanus canal I saw this painting in my mind… at least its composition: little head, upside down man, big head. It sort of seems to be a painting I would have wanted to make fifteen years ago, but hadn’t gotten around to yet. In some ways, it samples the best of the eighties, or something, but there it was and I sort of liked it. I liked it even more when I giffed the photos together into this animation. It may be Clark coming to Willoughby’s door… or some sort of pulp boxing story, or punch drunk romance. Can’t say as it’s done, but…
Eye and Needle (or Exodus)
He could hear the echo under the arch and his footsteps turned into thousands.
Laugh Till It Hurts (or Clark Vs. Willoughby)
Started on this fairly large thing today…. Not sure which way it goes. It’s either almost done, or no where near.
The First of August
So today the Swiss are celebrating and drinking beer and eating cheese and chocolat and having fireworks. Happy birthday Switzerland.
