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Sputterances

Metropictures - March 17-April 22, 2017

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Short Rains

Over on Allen Street in the park where the police drive on the sidewalk

the rains start slowly through the cold air.  

The rain accumulates, small puddles grow.

The puddles birth small frogs - lots of them.

They cover the road.  

From egg to tadpole to Frog in a matter of seconds

in the rain

in the short storm.

And the people are mad with excitement.

Staring, gaping

jaws down on the ground with the frogs

But now there are toads too.

And really it’s widespread - the birthing

Any pooling water is birthing the beasts

In water collected on broken umbrellas,

in the folds of broken awnings,

In the crevices of the iron railings leading down to the subway.

The frogs and toads are springing, first tiny, then teenage,

leaping out of the collected water in the elbows of raincoats of

the elderly in Chinatown.

It’s an amphibious skin, covering every surface as far as

can be seen - an amphibious liquid skin, moving and shimmering

and bubbling and reflecting as they crawl under and over each other.

And they’ve reached maturity now - calling for a mate

the floor is covered with hoping, screaming, fucking Frogs.

                  covered with hopping, screaming, fucking Toads.

The puddles have turned to small ponds and the rain continues

The ponds have grown reeds and cattails

The people hide

but some of them stand, approach, get close, peer behind the reeds.

This isn’t a plague,

The frogs are not pummeling from the sky above.  They are

birthed in the puddle-ponds on the corner where the black-

tar soccer pitch was.

This isn’t the lord reigning down terror on the sullied

It is life, cycling.

And now the frogs have begun to die.

Lying, unmoving as the rain slows, eggs,

tadpoles, frogs, fucking frogs, old frogs and dead ones.

And then the storm has passed.

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Miami Basel, 2016

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Miami Basel, December 2016

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Green Gallery, Milwaukee

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Green Gallery, Milwaukee

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Green Gallery, Milwaukee

October 14 - November 19, 2016

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Jurassic Park

Look back at it.  What follows is a formation of a saturnalian nature - landscape painting, not from life, as a primary source for the paintings.  Removed from the originality of the sight, relying on the alienated site, making the picture from the picture becomes the primary source.  The en plein air has unwittingly morphed, like all good, "trending" bodies it has become the site-in-transit.  My site.  My picture.  My experience.  My landscape.  My buddy system.

These pictures of pictures perform a transubstantiation of sorts - the substance they offer is changed.  The offer began as the representation of the landscape painted, and has become the representation of what is not represented in the landscape in the painting.  Here is an opportunity to consider the abstraction, the infinite difference  - perhaps also between the painter and the viewer, the artist and the audience.  Here is liberation – the freedom to interpret, the jouissance of experience – possession and persuasion.  Maybe like Margritte, for whom “a thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows.”[1]  Or even for Bruce Hainley writing about Sturtevant’s double binds, “...knowing that Stella’s epigrammatic catechism, “what you see is what you see,” failed to acknowledge what isn’t seen in what you see (and, since with her double binds, what you see isn’t what you see at all), Sturtevant cuts cognition from the habit of mindless recognition.”[2]

This isn’t Germany, this isn’t war.  Looking for difference in repetition, from a Courbet of a red sea at a museum in the nation’s capital stems a picture of a picture of a bay in the south of the northeastern state of Massachusetts.  There have always been representations of the sea, of the land, of landscape – landscape/portrait – there has always been fascination with the beautiful and the transgressive; the people have always been dependent on the appearance of communion.  The people keep painting.

Landscapes in this case is synecdochic.

Landscapes in this case is not subterfuge but synecdochic – landscape painters paint paintings.  Some may wish to avoid expediency, to control the breeding of images, to reach for the sacred through scarcity.  The landscape now accelerates, a different approach to the sacred, shot towards a burning or drowning of the Louvre.  My mountain is my body – breasts and waist and buttocks.  The ocean is a birthing.  The site multiplies in metaphors. Or perhaps as for Jean Genet:  "In the Maubeuge forests, I realized that the country which was so hard for me to leave, the enveloping region for which I felt a sudden nostalgia as I crossed the last frontier, was Armand's radiant kindness, and that it was made up of all the elements, seen inside out, which composed his cruelty."[3]

1 - Suzi Gablik, Rene Magritte. Artforum (December 1965): 30.

2 - Bruce Hainley.  Under The Sign of [sic]: Sturtevant's Volte-Face (Los Angeles:       Semiotext(e), 2014): 82, 84.

3 - Jean Genet. The Thief's Journal (New York: Bantam Books, 1965): 184.

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Landscapes, Marlborough Gallery, Summer 2o16

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Andrea Rosen, March 19 - April 17, 2016

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Small Town Chores

We are breaking. Small town chores - take the peaches to the retired teacher dying of old age in the house on the corner by the pilgrim grave across from the boatyard. Like a cow, sloe with his words now And chewing on an old tongue with broken teeth and dry spit. But the peaches are to die for. And smell like heaven. And remind you of sweat in the summer smelling of a sex that remembers on it own. Remembers a cold.  The cold of a father cum son cum husband.  And in between are the bruised egos. Between the ages. Cold or no cold the grandson is a husband so husband he's husband with frailty only frailty husbands have shown us. Mean. And then mean. Mean when accused of being mean. Don't be a thankless cunt. I work for you. I spend for you. I want you and all you have. I am all you have. Be all I have. These smatterings of shame must be passed through.  pass.  Slip in between two sleeps.  And Another small town reverie. A day dream so sincere. A day dream too sincere. A faulty, unusable day dream pathetic to remember. A smell of weakness in that reverie. But there's nothing to do there.  Nothing to do in the memory.  Nothing to do in the small town. Forget it. Bring the peaches. Eat the peaches. Say hello to your old teacher. Hope he's ok. Say hello to the family. So sorry for the family. I'd kill to be in your family. My family your family his family. I learned that language from him before he passed. Something about World War II and the German uniforms with the crossbones on them. Had he said whores? Did your grandfather say the American girls were whores?  Between his missing teeth, over his slow tongue, no lips catching. Had your grandfather said, the Germans were surprised that the young American girls were not all whores? He had not. No. Horrible. War. Not whore. The Americans were not as horrible as they had been made out to be during the war. Not whore.

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RFA, March, 2016

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like lee reynolds

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Habits, Svetlana, New York, April 1 - May 1, 2016

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Odilon Redon is a Woman

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Heroin: Cape Cod, USA

Off Vendome

February 18 - March 26, 2016

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Young Jean Lee Fundraiser @ 47 Canal,  Dec 14, 2015