David Petersen Artworks

Well, it was a good run, but I am no longer the ‘artist’ in the family. The younger brother has come along and snatched the title from my clutches, gone and got himself a mention in the Sunday NYTimes. Well played my friend, well played.

So, sure, I have been known to use this site to do a little shit-talking every now and then. It is all in good fun. Especially the photos. No one’s feelings should be getting hurt, not that I would apologize. They should toughen up. And I am definitely not one who embraces ad hominen attacks on those whose work is being shit-talked. But Michael Fallon must be about as tall as a stump, because the ideas behind   ‘Millions of Innocent Accidents‘ have just flown over his narrow-minded, quasi-academic, all washed up and only useful for a good chuckle head. Chuckle head.

So what is the deal, anyway? Why so obsessed with the youth culture? Why so determined to drag the kids down, not to mention hardland/heartland? Isn’t this the second time you have given it a shot? Is one of them dating your daughter? Plus, you portend to have some cute little crush on the wacky kids and their wacky ways, yet merely use that as a bottle opener to spill your true feelings. Have you any idea how ridiculous you sound? Do you realize what you are defending? Who is your audience, Mary Abbe and Katherine Kersten?

The most joyous part of reading your critique of hardland/heartland’s exhibition in the MAEP gallery is not that you only reach the surface and misunderstand it so well; it is not that you pull a punch like a pansy when you use disparaging phrases such as ‘poorly conceived, dolefully hopeless’ in the same sentence as ‘well-meaning’; and it is not that you are appalled at finding the work unattractive or ‘ugly’ (Are you serious, who walked you through art theory?  R.G. Collingwood?). No, the most excruciatingly fun part, upon reading your tiresome and wasted thoughts, are the deep, guttural, side-splitting, beer-spilling belly laughs that h/h and their collaborators will be having at your expense after they get through with your drivel. You feel so confident in being ‘hip’ to their angst and frustration and whatnot, surely you can understand their exhilaration and glee upon reading the ranting of what sounds like an exhausted cop who has taken a couple art history classes in a vain and failing attempt to comprehend the ‘criminal’ mind of ‘the graffiti artist.’

Where does the drollery begin? First of all, where do you get off calling h/h ‘well-meaning?’ What does that even suggest? That they ‘meant well’ to Art? It’s the thought that counts? That their hearts were in it for the sake of the audience? For the sake of themselves? There is nothing well-meaning about their work. They are not trying to make friends or to offer sympathy and they most certainly aren’t looking for visitors to the Institution to empathize with them. Far fucking from it. How on earth do you read their picture ‘ABOR TION SUCKS DICK‘ as seeking sympathy or empathy? Why would that ask such of a viewer? Harsh and blunt yes, crass, oh hell yes! But the last thing it makes you think is about the Issue in the terms that it has so redundantly and narrowly been defined and debated. You don’t want any part with the art works’ anti-social elements, fine, but don’t go spewing ‘off-putting and uninspiring’ with all the moralist implications that follow, not to mention do your own damned inspiring of yourself, not to mention that ‘being inspired’ is a horrible expectation of art in the first place. Toughen the hell up before you lose all your credibility, and seriously, torch the Kant.

Hey, and let’s not forget the difference between ‘inspiring’ and ’symbolic’ 35mm snapshots by journalists and the inspired actions made by the individuals documented in those snapshots and subsequently packaged and sold on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. Standing down a line of People’s Liberation Army tanks in the middle of Tiananmen Square in 1989 was certainly not a very symbolic moment for that student, that was very real desperation, not to mention balls. If you would like to co-opt his image, though, as some sort of pro-democracy emblem, or David vs. Goliath allegory, or even worse, as some sort of ‘we did it better back in the day’ tripe, as the West’s mainstream media has so gladly done, super for you. Your social security check is in the mail. Or, as h/h has collaboratively done (yet another key conceptual component of the work that has escaped you), annihilate those symbols that have been manipulated and manufactured for the marketplace, and expose them as meaningless frauds by re-repackaging them with undecipherable expletives and single finger salutes.

In the end, whenever it comes, there will probably not be any understanding any way. Look as we will, it isn’t going to happen. No matter, the whole point is that if you don’t want to get below the surface, if you refuse to consider sacrificing your precious Time/Life photo reproductions, and if you are going to live in the past with its pre-conceived notions of art’s duty, you are never going to get anywhere close. You are spinning your wheels, my friend, fast and furious. And we are having a good chuckle, because we understand that the hill you are trying to climb only goes down and everybody winds up there one way or another. Now, how about a beer?

Earlier this evening I recommended to a fellow blogger that the only way to effectively create some entertaining blog was to be a little blotto. Like now. I mean, that is what the blogosphere is all about, am I right? Tossing a few back, and getting all controversial at the keyboard. Stirring up some shit. Wacka wacka wacka.

By the way my celly telly is dead. All you folks out there who are normally white-knuckled with dread, frightfully awaiting my regular ‘It’s Friday night and I’m all-fucked-up’ phone calls, go to bed in peace. You lucky bastards.

The computer might as well be in the backyard with the dog.

All I got to say, is that, is that there might not be nothing so much to speak of right this moment, like now, tonight, but it is out there man, it is coming like a, like a train, and when it comes, it is going to be big, real big. You can’t even imagine how big it is going to be, it is going to be so big that I can’t even be condescending enough to tell you how much you don’t even know, you don’t even know, man, how big it is going to be, it is going to be so big. That’s how big it is going to be. You got a bomb shelter, my friend? Well then step inside, unless you don’t like having a face. Because when this shit comes, like a freaking freight train, it is going to blow your face clean off if you ain’t in your bomb shelter. Or underneath your bed. Just go to bed and pray to Jesus your super savior that this shit don’t wipe your pretty precious visage right of the map that is your skull, cause that is all that is going to be left. Your skull.

Look, I ain’t trying to be combatatative. I can only tell it like it is and like it is going to be. I can see things. I see things that you’re just not supposed to be able to see. I haven’t always been able to see these things. But I got me some perspective now, some real serious perspective. More like perspectives, with an ‘S.’ Sssssssssssss.

You don’t get to sit in this chair unless you have seen what I have seen and done what I have done. Messed up what I have messed up, and put that shit all back together again like motherfucking Humpty motherfucking Dumpty. Put that shit back together again.

You could also sit in this chair if you knocked my drunk ass to the floor with a boot.

Look, there aren’t even the requisite Google Image Search images for this blog. Can you deal with a blog with no pitchers? We need some pitchers, not no belly-itchers. You can’t just look up ‘drunk guy blogging.’ This is what you get:

This ain’t blogging, this is some homoerotic frat boy shit. The best part of this picture is what you don’t see and that is all his fellow Phi Kappa Gamma Ding Dongs having a circle jerk while they watch MSNBC’s stock ticker make their daddies some more blood money.

By now you got it all wrong too, undoubtedly. You are thinking that something has gone bad, that the shit hit the fan, that the local nine got their butts kicked this evening, which they did. But no, the truth of this very crucial matter is that things couldn’t be better, things just couldn’t be any better. I see it all clearly, from many points of view, like the space scientists do with their Very Large Array of telescopes in New Mexico. Clearly, I can see it all so clearly, I clearly see this clarity, out there in space, space that is rushing towards us and away from us all at the same time, time that is not moving any more because it has already all happened and now it nothing but a still life that you might see like a Morandi, all muddled and muddy with those pleasant beiges and grays with great composition but really do you know what bottle is in front of which?

It doesn’t matter, by now the computer is out in the yard, and my phone will be back on in the morning.

In his commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace didn’t exactly impart the kind of wisdom that sends graduates rushing out into the world to make a place for themselves when he spoke of “the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master . . . It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.”

Eloquent.

Why DFW hung himself in his garage Friday night we shall probably never really know. It is a pretty big bummer though. Not terribly eloquent of me either, but whatever. Neither is the noose.

I don’t mean to sound angry. I’m not. The news of his passing, however, was quite the kick in the chest. Not like I knew the guy, nor ever would. Only finished the Big Book, IJ, like 2 months ago. So what? And while the Artworks has never really been a hanky that we wipe our eyes with, there is something about this moment that warrants some reaction, however staccato.
In the same commencement address, to the same bright-eyed graduates, DFW attempted to redeem himself, and most likely his honorarium, concluding with “…it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head…learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

Bon soir.

Guten Morgen! A beautiful day to you all. Serious developments have occurred at the Artworks this week, mainly the tremendous news that we are headed to lovely Dresden, Germany. East Germany. After years and years of European rejection and alienation, a proposal has at long last been accepted by the fabulous people at 7.Stock, an artist-run space that is squatting the seventh floor of a city building. Or something like that. In late December, culminating the weekend after the Big Winter Holiday, the gallery space will be transformed into a summertime wonderland perfect for video viewing. It’s shall be called ‘Videos in the Park,’ a TransAtlantic installation of found and scavenged materials molded into a public space for viewing the video works of both Minneapolis and Dresden artists. You totally have to be there!

Apparently, Dresden is accustomed to such magic and wonderment. Along with their luscious green spaces, marvelous Elbe River, and lush art scene, there is already a Palace of Dreams, a most-magnificent movie theater treasure! Eight silver screens and 2,700 satin-covered seats, this along makes a visit, and maybe relocation, to Dresden an absolute must. You totally have to be there!

One way to do that of course is to submit a video. The deadline is November 1, 2008. There are really no parameters, but we are looking for pieces 5-30 minutes in length, something that people lying down will be able to endure. How tough can that be? So get your shit together and get something over here. Submissions, preferably in DVD form, may be mailed to Art of This. Look up the address if you don’t already know it. They’re huge and on the web. Also, let me know what the heck your work is all about and maybe even who the heck you are. That would make me a lot more interested, I’d bet. Now, c’mon! You totally have to be there!