Fartsy

ZINE #3

The Promenade of the Influential CriticHonoré Daumier, (1808-1879)

Cartoon from ‘Charivari’ magazine, 24 June, 1865 (lithograph)

My Seattle studio, 2010

Hysteria is a state of unmanageable emotional

upheaval. Historically, it has been attributed only to women, due to turbulent uteri that their weak constitution could not defend against. Then again, around that time Plato believed a uterus was like a living creature that wanders throughout a woman’s body, causing myriad problems.

My hysterical state mostly inspires desires tied to the flesh. I feed, I flee, and I fuck at abandon. Is desire a masculine or feminine affliction? It is passive bubbling up from the muck of the psyche but also inspires action... maybe desire is intersex...

All artists are androgynous. In the studio we are impregnated and impregnator, at least we are self propagating. Our fatherless works outlive us or are butchered at birth. Hacked canvases and shred sheet

music hang aborted sorrowfully sticking to the spilled coffee on the floor.

Once in a glorious while, my hysteria expresses itself creatively. In the studio, I enter a fugue-like state, a series of non-words echoing in the hollow of my head, hand moving as in a dream through charcoal, pigment, or over keys. Paint becomes instinct and runs to my wishes nothing more.

I’ve come to believe there is a certain sentience in this madness. At moments, I am a raw nerve in the midst of a churning universe, without control of my affect but a primitive intellect still burns which is both creative and destructive, as well as brutal, exploratory and sexual.

HYSTERICAL DESIRE

opposite:Scrambled/Transposed, 2011

Enamel on metal, 24”x36”

I create art, I am black, but do I make ‘black art’?

. . .As any good American, I labor under the idea that conceptions of race are unimportant. Yet I am also not ignorant, I know that growing up in Los Angeles, California - a fairly integrated metropolis that I had the luxury of feeling this way.

Indeed when viewing art, my thoughts are purely based on aesthetics before anything else. In many ways I feel if a work cannot stand on its own visual/literary/sonic merit without contextual details then its not really worth looking that deeply into.

This universal theory of merit persisted in my mind until I reached college and I began to notice my critiques ended up focused more on race than my more lightly

BLACK ART

pigmented classmates. It all came to a head with a mildly controversial video I made about stalking. I wanted to portray a stalker who was darkly who was funny due an over-the-top portrayal. In it, an unseen protagonist follows a (Caucasian) female friend of mind with a hand held cam

accompanied by Darth Vader style heavy breathing and an idiotically obtuse stream-of-consciousness poem.

I thought it was hilarious, my teachers and fellows did not. It became a poster child for cleverly worded Mandingo rape fears. I was surprised not only because of my distance from Jim Crow laws but also because the issue never entered my head.

Time passed, I left college and traded its more overt questions of race in art for more subdued inferences. And I still wonder if, in the eyes of the greater art world consortium, can an artist of color make art with a capital “A” or only a capital “B”?

SALON DE

previous:Brutha, Brutha What’s Going On?Digital painting

L’OBSESSION

THE FINE ART OF FALLING APART

Here Lies the Painter Paul Klee: [...] Slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough.

RUBENESQUE

I am addicted to flesh. When I see it exposed

on the street, I am tempted to squeeze it, lick it, kiss it, bite it and expose myself to it.

It must be what attracts me to Peter

Paul Rubens. His plump figures are heavy with promise on those old canvases. In his pastoral s c e n e s , f a b u l o u s l y painted heavy hipped vixens frolic frozen. The effortless sfumato d e p i c t i n g t h e i r voluptuousness in pearly tones makes them at once earthly and ghostly - thought and form. And this is what I actually seek - an idealized flesh.

Re a l f l e s h , w i t h ii t ’s d a m p n e s s

and unpredictability between my fingers lacks the romance of Peter’s pigments. This dream flesh envelopes my senses, it is an idealized imperfection.

And such is the land of art and artists -

an escape from life that lacks the nourishment that dreams exhibit.

At the end of high school, I discovered

the Pre-Raphaelites, a painting movement from turn of the century Europe. It was founded by a small group of painters and poets who believed that only by returning to the styles and themes that existed before Raphael could art be saved. Along with the beauty of the paintings they produced, I was attracted to their anachronism. I mean here they were, in the midst of the industrial revolution dreaming of knights. Knights!

But I knew this anachronism very

well myself. I’d always felt a man out of time and was myself ensconced in a velvet dream of Keats’ poetry and making of antiquated portraits

A MAN OUT OF TIME

HP LOVECRAFT AGAINST THE WORLD, AGAINST LIFE

A long-form mash note from one

literary monster to a long-dead writer of such. Over the course of its little under 90 pages of bite-sized essays, Mr. Houellbecq probes the themes, biography and personality of H.P.. Lovecraft.

Everything is praised here, from Lovecraft’s humility to his virulent racism, though the sections on his financial troubles, self-imposed seclusion in service of creating his so-called ‘great texts” smack more than a little bit of romanticizing poverty.

SMELLY OLD BOOKS

THE LADY & THE MONK

Pico Ayer displays masterful prose here

that is furtive, searching and lush. In his cultural and literary journey he finds is a complex and contradictory culture that spurns the hopes of Westerner’s in search of Eastern epiphanies. Sprinkled with poems of monks and courtesans, Iyer never bores.

HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

I’d bought this book some years ago in my

favorite used bookstore in LA, but never read it until now. This slim collection of the film’s script, original treatment, and character descriptions definitely reads more art-school than Hollywood in the best possible way. Besides the beauty of the text, the book offers insight into a bygone era of French film making and postwar mind sets.

WORK IN PROGRESS

MEMOIRSOF MY NERVOUS ILLNESS

Written by D a n i e l

Paul Schreber in 1884 at a German mental institution. He believed that his personal crisis w a s i mp l i c at e d in what he called a “crisis in God’s realm,” one that had transformed t h e r e s t o f humanity into a race of fantasms. A f a s c i n a t i n g read and major influence on Freud.

one, 2011Enamel on watercolor paper

4”x5”

two, 2011Enamel on watercolor paper4”x5”

OUTSIDER ART

Self Portrait #3, 2003Oil and charcoal on linen8”x14”

WHOS

ANYWAY?

I