When interviewed about his classic -'I wanna be your dog'-Iggy Pop once revealed that because everyone seemed to want to play at being God, it might be nice to reverse the first and last letters and be a dog instead.
Taking some license from what Jimmy said, I decided to do the same and so by entitling this study piece-'It's a God eat God world', it gives it a whole other facet. It was borne out of some of the feelings I've had about America lately, my position in it,the whole 'I'm alright Jack, bollocks to the rest of you' ethic.
It'd be fair to say that things have been weighing heavy on me. I entertain the notion of leaving the US at least every two weeks-perhaps moving back to Europe, or somewhere I've never been.
Here's Iggy from 79 doing it his way on the Old Grey Whistle Test.
I'm a coiled spring. The last threads on a rope, one drink too many, a bough ready to break.
I'm on the cusp everywhere.A month of toxic affrontary has rendered my nerves as sensitive as the wounded fingers of my hand.Its all just noise of course-I own nobodies myopic world view-nor can I change it. People will try and impose it none the less. My tongue is swollen from my clenching teeth.I've long since lost my nose to the spite of my face, but I fall further down the cracks of my own oblique obscurity.And whilst my contemporaries become media darlings, I realize it's petulance on my part, that I feel left behind.Meanwhile,ants invade my studio,like little black beads from a Dali painting, scattering in an ordered chaotic frenzy.It's like my disposition manifest. I'm Antsy.
The work by comparison is cascading out of me like a rich, delicious waterfall. I've no notion where the forms are coming from. It's like my disposition manifest.And I'm feeling furious at the world-I need to stop reading crap. The news here is a like a huge bloated worm feeding the bigotry, widening the chasm between truth and the myth of America.
I realise I'm saying this nine years post 9/11.
I painted 'Blind Liberty' like I was having a shower, except the waters are stained and brown like an open sewer, spilling oil, blood and tea. I wonder if I'll ever feel truly at home here.
'When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross...' Sinclair Lewis-1935 Fifteen years ago, an intransigent, extreme and archaic, dictatorship was ousted from office by her own party, following an elected third term in the UK.Though its true to say, that the beginnings of Margaret Thatchers terrible reign, brought an end to a period in the seventies of union discontent, it also brought with it a harsh and cold winter which lasted twelve long years. During her term in office, Britain endured the Falklands war, The Westland Affair, the end of the coal and the shipping industry, the privatization of the railways, BT, the electric and water boards, the beginnings of the end for the NHS, the reinstated Taxes- Poll Tax (abolished in the sixteenth century), and inheritance tax (a tax which ensures you still pay after your death) , eight million unemployed (the conservative estimate after the book cooking of training schemes).Education cuts and Mad Cow disease (CJD), the re-emergance of puritanical censorship with the moral guardianship of the nanny state. Hillsborough, Dunblane, Charring cross, race and poll tax riots in the streets and a further polarization of negotiations with the IRA. Even my own hometown of Liverpool was abandoned by the Iron Lady to what she proposed as a 'Managed Decline'
And whilst the maggots flourished and grew complacently bloated, the poor became more emaciated, and what they call the class divide in England became a chasm. As the country descended further into the bowels of Hades however, the machinations behind number ten maneuvered, and I watched as a tearful Thatcher was removed from Downing street. It was the only emotion I ever saw her betray.The dark days of the right were numbered, and there was a sense that the working class-through music, through art and culture, were on the move.
It's hard for me to reminisce the hope and promise of those times-but when Labour swept in again after so long, with D-reams song 'Things can only get better', it felt like watching life reanimating a corpse.Of course, history has shown that hopes are in vain, that the mess left in the Thatcher years was too far reaching -lopping off a limb is no good when the cancer has spread, but at the very least, the Conservatives were viewed as an aberrant joke-a terrible wrong footing that was the catalyst for the end an empire, a country were it was twenty five years too late for its terrible former premier to be diagnosed with dementia.
I prefix this, because in the insanity of the birther movement, the spitting sloganeering of the teabaggers, the endless, impending, end of days fervor of the evangelists -I see all too well, the failings of my own countries past. The dark unwillingness for change-an unwillingness, that comes spitting the vitriol of judgment, cloaked between the pages of the bible and a pocketful of race hatred. An angry mob, without a taste for irony, resembling the fascist diatribes of the 30's, much more than the institution and leader elect, they are demonizing, all stoked by their own ignorance and those special interests, who balk at change simply because they may end up a little light on change in their pocket.
Perhaps its as Churchill once said, a country does elect the leader it deserves, but having seen the terrible legacy of the Thatcher years, and those still being cast by the long shadow of Bush, it doesn't behoove one to imagine the kind of cretinous demagogue that could be borne from the bastard offspring of a Limbaugh and Beck.
'My anger is essential to my work,-Humour is a defense mechanism against the evils of society.' Tomi Ungerer I first became aquainted with Tomi Ungerers work, upon discovering his dark little tome-Testament-in an even darker corner of a Liverpool library in the very early 1980's. The naive, fluid economy of brittle line drawings, belied the psychological and political depth of his renderings-from the protest posters of the 60s, to the flabby skinned,pearls and fur draped caricatures of high society,stiffing one another with a leer, or the Belsen style corpses humping sadomasochistic machines (when not fleecing swine tied to kitchen furniture,that is), the stark expressionistic monochrome of his sardonic humor, cut through the dung like the knife carving blood trails on the jacket. A popular children's illustrator and broadsheet cartoonist in the US during the fifties and sixties-Ungerer-seeing too many parallels between the Nazi occupied township of his childhood, and the war in Vietnam, became incensed and returned to his native Europe in 1971, growing more subversive in the approach to his craft. Recast as 'agent provocateur' no stone of modern malady was left unturned and tossed in vitriol, be it a world choked by greed, overpopulation and industrialization, the sacrificial bloodletting and bomb stockpiles of the warmongers, or the alienation of sexual perversion-now more than ever-his work peels back the thinly veiled skin to reveal the stark bone of societies distemper beneath.
5. The Thumbprint gallery, here in San Diego shall be opening a group show on the 19th September which is a perfect showcase for my work, entitled Faith and Formulas. Doors open at 7pm to 12am, at 3925 Ohio St, San Diego, CA 92104 6. Whilst my daughter was in town, we had the opportunity of seing an exhibit of Richard Avedons work, entitled Portraits of Power, which was still showing at the Museum of Art in Balboa Park, here in San Diego,up until a week ago. A former photographer for the New Yorker, mostly known for his high society and movie start portraits, the exhibit centered largely around his political work of the sixties and seventies, utilizing portraits of political benefactors and activists juxtaposed alongside ordinary citizens, to express the moral, class and racial chasm that still exists within American society. Its a very powerful collection, which stays with you long afterwards, and may be touring to a different city, but is well worth the admission fee should you find it opening in your locale. 7.Accompanying me daily on my artistic travels, are my cats, who have taken to squatting in my studio and using it as their post catnip chill out zone.
