That's the new piece propped on my easel, and it strikes me that sometimes, the work I do- for all its predisposition-eerily resounds the now.
That sucking sound you hear is the canvas so dense with dark matter, it's like a black hole reflected in an ebon mirror.
It's the parable of Dante: a veritable
inferno beyond the soaring temperatures and the demons of my studio, beyond the faux outrage over a Disney Monarch shaking her skinny arse on national
tv, and a fallen crop of bloodless children littering the streets to the strains of a news anchors soundbyte. There's another ensuing war brewing like a witches cauldron in the middle east, a reactor in the orient spewing radiation like acid in a well, hubble-bubble, toil and trouble casting the shadow of an apocalyptic endpoint that both feeds the nihilists black imaginings and dismembers the optimists servant. To be an artist sometimes means being possessed with the rage of the aggrieved and the despondency of the paralyzed.
In other word's it's enough fuel to stoke the fire and extinguish it, if only because as little air that moves through the studio right now, there is no living in a vacuum at such times.
War, may have been etched in Charlies black heart, and in the Swastika on his forehead but it was Tex who got to do the crafty work on the plump gut of Leno LaBianca.
The war Manson hatched was black against white, but in the bloody epitaph of each letter lay seeds of a light and darkness battle, beyond the color of skin.
It was branded there in the lines of the slashed W, ascending and descending to form the square and compass of Freemasonry.
It was there in the anarchist A, and the occult numerical values of the R: 6+6+6. It was there buried in the word reconstituted as the alchemical symbol for the Hermetic cross and its directive "As above, so below"
And it was there resonant in the Eastern mysticism's and ancient Hindu deities that informed the era-Kali with arms like a decade of blood spattered tendrils brandishing tools of death, along with Lennon's decapitated head, hanging like a semaphore on the love and peace generation forever.
War-that's what it was good for.
The Man/son show runs from the 1st-31st October at Hyaena Gallery, Burbank CA. Opening 6th October 8pm-12am
'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.
