Earthly Delights

 

Vandalism of Innocence

where have all the heroes gone?

oil collage on glass with pictures of KKK graffitied police car and middle eastern oil field on fire to prevent use (taken in mid 90s from air view)

Trying to Make Sense

San Francisco Easter

KOOKY

KRAZY

KIDS!

Posters 1968

'be young and shut up'

'beauty is in the streets'

'we are all undesirables'

postered wall

Paris Graffiti 1968

'how can you think freely in the shadow of a chapel'

'under the pavement the beach'

'it is forbidden to forbid'

'live without dead time' 'enjoy without obstacles'

'life instead'

Easter Sunday 1950

Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,

Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,

I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,

I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,

I accuse the Catholic Church of infecting the world with its funereal morality,

Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.

Verily I say unto you: God is dead,

We vomit the agonizing insipidity of your prayers,

For your prayers have been the greasy smoke over the battlefields of our Europe.

Go forth then into the tragic and exalting desert of a world where God is dead,

And till this earth anew with your bare hands,

With your PROUD hands,

With your unpraying hands.

Today Easter day of the Holy Year,

Here under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,

We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

Dressed as a Dominican monk, Michel Mourre (who had previously belonged to the Dominican order) gave this anti-sermon, written by Serge Berna, at a quiet point in the Easter service which was aired on national television. This incident lead to the formation of the Situationist International, lead by Guy Debord, which instituted the art of action or "the situation" as a means of communicating reactionary ideas. By creating experimental situations set against the backdrop of a capitalist society, the situationists were able to create a dialogue where people were encouraged to critically analyze their everyday lives and in doing so realize their worth, meaning, or purpose. Debord's manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle, helped encourage and provoke a revolt against a consumer based society, spurring the May 1968 uprisings in Paris.

"The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative."
— Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle)

From zine "Start Your Day the Healthy Way"

Jean-Paul Sartre

"As long as the explosion lasts, juxtaposition signifies progress. Beside means beyond. For each object, scattered everywhere, in all directions, launched with all the others upon an infinite course, to be is to participate in the raging tide whereby the universe at every moment wins new areas of being from nothingness. [...] Its aim is to force the externality of Nature to reflect to man his own transcendence. For those who want "to change life," "to reinvent love," God is nothing but a hinderance. If the unity is not dynamic, if it manifests itself in the form of restrictive contours, it reflects the image of their chains. Revolutionaries break the shell of being; the yolk flows everywhere." - on the principle of "explosive unity"

Label 228

Rhapsody in Gray

stop screaming at me

in ways i'll never understand

your empty flashes of lost noise

shatter my silence with the

spice of words coated

in sweet surrender to the

everlasting nothing -

my clit is aroused with a burning curiosity 

stimulated by a fire i let too close to my retinas

branding my eyelids with acid rain

i shed poisoned tears for your lost soul

read between the lines

there is no way to lose

there has never been

anything left to gain

i can not tell the difference

between mental and real

escaping distance

escaping nirvana

upon eternal quest

i am not my own

i am held fast in nocturnal mind's

eye spy

captivating notions of

-all begin in heaven

so all must end in hell-

incalculable

incomparable

immeasurable

myriads of infinite jest

prance through my skull

out of order

time like an arrow

swift and steady

ready to make its mark

ready to explode in brilliant color

across the waves of an endless void

of empty space 

is lost

now fast forward time to dream deranged

no more black and white

forever falling down the pothole manhole rabbithole blackhole

Bite Hand Mouth

Gods or Men

acrylic, oil, ink collage on cardboard using pages from the bible, torah, koran and religious iconographic stamps

oil collage on glass with religious iconographic stamps

Gifts From Heaven!

In Celebration of the Sacred and Profane

Piss Christ is a 1987 photograph by artist and photographer Andres Serrano. It depicts a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist's urine. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects.

The photograph is of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of what appears to be a yellow liquid. The artist has described the substance as being his own urine. The photograph was one of a series of photographs that Serrano had made that involved classical statuettes submerged in various fluids—milk, blood, and urine. The photograph is a 60x40 inch Cibachrome print. It is glossy and its colors are deeply saturated. The presentation is that of a golden, rosy medium including a constellation of tiny bubbles. Without Serrano's explanation, the viewer would not necessarily be able to differentiate between the stated medium of urine and a medium of similar appearance, such as amber or polyurethane.

Serrano has not ascribed overtly political content to Piss Christ and related artworks, on the contrary stressing their ambiguity. He has also said that while this work is not intended to denounce religion, it alludes to a perceived commercializing or cheapening of Christian icons in contemporary culture.

The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with detractors, including United States Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms, outraged that Serrano received $15,000 for the work, part of it from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts. Serrano received death threats and hate mail, and lost grants due to the controversy. Others alleged that the government funding of Piss Christ violated separation of church and state. The work was vandalized at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia, and gallery officials reported receiving death threats in response to Piss Christ. Supporters argued that the controversy over Piss Christ is an issue of artistic freedom and freedom of speech.

Sister Wendy Beckett, an art critic and Catholic nun, stated in a television interview with Bill Moyers that she regarded the work as not blasphemous but a statement on "what we have done to Christ": that is, the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.

During a retrospective of Serrano's work at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997, the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, George Pell, sought an injunction from the Supreme Court of Victoria to restrain the National Gallery of Victoria from publicly displaying Piss Christ, which was not granted. Some days later, one patron attempted to remove the work from the gallery wall, and two teenagers later attacked it with a hammer. The director of the NGV cancelled the show, allegedly out of concern for a Rembrandt exhibition that was also on display at the time.