Fragonard (1775) The Visit to the Nursery

fig.53.23) missing money, hopeless fool

Where painting has failed to depict intersections of femme identity with its fluidity, it has instead inserted something like the Fates. Three women, the shrew or crone, the mother and the child with their representative skein or spools being present. Rather, this metaphor is of the latency within the pictures frame itself, a clever interpretation of something like a fractured understanding of dimorphism. Distorted by poverty, her arms held somewhat casually in front of her, one hand holding the other just above the wrist. From my vantage point they resemble an empty basket. My glance stretches on for a second or more, when suddenly she looks up and catches me in her own eye. I start from the shock of being discovered, I meant no harm from it after all.

When I was in the shower, all this was happening. The world continued as everything kept changing incrementally, without method or meaning until I returned. While this was happening, I slowly came around to reality. Clearview probably wasn't going to be sued into submission for profiting disproportionately from the exchange of an unrelated person's property. The photographs they scrapped from hundreds or thousands of websites were likely to be held until being hung on a giant wall separating the United States from culture. 

I was feeling inspired by something that CJ shared with me, I recall a number of years back in time, when watching the TV, it's Jane Wiedlin giving a tour of her super science fiction themed apartment. She was moving on after living in a sort of 50's pastiche of ray gun cool and gold flecked vinyl. She needed no qualifiers then, she's amazing enough now, still. She's Jane Wiedlin, the epitome gamine! While we were getting high and listening to Rocket From the Crypt, Frank had told me about a bootleg video of the Go-Go's that had circulated in the backrooms and alleys of suburbia. In it Belinda can be seen mocking a fanboy, threatening to set him on fire. Jane and the others are nearby, braiding hemp twine into rope while talking about cocaine spasms. Rope such as theirs was once highly prized in the US. In the 19th century hemp was a key agricultural crop in states like Illinois and Kentucky. After the first world war however, synthetic fibers would be introduced into the market. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed and many have surmised that its real aim was for deterring further growth in America's hemp fields. Stepping back and viewing the social upheaval of the decades that followed, all the pogroms and racial unrest that burned through this nation's soul. Frank used his copy of that video to prop up the stained Nintendo sitting in front of his TV. 

Leaning over the stage, it's like he's going to fall off while feeding the fish, the old man is selling cheap sneakers. He's covered in white out from head to toe, his nether regions doubly so. Gathered from the crowd by the door, he's returning their dimes for a shoe. The white out is from a wholesaler in Chinatown, an old lady with a quiet limp. She sells bootleg videos and sick turtles to passing school kids. Her TV goes on the fritz from time to time, "Good luck paddy!" Coughing, she slams the back door of white van shut. An old man rolls out on to Archer, heading westbound towards another cowboy's dream.

Knock Knock, the moll of Jacob's mess, found at night where the loudest poems bleed. Peel back the corner lazily, the dust and then the dust again. I've had too much to drink, I'm a servant only - this economy has made for me a need to pee. I'm tipsy again, singing bravely, wrongly and hard. This is my vote. I'll share it with you, now back to bed.

After that I was in the shower thinking the same damn thing, I was thinking what will scare the shit out of Jeffrey Deitch most? Before I got any soap in my eyes at all I said, disparate groups of poorly funded presenting organizations trying to upstage their artist friends by hanging their work in the dining room and waking up on Saturdays to show it. That would scare the crap out of anyone, right? These spaces, these projects might be commodity obsessed exchange-phobes. They might not get what they want, but when it's late at night and their secret yearnings get confused the New York Times is there to get them.

Oh yes, here it is now - our return to the hell pit of rococo's grandiosity. With all of its meaningless substrates of piled fashion on top of pitiless constructions of symbolism crafted from some facile glittered secretion like that of wet moonlight or the drippings from a spurned breast. It does work to pull into perspective the Dickensian flair of those Victorian ragamuffins though. They spent their own dark days rolling around in perceived illnesses waiting for something named progress to wrap a tin wall whatever they had and then sell some tickets to it. Civil wars were constructed by assholes from that era in order to sell even more tickets to the uninformed or poorly doctored.