Paul Martínez Pompa has lived in the Chicagoland area for most of his life. He studied at the University of Chicago and at Indiana University, where he received his MFA in creative writing. His chapbook, Pepper Spray, was published by Momotombo Press in 2006, and his first book My Kill Adore Him was selected by Martín Espada for the 2008 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). He currently teaches English at Triton College. His writing has appeared in After Hours, Borderlands, Locuspoint, and Rhino.
AMPUTEE ETCETERA
Nothing cuter
than a war amputee.
His limb not as fleshy ruin
but as fresh bouquet
of soft tissue, blasted with love
through desert air.
Nothing prettier
than a deserted semi-trailer
loaded with dead Mexicans.
How their mouths fall
open like little brown orchids
thirsty for a breath
of hot air.
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Artists Write: Thinking While Making Things is the column of art theoretical writings by practicing artists, edited by Mark Staff Brandl, in Proximity magazine. This issue, Number 5, features "Ideas Don't Matter: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art" by John Link.
IDEAS DON'T MATTER: How Literary Ideas Subvert and Vitiate Art by John Link
The dirty little mandate of our "anything goes" art scene is that "everything" must revolve around ideas, must ultimately emulate some sort of literature. The connection between visual art and the literal can be obvious or it can be contrived or it can be plain silly, just as long as it is "there."
...
A truly inspirational essay for artists at this time, although it was written in the 1840s. Read it. Although the language is dated in some ways ("man" not "person," etc.), you will be amazed at its current importance. The description of the real American religion, as Harold Bloom described it. It even begins by mentioning an artist. We need an explosion of these values and interests in the artworld. A New Year's wish.
Whistler enjoyed baiting the critics. He began his Ten O'Clock Lecture, a public manifesto of his artistic ideas, in London in February 1885, with a sarcastic dig at John Ruskin, the most powerful art "authority"of his time. Whistler counted on many artists to take his side but they refused fearing damage to their reputations. Besides his long libel suit against Ruskin, Whistler frequently wrote letters to daily newspapers ridiculing art critics. He believed that only artists had a right to criticize other artists' work. In 1890 he published The Gentle Art of Making Enemies a collection of writings.
This self-portrait also bears his famous signature logo, a butterfly with a scorpion's stinger for a tail.
"... About the power of the October crew--there are the practical, effective maneuverings that Rob Storr describes in his Frieze essay and then there is the much more important power the Octoberists wielded by offering such a seductive model to the inhabitants of art institutions everywhere. ... See, more seductive because it offered clear guidance to the exercise of art-world power--the power, first, to define the canon, to write the list of relevant artists, and the power, second, to establish the "correct" interpretations of these artists. Many critics, curators, and historians resisted the October model. But many did not, choosing, instead, to embrace it with the grateful relief of those who had been looking for guidance from an overbearing authority and, in the October dogma, found it. ... Just so that there is no confusion on anyone's part, I am against the October dogma--"painting is dead" and all the rest of it."
"When in Rome, don't do as the Romans do." -The Shark
It is an interesting view here in Chicago, to say the least, watching the mob of post grad mini Pol Pots, the levelers, the everything is equalizers attempt to in essence, stage a coup with nothing! In fact the latest ploy of these revisionist is to do away with the object all together -that way we can all hang on the same level killing field -with of course them being first among equals....will this same tired Marxist junk forever rear its ugly head?
UK artist Shaun Belcher's dog Moogee makes some fine doodles and cartoons about art and the artworld. Here's one.
