sketches

Blocks on the Turntable

At a friend's house today making test prints from her large trove of found newspaper printing blocks--I borrowed a few to bring home and try working into my collage prints. The blocks looked good laid out on top of the stereo; this photo is flipped horizontally allowing the block to be read as if in a mirror, or as if printed.

Cellophane Tape Collage

Contemporary Memorial on Elvis's passing on August 29, 1977, with a line lifted from the Clash. Late August, 1977, I think I would have been on the East Coast. I moved to NYC with $50 in pocket, traveling on Greyhound bus, living for a week on Bowery in a roach-infested room. Moved for a few weeks to Long Island City, the home of friends of friend--I was too young, too dumb to find work in New York City, not smart enough to try to sell myself on the street, and to weak to survive on my own.

Hampshire College, 1977

fliers for my performances in late 1977 in the Centrum Gallery at Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.


Attendees entered the gallery to find me lying on banquette playing forty-fives on my little portable mono record box--Willie 'Loco' Alexander [Boston new wave], Brian Eno's "Seven Deadly Finns". The walls were lined with photo documentation of work that intrigued me--Cosey Fanni Tutti from Throbbing Gristle posing as a stripper, Marcel Duchamp's back-of-head with star-shape cut to scalp. Photographs were displayed like art but depicting magazine and book reproductions, and printed with an obvious carelessness, disregard. A group entered the gallery, a bunch of dancers with whom I prearranged the action, and began to discredit the work as dishonest, crap, an insult. They brandished spray cans and started graffiti-ing the photographs, tearing them off the walls. Then, just as quickly, the group and I turned on the audience and yelled them out of the gallery. "The show is over. Get out! You got what you came for!"

Concrete Barrier on FlatBed Truck

shot these on my cell phone out the window of a Metro bus at the cargo on the flatbed of the truck beside the bus, just south of the Spokane Street bridge on 6th Avenue south, heading north.

black and white dance from 1977

These are two from long series of self-portraits taken with a Kodak Instamatic camera . To take self-portraits, I tied a string to the shutter release on the side of the camera--that means I must have used an X-15 from the looks of pics on the web. The shutter-release sting would then go down the tripod and out to me. I held the string by hand and by leg and by arm, developing a sly dance that would create enough pressure to pull down the release but not pull over the tripod. The dances of Steve Paxton and Contact Improvisation were specifically on my mind--I'd seen a photo in a NYC paper of Paxton dancing and thought it the most beautiful man pose this side of Egon Schiele. this link is not the shot I'd seen, just a good example of the slight moment of a photo-captured dance that I was after, aiming for, so to speak: http://artsalive.ca/fr/dan/mediatheque/photos/photoWindow.asp?mediaID=277