THE DAILY DICK
This is a first installment in a
daily blog (to be published daily going forward).
I started doing the work
last year around this time, late August 2012. My dear departed spouse, John
Callahan, http://www.ageofconsentrap.com/asked if I wanted his 2013 American Express Date Book. (He was still
alive at this point.) I accepted his kind offer. It occurred to me that it
would be a low-pressure way to do artistic play—I would be working on really
crappy paper already printed with clanedrical (is there such a word?) crap.
This would free me of worry about doing good art, and I could cut loose.
It was actually reminiscent
of my first one man show, at The One Way ( a leather bar in Silver Lake that
has since gone defunct after losing its liquor license toward the end of my
show’s run) in the summer/fall of 1989. That show was entitled “Recycled
Erotica”. All the art was drawn on the back (or front) of found Xerox copies,
or painted on grocery bags I disassembled and gesso’ed on one side for this
purpose.
This new project served the
same artistic purpose, except the new art would receive even less exposure than
“Recycled Erotica”. I was working in such a way as to make reproduction or
scanning difficult so as not to be tempted to do precisely what I’m doing now:
posting it on my blog. I simply couldn’t deal with it: I had too much going on
in my life, not the least of which was my spouse’s impending death from
metastasized prostate cancer.
Anyway, John died on
February 17 and I had my stroke on April 2. My beloved boyfriend, Richard R.
moved in with me upon my release from the hospital on May 18. The last 3 months
have been all about getting my life and my health (and my
drawing/painting/writing ability) back. Only now, on the eve of my September 2nd
resumption of paying work, do I feel the need/ability to start posting this
rather extensive archive of work. I’ve no doubt I’ll be kicking myself as I
start trying to reproduce scan… but what can you do?
This
is the cover of the volume. The black paper cut-out penis is glued down with
Elmer’s Glue. Last Saturday,when I took it off the shelf to show it to friends
(Joe Flazh! And Sid Lanier, of the now defunct Flazh! Alley Gallery, in San
Pedro), I found the penis was becoming unglued (“It’s hard to keep a good dick
down”, Sid quipped), I revisited the adhesion, this time (over) using Nuetral
PH Adhesive, by LineCo.
I started working with cut paper a few days before I did these. I’d cut the shapes out, glue them down, at this point with Elmer’s glue, then draw back into them with Prismacolor or whatever I was using at the time.
