Monthly Archives: April 2015

Marilyn Minter, Most Definitely

All my FB friends are jealous that I got to go to the opening of Marilyn Minter’s career retrospective at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. Maybe they should be: Pretty/Dirty is a plunge into a gleaming netherworld of beauty and desire in a thousand beastly internecine layers, celebrating mistakes and mayhem, pearls and pimples, sagging and lots of dripping—Marilyn’s models generally look like they’ve been dancing and drugging and screwing all night. The Minter dream-world is swimming with a gigantic pink tongue lapping at antifreeze-green liquid, flesh-toned paint dripping from a cock, metallic shoes edged in mud, ochre jewels flung from the foot, a patch of underarm hair missed, globs of silver here—and here—and here—lots of errata purposely evoked, fully erotic.

Oh, it’s provocative, all right. In lots of ways. But what else would you expect from an artist who, realizing the price of ads in Art Forum in 1989 were the same as a 30-second commercial on David Letterman, decided to buy some time slots. The lady had big plans right off. (Her ad, for a show called Food Porn, runs continuously on a little 80s TV in the CAM show.) A Houstonian friend said, “She’s got something to offend everyone, doesn’t she?” With a laugh, my friend explained, “I don’t mind cum shots, don’t care about snaking underarm hair, disgusting-looking food, a made-up mouth vomiting pearls—but fungus-thick toenails? That I cannot abide.” Oh yes. Those gory painted toenails were featured on the foot-focused, silver-splashed video created for Brooklyn Museum’s Killer Heels show. The oversized feet in fancy shoes dance on an infinite loop, spraying and splattering in mercury puddles over and over as if condemned to it, and I could hardly abide them either. Nor could I look away. And that’s the point.

Or part of it, anyway. On the pre-show walk-through, the charismatic, larger-than-life Minter allowed that the point of the retrospective is the pimple on the freckled model in Blue Poles (2007). Aha. I was happy to share that with the friends and family who saw it this weekend. That punctum over a sparkly shadowed eye, midway through the show, did seem the golden lotus from which the whole party springs. Unless it was the crumpled foil on linoleum from one of the show’s earliest paintings (Aluminum Foil, 1976). Or the dripping, tragic sparkly blue eyeshadow. Or those toenails.

As for the jealousy? I remind friends, FB and not, that jealousy is always our ally, reminding us to take action. Act: go see this show.

Pretty/Dirty is in Houston through August 2, and then it will travel to Denver, Orange County, and on to Brooklyn in 2016.

As it’s April, it’s all about Poetry (capital P)

The blog that’s getting the love is my ab chaos poesis, in which I play every day and link to other wordsters. But stay right here and enjoy a little Diane di Prima with your coffee.

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #19

(for The Poor People’s Campaign)

if what you want is jobs

for everyone, you are still the enemy,

you have not thought thru, clearly

what that means

//

if what you want is housing,

industry (G.E. on the Navaho reservation)

a car for everyone, garage, refrigerator,

TV, more plumbing, scientific

freeways, you are still

the enemy, you have chosen

to sacrifice the planet for a few years of some

science fiction Utopia, if what you want

//

still is, or can be, schools

where all our kids are pushed into one shape, are taught

it’s better to be ‘American’ than black

or Indian, or Jap, or PR, where Dick

and Jane become and are the dream, do you

look like Dick’s father, don’t you think your kid

secretly wishes you did

//

if what you want

is clinics where the AMA

can feed you pills to keep you weak, or sterile

shoot germs into your kids, while Mercke & Co

grows richer

if you want

free psychiatric help for everyone

so that the shrinks

pimps for this decadence, can make

it flower for us, if you want

if you still want a piece

a small piece of suburbia, green lawn

laid down by the square foot

color TV, whose radiant energy

kills brain cells, whose subliminal ads

brainwash your children, have taken over

your dreams

//

degrees from universities which are nothing

more than slum landlords, festering sinks

of lies, so you too can go forth

and lie to others on some greeny campus

//

THEN YOU ARE STILL

THE ENEMY, you are selling

yourself short, remember

you can have what you ask for, ask for

everything