archive of past works

In the collection below, which I consider drawings, I was inspired by Basquiat's copious examples to write urgently about anything and everything with a china marker, on objects, paintings, cloth, paper and books. the image or object would spark an authorial voice not my own, some of which are transcribed directly here. they also become visual poems. this led later to experiments with automatic writing.

china marker on framed school photograph

 

I was number seventy four

fullback position I drove

a Camaro my girlfriend’s

brother sold me for 1G that

I had saved from

the gas station but 

Tracy that’s my girl

friend never liked

that car because 

someone had died in it

just a normal drunken

thing I guess but coach was

pissed cause he lost his 

QB reserve when Cal

drowned in his own puke

but I mean you can’t even

smell it at all she (Tracy)

says she can and won’t

sit in the back seat ever

china marker on mirror. collection nancy shelby

 

 

 

(written backwards on a mirror)

 

 

and the trembling

knight asked his

lady that night

wilst thou be my

bride? to which the

damsel, glad of the 

echo in her own

heart Say! what

is this shit?

 

 

jesus I mean fuck, whatever, I

mean it’s not like I meant to

do it or anything only bob put

me up to it only you’ll never

hear it from him like that

but I know for sure he

was totally wasted too,

though it’s his beers

and seconal to

my joints & whis-

key nobody's

proving

nothing

 

(signed) butch


it's rare enough to get the time to rummage through old slides and find gems of ideas since passed-consider the following scans of works created from 1994 onward, when I finished my MFA in San Francisco. my final graduate show is first, and then come the shows created during the ensuing several years.

"tag" 1994.  hand-framed street grafitti, chain and stuffed antelope head. 110" wide.  this work is based on my love for and appropriation of others' works of temporary grafitti in the form of hand-drawn stickers-a genre that blossomed in the 1990's in the Bay Area. I was an avid collector of them at the time. I was criticized for using work not my own, but since I had lovingly hand-cut frames for each image, it lives as an homage more than an appropriation. tagging an area with your own name on stickers is a way to control your environment and assert yourself, a logical analog to the killing and stuffing of wild animals.  both are proud trophies of a sort.

"fag", 1994. this six foot long sign of urgently twinkling lights went over with a whimper.  not even a whimper, no one said a thing, positive or negative. It was the exact size of a defunct 1950's neon sign still hanging on market street at the time. I had to defend it to myself because of being straight, though a person with a fair amount of flamboyance. I still don't know exactly why I made this, but enjoyed its campiness as well as its making. It was lent to a party and never returned.

"brag", 1995. a chance find of some one hundred pounds of keys allowed me to make these giant key rings.  from afar they looked like craters of the moon, and were oddly satisfying to stand within; and many did. see them in context of the show Access in the photo below.

 

collections Daniel Gorrell and Kathryn Reasoner.

from a two-person show in San Francisco called Access, with Stephen Hendee. thrift store clocks and computer-cut wall text made a shabby ironic installation called Global Time, a flea market parody of a big business trading floor wall. two big key rings sit on the floor. 1995.