IT’S CHEAP.
O.K., here’s the rest of the article. Despite it’s semi-famous
art school, this town is full of some of the most gawd-awful
public art that you will ever have the misfortune of
smelling.
Richmond is pocked with it, and I am here to ridicule
the
most mediocre of this dubious collection. So let us
start with
the endless procession of Fascist slave owners
that adorn every
corner of this live-in-the-past
with-your-head-up-your-ass kinda town. It’s a free
country
and I respect your right to celebrate your "heritage".
So please respect my right to say that you are full of shit! Why are you so
proud of a heritage that
kidnapped millions of human beings
from their homeland, placed them in perilous bondage,
and
then proceeded to sell and enslave them. Maybe you
need to
have that happen to your family. Lets see if you sing
the same
tune after your Mom is hauled off by a bunch of
club-wielding drunks. So don’t give me that shit about
it
being about your heritage. If that’s true then how
come there
aren’t a bunch of statues of doctors and lawyers,
musicians and transexuals? DON’T LIE.
Those are statues to a war
you wish you’d won that was waged to keep other
people in
chains. So here’s my proposal to rid our town of some truly offensive
(and bad)
public art--take those statues of Lee, Jackson, and all their rascist,
Fascist,murderous brethren,
bulldoze them, melt them into slag, and build a huge statue of
Hitler. If we’re gonna build a monument to hate, lets
make it a doozy...
Still, black people shouldn’t worry about all those honky
metal men. After all, doesn’t the black
community have adequete sculptural representation
of some of their best and brightest?
Like that Arthur
Ashe statue.....Arthur AAAAAAAAAAAShe!
I’ve seen a lot of bad art in my
time...I went to V.C.U.
for gawdsakes! Since then,
I’ve made a career out of it. But that is
absolutely the most confusing
and just plain stupid-looking
piece of matter I’ve ever had the joy of ridiculing. A friend of mine
took his kid to see it and
ask the child’s opinion. I quote the wisdom of
Yar, age 10-- "It looks like
he’s hitting them". And he
is. An unsmiling Ashe lifts his racket/club on
high, luring
the children in with a stack of
anonymous books (gay porno). In
vain they raise
their arms to sheild themselves from a volley of
blows that only a Wimbeldon champion
could
deliver. What does Pasquale, the artist behind this
cultural monstrosity, have against
Arthur Ashe anyway, that he would portray him
as a pummeler of the young?
I’ve got news for you Pasquale--children are AFRAID
of that sculpture, and
everybody else thinks it sucks, especially the black people that
it is supposed to honor.
And why his strange prediliction for statues of pissed-off
ethnic types?
Pasquale did the big indian at the Diamond--a cool piece of work but
that
proud brave doesn’t look too happy to be there. In fact it looks like he’s about
one inning away
from animating, breaking free, and devouring every season ticket
holder he can get his mits on.
It’s hard to imagine a more condescending and and
insulting racial stereotype than George Lucas’s
intergalactic Stepin’ Fetch, Jar-Jar Binks. But nevertheless
it does exist, right here in our fair-to-middling city...
Thats
right kids, I’m talking about the Bojangles statue in
Jackson Ward. It’s bad enough that it’s also the name of a
famous chicken restaurant (but Dave, black folks LOVE
chicken) and that the statue literally looks like it was made
of shit, but enough is enough. Thinking about that statue
makes me pray for a race war. Then we can get everything
out in the open, burn everything down and start over again,
with the Earth ruled by a benevolent race of alien
tree-sloth people. I wonder what young black people who
have just turned off Monument Avenue think when they
arrive in front of their communities cultural icon. I bet they
are PISSED. In fact, I got jumped one time less than a
block from that thing. Look, I’m not saying that Bojangles
was evil or an Uncle Tom or even remotely related to the Huxtables. But when
young black people look to the streets to see how they stack up against the Great
Southern Death Cult, they get the almost deliberately insulting depictions of Ashe
and Bojangles. And before I get bum-rushed , I don’t mean to even suggest that
these men are not deserved of honor--they certainly are. But it’s way past time
young black people were encouraged to do something other than dance or hit balls
for the entertainment of white people.
NEXT! O.K., here’s a hard one. It’s fun to ridicule
people you’ll probably never meet, but when
you
actually know somebody that created a piece
of
art that screams "vandalize me",
things can get a
little sticky. So I dive in. I’m sorry, Ed
Trask!
I respect
your work and the time and effort that
goes into it. It’s very gratifying to see
one of your
peers do well. But that painting of Lady Di
is
HORRIBLE, and the nose is even worse.
I hope he got paid money, and a lot of
it, and he painted that
nose as a silent protest against this perversion
of
his God-given gift. I can understand that,
I mean
one time I got paid 300 dollars to wrestle
Dirtwoman (local infamous fat as shit transvestite/retard
thing).
Seeing this painting almost caused me to
wreck my car. I mean, is that her before
or after the accident? Or after her split
decision with Mike Tyson? And why do we
feel the need to honor foreign
royalty--I mean what was that whole revolution thing
about? When the Royal Suckle-Mother of Upper
Togoland loses her hangnail, do
we spackle the floodwall? Oh, thats right,
we’re a Commonweath. That whole
Lady-Di-Getting-Smashed-and-I-Can’t-Find-a-Decent-Picture-of-it-on-the-Internet
thing pissed me off anyway. People who get
in drunken car wrecks are generally
reviled in the press, whether they deserve
it or not. But just because Lady Di is
Princess, she gets treated like
royalty! And I have to be reminded of it every time I
go to Shockoe Bottom. As if I needed another
reason to stay away from that
shithole.
Richmond is simply awash in
mediocre painters that make Ed look like freakin’
Van Eyck. These shambling horrors have polluted
our psyche to the point that the
General Assembly is actually debating banning
all forms of expression except for
macreme’. Because of the efforts of these
pointless yet demanding air-takers, the
definition of the word "art" is
being changed to "whatever meaningless drivel I can
slop onto a canvas (or maybe a shit-smeared
piece of rotten plywood) in order to
justify my meaningless existence and maybe
get a scrap of pot, a cup of coffee, or
into your pants."
It’s
gonna end soon. I know it’s bitter, but I’m always looking for a way to lash
out
at this town. Maybe it’s because they ran Howard Stern
off the air, or the fact that
my band, GWAR, hasn’t been able to play a decent-sized
club in years because of
the local ABC Nazis. Maybe it’s because Richmond sucks.
Forgive me, but I’m
trying to be honest. When I see something I hate I
have the right to hate it out loud.
I do love, but this article isn’t about love. It’s
about hate, my hate, and what to do
with it so I don’t go nut-log. When I see shit being
tolerated, or even worse praised,
that is blatantly offensive CRAP I simply have to take
one. And on the subject of
crap, we are led to our last and greatest piece of
really bad public art. Drum roll
please....and the winner is...The Office Supply Rental
mural over there at Broad
and Belvedere! YUCK.
To say that this work is a piece of garbage is to give it more credit than it deserves.
To say that it is shit is to imply it actually qualifies
as shit. First off, they ruined a
perfectly cool piece of art that had been on the side
of that building for a couple
years, and probably arrested those responsible (I’m
sorry, your art isn’t bad enough
to be viewed by the Richmond public). But what the
hell is that thing? What are
those blobs? A tribute to excrement? What is this,
the Crapple-Dumpling Gang?
And then there are the portraits along
the sides. They are so poorly rendered that it
is impossible to recognize the faces, even with the
aid of the arrogant message
painted next to it. And the selection of people--I’m
sorry, I’m just a little confused.
Robert E. Lee and Harriet Tubman? Edgar Allen Poe
and Bruce Lee?
Afrika Bambatta
and Freddy Mercury ?
Didn’t anybody check out the rough
sketch?Can I please run screaming
down the street now? Or can we just
burn the building down?
Please somebody
explain, or help, or send money,
because it hurts me to look at
it, and I have to look at it every day. In
a town of really bad public art, it
crawls shins and toenails beneath
them all. And what can I do to fight
back in the name of goodness and
light? Crouch in my sunless bunker,
hunkered down behind my malevolent
mouse, ready to pour forth in vicious
diatribe against that which would offend
mine eye. This is my right, my
quest--let there be consequence to the
application and execution of bad art,
let it be attacked, and defiled, and for
those guilty, let them be punished, in
public, ridiculed, and chastised! All in
the name of evolution. Farewell, or not
at all.
Thanks to Kristen Walsh for photographs