Please Visit my Studio

Please come to my studio at 40 East 75th Street NY, NY. That's next to the Whitney Museum. You will enjoy your day in the area also. Thanks.

http://www.ny1.com/content/143945/local-artist-leaves-two-paintings-behind-in-cab?r=6022888065

Missing Artwork NYC

Time Square

Time Square

Time Square

Union Square North

Union Square

Washington Square

Bobst Library

NYU Stern

Astor Place

Andy Warhol Sculpture. Union Square

Missing Artwork NYC

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Whitney Museum Missing Artwork

Illegal alien, the copy, temporarily suspended in the museum of American art. The original, missing on the streets of America.

Missing Pieces

Missing. Left in a taxi tonight or somewhere else. Please report if you find them. Thank you.

La Marcha

La Marcha. Gouache on paper. 42 x 71 inches

Big is not Enough.

Fierce matters more than big.

So Called Irrational Animal

Theorizing a Kiss

Dare you to theorize this. Start with Baudrillard's "simulation. Go to "author" and authorship concepts. Copyright issues and whatever have you. See, this vid is almost one million views and counting.

Method of Love

Method Man

Two Types of Caged Animals

There is a Woman Kissing a Dog in Jupiter

There is a woman kissing a dog in Jupiter
Next to a giant bowl filled  with a soup of tears

A river of unsolicited lovers run by her side

She kills them one by one
With a dagger of a beautiful smile

Why This Earth Has No Forests

Why this Earth has no forests

No sea; no water
No creatures killing each other; eating each other

No love; no sex
No new born babies

Abandoned buildings and street musicians
Rodents and cockroaches

Dirty politicians, robber barons and Internet pigs

Pamela Anderson

Exploding salty frogs in a swamp
Rotten blue cheese smiles
Smelly under pant bear bars

Boney knees
Rib caged twenty something corseted waists

A flaming Cuban cigar in a lawyer's shiny red lips
An unexpected kiss at a bar

Somebody's shadow falling fast in the quicksands of envy

Buried treasures, unearthed traumas

Seaweed undulating in the flows of euphoria

Big foot kicking: work, work, work
His toe gives you five dollars for your imprisonment

A tourist trip to the crater of Venice
In the Mediterranean desert

People hanging down to the balcony of their suicide

A concave breast

Skin tumor of social beating

You are bad, you are bad; obey and serve

Ulcerations of past adventures in an aging memory

Pustules of green fresh times gone by

Galleys of military service

Love as unrequited as a black sheep hole

Contraceptives of every kind and use, million of them
To the whole sum of alternative futures

A pearl in your lap
A massage on the trapeze
A kiss on the nape

A nice haircut inside the brain
To shed off the periodical negative thoughts

An ointment of You and Me

Phillip K. Dick “The Man in the High Castle.” Chapter 5; and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art"

Remember Walter Benjamin’s point of view in that overrated “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, about the “aura” of the original work of art? This is how Dick handles the issue:

“ Well, I will tell you,” he said. “this whole damn historicity business is nonsense. Those Japs are bats. I’ll prove it.” Getting up, he hurried into his study, returned at once with two cigarette lighters which he set down in the coffee table. “Look at these, look the same, don’t they? Well, listen, one has historicity in it. “ He grinned at her. “Pick them up, go ahead. One’s worth, oh, maybe forty of fifteen thousands dollars on the collector’s market.”

The girl gingerly picked up the two loghters and examined them.
“Don’t you fill it,” He kidded her. “The historicity?”
She said “What is historicity?”

“When a thing has history in it. Listen. One of these two Zippo lighters was in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s pocket when he was assassinated. And one wasn’t. One has historicity, a hell lot of it. As much as any object ever had. And one has nothing, can you feel it?” He nudged her, “You can’t. You can’t tell which is which. There is no ‘mystical plasmic presence,’ no ‘aura’ around it.” (Ibid 57).

Phillip points out, the placement of the market value of an item is not located in his physical quality but on the amount of history or tradition it carries with it. A work of art such as Andy Warhol’s “Green Electric Chair” sells in the auction house for half hundred million dollars not because its embodiment of artistic genius or aesthetic qualities but because of the history and art historical tradition it carries within.

The difference between a successful artist and one that is not lies not so much on his/her capacity for innovation or talent as on his/her ability for creating a historical narrative of his/her being and of the products that embody that being. That’s why Joseph Beuys needs to concoct a story about falling down from the sky in his airplane and be saved by a Caucasian tribe with fat and felt; not fortuitously his preferred working materials. The trick has been used and perfected throughout the 20th Century by artistic movements and figures such as Dada, who put the emphasis on scandal and noise; Picasso and his picturesque women; Modigliani's erratic behavior; Yves Klein dragging his naked females across the floor; Jeff Koon having sex with Cicciolina and more recently Banksy and the street artsy packsy playing clandestine urban guerrilla.

The problem with Walter Benjamin's concept of the original, unique work of art, and its "aura" on one side; and the democratic, pedestrian reproducible image on the other side, is that any massively printed or distributed object can be infused with "aura" and made a cultural fetish by way of manipulation and aggregation of meanings and connotations. Take for example the most distributed image in the world; that of Che Guevara, imbued with meanings that go beyond the auratic and reach the religious. Or take Leni Reinhfesthal "Triumph of the Will"; images that have been used to exhaustion for propaganda purposes and imbued with aura and all the attributes of the authoritarian work of art. Because as Phillip K. Dick says:

" Its all a big racket; they are playing it on themselves. I mean, a gun goes through a famous battle, like the Meuse-Argonne, and it's the same as if hadn't, unless you know. It's in here." He tapped his head. "in the mind, not the gun..." (Dick 57).

The "aura" is neither in the original work of art nor in the mass reproduced photography or film. The "aura" is in the mind of the beholder. And what is in the mind of the beholder you should be able as an artist or psychological manipulator, to upload (...Will continue).

Work Cited:

Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle. The Library of America, 2007.

Phillip K. Dick “The Man in the High Castle.” Chapter 4:

In this novel Dick paints a scenario in which the Nazi and the Japanese Imperial army had won WWII and has divided the US and the world into two parts, each belonging to one another. The reason Dick has done so is not political but because he wants to immerse his characters in the winner/loser situation of a world where its inhabitants are subjected to the rules of victors over defeated.

The narrative traces the lives of several ordinary people caught in a maze of hierarchical structures; the cogs of commerce and economic and social relations. All of them subjected to the absurdities of having to serve higher powers. People who has lost everything or who were not born with anything; the dispossessed or so call loser who try to redeem himself by starting a new business, seeking success to boost his self-steem and position in life and recover his wife back; she who goes around with men trying also to rise her self-steem. Or the careerist who change his name and identity with plastic surgery and forge strong connections with the powers that be. Even those who apparently have a better position in life are trapped in the assigned cell of the social pyramid.

I’m dumbfounded by Dick’s capacity for paranoid thinking, which makes him look for universal connections in all aspects of human life. Trans-personalization; the capacity to break the unity of the self and link it to external objects, allows him to blend his characters with multiple spatial and time environments. What some may call delusions of grandeur or ego-centrism, is the center for rationalization and concatenation of external events to one’s thoughts and will.

Individuals are caught into conditions that are alternative realities or possible scenarios according to a view of history as something that doesn’t follow causal relations or obey a concatenation of events, but that occur by mere fortuity or chance. But we also are who we are by constructing reality and setting up in motion the events of history with our thoughts and actions.

In this particular fragment the protagonist, after being fired from his position at an antiques forgery factory, comes back to claim his tools only to find out his best friend offering him to start a new business. This offer he accepts after much questioning and reflecting on the I Ching riddles; which is another of Dick’s favorite themes in this novel, say the preoccupation with destiny and what the future have in his magic purse for us.


“ Hell, he thought, it has to be one or the other; it can’t be both. You can’t have good fortune and doom simultaneously.

Or . . . can you?

The jewelry business will bring good fortune; the judgment refers to that. But the line, the goddamn line; it refers to something deeper, some future catastrophe probably not even connected with the jewelry business. Some evil fate that’s in store for me anyhow . . .

War! He thought. Third World War! All frigging two billion of us killed, our civilization wiped out. Hydrogen bombs falling like hail.

Oy gewalt! He thought. What’s happening? Did I started it in motion? Or is someone else tinkering, somebody I don’t even know? Or –the whole lot of us. It’s the fault of all those physicists and that synchronicity theory, every particle being connected with every other; you can’t fart without changing the balance of the universe. It makes living a funny joke with nobody around to laugh. I open a book and get a report on future events that even God would like to file and forget. And who am I? The wrong person, I can tell you that.

I should take my tools, get my motors from McCarthy, open my shop, start my piddling business, go on despite the horrible line. Be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best as I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind. That’s what the oracle is telling me. Fate will poleax us eventually anyhow, but I have my job in the meantime; I must use my mind, my hands.

The judgment was for me alone, for my work. But the line; it was for us all.
I’m too small, he thought. I can only read what’s written, glance up an then lower my head and plod along where I left off as if I hadn’t seen; the oracle hasn’t expect me to start running up and down the street, squalling and yammering for public attention.

Can anyone alter it? He wondered. All of us combined . . . or one great figure . . . or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

Closing the book, he left the lounge and walked back to the main work area. When he caught sight of McCarthy, he waved him over to one side where they could resume talk.
“The more I think about it,” Frink said, “the more I like your idea.”
“Fine,” McCarthy said. Now listen. Here is what you do. You have to get money from Wyndam-Matson.” He winked, a slow, intense, frightened twitch of his eyelid. “I figured out how. I’m going to quit and go in with you. My designs, see. What’s wrong with that, I know they are good.”

(…)

“Okay,” Frink said, a little dazed.
McCarthy gave him a slap on the shoulder and went off.

I’ve gone a long way, Frink said to himself. In the last ten minutes. But he did not feel apprehensive; he felt, now, excitement.
It sure happened fast, he thought as he walked over to his bench and began collecting his tools. I guess that’s how those kind of things happen. Opportunity when it comes—

All my life I’ve waited for this. When the oracle says “something must be achieved” –it means this. The time is truly great. What is the time, now? What is this moment? Six at the top in Hexagram Eleven changes everything to Twenty-Six, Taming Power of the Great. Yin becomes yang; the line moves and a new Moment appears. And I was so off stride I didn’t even notice!” (Dick 46-47).

Turns out, these two souls have possibly concocted an idea to start a forgery business that could ruin the life of several other people along the way. Ying-Yang, dualism, bright and dark, the happiness of one is the suffering of another; the good fortune of one person is the fatality or another person; the world cannot exist without the two events happening at the same time; Benjamin and Adorno, they both have good things and bad things.

I cannot tell you what happens after in the novel while I haven’t finished yet. So now I have to keep reading... Ahhh ... Dick.


Work Cited:

Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle. The Library or America, 2007.