PDX Art: "Paper, Scissors, Botox"

"Paper, Scissors, Botox"

Taste is required so is beauty; the dead can't complain anymore about new trends in the body erotic. Artificial is good enhanced while natural is a trivial pursuit. The land has escaped the rapture still waiting under over utilization for the big dig and the consequential rededication of unaltered nonsense.
Until than its “suck, cut, paste and immobilize”.
The body has become like a piece of marble that can be transformed into any kind of shape even if it means to deface a face by turning it into the face of a humanized cat like Capore.
It seems wittier at first than logical in its next step but quickly becomes ridiculous down the road to Cartoons Ville.
But the guys are happy looking at doey eyed over breasted little wife’s dressed like naughty Barbie’s.
Arousal is guaranteed as long as one doesn’t touch the fruit of this laborious nip and tuck façade.
One might experiences a surprise leak or a cheek that doesn’t feel the pucker.
Sure Luise Bourgeois painted, drew, reconstructed fantasies like this long ago but I am sure she did not intend to be the inspiration for such outgrowths of human libido.
We all learned lately that reality can be weirder that fantasy. It shows that we don’t just do it with our eyes closed but that we also fuck to satisfy our imagination.
There is no question that even this trend will pass and that those replaced Silicone implants will show up in an art exhibit maybe titled “Redux – Reflux” if it hasn’t already happened.
It gives a whole new meaning to “when Art goes skin deep”.
So what! Reality is out/ dead unless it’s hyper reality of course or infantile reverential reality.
Not so fast you say and what’s all this wordy orgy suppose to be about?
Honestly I don’t know why all of a sudden all the faces around me look alike with this botoxed mastitis and so does the Art as if everyone belongs to the same creative tinker tank and decided which stitched together slope to take next.
Places open like Together gallery or Grashut and I can’t seem to figure out whose show I am looking at.
Art has become plastered over by all the trends that ever promised success graphicy or artsy, re fab, pre consumed, pre ordained you name it it's on the shelf with all the other plagiarized perevilia.
Cut paste ready sign it frame it and declare it an original. Tada good plagiarism makes the best Art.
What’s wrong with plagiarism? You ask; nothing of course because originally we learned from each other by copying each other’s behavior. That’s how the brain works in the early stages of development until we supposedly wean ourselves from old parental paradigms and develop our own frontal lobe world.
But we have become so lazy because all things creative are just a mouse click away and with a little artistic Botox looks just as fresh as other peoples potpourri but we can claim it as ours.
Have you created a “Motherwell’ lately; you know ripped some brightly colored paper, a strip of refit text and some black ink in splotches will do the trick. Have it screen printed and you are in business.
Oh what you are in need of a Chris Martin ; take your daughters drawing and fill it in with semi solid colors and a few out of place white dots you got it.
Jim Dine anyone; trace an antic figure and give it a splotchy back round wham bam there you go.
How about an Andy Warhol to go; get a faded picture of Marilyn outline her face lips eyes and nose with a water resistant marker and pop goes the weasel.
Lately even blind people have become photographers showing their Art to non blind people. I have nothing against blind people I could become one of them but what the fuck? Sure it’s a nice gimmick I guess soon blind people will Botox others and the result will be also sold as Art.
Everybody wants to be in the fine Arts lately no matter how unrefined it is.
Unrefined is the new black just use black glitter there you have it; an understated statement about blackness in America.
The Art waters have become very shallow at least nobody will drown in it soon. Over bearing minimalism competes with under developed exuberance for first place in the race to win the Art Tour de Force but most of us will stay stuck in the deluge but you decide what’s better for our Art Nation, who has the best botoxed looks for marketing the whole package and who’s implants stand the most erect like sculptors to be touched by infidels.



copyright 2009 R. Schemmerer

PDX Art: "Desire" by R. Schemmerer

Desire
Or what you can’t have but could have instead

We desire change but are missing the point that change is ever present.
Instead of shaping that change we are adrift on a raft built from impatience just to anticipate to be saved rescued because we rushed too far out ahead of ourselfs.

We hope to be found by whom? Someone else who is lost or some vessel an entity that brings us safely back to the harbor we tried to escape from but had no plan at hand.
Our common wealth seems always to be threatened, our safety never secure but we still go ahead and pretend that we can have it all, stay in one place one position and still have the freedom to indulge in the excitement teeming on the other side of the frontal lobe. We fight change in side of us but want its promise.

We also want security like on a cruise ship while we are on our excursions into previously to us unknown territory expecting to be protected by a miraculous hand or some other imagined surprise while we anticipate the unexpected around every corner.
We are ambivalent about life but want our life to be a free ride to be remembered.
Optimism is sold in easy to carry paperback editions produced by an industry of self help moguls.

Pessimism is re-packed into series of books explaining to us how to get ready for the looming Apocalypse.
Politicians are going rogue to sell some flaccid gibberish in hard covers exposing the butt of the joke of American Politics.
Social change is handed down like small change handed down from impoverished previous generations and articulated by the restless mind syndrome of restless creative’s and the restless heart syndrome of the stubborn fundamentalists alike.

Social engineering can go in every which way swinging like a pendulum as one stand advances the backlash is not far behind because nobody wants to be behind especially not the 60 millions who read “The Left Behind ‘series. Every threatened sub group gets mobilized as soon as their life style is perceived as threatened.
Otherwise we just coast like a free floating iceberg in the landscape of ignorance until panic strikes where it hurts the most in our wallet.

Art is and has always been threatened by extinction so the latest developments proof nothing new. What had changed was the expectation of becoming in some way famous and its short lived viability and the dream to make a living of being an artist in a technology addicted world.
This seems to have built on an irrational assumption that Art can be dealt with like a commodity independent of research and study as if Art is really needed for survival and that artists are truly worth the myth.

Art has always been a slave to someone, some institutions religious or otherwise, under a governmental support system or used for propaganda, in advertising and being simply decoration for the rich and already famous.

Art as a means of creating awareness is still like an unproven science. It’s like the dog barking at its own mirror image expecting it to bark back or the dog pissing on an artificial tree.

It makes no difference, it doesn’t matter what artists and Art thinks it is or ought to be because it is just an outgrowth of our feeling of inequality a tumor on a system that is always looking to have a newer more exciting product that can be marketed to a polled demographic.

The whole notion of “selling out” is rubbish and artists who worry about that or claim too are living in denial; after all it will be sold and it doesn’t matter if it is as an original, a limited edition, mass produced, or on consignment for a collector which is just a nicer name for a buyer and customer.

Of late Art has taken on so many forms that it has cloned itself to be everything.
The old saying goes” if you are everything you are nothing” ; I think this is a bit harsh and narrow but value is like currency it is an artificial standard and at the end just a transaction like a barter.

You can trade your piece of Art for a Mango or a Porsche dependent on your inclination and desire and trade the Porsche for a 1000 pairs of tube socks if that is what makes you happy.

Happiness has not really a price tag, it’s an amalgam of your wishes and how you expect them to be fulfilled.

We manifest it all the happy thoughts and the unhappy ones the life affirming and the stifling clingy ones that make us a victim of our wants.
It’s all a grand fiction based on some half true stories invented by creative minds to find an outlet of expression and financial gain, implanted into our heads.

The future is constantly invented by smart marketing people who study us as demographics, to poll what we possible want for the next season of happiness or need to have according to them and the companies who get rich of our constant craving for gratification.

Give me more and give it to me now is our slogan like a baby that hasn’t learned yet that everything has to be earned in one way or another. The price for our dissatisfaction is high and there is no piece of Art that possible could fill that void forever.

Even if we say we want less we still want and we are still justifying why it is that we are not happy with how things are.

Art cannot have an effect but it can produce an effect. Art is itself trapped in its own promise and has to free itself constantly from false labels.

Art has to cut itself loose from the need to influence or be off influence, from selling or not to be sold, from trying to be pleasing or the need to shock because Art is the greatest gift of all the gift of not having to make sense just like this essay.

It is a gift to keep not to squander on something utterly frivolous and nonsensical in this sensual and sensory overloaded world.

Art is a place where social and antisocial mate to form new forms of mates, from the redundant to the extremely wasteful from the sublime to the pornographic from the cast out to the iconic, to be an expression of the wonder of human kind and its painful limitation.

The reality of Art is no matter how artsy it is done that it is still unreal at its core; it is a construct produced by speculation and there is a real danger that art is shoveling its own hole trying to sell itself to hard as Art by claiming that the World is in a hole but that art is not in it with it.

Art is not something outside of this life but is life and is living it; life is the real Art that continues to keep as fascinated.

At least I hope so

PDX Art: "China unwrapped" photography by Richard Schemmerer

copyright 2009 Richard Schemmerer


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Headlines & Time bombs

Headlines & Time bombs

Tick, tick who is there?
The mission winds down like a wound up doll that lost its spring.
“Shock and Awe” stepped way outside the law and took down the empire that had missed its step by side stepping justice and equality.
The math doesn’t count up in the schools for the children and their parents, brothers, sisters, relatives working at the world’s largest retailer in a fight for survival.
The “By the way Walmart Nation” doesn’t care for a cure for all; says cut it down after years of fights to trigger options and selective choices.
Congress is infiltrated on boyhe sites by "The Family" which stands for all things against family.

20 years ago the Wall came down in Germany but political philosophies don’t die that quickly only war zones shift shape like designer dresses and hem lines so no one remembers the same old patterns.

8 years into Afghanistan and the walls are not budging. Do you know how they feel, do you care to know?

The grave yard for empires is standing up to killer drones, to the rumors and to the accusations while Poppy fields still bloom in bloody red letting heroin flow into Russia youth as if it where an elixir of love and not hate.

Runaways disappear in human trade and street violence takes on many shades.
Freedom can’t ever be taken for granted or worn as a badge of honor; freedom has to be deserved, has to grow bigger than its old form of dynasty by ever adjusting to crueler challenges.

Who is your Stuart, what are you serving, whom are you going to mentor?

Global forces shift the home ground. Legal slaves formed from the dirt of illigal aliens run the show of commerce while their homeland becomes a travel destination.

Colonization of the mind skips no beat for profit and “Colonias” provide the exclusive amenities for the life styles of the better 1% of the world while the streets of our home towns are littered with homeless, run ways, addicts, outcasts and the unwelcome.

It’s time to look pretty; the season of giving is coming to the store next to you; it’s time to plan for the parties that ring in a new year.

Al Gore says it’s our choice while the Lord of the Dance takes a chance to fight to get our attention.

Sleeping under a bridge is not the same as being sleepless in Seattle.

Let them pick berries let them dig the yards and clean the highways from fast food litter, give em some card boards and call them a name because that’s’ what they are used to get because there is nothing to gain but shame.

Icons don’t grow on heaps of abuse and independence is nothing like scavenging for cigarette butts and empty cans in the trash of an oblivious society.

Oprah can’t save us all even though her money could go a long way.

Just to be with one to receive respect is at the core of what makes us feel human.
We expect the unexpected but forget to build up expectation.

A train in the bedroom circling around the ledge of dreams promises a quick getaway but life has other plans doesn’t know of worlds built from dreams.
It has its own stations, places to go and stops to make; not all lead to a permanent revolution of the mind or heart some lead back the same road because something had been lost on the way while rushing ahead of one’s self.

Success on any level is like a field of weeds to be tended too that includes weeding.
One can have a home and be homeless; to experience redemption one has to redeem one’s self.
Remember not every train will stop for us no matter how desperate we are to get away on it.

PDX Art: "Pay off time"

Pay off time

A pond becomes my mirror
A tree becomes my soul
A bone shows me direction
An empty soda can reveals its truth
A falling leave serves as an omen
Do you want to super size your order now

Not everything needs to be meaningless
But not all things have a deeper meaning
If it can be bought it is not priceless
A strip joint can reveal more
About the trappings of entertainment
Expose more than whirling naked flesh

Humanity is on judgments bench
Taking stock of its path of events
Grooming and upbringing are questioned
Accusations are bouncing of histories walls
Defenses are let down in retrospect
A jury will preside over verdict and punishment

A pond becomes more than a pond
A mirror has no choice but to reflect
The tree loses its decorative foliage
With the change of season comes rebirth
A bone is rediscovered by a dog

A soda can is picked up by a bum to be recycled
Moods change like shopping habits
Days come and go altering the meaning of one’s life
Charge cards have expiration dates
Everything keeps giving until it is pay off time

PDX Art: "Branded' by Richard Schemmerer

Branded
disposable humanity

Not a claim not a franchise not yet a brand but still branded by publicity
multiplicity infringing on conditions of anonymity
canvassing the mental platform for the logos and its postered trade- marks
handcuffed to consumerism plagiarized by copyrights
branded by what I say what I hide behind walls
I can’t reveal the truth because I can’t be truer than the truth
without being branded
the ghosts of past successes are hunting me
but what can I offer
to a world that is too big for itself and me to be understood
think bigger they said, be special they pushed, name that game they probed
pray to the highest god they argued
claim your place on the elevator to the top floors of success

potential doesn’t grow on trees and still it is home grown, I overheard them say
your uniqueness is like a mine you’ve got to dig deeper to strike the prospect
stop being a fraud and become authentic they commanded
there is not absolute truth on how to know
only knowledge can be accumulated they wisecracked

when the core is rotten get a new apple they ordered
if that doesn't help take out the tree
to find the code to your destiny you have to become the master of your destiny,
the leader of your gang, the straight arrow on the crooked path
the solid ground on the wavering shore they shared
define yourself or others will they yelled from corporate high-rises
create a manifesto and sell it to the highest bidder
built your church on dogmas with the promise of satisfaction
be the brand you want to be than become its biggest advocate
be a poster boy
think big and live even bigger while you eat from the golden calf
and drink the body of the holy man to rise above the average
to climb over the mis-fortunate and to celebrate the brand you are
the time is now because now spelled backwards means won

but still I feel not matter how much they think I should adorn myself
no matter how loud they yell I know that they are wrong
that I am not a brand that can be sold a label that can be worn and torn
but that I am a human with a voice that speaks out against branding
and against a disposable humanity























you & me together

PDX Art: "Pennies" Images & text by R. S.

Pennies and promises from the pockets of Heaven


First there was stillness than a rush of fermented flavors, a drum roll like buttery popcorn popping into a megaphone.
Colors reduced blocked bleached out by chalky white eating away like hard core acid on the brain of the self indulgent. Picking on it like pigeons on a piece of stale wonder bread that has lost its power of wonder.
Traces of vaginal fluid flow together with streams of premature ejaculations next to a chair that pretends to be more like a sculptor, a metaphor for the seat of the gut the content of the digestive movement spelling out like as if little cramps of discomfort could actually speak spelling out “remember reality” meaning that we are not invincible spelling out silently like a witness to a holocaustic event waiting for the return of the horizon of previous pleasures.
I look at you, myself and the world through my looking glass what I see is like in a prism of obscenity while strobes of pleasure enlighten my retina giving me flash backs of the impossible which became my reality that revels in sand squares soft to the touch.
I am the museum and a mausoleum of my past over the counter encounters my intellectual clashes with cultures and sub-cultures, the stored images of objects and subjects that engaged me made me search for justice in a place of injustice, a space between two ideas which occupy the same locality and claim to be its righteous owner. I am the divided occupier like in a fable that holds the truth in one hand but deprives the other hand from getting to it like in fable that holds the answer to the secret holding it up to me like a mirror but I see nothing when I look into it.
Bloodless concepts perform a buffer between zones of recognition. Is it me you hate or is the you that you seen in me that you can’t accept or is the me in me that irritates you reminded you that hate is an option.
I am collecting the collective guilt to trade it for a new pair of lucid optical fresh spectacles as food for future countless guilty acts of careless pseudo caring to save the ideas of superiorities on the on the backs of the sacrificed for the cause that caused the scarifies.
I am looping the pretention with the unpretentious to come back to full circle. I am a wall in a wall in a wall without foundation like a skeleton of concepts without a frame of reference or a stand to hang from; existing in the base that thought is the base of our purpose unless it is debased.
Complications arise like motivations which were formed out of the too quick logic of post war mentality.
Transnational ideas are glued together with patriotic ideologies of branding a dream for the world onto its dislodged psyche.
It’s obvious isn’t it: she said
Flicked her tongue around her thumb and took off.
Flick, flicker, words flicker in the brain before they burn like blisters in the mouth forming a signal tone a shock wave of sense code into hasty syllables escaping into thin air escaping the abyss of memory to defy the limitations of communication to articulate meaning full of meaning leaving us guessing it’s meaning.
Draw me a line I can follow, throw me a line I can catch, hand me down a line that binds me, swing me a line I can jump , string me a line I can hang my hopes on, lay me a line I can overstep, unleash me from the limits that limit my ability to love.
The shadow has no recollection it is uncertain of its independent existence; like a stalker it follows its victim like a stalker that wants to be stalked.
Worlds of words of words that resemble significance a prophetic in nature substance underneath the sugar coated elegance are an elegy to surface. The tension underneath is the proof that the world, this world is still in the making and that the maker is not done with it yet, that the maker is like the stalker waiting for the moment of self realization not in the other but in the completion of the mission which started in a heaven made from pennies and promises.

PDX Art: "Fresh Cut" B&W by Richard Schemmerer

looking new at something like a fresh cut into the flesh exposing the bloody wonder that lays underneath the surface of expectation