Posted on Facebook, this Peter Steiner cartoon from 2016:
(#1) From a 1/28/16 posting on Steiner’s blog
The humor turns on an ambiguity of the verb read, and also on a specialization of the derived nominal reading to a very culture-specific event.
(Then some words on the artist, who now has a Page on this blog.)
(Flânerie, strolling from one thing to another in Victor Frankenstein’s neighborhood — and, as it turns out, in mine too.)
At the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, the exhibition “Betray the Secret: Humanity in the Age of “Frankenstein””, 4/4/18 – 8/5/18, which I viewed yesterday, as a Memorial Day treat. The image for the show:
(#1) Beth Van Hoesen, Stanford (Arnautoff Class), 1945 (graphite and ink on paper)
Just one part of a larger Frankenstein celebration at Stanford. A mid-sized show, easily graspable within an hour or so — the Cantor is very good at this — and, thanks to its dependence on existing collections at Stanford, offering many works and artists you wouldn’t have predicted and might never have heard of (I’ll write about one of these artists below). In any case, thought-provoking, in line with the Cantor’s mission as a “teaching museum”.
(Only the first image — daddy and boy in sexual medias res — is problematic; but it’s probably over the line for Facebook these days, and it might be for you too, even though it’s penisless. The penises are in an AZBlogX posting “Gay butterflies”, in three mansex collages with word play and butterflies.)
It started with a visual re-run yesterday in “Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar”:
A collage of mine (from my 10/21/16 posting “Another Spanish lesson”, with a Daddy / Boy scene illustrating el papá taking charge of the body of his boy:
In my 12/31 posting “El Bruto commands” there appeared two of my collages on the theme Spent Husks (SH #1 “The Wages of Dissolution” in #2 there, SH #2 “The Lost Boys” in #3 there). The theme of the set is the folk-medical idea that ejaculation is using up, spending, a portion of a finite stock of the essence of masculinity, of male strength; in this view, a man has only some many shots in him, so that frequent masturbation and other sexual activity depletes the stock, eventually reducing a man prematurely to a spent husk, an impotent, desexed shell.
Couple this idea with the belief that gay men are extraordinarily profligate sexually, and you get the view that even young, vital-seeming gay men are just pretty, but rapidly degenerating, husks of humanity. Et in Arcadio ego.
From this spring the SH collages.
A recent Pinterest mailing included a board devoted to the Aberrant Art collages of Barry Kite — this because I posted on them a while back (on 11/30/16 in “Poet in Search of His Moose”). Six of them in that earlier posting, now four more I’ve chosen from those in the Pinterest mailing. They range from relatively simple compositions to an enormously complex one. But like the collages I posted about last year, they’re zany educations in art and popular culture, packed with astonishing juxtapositions of images.
On AZBlogX, three final sets of XXX-rated collages in which my doodles figure prominently:
from 12/5/16, “Doodling with the critters”: 8 XXX-rated collages with critter descriptions (of insects, spiders, scorpions, snakes) plus doodles
from 12/6/16, “Doodling with dinos”: 13 XXX-rated collages combining dinosaur descriptions with doodles
from 12/6/16, “Miscedoodles”: 10 XXX-rated collages with prominent doodles in them, on various themes — some with found captions, some with captions composed for the occasion
Almost all of these are relegated to AZBlogX because they have penises in them, but there are a few with merely racy images of men. Here’s #1 (But is it art?, Superman wondered, as the penguins surfed) from the last set, with a grim surprise in the caption:
On AzBlogX, the first of a series of postings with XXX-rated collages in which my doodles serve as design elements. In this AZBlogX posting, the background images are ad photos for Kristen Bjorn’s gay porn flicks, in which his actors (in twos and threes) display their bodies, especially their hard cocks. (On Bjorn and his work, see my 2/26/13 posting on AZBlogX.) Each has a wry caption, plus other added design elements, and a somewhat snarky bonus caption commenting on these various elements.
A final pair of penguin collage postings on AZBlogX: 8 from larger originals, here; 9 from smaller ones, here. Brief comments on the individual collages there.
Most are gay XXX-rated, but some are merely homoerotic. Several I still find funny (though they were created five or more years ago), and some are touching in other ways. For instance, #1 in the second set, which I can reproduce here because it’s genitals-free (but sexily shirtless):
On AZBlogX, two postings of homoerotic Pingu-based collages (featuring the animated penguin Pingu), 8 in each set: “Pingu: first wave” (here) and “Pingu: second wave” (here) — being birds of the sea, penguins come in waves.
Pingu will then lead us to other pingu- words, only a few penguin-related; and to the pungi, a musical instrument (cobras will be involved).
The cover page for two showings of my work, in 2003 at red ink studios in Palo Alto and in 2005 at the Stanford Humanities Center:
(#1)
The big point here is that I consider these works (and two other sets of collages) to be art — eccentric art, perhaps, but nevertheless art. For many people, this is a problematic claim, so I’m somewhat defensive.
