On being painted as Abby

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far sunken from John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.    

 

On being painted as David

 

The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste. 

To Know Mary

To know Mary is ride into the tactile and the carnal. 

To Know Abby

 To know Abby is to get back to where you once belonged. 

Mutants II (Electric Boogaloo)

About pursuing cultural Philly in the Aughts as a raison d'etre, I made a decision in about 2012 that I haven't looked back from. Some things clarified themselves for me, so that the path chosen was, I felt, the enlightened one. Accusations of hubris or delusional grandeur aside, I was unable to resist this thought— this group, multi-disciplinary, who I call the Philly Free School, are mavericks. If we are mavericks, it's because we're the first group of American artists to climb up to the artistic perch of classicist Europe. Until us, no one in America really has or did that particular task. This is especially true of me and Abby. Thus, any engagement with any media enterprise which would refuse to acknowledge this maverick achievement would have to be a useless one. But, let's get real, shall we? The American media deplore classicist Europe. The syllogism has, thusly, to end in a temporary media blackout. Perhaps a Cold War, too. So that, Mary here can out-charisma Deborah Harry all she wants. The sense the media likes to emphasize, of reach— has to be blood-sacrificed, on the altar of essential, individualized integrity maintained. Do we need Anton LaVey to do the sacrifice? Probably. But I am setting this group up to go the distance. That's the conceit. One way or another.

Mutants!

There is something else to say about taking Mary and Abby, and making them pin-ups. What I am about to say pertains particularly to Abby, as a nascent heir apparent to Ingres and David, the French Neo-Classicists. To take said heir apparent to Ingres and David, and enfranchise her as a babe, as you see here, makes her and I both freaks and mutants. Taking the twig-like mold around Neo-Classical level painting and snapping it, is a good way to earn a hale-and-hearty, completely stunned silence from all and sundry. Thus, soaring numbers on these sights, sometimes staggering numbers, but no buzz. Bizarre. And, as time goes by, we're only going to get more outlandish, more bizarre. The catalogue of pin-up shots and the catalogue of paintings will be forced to do a dance like the Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. No one on Gods green earth will know what to make of us at all, I predict, half-kidding. No molds, no formulas, no codes. No one behind us pushing us out as stooges, either. But worth noting that in this first wave of recognition, wherein the sites are manned with rubber-neckers from all necks of the woods at all times, I was able to spot something in us new enough, and bizarre enough, that the mutant streak we embody or boast, may be seen from many perspectives to be the dominant one. And that that's fine. 

Anonymous (West Philadelphia, USA): "Portrait: Abby Heller-Burnham"

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