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, done in her co-op studio space in Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, 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 shadier, and nastier, than 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 (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David) elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled, The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.
