Charles Demuth's Sailors And Flowers

One of my favorite American artists of the Twentieth Century was Charles Demuth. I'm not going to go into an intricate biography of the man here. There are plenty of accounts, both exaggerated and more respectful, which detail his supposedly lonely and pathetic existence. He was not a healthy guy by any stretch of the imagination; but he was extremely productive, and he had a good many friends who supported him and appreciated his exceptional gifts, not least among them Marcel Duchamp. In connection with Demuth's Pissing Sailors, it should be pointed out that Demuth was one of the most vocal defenders of Duchamp's appropriated sculpture, Fountain, which is of course a urinal repositioned, laid down on a pedestal. Like Duchamp with the Étant Donnés, Demuth was making his most important art, not for contemporary public viewing, but for a public thirty or forty years hence. As for the flowers, as organs of regeneration, I believe they do very well juxtaposed with these hefty dicks. Some scholars assume that Demuth painted his friendly working class gobs as he did because he was himself incapable of achieving erection. They go too far with their assumptions and conjecture. There are even some academic fools who would claim that Demuth wasn't Queer. Such stupidity is insulting. Why must blind men try to write about visual Art, even if their blindness is only metaphoric?

The Drawings Of Pedro Palanca

I had been planning a post regarding the work of the Peruvian homoerotic artist, Pedro Palanca, for some time and had everything ready when I was struck down with pneumonia and wound up in SF General Hospital for close to two weeks. For me Palanca is the perfect mixture of the vulgar and the refined. He has a remarkable ability as a draughtsman and in some matters shows extraordinary taste and daring. I don't care at all for his connection with the LA leather scene or the Tom of Finland Foundation, but I won't go into that now. For the present I just want to show a small selection of his prodigious output from the last twenty years or so, in hopes that it might gain him some much needed admirers of a more discerning temperament.

Paulo Colimbra, Fabricio, And Ricardo Onça; One And The Same

For some time now I've been planning a post devoted to the beauty of this particular Brasileiro over whom I've been masturbating since I first became aware of him some seven or eight years ago. He has worked for various companies, many of whom pretended that he was their own special find (hence the many names, which extend beyond those listed.) He has a peculiar smile, which needs to be photographed in a better manner than the various professional photographers that I've sampled here seem capable of. I've done my best to alter the lighting, exposure, and mood of the assembled images and cropped them to my better liking. I hope I have made them work as a group of pictures, because I really do admire this guy no end. He has a face worthy of a drawing by Pedro Palanca.

Paulo




Fabricio


Ricardo


Paulo (again)

Duchamp And The Mechanics Of Desire

I had planned some time ago to do a post on Marcel Duchamp, accumulated the necessary images, and failed to construct the post. This is not the only instance of such wasted effort. As luck would have it, a recent reverie concerning Duchamp and his admiration for American Plumbing and Engineering reminded me of how much enjoyment I've had of late, watching his films and looking at his art. It struck me as silly that people were not better able to recognize the sincerity of his satisfaction in good industrial design; but what I now see as almost obvious comes after many years of study and many years of others writing about his work. I thought of him sitting at one of those inventors fairs where he was hawking his goods to little attention (but greatly enjoying the atmosphere) and it seemed a good time to pay tribute to his understanding of the mechanics of sexual desire and the importance of frustration in love. The last image presented here is, of course, not by Duchamp, but by me. I wanted to present an instance of my having learned by his example. It was made, in large part, as my homage to Étant Donnés.