Q: How do you know if your Doctor is a man?
A: There's shit on his speculum

Looking backwards, ass backwards.
This is your life.
Peephole history.
The Wayback Machine.
Porthole to the soul.
Your lemon sheets, hung out the bedroom window
[to dry.

Lonesome yellowing scrapbook in the sun.
Gilded hair gone white.
Silver Mirror.
Golden Boy/White Trash.
Upscale cracker, with caviar on it.
Tommy Roe, Cum Gum. Bun Boy, Love Gun.
This is the oval reflector, solar-framed, exuding light.
The mirror has been painted on, outlining the self.

At the crossroads of life.
At Tross City limits.

Standing, vertical, in front of a mirror, in the dark, with
[candle in hand, reveals the multi-colored aura.
Caught squatting over a mirror with a flashlight.
"Say, Doc, is there such a thing as an anal speculum?
[Huh?"

Oh oh! Candle in the sock drawer.
Yes, right below the vaseline drawer, sir.
It's next to Mommy's secret cabinet... of... of
[HORRORS.

Body loathing. Mmmmmmmmm good.
Gaze trauma. Wow! And, va va voom!
Keyhole shock. Zzzzzzzzzz.
Electric door knob.
Jane and/or John Doe caught a disease from it.
They all bumped into it and got a hickey. Yeah, sure!
Blame it on the toilet seat, just like everyone else.

What's that a picture of, in there?
I don't know, and if you can't say what it is... it must be
[dirty.
It's bad, and I'm bad, and we're both alike and that's
[good.
Tee hee! Look at me! I'm naughty.

When painting a painting, there comes the final period when you enter into struggle with it. It taunts you; it dares you to force it to behave, to make it be "right". A painting might be finished, that is, the support may be adequately covered with paint, the handling of the medium may display a proficiency with materials, yet the painting does not seem done. It calls out: "I have yet to conform. That mysterious sense of order and balance has not yet been attained." But when this balance is found you instinctively know that it is so. Then the painting becomes placid and ceases to cry out. Only then is it good.

But what are the rules that define this completion? What are these laws that elude utterance? One can speak, but the language that surrounds a true image never conveys its material perfection. An image that sits well defies explanation. Its surrounding language has an other-worldly air, divorced from body and soul. It comes off as pedantically technical, emotionally empty. The thing done correctly is the thing that assumes its own naturalness. And the natural is irretrievable through anything but itself. It can only be spoken through itself. The laws that govern true being must not be questioned. They simply are. To question them is to destroy their naturalism. To pose the question makes the truth into a lie. What are the laws? Shut up, and don't ask. The law is the law. It is buried in you. You operate perfectly well under its domination. And, believe me, you really don't want to know anything anyway.

Pray to the old God, the cruel one.
Pray to the One you struggled to erase your belief in.
Pray to the One who preys on you.
This is the vicious God of the Old School.
He is the maker of the violent universe.
He is the cosmic torturer.
He snorts when you say the Messiah has come.
"No son of mine," the bass intones.
"Slap the Sissy around".
An Helen Girly-boy Brown
Came to town
Sittin' like a girl, crossed legs
Carryin' schoolbooks like a girl, pressed to chest
Sobbin' like a girl, tears rolling down apple cheeks
Gigglin' like a girl, with a gaggle of others
Gettin' beat like a girl, submissive-like
Suckin' Dad's Cock like a girl, etc., etc., etc.

Except maybe it's Mom's Cock. A lot of things aren't what they seem, are they? Take the painting's aura of completion, for instance. Let's call this sense of completion the painting's normalcy. What if this normalcy is only a screen memory: a projected image of comfort, based on social stereotypes, used to mask an unbearable true event that cannot be faced without grave psychic damage? In this scenario the paintings comfort, its sense of naturalness, comes only from repressed indoctrination covering up subjugation and abuse. Your root, your true self, is a false mirror. Who knows what's really there? It's a moot point now, because nothing's been left behind. You are only compliance. Your inability to get to the bottom of your sense of aesthetic pleasure is not a merging with a natural order -akin to not recognizing yourself in the mirror, which is a beautiful humble experience- it is simply repression. Oh, you think you have risen above. You think that your loss of memory is a sign of getting past certain wrong-headed childhood fantasies, of leaving old useless baggage behind. Not true. Your memory loss is successful, planned erasure. You are now living, breathing, indoctrination.

You are now "you". Since your true self cannot be confronted you have mystified it. Now that which has been tossed into the mind's garbage can becomes "special". The so-called "finished" artwork is simply the one that presses unlabeled psychic buttons. They switch on the pleasure sign, the one that illuminates your denied, hated self in an admirable light. Every time you feel aesthetic pleasure you unconsciously reenact your abuse at the hands of the law. You live out again the unchanging rule. You don't know you are doing it. Your sense of accomplishment is mysterious. You don't even realize you are in compliance. You don't realize that your very being is a continuous loop playing back your originating abuse.

I am the reincarnation of Hans Hofmann.
Prodigal son.
To Sir with love.
Beachside painting resort disciple.
Old-fashioned acolyte.
Fawning at your lord's feet.
You can go home again.
Teach Me Tonight.
Rebirthing once a week.
Put down in the ship's log.
Hearth and home.
Call me Norman Bates.
Summoned up.
Making the primal scene.
Family-treed by bloodhounds.
Puppet of the ancients.
Unhooded by the Clan.
Outlived by Jim Morrison's Dad.
Transfused with Master's blood.
I, Renfield
The Fall of the House of Maytag.
Still warm stiff.
Blood is thicker than matte medium.
In the shanty foldin' panties.
Ed Gein Memorial Junior High School.
Past sniffer.
Corpseophile.
Not dead, just sleeping.
Awake!

Whenever you "rediscover" your old creations, isn't it funny that you find them so satisfying? You're as engrossed as baby is with his or her own poop. And, to top it off, it seems as if a hiatus from old ways sharpens your skills at those abandoned practices. Then you ask yourself: "Why did I ever stop doing this? How is it that I forgot myself? Why do I have to rediscover what I already know?" And then you cry out: "I want to go home again!" Well, come on back. Your room's just like it was when you left. We've kept it exactly the same, untouched, in anticipation of your return. You're home.

So here I am back at the steps of my old academy. I knock on the wise door with a tear in my eye. Yes, I am the first to admit that my paintings are willful perversions of my training. They are full of ironic inversions and grotesque substitutions. All of these strategies are empty posturings; they are simply flimsy facades hung on a solid framework, but they do not diminish the truth of their interior structure. All my pathetic Oedipal struggles to construct a new aesthetic, one that is solely "mine", cannot hide the fact that all of my later "innovations" are based on unshakeable law. Inversion and perversion only serve to reinscribe the law they seek to undermine. Surface meaning is of no consequence. The underlying rule never falters.

I, on the other hand, stumble. Weak-kneed, I totter ahead still deluded that I chart my own course. I live a lie. I believe that I have matured when I have only aged. I fancy that I have constructed my own history. It is all shit. The law is there. And in my last breath, like all lapsed believers, I will whimper and ask for forgiveness. I will die groveling, begging to be reinstated into the ranks I never truly left: the ranks of the law-abiding. Stupid me. I was a believer all along.

M.K.



(Published from the exhibition catalogue
"The Thirteen Seasons [Heavy On The Winter]",
Jablonka Galerie, Cologne, 1995.)