Archive for August, 2006This, from a good friend currently deployed in Afghanistan. A reminder to support our troops….Being that i have a lot of freetime on my hand and often eat bad food out here, I wondered how far the human ass travels in a lifetime because of farts. Assumptions: a good earthy, average fart oscillates the cheeks approx 10 times/sec a cheek moves 1/16″ per oscillation average fart approx 2 seconds the average person farts 13 times/day average American lifespan is 77 years given these numbers, one can marvel at how resilient the human body is. in the course of one’s lifetime, the ass will move 28.83 miles because of gas. thanks for the tax money :-)(fyi, “farts” was tagged as being misspelled by blogger. I just thought that was funny.) Immediately I noticed that one of the pieces which I had donated to the silent auction for a local fundraising event had been covered slightly with a notice which read: PARENTAL VIEWING –ADVISED– THANKS!. My first censored work of art. Excellent. I grinned from ear to ear when I saw it, knowing that “the forbidden” only draws more attention. It was not my intent to be controversial in any way, but here I was, the center of a quietly bubbling controversy. The piece in question is this one:
I didn’t think anything about it, and continued perusing the other art on display. As I was walking through some of the sculptures, one of the members of the board of directors for the organization which was holding the fundraiser approached me. He wanted to explain to me the reason for the censorship and make sure I was OK with it. I told him, regardless of the reason, I thought it was great. He then explained the story to me. A middle aged man attended the event with his two young sons, about ages ten Because the event was intended for all ages and wanting to respect the wishes of the parent, but also wanting to keep the piece on display, the windowshade solution was implemented.
His boys were participating in the event, which consisted of creating an original sculpture out of objects and materials found throughout the establishment’s cache of goodies within an allotted amount of time. The sculpture the boys created was a machine gun, pictured after the jump in previous posts. A discussion ensued amongst some of the board members and myself regarding the irony of the situation. Sex is often packaged along with violence. The father was objecting to a piece that he perceived as portraying sex. Yet his sons created a piece of art that portrays a machine intended to kill people. To me, this made my piece even more poignant, because the text of the piece reads:
Server Error in ‘/Love’ Application. The resource cannot be found. Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is permanently unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly. Requested URL: /Love/login/default.aspx If there is no love in someone’s heart for a person or some people, he may instead have violence and hate in his heart, thereby allowing him to justify using a machine such as a gun to kill his perceived enemies. The question was asked, how is war and violence acceptable in our modern society, but depictions of a naked body are not? Also created during the competition was another, slightly more subtle, depiction of war, a chess set:
There was discussion about weather or not it was appropriate to speak publicly about the disconnect involved in this controversy, but it was decided that the fundraising event was not the venue for such a discussion. I agreed.
Marc Mans the Guns, originally uploaded by love not fear. Ratatat-tat! Read the story behind this photo
The smell of burning leaves permeated the afternoon air. I sat sipping warm cider, smelling the stench of rubber being made as it mingled with the burning of the leaves in the neighborhood. The ash from my cigarette fell onto the wooden floor of the porch when the screendoor slammed. Betsy stepped onto the porch. She handed me another mug, and I took it from her gratefully as she took my cooling cider from me and lit a cigarette. “What do you think we should do?” she asked quietly. I sipped slowly from my mug, knowing that it was hot whiskey before she had handed it to me. “I guess we rake the leaves back into the stove,” I said. We had been raking leaves all afternoon. We’d rake them into an old brick stove that the previous owners of the house had built. Once it was full we started the fire and kept raking. We’d sit into the dark with blankets wrapped around us, watching the embers glow orange, until the last of them had burnt to black. We’d unwrap the blankets from around us and go inside. Go to bed. “No,” Betsy said, “I don’t mean the leaves.” she said. “I don’t know,” I said. “We could take them to the river.” “We can’t do that,” she said. “Why not?” I said, sipping my whiskey. “If we feed them, we’ll have adopted them.” The crawled over and around my feet on the porch, mewing, lapping milk from the tin Betsy had set out for them. “You’ve already fed them” I said. “It’s the river or the kitchen.” It was getting colder. The sun was disappearing quickly behind the dingy buildings. We had found them that afternoon, crawling around in the leaves inside the old brick stove amongst the trash and branches. What if we had burned them? Betsy had asked when we heard them crying. What if we had, I thought.  |
