Teach Your Children About Johnny Cash

Teach Your Children About Johnny Cash

On Carson Street, in Pittsburgh, is a cool coffee place called the Bee Hive (first picture) (http://www.betatesters.com/penn/sahside/restaura.html) where the freaks and hipsters of the Burg meet to play chess and talk about all manner of cool, young, artful things. Hippies, yuppies, outcasts, and weirdoes converge on this large, three room coffee colony. It is really an unusual and energetic place, the likes of which I have not seen since I used to hang our in Lawrence, Kansas in my early 20’s. It’s a kind of grunge palace left in the nineties where poets and stoners and musicians stake their territory, and being “different”, in a town where football is king, is the graceful and right thing to be.

It is at this place where I was invited to take place in an experiment. Jason Szalla, whom I have mentioned here many times, invited me to collaborate with him to make a coffee house event of visual art. The event was to take the train to Pittsburgh, bringing with us nothing but a small selection of standard supplies (pencils, pens, markers, a camera). We would arrive two days before installation, and journey straight from the train station to the hotel to the bar. At the bar we would advertise our experiment and conceptualize our ideas. And drink. The next morning, the day before the installation, we would work from dawn to dusk creating every piece that would be displayed in the coffee house. Then we would install our work, creating new work as we went along, have a small opening with the people we met, hop back on the train and leave. Bring nothing, leave with nothing, coffee art as coffee art.

The second idea for the show was that each work we created would need to be affordable to coffee house patrons. No piece would exceed $20.00 in price. Accessibility.

While this experiment seems silly, and it is, it also seemed as though it would be a lot of fun and a chance to do things, create things, I usually would not do. It would be like a vomitious release, an abstraction of ideas, which would perhaps resonate in later work. “Teach Your Children About Johnny Cash” became a mad jam of ideas, like a garage band of visual music flowing sloppy into the street, without any refinement. Most important, “Teach Your children About Johnny Cash” was fun.

The results the experiment yielded, all created in one day of preparation and one day of installation, are as follows:

“Portrait of Kimmie as a Wooden Duck” (second picture) was by far my favorite piece I created for this experiment. Kimmie was a very flirtatious young woman we met at the bar. Between the booze and the cigarettes and the pool tables and the Steeler’s posters, she became a sort of symbol to me about the compelling luster of the gross small town nightlife and the attraction of sexual repulsion. The portrait I created was a wooden duck decoy I found at a Salvation Army Thrift Store. The duck was coated with Vaseline brand petroleum jelly, and left on a table top next to a price tag. The Vaseline was so sexy on the duck; it glistened and was mistaken for wax by one poor patron who touched it. What I most enjoyed about the piece was the humor which and simplicity it contained. “Portrait of Kimmie as a Wooden Duck” was the only $20.00 piece I created.

“Portrait of Ted, Mayor of the South Side” (third picture) was the only piece that sold during our small opening. It sold for a huge $11.00. Ted is much the regular at Carson Street shops, cafes, and bars. Several times did Jason and I run into him during our trip. He is an older hip guy, full of stories and magic tricks who loves to entertain the younger women. Portrait of Ted is much like my earlier drawings I have posted on this blog. It is Crayola brand crayon and Sharpie marker on paper.

“Blow-Up Parrot, Blown Up and Then Nailed to the Wall” (forth picture) was another favorite of mine. I enjoyed its disguise as a serious conceptual piece. I hope people bring a lot of meaning to it. For me, I enjoyed the pointlessness of blowing up the parrot in the first place, and the name of the piece is a real crack. This piece contained one blow-up parrot, one seven-inch nail, and Sharpie brand marker.

Among Szalla’s pieces that I enjoyed was the piece “Schaden Freuda” (fifth picture) which was a blow-up flamingo, truck-strapped to a board upside down, with its blow-up feet sticking out into space. This piece was later vandalized with a cigarette by one of the viewers, the irony being that schaden freuda means deserved punishment. Szalla also created a hanging chandelier-like sculpture at the last moment with the left over tape rolls and a few bungee cords. The shape of this object was really quite beautiful and as a last minute addition, I feel it became as deserved focus and theme to the show (sixth picture).

Teach Your Children about Johnny Cash is at the Bee Hive Café on Carson Street for one month.