REALLY FANTASTIC FINGERPAINTING

 

     It is nothing and yet - in the eyes of all those who would declare life used up, it is ALL we need to see of what is unseen: a flower with a politician's head, a car driving through a small aperture in the side of a camel. But these are the obvious elements. What remains after the eye is tired is a promise disguised as a fist. The cold refrigerator door holds what is hottest about a universe bereft of mere adulthood: a pause before - and a cigarette after - a carnal reinterpretation of digital desire! ItItF

Are we worthy of seeing such radiant child labor? Here - already in full efflor- escence - all the elements that make Fuchs essentially Fuchs are already present, waving their little pink hands to be seen above the ugly crowd of those who would linger.  Light rapes line, and content arrests form, in a miniature recreation of the worst city blight. Yet, all is forgiven! A specific sunlight falls upon a wet rock, and all the press agents are wearing SOFT RO- LEXES! Nothing more is to be ex pected from all that childhood has to offer us in the way of brutal disregard. Yes indeed, Early Ernie: a B+!

"Green makes me cry, but only when it is money." -Ernst Fuchs

     A gentle approach toward that which most corrupts us. The second grand gift from Fuchs' imagination surpasses all we had never desired. Little perfume bottles like see-through Sphinxes, cereal cartons decked out in a thin veneer of exposed hypocrisy, like a woman caught bathing nude in a bus station. It costs (too much!) but we pay, because - after all - we are only human. Even now, as I write these lines, the terrifyingly sad re-entrenchment of Fuchs' "Stout Can of Curdled Cheese Matter" continues to ac cuse me of every dreadful illegitimacy, and I must shut my eyes to type. AIM

Let us be honest: we expected nothing from Fuch's foray into com mercialism, but that use of art which leaves imagination empty. So, we are pleasantly shocked to see - not a mere marketing tool - but a statement about the innate invisibility of what is to be purchased or ignored.  There are lines and - much more  essentially - there are dots. Both speak not to the smoker that sleeps in the best of us, but to that clean- lunged youth who first saw the light of day in Fuch's magnificent "Visual Ode To A Café Malingerer."  In the presence of such noble marketing we can hardly catch our collective breaths.

Let

"Raconteur, racketeer, rocketeer: I imbibe love!" -Ernst Fuchs

I turn many corners, and most have only new shoppes to be seen. What one desires - of course - is to have a permanent revolution, in which a corner is never extinguished against a wet building brick. Certainly, we want what is most real, but - above and about that - we pursue the infinite corner, where symbols become realistic, their elasticity vanishing in their fatigue. Yes, make no mistake: we KNOW what a fire hydrant connotes, and we know why mothers avoid them. BUT at that point where what is seen collides with what we forgot to mean, a sturdy so that's what it is! stands in front of us, blocking our entry into a barbershop.  

REALISTIC

Fuchs wished to capture the sensation of looking without seeing: i.e. THE DISINTERESTED EYE. He failed, but the attempt places him in our high echelon of those who refuse to be competent. What is it - really - about golfer's knees that elicits such ennui in those of us most dedicated to the pleasures of the gaseous oubliette? One searches in vain for symbols which do not demand attention: Fuchs - moving out of his commercial subversion stage and into realms untouched by thought, found a new castle of correspondences in the very stuff of non-stuffness. Do we applaud him or even acknowledge that he has passed our way? Maybe, but only by accident. What less could we expect of ourselves? Note the analogical felinity of the eternal scene, rendered effeverscent via the medium of the artist's uber-concern.. 

"I take chances, but chances don't take me." -Ernst Fuchs

"Happy Cat""vv

inin

 

in

Ho-Hum, another day. Look at all the tired things we have to negotiate on our way to bed. Flaccidity is the core being of broken field running manifested in lassitude. But we digress: reality is not reality UNLESS it is covered in decorative dots. What else is to be learned from life?! These ornamental distractions have a purpose beyond mere attraction however: they recall to mind man's most horrendous position. so we expect much of them, and are invariably disappointed. That is as it should be, for we must always keep desire at a distance, where we can make certain it is not behind us. For desire carries a gun, and has a better job than we do..  Ho

It is Adolph formalized as a vendor of tutus! And he is swarming with the pink dots of pre-war tension, made safe by Fuch's attention to the frazil fundamentae first hypothesized by Paracelsus. What more in the way of sheer wallness could we demand without becoming tyrants of art? The eyes are refrigerator magnets of alluring liquidity, and the dots (atoms of fire, battered mites, tacks in a battleground map) warn us: "Be prepared to stop!" And so...we do...but only to ADMIRE.

Do I find myself disturbed? Do I? Do I want only for fervor? Do I? Where is the spirit of gaudiness which sustained me through many embroidered nights? Alas, answers are the one thing missing from the tool box, and the box has been stolen by the electrician, who has run off with the plumber's daughter. We shall not see his like again. 

So we re-assign ourselves to a slight locking calm. This is the precise juncture at which blood coats a tea cozy and we do not care. For we have become one with the newspaper.

And we meditate upon the politics of nervousness. 

I am

Too much Nyquil and coffee. I cannot ascertain what the exact type of brush or paint was used in this composition, but surely it is enough to know that Fuchs painted it in a prehensile state of nude hysteria. "We live and die in a lipstick society," whispered Fuchs to the pulmber's daughter, "and we must not allow ourselves to be detained by smudges which resemble foreign countries." This sort of honesty is rare but only because it is well done. 

"Where are my keys and coffee, little cabana boy?" -Ernst Fuchs

Digging creates holes, and holes speak eloquently of digging. This is the profound paradigm Fuchs fell into when he considered that - after all - what IS the meaning of non-meaning? A question only asked in the bluest dress and upon certain decomposing balconies. We are sad: yes, but do ads make us sad? This temerity of preposterousness is the pure engine of jaded thought. A pact must be made then unmade - like a hotel bed - by a series of somnambulant exertions. We pay others to do such labor. We must - above all - remain clean for the ballrooms. digging

 

Grandmother has her head in a shiny new bag! Through it all the lights look like fuzzy stars, and the tea is getting cold in the kitchen. Liver livens up the library with the sound of a train being pulled through a cheese cloth by a circus strong man. There is hair growing from the armchair, and it is Rosalita's job to shave it with a theater ticket.

"I think Picasso is a squirrel on my rooftop." -Ernst Fuchs

Someone always knew that it was bound to happen, but we did not know that someone, and they would not admit to having known, so we were - admittedly - shocked by the willful indolence demonstrated by the innocuous cube. Reminiscent of the cubicularistical refrigerator of a comical youth, and embedded in bland cultural anticipations, a movement has ceased to move! As Duchamp spoke of "Stop- pages," we speak of being "stopped up": with a green crud that sings folk songs. Or is that only Father dressed up as the Decapitated Shoetree? We don't answer the questions, we only refuse to ask them.

Deciduous face creams in a sulphurous armoire. All that needs to be conject ured upon in the realm of medical comedy. We fully expect the corpse to laugh when we sit down to evacuate ourselves. Yet (deliciously enough) the door opens upon a scene made entirely of curtain rings. Are these objects not to be the one seriously enforced memory of an age only too devoted to narcissism's prepubescent glove compartment? We can only dream otherwise... 

"Pound for pound, my art is obese." - Ernst Fuchs

"Purse Falange"

When slow things pretend to go fast, a breach is broached. Into that breach, a handful of white inebriation may be flung, like rice after a bleeding bride. If stars were vegetables, their tiniest gears would be the President and his daughters. So we demand a spaniel in the wok, slavered in the onions of disuse. Sure... and we also want to hear an opera singer being crushed between two rapidly moving cylinders. Are simple desires the best desires? Fuchs tries to answer such questions.  

It was executed using a shit-smeared harpoon and an army boot. Love has a habit of climbing stairs into an office filled with black flies. This is not an uncommon disaster, although this time the thighs are exposed to a torrent of pale beer and clown makeup. The mixture evokes a summer day in the dead of winter.    

"When I bought the future, I asked for its pink slip." - Ernst Fuchs

"Talk Radiozone"

There is a shoe in the garden, and a man is growing up out of it into a umbrella that his hands were already holding. When he is ready, he can walk to work and be led about like a dog by a very beautiful woman named ShutUp. We all know what to expect from such social icons: barely-audible squeaking. No doubt this is the sound of lovers screaming into a bathtub, and so - it is our business to listen. 

1. Visualize
2. Carbonize
3. Etherize

So spoke Fuchs of his "technique" which - after all - is not a tech nique but a pagan rite enacted out of a need for rent money and the occasional sandwich. He has begun a slow descent toward an asymptote of spiritual delay. We expect only the MOST from his scientific albedo.  

"Wherever I look, I see." -Ernst Fuchs

"Mother"

Ancient roads are collecting in a linen closet, sprayed by the urine from a priest. A wall, some straw, and very ugly children in dog carts. It is a kitchenette of leather. And we are privileged to be standing in a puddle of blood-veined milk that drips  from a hole in a deflated "Monsieur Teste" doll. Or so said the directional sign that pointed to the barn. Who are we to demure when called upon to take up the shovel and load up the trucks? A slim woman joins a Communist cadre in Cleveland, and suddenly she's naked on horseback on television!   W

Integral immobiliza tions stand at the very center of Fuchs'     

devotion (for there is no better way to speak of such a disease) to a manner of adapting, just so that he never passes into non-profitability. Each work thus becomes a schematic of desperation. - Buzzwords - rather than being a form of play - thus become a necessary tactic of dollar renewal. Don't  be concerned: we quite understand.

"Pants are short, and art is pants." -Ernst Fuchs"

"The Pooh Tapestry""

Violent "cartes de postale" satisfy our hunger for paralyzed action films. It all makes so much "sense" without losing the capability of making "money." This useful dualism of purpose is an indicator of a deeper sub-non-meaning that is quite beyond the human eye's ability to "see through "shit" which is - after all - just a cynic's term for unlikable things. But how can we bring ourselves to care when the REAL object is money?T

Fuchs has stopped resisting the allures of historical centrality, and aren't we all the richer for his weakness?

"When I speak, I usually listen" - Ernst Fuchs

"Bombing Father's Workplace"