Occasionally, when mixing, accidentally, with the people i avoid, i will be rudely asked, always by the usual gossiping, out-of-it privleged trolls, “How do you pay for all this?” Especially if they find out that most everyone gets pictures, and it begins and ends there. Handing out prints to my “subjects” including, even, fine art shots unrelated to their shoot with me, i guess, is my art, and doesn’t come anywhere near the art world venues.
Although, unkown, i have shows. Here’s one at the Gonzalez Brothers’ body shop in 2015, in the Iron triangle section of Queens.
The first and primary reply is – it’s none of your fucking business. How would well-off white, black, and any color, react to a stranger questioning their source of money? I got much better things to do, then waste time on something i would know intuitively, but is lost on people buried in screens, comfort culture and disconnection from the world.
It’s obvious, the source of the money that fueled displacement and unaffordable rents in Williamsburg, from a culture that was the flip side of ours. Of course. The working-class, don’t need to question their source of funds. It’s entirely obvious.
But, aside from the answer “it ain’t none of your business,” the honest reply would be, “anyway I can.” Why would I ever reply to people, if they don’t have the chops to understand how a person could practice the lost art of selflessness during the time of selfie-art, my version of which is the above shot, though technically not a true selfie since someone from the hood was taking the shot. One of my “subjects.” or, at least, his dog.
Forced out of my home for life, ibwent to the Bronx, to struggle for eight years, until i got some form of stability back. The PC gentrifiers don’t see folks struck with major discrimination, loss of career and home in illegal displacement, on top of their abusing senior citizens, with their clonizing in cities, that they are not from. When they came the neighborhood improved and no longer was the slum we knew. As an example, we complained about the closure of McCarren Park pool beginning in 1983, as well as, the smell of poop that used to overwhelm the neighborhood, coming from the Greenpoint sewage facility. Finally, around 2006, the rehabbed pool opens while a billion dollar “digester” and new sewage facility is built, eliminating the fecal smells. Of course, as we knew, this would signal our forced departure, as the neighborhood becomes more desirable to the rich or well-off, boosting the already absurd housing costs.
In Williamsburg, today, do you know what they call any resident from the old working-class days? “Leftovers.” That says it all? And if these were so-called “black and brown” people, and not white, what empathy would suddenly arise from the PC- addled spawn of baby boomers?
Working the streets is just one of the many jobs i’ve had to learn and take on, so i can have a clear spot, from which i can produce expressive works, but with complete accuracy, clean of bull shit, and not transactional in any way, shape or form. How could people whose relationships are all transactional possibly understand the lost art of selflessness and telling the truth?
An after work shot the day after the top of my little finger got sliced off at work in Chicago delivering newspapers by truck. They “saved” it by attaching it with six stitches which meant, that within ten days the tip would rot and deacy, and fall off. Luckily our fingernails are rooted under the skin and some flesh gathered around the growing fingernail, allowing for more a bit more flesh. Every little bit counts.
You’re supposed to look at the picture to edify and inform you, but, instead, you are so transactional, as to deprive yourself of aesthetic and social nourishment, while bathing in your own gossip. No wonder art and media have the most bizarre overvaluations, worse than the prices of Williamsburg real estate and the art stars, famous in their own lives with big bucks flowing from their works of art.
Privacy? Remember that time-honored human value, lost in the Section 230 exemption? Well-off tech folks have as much or more access to our private data, than the government that gave them their biggest gift – no regulations. But try to find any data on them. Has anyone ever really contacted google through their web of protective layers. Inventors and promoters of screen technology and social platforms will not let their own children use these products until they become adults, obviously recognizing the risks in their work, but recognizing more the beauty of unheard of profits, defying any analysis because that is the way the business is structured. The techies have gentrified the working-class out of places like San Fransisco, pricing out the more common folks. Their empathy rating, scientifically is one of the lowest, close to sociopaths, and, thankfully they do have discipline, and confine their anti-social behaviors to that particular disconnection.
Art has taught us since the 1980s not to trust photographic truth and realism, promoting to the point of complete overvaluation “strategies” of appropriation, selfie-art and making an art of the deconstruction of the photographic object, similar to the deconstruction of my home and beloved neighborhood or, even the deconstruction of democrat by the likes and dislikes of Trump and Bannon. And what’s left from a desublimated form, devoid of connection and soul? Comfort culture and the end of tragedy.
We already know, particularly after having another culture, the dominant one now, create the atmosphere for our forced illegal displacement. “How do you pay for this?” It’s rhetorical, we don’t need to ask, it’s obvious. They are well-off and they bought their way into Brooklyn, when the place normally got filled with broke immigrants, looking for a better life, living in and taking the least desirable sections of the city, to save money. And they were happy, as they built an extensive, deep working-class paradise that lasted 170 years, because it could flourish in its own stability, until disrupted, big-time, by the new form of immigrants/emigrants, with plenty of dough this time around, to make more bread, and make Brooklyn theirs.
One month after an exploding bottle of seltzer blew a hole in my arm at work in downtown Manhattan. Seven pints of blood were deposited on the streets of Manhattan, i guess, fertilizing my connection to the city even more. There was no choice after this one – not to ever let this happen again. My motivation for doing what i was placed on earth to do, in the first place, was a serious work accident in 1975 when i was in an incinerator, torching off its iron panels, and it collpased. I said then, i gotta do what i always wanted to do – get the hell out and make movies, pictures and books.I vowed unconsciously, wheter i liked it or not, to never do this low-pay, dangerous labor again, or, at least, keep it confined to producing pictures, words and sounds. If I’m gonna die or sacrifice I prefer to let it be creating truthful works than simply paying the bills.
I’ll tell you this. Whether I liked it or not, or, whether I even thought about it or not, this was never going to happen again under any circumstances, unless it was purely in the service of this site and archive. I’ve always known how to make money. Gandolfini, called his job at Gimme Seltzer, one of his favorite jobs, and went on to make millions based on playing a gangster, his truly favorite job.
Funding? Ask the data sellers, the gold of our time, they know everything about you and me, including my money and yours. But they’ll never know my full picture because of the nature of what i do. I’ve had to learn to do a lot of things, unrelated to art, just to find a clear spot.