Gilt Rip

Viewers who encounter my piece Stranger Fruit (for Nazario Conchuza Gonzalez) AKA Gilded Disc®otu m’, (1997/2016, Enamel on mirror tile fabric, polyester fiber fill stuffing, defunct bumble balls) at Nick Brown's "Werewolf" show at Charlie James Gallery are unlikely to remember it from my 1997 solo debut at POST, where it was one component of an "experimental narrative circuit" entitled "St Sebastian Tom Sawyer Cathy Mishima Expo 67," so here's a link to my admittedly skimpy documentation.

Later, in an essay for JOAAP's "Failure" book I described the work thusly:

Descending in tandem from the rafters was the gender-corrected biorchid soft kinetic sculpture Disc®otu m’, a sack of mirror-encrusted fabric containing two motorized vibrating wads of material. I’ve always been puzzled by Duchamp scholars insistence that the title of his last painting Tu m' was an abbreviation of the French expression “Tu m'emmerdes” or “you’re shitting on (bugging) me.” As far as I can tell, it’s just a guess – it could be completed with any French verb starting with a vowel. Why not “Tu m’blank” as in “You blank me,” which, rather than sealing the tomb on painting because of some specific affect (irritation, beshitment, boredom), emphasizes (and probably expresses doubt in the validity of) the very hierarchical subject/object binary model of communication (and by extension reality itself) by which it achieves its agency. Disc®otu m’ in addition to presenting a disembodied teabag of Damocles that visually mimics the geometry-bound domes, was intended to expand Duchamp’s contraction, doubling it with mirrors and subjecting it to seizure. Lazarus, Come forth!