This was one of the best, most enigmatic pieces of mail unintended for opening that I’ve ever tried to open. When I explained to Phil that I’d tried to get at the contents, he laughed–adding, “you did? that’s funny. there’s nothing in there.” nothing except for glue. I’d given him a book on mail art and he in turn, in time, sent this my way.
So, someone wants to have a naked-lady-t-shirt-wearing-night out at a bar. Great idea. I don’t go to bars. I hate ‘em. They’re depressing shitholes–but nonetheless–great idea. Someone else jokes about naked guy shirts. Equally great idea. I mention that I have drawings I’ve made of plenty of both and offer up stencils so that anyone with a wardrobe lacking in smut may rectify the situation and participate. Someone volunteers to come grab the stencils so I can avoid both setting foot in Williamsburg Brooklyn and a bar. I stencilify three of the drawings that I don’t already have drawn up as stencils and think–”Fuck. These would look good bigger–bigger and in an orgy.”
So, a small laser cut batch for the pervs at the bar and a larger knife-cut batch for me. Then I realize how sick I am of spraying stencils, but how I could use some unwinding. A friend asks if I’ll be working on Sunday or at “choir practice.” I start obsessing about choirs and realize how well orgies and choirs compliment one another. Instead of working on finishing the drawings for Volume 3 of But They Don’t Blink, I take a detour, whip out the watercolor and decide to do an edition of 50 hand brush-painted, 3-color, 18″x24″ paintings on 140LB cold-press watercolor paper. I finish the first and decide, “Choir Practice.”
It includes a mobius of gay guys fisting themselves and one-another, a woman shoving her fist down the throat of another–much heftier–woman and a guy penetrating a contortionist in utter enuii.
I’m only gonna make them available via this post, cos they take too long to paint. $80. Signed and numbered. Edition of 50. Email me if you want one.
I was just going to post the blocks I etched for the packaging and titling, but since last weekend, the project’s evolved quickly. BUT THEY DON’T BLINK is a story about walls–hand-stenciled onto wallpaper. The story is a social snapshot reduced to a set of three five-line stanzas and spread out over fifteen 18″x24″ pages. Like FORE, it’s a poem and a children’s book. I’m considering delivering the story serially as a set of three five-page books–more or less making the volumes available as I finish illustrating each stanza and doing my best to make the overall project affordable to collect.
I’ve been disappointed lately in the cost of things like t-shirts and art prints. I always thought that the point of a print was to give people something exclusive at an accessible price. I’m not sure how deeply illustrators and designers are shoving their wrists up their asses to produce their prices, but arbitrary pricing, hyphy meatheads, corrupt gallerists, ebay and agenda-driven journalists have all had a hand in contaminating access via unrealistic artificial inflation. There’s no excuse for a hand-printed poster to cost more than 25 dollars. Frankly… traditional ink screened/stenciled/stamped posters on paper shouldn’t crest 10 dollars.
So, here’s the skinny. I have enough material to make 400 15-print books and 300 un-stenciled five-sheet poster sets. This isn’t set in stone yet, but I think I can split the book edition up into 200 fifteen-print books at $120 a pop and 200 three-volume print zines at $50 per volume. The 300 poster sets would be $25 per set. Books and zines–signed and numbered. Posters–numbered. I’ve never understood how people feel justified signing things they haven’t printed themselves.
If you want to reserve a copy of anything, email me: protest {at} visitordesign {dot} com
No commitment. I’ll just let you know as soon as whatever you’re interested in is ready.
page1&2:
page3&4:
page5:
BUT THEY DON’T BLINK VOL.1 OF 3
pinkslip in her purse, pink panties on feet, mom sells her ass to buy babies meat
when belts tighten up and it’s hard to pay bills we sell off our children to farms in the hills
to keep ethics low and prices less high, x mart takes cashiers to the dumpsters to die
gas guzzles dollars and trucks guzzle gas, so the makers of trucks are all out on their ass
they’re drinking away the economy spook as they pass out in puddles of piss and of puke
illustrations, text and wallpaper ©2008 chris habib / visitor
Rita does lots of the right sort of wrong. Everything she does is haunted. She and Dave gave me this 12″ years ago at a performance she did at Roulette–her shadow-puppet show.
I’ve looked around for info on this, but it’s pretty scarce. Part of the purpose of this blog is to make sure that things that’ve made their way into my hands and inspired me in one way or another find a way of persisting. So many people I know have made so many beautiful things–things that I always fear will just be forgotten–the problem being, not that people don’t care or don’t pay attention, but that there are some people who just produce so much in so many mediums–that no one can really keep tabs on all of it. It’s not really a problem at all, per se. I guess it’s just more of an archivist’s nightmare.
Rita’s a great example of that. Somewhere I have a trading card she gave me for this band, Fuzzy Peach, that she, Dave and Chloë had going for a minute–literally, a minute–almost. That’s how a lot of people around here work. Do something. Strengthen it. Make it cohesive. Give it a context. Let it end and make something new. Rita’s never let her work stagnate.
So, this 12″… The jacket is hand-built–two edges taped with strapping tape. The front and back covers are smeared with thick, crimson globs of fingerpainted acrylic–much like the accents in many of Rita’s iconic paintings of fast girls and Marlboro men. The gatefold is a xeroxed pop-up assemblage. The record is translucent red vinyl. It’s got tracks and a red label with Rita’s fingerprint pressed onto it on one side and an etching of a bird and a girl with “FOREVER” radiating out from her third-eye on the other. The catalog number is E#100/CARNAGE PRESS.
The tracks get back to that haunting thing. The source is just cassette recorded cut-up vocalizations–Hungarian wherever there are discernible words–lullaby-for-Rosemarie’s-Baby jams. There are intermittent flickers of organ slicing thru the whispers, but they’re generally snuffed out by abrupt cassette-clicks. It’s hands-down, one of my favorite objects. This record basically doesn’t exist. I think fewer than 100 were made.
Kim’s a compulsive omni-maker. A lot of people know her band. Some remember X-Girl. A few remember her role in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Fewer know of the books, columns and articles she’s written. Then there are the exhibits she’s curated, the theater actions she’s directed, the films she’s made and that dancing she did for our film in the pink wig and school girl skirt. There’s also the point of this post–the portraits she’s painted.
I think the first time I noticed her paintings was during a mind-numbing afternoon of troubleshooting an old Apple Performa she had in the Gordon/Moore apartment in NYC. I had this non-functional, artifact of prehistoric computing dismantled on the floor of her office and stood up to refocus my eyes thru the window to Crosby St. Looking back down at the dust-bunny ravaged components on the floor, I caught a glimpse of a basket boiling over with canvases.
“Oh shit. So this is where the cover for Sentimental Education came from.” I guess I hadn’t realized she’d painted that image. I flipped thru the paintings in the basket and shouted across the living room to ask Kim about them. “They’re just something I’m working on. I’m not sure what’ll happen with them. I’ve been giving ‘em to people as gifts. You want some more tea? Hey, Thurston–you want to order some Indian? Chris, you want Indian?” It was like that–just this one-more-thing she was doing.
I dug back into the eviscerated machine, repaired the power supply and got it all back together and running. The three of us sat down for some Baluchi’s and pondered the direction the internet would ultimately take. It was ‘96 or ‘97, so it was anybody’s guess. Turns out we were all right in our theories of meta-expansion/collapse, content-as-king entertainment hub and advertising-dense wasteland. We finished our meal. I packed up my tools and laptop and headed out to the elevator. Kim popped open their door with a painting in her hands. “Here. You liked this one, right? Take it. Thanks, Chris.” A kiss on the cheek, a salutory wave from Thurston and the elevator dinged.
Since then, my little collection of Kimstuff’s expanded substantially. Here’s that first painting, side-by- side with one of the others she painted on vinyl a couple of years later.
