Watch out for Painting

Steve Dalachinsky
April 2017

Woman with Pink Gloves (Man with Gloves), close-up,
c. 1925-26, image courtesy of Arteidolia

PICABIA  @ M.O.M.A   – Watch out for PAINTING

“What has always amused me is this public that knows me but doesn’t know itself.”

Enigmatic
Yet straight forward
Master painter
Master baiter
One of the greatest
appropriators

(” …for many people happiness lies in imitating” )

“skepticism
cynicism
the infinite”

the Nazi youth corps  meets Hollywood
the porno queens undress
the smiling Arians
Rimbaud meets Apollinaire on the battlefield
Lautremont & Nietzche  find ways
to unbury the hatchet

as long tomorrows

become  the machinery

of night   }                                         poet as painter \  painter of poems

“I knew a condemned man who asked for a toothpick he must have been a poet.”

notefoot: many great painters have been poets     Picabia is no exception
but he is indeed a great pome/painter

she sits
synthetic fluffy red fur jacketed
& subdued striped pants
a combination of Paris
abstraction / cubism
& Cannes kitsch

she is sketching what he has painted
2 lovers entwined
we/they once again
banished
from the garden of riches

painting “as acts of love … as a contradiction between life and sleep”

Adam & Eve                  2 bourgeois comedians

post-pioneer arrives quickly    alien to the prehistoric ethnicity bans
dah doo dah dah is actualized ( cryo-oblation hyphoo {{stolen?}} )

the scandal of cycling     controversial

metric(k)s   appropriate
or was that sunlight?    he relished en plein (the air)

trickster doing your devious tricks in plain sight
sending postcards of postcards of landscapes
the effect of sunlight on reproductions used to produce paintings
i.e. of photographs                              postcards of postcards

the effects of sunlight without actually dealing with the sun
like this writing  >  a pomessay  or artificial newspeak?

“DON’T FORGET THAT THE GREAT MASTERS OF PAINTING WERE ALMOST ALWAYS POETS”

what is the point of pointillism if you’re not really pointing at what you’re painting ???????
post-Seurat   post-fauve post-impressionism   post-post
FAUX   everything   everything

“painting  music  literature   hothouse flowers   everything”

futility cube springing as in the creation of (the) uni-verse(s) for instance
or universal perhaps {i.e. the source}

reconfiguring & (in)jesting it all          one’s perception

thru body fluids > perhaps the body itself
this distance of the star dancer
false news in wheel settings

real paint    real form    real distortion  a (sur)real reconfiguration
of physical culture / wedlock it   catch as catch can
tragic comedy & mocked
there is non-objectivity his choice his will  Kupka’s cupcakes roundly
swimming in there somewhere  as arcs bend   horrible pain
rhythm      synesthesia
mechanical biologies   quasi-visceral orifices
Motor-psycho babble / >

“yes I paint  /   it distracts me from the paintings of others”

editor & illustrator for journals         391 & litterature

LITTERATURE LITTERATURE

co-editor & cover illustrator for Breton’s Le Revue
& contributor to countless journals both as poet & visual artist

DADAGLOBE

the little old lady walks by with another little old lady      she quips:
“Leger style… it’s interesting… it’s very good but… “(fill in the blanks)

or shooting blanks > the music is profound the deeper one goes
she’s a very rainy woman       a tiny woman

MECHANOMORPHE

there is all this strange noise emanating from these paintings     at times
quietly breathing >     behold porn mother without a piston
paroxy(s)m   post-futurist mechanics  ala mechanique    ala ballet

L”OMBRE D’UNBOCHE    – reverent

& then there is the parade & RELACHE blasts us with Satie’s irreverence
as does Entré Acte > 2 (in)jesters  wit bearers / pranksters
such a combination  \ one rich       the other poor
a machine without a name >>  “music is like painting”  like a child

these paintings bring me there  \  but where is there?
where there is        is still to be determined

“I learn to find by seeking.”

“I want to open the eyes of those who have the same eyes
as me to make them believe in the eyes I myself have.”

the cocadylic EYE > Basquiat  must have seen this

& that inappropriately loud voice booming from the ceiling or possibly from heaven
in anglais reciting your poems repeating the verses over & over again like
a SCHMAAAA   a SCHMAAAAAAA    a SCHMAAAAAA

where is the blessed virgin when we need her?
is she stuck  inside the dada-phone?
is the american nurse having a conversation with the cuckold?

what no meaning exists what numbing
this the only known composition creates
3 notes on the piano
yes he wrote music too  La Nourrice Americaine  –
it got played in weird places
like a phone ringing a repetitive minus
total three notes (high-mid-range-low)
mono-tonal over & over again dense  airy
three notes slightly changing speed
over & over again     over & over & over & again  3 notes    referred to as
what he referred to as referred to as what he referred to as

“SODOMITIC MUSIC”

if i could draw its thick simple dark square >  block c(h)ord(s)
strung in an otherwise blank frame (truly a masterpiece of deceptive
hyper-simplicity } or…     Danse de Saint Guy
fault comb leap year(s) –

RIPOLIN

this is Steiglitz’s camera                  this is his other EYE

(bi-sex/tiles)  >   con/versation  & poetry   lots & lots of poetry

pair… impair… he is in essence   AN ANIMAL TRAINER
training us to rethink   re-see  re-evaluate   reinvent  rehearse remark
retrieve  repair      return to (dis)order       to   la danse

MONSTER & Lovers (after the rain)  > a decorative emptiness

the artificiality of serious  art

creating his own frames   that snakeskin frame  the frames during that
period of his painting much more important than the paintings themselves
much more intricate  beautiful  &… substitive      REAL

not theatrical like the paintings themselves

“The crucified make art in order to sell it.
Grocery boys make art in order to get
the Legion of Honor.”

“Art = God = Bullshit = Mercantilism

Piss off.”

like the promenade d’anglais …. & the way his transparencies  hum

i am calling him now on the OPTO phone >  i need some answers

could you even imagine how far your influences would stretch
your canvases reaching those mediocre adventurers of the 80s
like Salle & possibly Fischl  >  heil  hail >

No photos of AELLO allowed – it is in private hands now
it’s springtime always somewhere    (but he is not)
a mystical ambitious young girl in paradise

the resonance thru this resinous varnish > these pock marks

while Salome looks on
this SPHYNZ (that’s you)
keeps playing around with process
just can’t sit still … or phone it in
tho it may appear that way at times

i repeat there she is again… for real
she is in red fake fur like your painting…
she sits and draws Judith then swivels around
as the lovers loosely embrace
swivel their eyes about
while branches embrace their skin
leaves caress their skin  –

first Adam then Eve   then           ADAMEVE

you say laughing inwardly “Perhaps I make painting sick. But how
interesting to be a doctor.  /  “Tomorrow I will make painting my doctor.”

there is a portrait of a woman. i’m having trouble with my life today. it
came apart when i left my apartment. i entered through the exit.  i exited
through the entrance.    Litterature. Litterature litterature…….

“Give me colors to grind
Picabia to grind
don’t look for meaning
in what has none.”

i am a happy German youth stuck within a porno magazine somewhere
on Hollywood Boulevard quasi naturalistic hyper realism they disappeared
me for 30 years now I return to haunt myself & all those would-be
experimentalists…

Lecha Lecha   go to thyself.        GO   GO FOR YOU      dear ALARM CLOCK

anti-semite or semantics this seminal reverberation of Hebrew
hidden in the upper right hand corner of the painting

you finish your life where you began
an abstract thinker stuck in the machine
machine of naturalism     of realism of figuration
who is to say what is what or which is which or…
the orbs of the 1950s… 1949 to be precise silencing the little somes
with cynicism casualness of subtle barbarism & we have almost come full
circle or have we become full circles… & the earth is still round he
affirms playing with textures layers surfaces danger of strength &
egoisme …. we’re on the ends of where life begins (&) “I am the poet of
my life …” there is only one happiness & that happiness is BLINDNESS.

author’s notes

1: online there are musical selections chosen by WQXR’s Terence
McKnight to go along with the work – some of the composers include
Debussy, Stravinsky, Ravel, Messian. there is a jazz rag & the piece by
Picabia. Why no Satie?

2: find and read Picabia’s I AM A BEAUTIFUL MONSTER – POETRY, PROSE
AND PROVOCATION, MIT PRESS