heady crushes and how they yield unpredicted things, such as aquaintance with artistic penumbra . . .e.g. Martin Kippenberger

(summer smog, Los Angeles)
L. monitored the Barney’s rich hippie scenester jewelry in 2007 when I met him. I liked his ties and cuff links and accent and stiff fussy manner. Fusty, snarky, with quips about the salt mines in the deathcamp sentence/retail environment.
Why I love Tom Sachs, or had to live Tracey Emin’s excruciating self-exposure, I don’t know.
Do I wish for better, or not?
What makes ugly art the chronic obsession of aging aethetes?
The Kippenberger extravaganza at MOCA the end of 2008 was so ugly in so many ways. As ugly as the mysterious murder/suicide of the Bader Meinhoff group.
Or the Betty Ford Clinic, or the face of racism.
Maybe even uglier than Francis Bacon’s terrors.
With identifying
Re: the problem maker in our head, Kip has granted us
Life saving redemption.
“You are not the problem, it’s the problem maker in your head.”
A relinquishment of blame. The analytical mind as god google. To whom we go to parse our dreams.
Pointy haired Kip in his surreal finest.
Extasy, luft, popart, and
Death by cancer it seems check art forum feb 09
Techno casualties.
Quality of art doesn’t matter now he’s dead
Frank Kafka’s Amerika
At an end
Good things end.
Austria and the egg and the frog and shame “ab in die ecke und shame dich (go to the corner and be ashamed)
Geffen closure
The Taschen Kippenberger volume, at a bar, for a long awaited date, that became like a movie of ill-suitability. His hurting toes, and the brutal honesty of his “no” and the tenderness of his kisses upon my cheek. Anyone so lovely who calls me darling wins a place in my heart forever. . .
Tom Sachs Prada Death Camp or Chanel Guillotine.
Tracey Emin is now another ugly art icon to me, a beloved destroyer and an international woman, a liberator of art, mind, and language.
Why did he like such dark art? Tom Sach’s litter of Jameson Whiskey bottles and Faux-NASA truly disturbed me.
My crush became a primer for my love of art.
Art became an escape from love, and an escape from beauty and Kant’s aesthetical dialecticism, when sonorous tones of the smothered Irish tongue would not speak to me.
L. gave me a high temple of the commodity art and an escape into a shadow world, off to Italy he went, and I would go as happy as a gingerbread cookie with him to see mum in London.
He gave me a trapdoor to the other realm and I told him of another lad, a smart one that actually talked to me, ah but barely.
As for L., I’d never have seen the Gagosian BH or known of the Venice Biennale or the Documenta or the Neue Gallerie in New York, had I not been bewitched by his Wildean grandeur and preposterous sense of style. Nor would I have fallen in love with fellow dandy Simon Doonan, art director for Barney’s and writer of witty books.
I wonder if L. still has the Baudelaire and Beckett I gave him.
He said, “What? Are you trying to educate me?”
L. looked lovelier than ever in December 08 and was oh so fake with me kiss kiss goodbye now! And sported long hair for Barney’s hippie Christmas. And we’ve a mutual friend, an obscure Chris Kuhn who makes the oddest collages.
L. would like the collage art of John Baugh.
And collage is a most pertinent art form with which Hannah Hoch and the Dadaists made great strides.
My comedic attraction to him, has reminded me that love and crushes often fertilize the mind, despite the pain of unrequited affection.
Kippenberger helped me through the agony of yet another lonely December. And the accompanying Louise Bourgeois at the MOCA downtown LA, reminded me that productivity, not beauty, is key. And that art is a guarantee, of nothing. Or in her words “art is a guarantee of sanity.” But I’m not so sure.