Before I Was A Painter

There wasn't one painting or drawing in my application to school.
In 1996, a year before art school and few minutes after half-reading "Discipline and Punish", I adopted the name Panopticon and began sending mail art to anyone who would give me their address. I was really into Throbbing Gristle and mail art worked so well with all the industrial noise music I was making. It started as cards with photocopied images on the front and a two or three word message inside, and culminated with me sending out nearly 40 of the baggy/razor blade/tag combinations shown above.
People really didn't think about privacy the same way as they might now, and no one remembers giving out their address. So I had a few people worried, and one even drove past my house(I'd listed a return address in hopes of anyone reciprocating, no one ever did).

Later, a second project came up where I put a bit of water in with the blades so they would rust during delivery. One night on mushrooms at a movie theatre I remember pulling out a pack of rusted razor blades from my pocket in plain view of some folks I didn't know so well.

Thanks so much to Joel Jackson and Heather Kvill for sending these photos. I had to blur the address because my mom still lives there.

Gilles Deleuze on Foucault on Unicorns

A proposition is supposed to have a refferent. That is to say that while reference or intentionality is intrinsic and constant in propositions, whatever fulfils that purpose is extrinsic and variable. But this is not the case with statements: a statement has a 'discursive object' which does not derive in any sense from a particular state of things, but stems from the statement itself. It is a derived object, defined precisely by the limits to the lines of variation of the statement existing as a primitive function. As a result there is no point in distinguishing between the different types of intentionality; some could be furnished byt the condition of things, while others would remain empty and offer instead an example of generally fictive or imaginary states (I met a unicorn) or even generally absurd ones (a squared circle).

Falling of my chair laughing at the laundromat led me to what will be my next post on personal pronoun play in my paintings.