TV Art Blast From the Past

I have been hunting through the stacks of late. Artists end up with lots of old portfolios that get stuffed (not always in the English sense) with lots and lots of old papers and photos and the like.

The reason for the hunt is unimportant to you the reader. The flotsam and Jetsam of the search may be of some interest. I just ran onto a photo of an art piece I did my first year at the Kubert School. This is the piece that got the interest on my future partner, Ernie Pasanen.

The frame was the front of a wood cabinet TV set. The painting in a POV from a monster`s mouth through the lips and teeth out into a Ditko/Lovecraft madness. To add to the madness the painting is flopped 90 degrees.

The control knobs have been replaced by 3 push buttons and 3 lights. The speaker is wired direct to a rheostat coil soldered at different points on the coil so three different tunes of raw electric static erupt from the tortured tinny speaker.

There is a polyester resin casting of a translucent naked blue hag with a bright red giant tongue. There are lights in both her breasts and in her giant red tongue. Each was wired into one of the sound buttons.

When Ernie (later one of the architects of the ARPNET and the on site consultant to the Princeton Super Computer Group) looked at the wiring he was blown away with the comment that it was brilliant in its primitive approach and that he knew too much about electronics to ever be able to do anything matching it.

On the top of the TV console is a cigarette burn and a half-smoked cigarette. The cigarette and ash was soaked in polyester resin and then repainted to look like a cigarette and ash. I had to repaint it every so often because people would try to brush it off the TV and would rip up their hands and leave blood on the resin ash which was sharp as a obsidian razor.

I created this piece during my first summer in Dover. I came early to school and rented a giant second floor walk-up studio and worked in a restaurant. I got Rick Grime a job as a dishwasher in the same hellhole.

Early in the first year I brought the TV piece in to the Kubert School and plugged it in at the bottom of the stairs. All day long there was the constant music of the tortured speaker with raw electricity erupting in pain. Fittingly this piece in now in the collection of Ernie Pasanen and all I have is this photo.