Warwick Slavik's day at the Museum

Jesse S. Mitchell

A sordid creation, vile, this human mess.  Paint collecting in all the corners, canvas, movie screen, half-hearted barely there semi-real pseudo-philosophical emotional screeds.  Always loud, always shrill, always in motion, never quiet, never still.

And what can stop the hemorrhaging, the Guernicas happening? 1-2-3-4 more, bloody art and left the reeling subjects sore, the poor, the eyeless nearly dead. Does the peace lie with the razor blade, or with the open vein, the wide sea or the open air?  Is it serenity or is it power, we are creating for?  Fighting for, with blankstaring words and obtuse abstraction blotchy-stains, the refrains, the repeating repeating refrains?  What remains?

So, he follows his mind, lets his eyes unfocus and go blind.

But this is where we all collide, fireflies, skies, lotus-eating bits of flame.  Old fashioned Agnigods that throw their hands over everything and breathe into us our smokestack lungs, ghostly shades of ghastly things, that we call them souls, waif thin and gauzy gossamer and recreate them in bold relief, haphazardly melting and melding and welding, all collision. 

John Frum and Jack Kennedy and Salvador Dali, but raining bombs or steel or paint like rain from out of the sky. 

It doesn’t matter.  Warwick sighs; he doesn’t know a thing about art.