A thought-image that I relate with Nick Blinko’s art: The holocaust is the imposed death upon its victims, the totalitarian perpetrators like to use the symbol of the skull [1]. A world ruled with Angst and you are aware of that inner skeleton, that is part of your nativity. Each skeletal being is an individual being too.

To me Nick Blinko’s art seems like a journey into a gap between all kinds of possible definitions of death. Elias Canetti implied the “crowd of the dead” in his thesis about crowds and power.

That what lies like a marker of separation
between an imposed death,
and a form of might built on symbols of murder

produces two worlds of human understanding

The voice a a form of expressing despair, doubt, … Nick Blinko’s singing is impressive. Maybe one can get his arts best when listening to his vocals. See: Nick Blinko at the Henry Boxer Gallery http://www.outsiderart.co.uk/blinko.htm and Nick Blinko at deathrock.com: http://www.deathrock.com/rudimentarypeni/main.html

[1] See in that context an info about a nazi skull symbol of the third reich and how it’s still in use: Info on ADL.org: http://www.adl.org/hate_symbols/neo-nazi_skull.asp

“Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist”: http://www.jackieormes.com/ a biography by Nancy Goldstein

“Jackie Ormes’ cartoons often responded to events that were important to the black community, such as the brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. Till was killed in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.” From the Collection of Judie Miles.

Also you may wanna visit: “Pioneering Cartoonists of Color”: http://web.mac.com/tim_jackson/iWeb/Tim%20Jackson%20Cartoonist/Salute%20to%20Pioneering%20Cartoonists%20of%20Color.html

http://www.96gillespie.com/artists_profiles/vaucher.htm

See works of Gee Vaucher on 96gillespie. I always admired her work (since I became a huge fan of the famous Crass in 1983 I guess). Gee’s ART is so critical, political and aesthetically highly expressive.

I believe her ‘Animal Rites’ works, convey something about the gap that exists in the whole human-towards-animals relation: People pull an anthropocentric “dress” over animals as much as over “nature”.

Gee Vaucher’s work as “the CRASS artist” put that what the CRASS lyrics and music expressed, into a visual scheme. And one can’t really tell if it wasn’t even her arts that would give the very crucial impulses to the band. Her sleeve designs certainly left a stimulating impression on the onlooker. Vaucher’s CRASS related works created an atmosphere consisting of the same interesting fragmental pieces, that the sound collages of Eve Libertine added to the band’s recordings.

The sound collages by Libertine and the image-and-word-collages by Vaucher seemed to express an essence of a spirit which it still hard to grasp, and which I for myself can put only into personal chain of words I would associate with the impression all that ART left on me: London, the post WW2 Generations, intellectualism that hadn’t anything to do anymore with either socialism or the conservative past, a social system could be told apart from something that this “system” would try to cover: society functioned as a veil that hides away an outer and an inner reality.

Crass, I believe sought to set things into sharp contrast with each other. An own rebellion can become dependent only on yourself, when life becomes meaningful by stepping out of something that looks like a “home” but that in reality turns out to be an evasive scientifical and philosophical miscalculation. The rebellion discovers a specific value of freedom, one has to be engaged for, fought for.

Other than that … I could imagine a picture, in which the love for the inevitable combination of ‘a tame nature’ and the human desire for luxury (as a possesable paradise, dead, packed up in slices)  is critically explored. The earth as a possesable item? In equal or unequal shares, what difference would it make.

Monique Fagan Smith

Monique Fagan Smith, homeless New York based visual artist. I heard about her on the Bryant Park Project and recommend you the blog entry there: Post Office Steps: One Artist’s Studio  about her: http://www.npr.org/blogs/bryantpark/2008/06/post_office_steps_one_artists.html#more

Two other links for Fagan Smith are also:

Monique Fagan Smith at Art Pathways: http://artpathways.info/#/moniquefagansmith/4522236905

and

on ConnecTV -  On Her Own Terms: Painting a portrait of a homeless artist in New York: http://connectv.org/streaming_media/on_own_terms.html