Art in America (03)

Jackson Pollock committed to memory Guernica’s canvas back
hung in the Guggenheim circa ‘39, then reproduced the thought
on canvas swathes he freely cut to isolate the best of them
until, by career's end, he could afford to forget those figures,
first occasions for his blobs and paint-whips, wounded peasants.
Morris Louis later witnessed swathes of color wallow on overalls
as droopy gesso rainbows. While Christo wrapped a high-rise
in brown paper, and Damien Hirst aspired to split blue whales,
sink their matching halves in picture cubes. Christo addressed
the package to itself, then whales breached its satin ribbons
to flop in Hirst's abbatoir, gigantic, and televised at that.
What avatar transvalues their values? Chris Burden had himself
wounded in the arm, then laid between power lines and water.
Andy Warhol dropped the lady's pump he'd been sketching
for Redbook, to swish among the socialites with a Polaroid.
Someone jumped from floor five far too fast for him to shoot.
Julian Schnabel busted restaurant crockery to plaster shards
on murals buyers paid hand-over-fist to hang in chi-chi houses.
What's to be done? An Austrian has also sliced his foreskin off
for photographs displayed as art-prints in some high-end gallery.
But all that Arnold Schwarz-Kogler was rewarded for his work
was a portrait--bandaged, head to toe--above a brief obit in Time.

Who however will assemble the firing-squad for our next piece?
Where’s the concept artist who can breath life into art
through needless death? Who will get the genius grant
to displace millions? Manufacture suitcase atom bombs?
Poison whole cities with smallpox, inoculate survivors
for reality TV debuts, inaugurate frenzied religious cults
living by lashes alone? Channel heaps of cash to the drug trade?
Numb latchkey kids with white supremacist sex fantasies?
Work millions into epileptic froths, send kamikaze battalions
to the moon? Drop a thermonuclear bomb into a cheese-hole,
and who will call the bluff? Who will poison whole species
for this month’s Art In America, construct malls of mud
in the Amazon, next door to the rainforest Chippendale’s,
or spread sexually transmitted diseases like wildfire,
invent new mutant strains, clone ubermenschen porn stars,
and plasticate their remains for exhibits in corporate lobbies
or pipeline tongueless child prostitutes raised to be janissaries
on Singaporean ship containers, or bury subliminal messages
in heavy metal, urging prepubescent youth to off themselves
if they can’t kill gratuitously at will? Who can top their act?
There’s a message. Even this poem -- loose and lazy catalogue
of atrocities thought or done, imagery arbitrary as windings
through gutters -- goes on as long as you want: this just came in.