COME AS A CHEF
My choice of career and subsequent path I was taking in establishing myself as an artist led me to investigate the institutions of both art and religion. What was a gallery or a church or good or evil? The times of the Jonestown suicides and the Moscone/Milk murders falling so closely to each other, as well as my personal situation being fueled by coke and domestic violence all played into the work I would do during this period.
I was on a roll. I hadn't yet ventured into music but my visual and word oriented pieces were beginning to pile up and mutate. I did pornographic newspaper collages, curated shows in places like abandoned department store windows and "performed" in punk clubs and alternative spaces. I started using the information i gathered in pieces like Missionary in order to build a sparse narrative that i could perform in public. In a genre later called "spoken word" I laid out the larger peices I was working on in a kind of sing-song, prop infused personal play. Then, once again, the morning paper led me to another approach. A black minister, Rev. Willie Dicks had himself nailed to a cross in an Oakland park in protest over the recent mess in Guyana. He delivered a message of fire and brimstone to a predominently black congregation gathered to witness this crucifixion. He chatised his community for following Jim Jones so willingly. I called him up.
My idea was to establish a church for one night with the Rev. Dicks as the man on the pulpit. David Ireland and I were working on a property that he had purchased at 65 Capp St. It was a little one story salt box shack that would be perfect for what i wanted to do. He agreed to let me take it over for that night. I rented some pews, got an organ player from the New Wave band The Units, lit the place with candles and had the front window stenciled in gold leaf with the words THE CHURCH. I left the message to Rev.Dicks. A one page program was printed up with a short explanation of what was to take place. I didn't have a clue.
I stayed in the background, merely the architect of the evening. The congregation was now predominently white so Willie switched gears. His sermon ebbed and flowed, stitched together with messages of love and responsibility as it got darker and darker in the space. The candles twinkled on the rafters overhead as the artsy crowd tried to figure out what the hell they were doing sitting in these pews. You could hear a pin drop as the good Rev. paced back and forth building to a crescendo. Then, as the organ swelled Willie summed it up with this apocalyptic message: "In the great barbeque to come, it's better to come as a chef than a rib." Amen.
I was on a roll. I hadn't yet ventured into music but my visual and word oriented pieces were beginning to pile up and mutate. I did pornographic newspaper collages, curated shows in places like abandoned department store windows and "performed" in punk clubs and alternative spaces. I started using the information i gathered in pieces like Missionary in order to build a sparse narrative that i could perform in public. In a genre later called "spoken word" I laid out the larger peices I was working on in a kind of sing-song, prop infused personal play. Then, once again, the morning paper led me to another approach. A black minister, Rev. Willie Dicks had himself nailed to a cross in an Oakland park in protest over the recent mess in Guyana. He delivered a message of fire and brimstone to a predominently black congregation gathered to witness this crucifixion. He chatised his community for following Jim Jones so willingly. I called him up.
My idea was to establish a church for one night with the Rev. Dicks as the man on the pulpit. David Ireland and I were working on a property that he had purchased at 65 Capp St. It was a little one story salt box shack that would be perfect for what i wanted to do. He agreed to let me take it over for that night. I rented some pews, got an organ player from the New Wave band The Units, lit the place with candles and had the front window stenciled in gold leaf with the words THE CHURCH. I left the message to Rev.Dicks. A one page program was printed up with a short explanation of what was to take place. I didn't have a clue.
I stayed in the background, merely the architect of the evening. The congregation was now predominently white so Willie switched gears. His sermon ebbed and flowed, stitched together with messages of love and responsibility as it got darker and darker in the space. The candles twinkled on the rafters overhead as the artsy crowd tried to figure out what the hell they were doing sitting in these pews. You could hear a pin drop as the good Rev. paced back and forth building to a crescendo. Then, as the organ swelled Willie summed it up with this apocalyptic message: "In the great barbeque to come, it's better to come as a chef than a rib." Amen.
posted by mike osterhout at 9:23 AM
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