Did You Kiss the Dead Body is a reference to the last line of Harold Pinter's Poem "Death." It is the title of a new closely related body of work which uses U.S. Military Autopsy Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan as their starting point. I am working on new ink drawings on autopsy texts, a sound and sculpture installation and a 20 minute video.

This work relates to the tradition within European painting, of “Dummy Boards,” also known as “Silent Companions.” It began with the Dutch Trompe l’oiel tradition of tricking the viewer with the presentation of illusionistic space. This was sometimes achieved on panels created in the shape of the figure or object being painted. Dummy boards were often of servants and were placed in domestic settings such as drawing rooms or in front of fireplaces. Part of their function was to trick the visitor into thinking someone was standing in the shadows of a room.

As with my past projects, I am interested in examining the ideological positions within the production and distribution of images as they connect to historical and contemporary regimes of power. Taking dummy boards, which have mutated into a vernacular painting form, I am changing them again, in scale and purpose so that they recast the role played by the “servant,” or colonial subject in relation to power and history. My dummy boards, or 3-dimensional paintings have fronts, sides and backs and extend the boundaries and relationship between painting and sculpture and use the genre of ethnographic/ colonial photography and contemporary media images as source material. The work’s form simultaneously presents and negates illusion as the viewer moves toward and away from it’s center.

Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada
Performed at Artists Space, July 16, 2008

Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada marks my first public performance and continues my explorations of the transformed and grotesque body within historical moments of crisis. The multi-media piece moves between post-war Austria of the 1960's and our contemporary moment of war, offering a new way of looking at Rudolph Schwarzkogler's work, while reflecting on the impact of technologies on our present individual and collective bodies. Considering that war can now be created and watched from a vast distance, Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada addresses a collapse of this distance and attempts a recovery of the bodies we have separated ourselves from. An audio component features the voice of Shahzada, a former Guantanamo detainee and tribal elder from Afghanistan known through the camp for his sad and beautiful singing voice.The songs are based on lines of poetry smuggled to him by fellow inmates.

Schwarzkogler
,
a member of the Vienna Actionists, began his career as a painter and went on to create largely private performances using himself, a model and a photographer. The results were simple, disturbing and austere photographic images of the body injured, healing and in the process of being handled and manipulated. Aktion with a Male Body: Notes from Schwarzkogler to Shahzada makes reference to the frame as a device that links painting to performance, image to the real and the past to present.

Credits:
Performers:
Jesse Lopez
Erin Shigaki
Rajkamal Kahlon