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Indepth Arts News:
"TATTOO JEWS, BUDDHIST ZENGA and FLYING SKATEBOARDERS:
Shaeffer Ink Pen Art and other works by California's Alan Kaufman
"
1999-10-17 until 1999-11-17
West Chelsea Arts Building
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Internationally acclaimed poet, author and editor Alan Kaufman has been
called a new young Kerouac by the San Francisco Chronicle and hailed by
everyone from David Mamet to Good Morning America for such zeitgeist-hopping
projects as Tattoo Jew, a webzine of transgressive Jewish culture to the notorious DAVKA Magazine to his forthcoming
massive anthological history of outsider literature, The Outlaw Bible of
American Poetry (Nov. 1, 1999, Thunder's Mouth Press).
In his first one man art show, Kaufman deploys for many of the works the
quintessential artifact in the thinking cosmopolitan Jew's repertoire of
cultural weaponry, The Shaeffer fountain pen. With astonishing affect he
ranges from line, brush, marker and pointillist drawings of such subjects as
Holocaust nightmares, anorexia and smut to Buddhistic survivor portraits
reminiscent of twelfth century Asian Zenga art. He also presents a series of
colorful flying California skateboarders done in acrylics, as well as defaced
pages from that sacred cow of art history, Jansen's History of Art. The
pages have been torn out and the images recontextualized through manipulation
of the cheap ink printing surfaces. In a separate but comparable series he
mutilates ripped out pages from a somewhat rare Goya monograph to create a
series of witty post-modern portraits. There is also an amusing series of
portraits entitled School Greats of the 1960's with accompanying text. In
many of the works text and numerals play an integral part.
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