ArtCrimes

collage for # 6
by s b smith
ONE MORE GRAFFITO
Pity anyone
Who has to shit in nasty
Filthy Cleveland cockroach dead air
Evil shadow bars yellow dog cell
Meaty graffiti Uncle Sam junkie
Punk funk old mushroom clouded
Soupbone cough coffee
Cold monkey ass sand-
Which is the way it is
City jail where
Taking my eyes off
The contemptible
Unkept floor
I leave the future
Occupant of my cell
One more graffito
May your dirty dreams
Keep you sane
- Daniel Thompson
ArtCrimes Publishing History 1986-2006
513 ArtCrimes Contributors
Reading any issue of ArtCrimes has been an adventure. When you plunge into the currentsof the aptly named Duck and Cover, best take your fine-art discernment out of your wallet andkeep it clenched firmly in your teeth. It's almost like Deliverance. Unkempt poets,painters and less-definable types snipe at unwary readers from pinnacles and deep canyons ofquality and subject matter. But in fact, almost all have been visible in the city's galleriesand performance venues or on the printed page for a decade or more. Included are notablevisual artists like Melissa Craig (also a former ArtCrimes editor), and revered CSU prof KenNevadomi, George Kocar and Dexter Davis (even Utter finds a small place). AmericanSplendor artist Gary Dumm contributes a two-page spread, Harvey Pekar himself actuallydraws a stick-figure rendition of a downtown incident, and many of the area's best poets claima page or two. Maj Ragain, Daniel Gray-Kontar, Chris Franke, Michael Salinger, Amy Sparks, BenGulyas, John Byrum, John Stickney, Ray McNiece, Jim Lang, Peter Leon and many others addextraordinary works, often sandwiched between vapid, puerile — crap.
But so what? Truly wonderful talents mainly known to Ohio audiences like Marvin Smith, TerryDurst and Marsha Sweet are represented, as are veterans of the larger art world — painter andformer Cleveland Institute of Art instructor Catherine Redmond, for instance, writing a poemfrom her New York digs. They share space with local legends like Robert Richie, cartooninghere under the name of Dick Head. The book opens with one of Scott Radke's haunted hybrid softsculptures, part goblin/part sea serpent, sporting a bird's nest and an egg in its midriff,and continues with all sorts of hybrid surprises, including a 1990 poem/letter written to BenGulyas by Charles Bukowski. Painter/sculptor/chanteuse Brenda Stumpf shows up with amysterious charcoal sketch, and many others wear several hats as they scramble to live for artand the city at the same time: There are artist/gallerists like Joan Deveney and BridgetGinley or bookstore owner Suzanne Degaetano. And there are ghosts. Daniel Thompson, for one,and of course Smith's beloved Mother Dwarf Smith. Even d.a. levy, patron saint of allCleveland's beat/hippie lit, is represented.
In short, Duck and Cover is a big, fat, mass wedding of retro-beat, neo-dada andgenuine curbside rust-belt art, found or made by artists who don't give a damn about the NewYork radar, let alone the perceptions of more local hierarchies. If there is a cutting edge toArtCrimes, that heedless idiosyncrasy is the source of its sharpness. This is an irreverent,incorrect chorus of voices, each answerable only to its own disheveled muse, driven to createnot by any institution, market or public expectation, but by the dictates of stubborn innerneed.
Or as Bukowski remarks here on page 138: "They stuck something in me and it said WRITER andthere I've been. Like a wooden leg or a windshield wiper."
- Doug Utter, for the Cleveland Free Times