DONALD JUGGS CONFERENCE 2010: PorNO you din’t!

For the very few who didn’t make it out to see Oregon Painting Society with Woolley Mammoth Comes to Dinner on Friday night, Saturday had its own offering.  Around 9pm, I sauntered over to ROCKSBOX Fine Art on N. Interstate Ave.  My suspicions that I was still drunk from the night before had me feeling apprehensive about driving my pickup truck to or from the gallery, so I put my pride aside and traveled amongst the people.  Yes, I took the MAX (shudder).  To say that the Yellow Line MAX train bound for North Portland on a given Saturday night is a shit-show would be an incredible understatement.  Trying to appear like a regular, I sat near the back of the train and pretended to listen to my iPod.  This achieves two things: 1, few people will try to engage you while on the train, and 2, it allows me to maintain all of my senses, so that I can quickly defend myself in case a crew of unruly African American teens attempts to “jive me for my cheese.”

Saturday night’s action was, presumably, a knee-jerk response by ROCKSBOX proprietor Patrick Rock to the recent Donald Judd Conference taking place right here in Portland.  I’ve carefully chosen not to cover the Donald Judd event because every other critic in town was sucking this corpse’s fucking dick for like a month already (which, I might add, is definitely illegal).  Remember that scene in The Shining when Dick Halloran gets all creepy and looks sideways at Danny and telepathically and asks him, “How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?”  That’s the closest comparison I can make to how it must have felt sitting at the Judd Conference, listening to a bunch of dick farmers talk about cubes.

Rock decided that his gallery was going to give a proverbial penis-boner-as-stand-in-for-a-middle-finger to the organizers of the Donald Judd Conference.  What the public got was the DONALD JUGGS CONFERENCE 2010.  I saw more tits on Saturday night than I did during my entire time in college.  And believe me, I pretty much had a tit in my mouth every minute of my educational years, mang.  Like, stretched out and gnawed up mom-nipples just smooshing against my gums and collecting tartar and plaque, brushing my teeth with breast milk and scarred areolas.  Gawd, does anybody else miss college as much as I do?  Fuck me.

The above image is one that I didn’t shoot myself.  I don’t have any clue who shot it, but I just took it off of the ROCKSBOX Facebook page because I don’t give a shit about no photographers.  You can see from the image that each of these rectangular boxes are plastered with bitches spreading their shit and smooshing their titties like it ain’t a thang.  This is the first art show in a while where I sprouted a raging boner and wanted to get some stinky on my hang-down right away.  The last time that I rubbed my peter through my pocket at an art opening was PNCA’s BFA Thesis Exhibition last spring while I watched “Cunt Milk” by Brooke Eastburn.  It was considerably easier to subtly masturbate during her video because of the dark room in which it was shown.  This was my major beef with Rock’s sculpture: if you’re gonna show me mad titties, give me a cup to cum in and a little privacy, you dick.  I almost ripped a hole in the dry wall trying to hide my raging member from all the female art groupies.  A boner in the bedroom is masculine, a boner in the gallery is a no-no.

Besides this Modern Mammary Minimalist Maneuver, Rock also did a live reading (see video at top) of some erotic writing featured, I assume, in Juggs Magazine.  It’s my understanding that all of the cut-out imagery was also from Juggs, which means that those heaving bosoms were 100% real – which is fucked up, because some of them were bigger than my cat’s litter box.  Rock had gone through the story and changed every erotic or offensive word to “cube,” and as the story progressed, it became impossible to understand as nearly every other word ended up being “cube.”  Naturally, one can imagine that the mission behind this gesture was to poke fun at the fetishization of Donald Judd  by so many Portland artists in the weeks leading up to the event at ROCKSBOX.  It is this critic’s opinion that Rock was pointing a finger (or maybe something else) at all of the participants in the Donald Judd Conference and saying, “Hey, it’s cool that you’re like into Donald Judd and everything, but you don’t have to get so gay about him.”  Probably nobody is going to point that out in writing, because everybody else in town who writes got wet as fuck when they heard they would get to sit around and jerk their mouths off about “Specific Objects.”  It’s interesting to note that while African Americans were getting the shit kicked out of them in Alabama for trying to register to vote and create a revolution, Judd sat around and wrote about how putting boxes in rooms was, like, seriously important.

I’m also a big fan of Rock’s double-double-entendre.  Not only did he manage to skewer everybody’s unrequited Judd-love, he also lampooned the idea of “Specific Objects” by covering his own with some other specific objects: women.  Calm the fuck down, I’m not implying that women are supposed to be seen as objects, you retard.  Whether or not you beat your girlfriend is up to you.  Judd’s simultaneous exaltation and exploitation of art forms makes an interesting parallel to our own culture’s perspectives on the female vs. the female body.  Get it?  Was that so fucking hard?  Rock’s somehow managed to make work that is obnoxiously over the top and also quietly meditative on multiple layers.  This event was unbelievably smarter than any show that you’ve ever been in – WAY SMARTER.