Backstory:
The Frank Moore Archive Project is emotionally and physically
overwhelming. I liken the viewing of the archive to visiting
the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., or to viewing
the AIDS Memorial Quilt on one of its last tours in the
early '90s. There is reverence, some humor and maybe some
surprising names of artists who are ostensibly prisoners
or casualties of a war that one may not have necessarily
known they were fighting. The overall feeling is gravitas
and anger.
In considering the subject for this exhibition I did not
want to give in to preconceived ideas about whose work I
would highlight. I attempted a system to view the archive
from A to Z. The system would be simple and would bring
some objective distance to the subjective and emotional
work of making curatorial choices in the face of so many
compelling visual arguments for inclusion. My system began
with framing a concept for the show with a title and then
matching every letter of the title with the first letter
of the last name of each artist chosen for the show. While
the choice of artists would be subjective, my choices would
be ameliorated by the objectivity of my system. It would
be a Dadaist game that could end in an interesting display
of work culled from a massive library. The title of my show
would be Fuck Me Fuck You Fucked Up, a title somewhat representative
of my personal feelings toward the continuation of the international
HIV/AIDS crisis. It would allow me to work with the images
of some of my favorite artists, such as Arnold Fern, Robert
Flack, Joel Carlson, David Krueger, Mark Morrisoe, Frank
Moore, et al., but the system represented some problems.
(Yes, I know that there are a lot of problems with viewing
the rapacious black plague of our times through the lens
of a Dadaist language game, but I needed some sort of device
to harden me enough to do my job. I mean, I needed something
to help me through the crying.) First there was only one
artist in the archive whose name begins with the letter
"u." This problem could be avoided by spelling
the exhibition title so that it would read F*ck Me F*ck
You F*cked Up, but the fact that Jerome Caja's and David
Cannon Dashiell's works were not represented in the archive
posed bigger problems.
I wondered at the fact of their absence. I wondered at
the kind of history of queer art or AIDS-related art that
would not mention Jerome Caja and David Cannon Dashiell.
These two artists, unlike few others, served as cultural
role models for me and those who marched through the streets
of early '90s San Francisco holding hands, having impromptu
kiss-ins, screaming fuck you to Jesse Helms, dressing in
black and staging die-ins in the middle of San Francisco's
overly commercialized Market Street. Their work struck much
closer to home for San Franciscans than the work of Robert
Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz or Keith Haring because
Caja and Dashiell were our homeboys. That is, although their
work had been made in San Francisco, in their short lifetimes
it had not been packaged in LA and then sold in New York
and they lived and worked among and alongside us. I could
not fault the staff of Visual AIDS or the executors of the
estates of Caja and Dashiell for not reaching out to each
other. Like people living with AIDS, artists and AIDS activists
are in a daily fight for their lives and livelihood due
to lack of funding for their important work. Eventually,
I am sure that the estates of David Cannon Dashiell and
Jerome Caja would have joined the Frank Moore Archive Project,
but I decided to speed the process along so that I could
use my stint as a Web gallery curator as a platform to introduce
two artists whose forceful, singular artistic achievements
bridge the gap of early misunderstandings about AIDS and
its relation to autobiography and creative output.
On Caja and Dashiell:
Jerome Caja and David Cannon Dashiell found their mature
artistic voices in the environment of the eighties and nineties
in San Francisco. For decades San Francisco had been known
as a breeding ground for cutting-edge artistic practices
developed outside of the influences of dominant markets
for art in ways that force us to question the validity of
the inside of the art world. San Francisco was the birthplace
of radical movements and groups such as The Summer of Love
and drag performance artists The Cockettes. A community
of artist-run nonprofit galleries and exhibition spaces
was supporting art with little to no economic incentive.
Caja and Dashiell both received early support from places
such as New Langton Arts, Southern Exposure, Artspace, Art
Lick, Kiki, The Lab and eventually The San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the University
Art Museum, Berkeley. Artists, writers and curators forming
that community included Nayland Blake, John Caldwell, Kathy
Acker, Rex Ray, Peter Edlund, Wayne Smith, Robert Riley,
Laura Brun, Rick Jacobson, Glen Helfand, David Bonetti,
Cliff Hengst, D-L Alvarez, Jeanne C. Finley, Sono Osato,
J. John Priola, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Lawrence Rinder,
Renny Pritikin, Robert Glück, Jeannie Weifenbach, Loida
Sorensen, Brett Cook, Judy Moran, Jon Winet and Lawrence
Andrews, among many, many others. It was a particularly
vital time in the life of San Francisco art (and really,
someone should write a history about the era because there
is no way I can mention all of the extraordinary people
here.) While I believe that David Cannon Dashiell and Jerome
Caja received much of the same support from the artist community,
Jerome also had a lot of support from underground queer
meeting places and clubs such as the Crystal Pistol, the
Stud, the End Up, My Place, Baby Judy's, The Café
Flore, the Top, the Eagle, My Place, Chaos and Club Uranus.
Jerome often performed at Uranus as a go-go dancer and as
a participant in the Miss Uranus Contest. He was also a
stunning, sexy, frighteningly beautiful spectacle at queer
community events such as the Folsom Street and Dore Alley
Street Fairs.
Jerome Caja was born in 1958
and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, along with 10 older, bigger
brothers. Since he was a fragile, sickly child he developed
a sharp wit that he used throughout his life as a defensive
and sometimes offensive weapon. He had a Catholic upbringing
and his religious background and bits of autobiography would
always play a part in his work. He received his initial
artistic training at Cleveland State University then came
to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute.
He studied with Richard Shaw and Sam Tchakalian, switched
from ceramic sculpture to painting, met his long time friend
Charles (whose ashes he used in paintings after Charles
died in 1991) and received his MFA in 1986. I met Jerome
in 1991 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's opening
of Facing the Finish. He was one of the stars of this group
show of emerging California artists and he graciously approached
me because he had never seen me before and was interested
in a new face among what had become an all too familiar
crowd of drag-queen groupies and conservative blue-haired
art patrons attending openings to get a kick out of him.
Jerome was a tall, thin (really, really thin), stringy
haired man who often appeared at his openings in the character
of an outrageous drag performer. But such outings were reserved
for when he was not painting. He was prolific, uncompromising,
and obsessive about his artistic method. He knew his work
was good. He used it to pay his dentist and he used to entertain
himself. He said, "'Cause that's what my painting is,
it's me talking to myself, telling jokes, or making a statement,
or losing my temper, or whatever." In the installations
of his paintings raunchy, outrageous, bloody, hysterical
images of phallus worship, rape scenes, eyeless saints (St.
Lucy recurs even as Jerome was losing his eyesight), murderous
clowns, and child abuse mix with images of birds, bears,
worms, eggs, Christian themes, art historical references,
and philosophical language games. This was Jerome's way
of allegorically sharing his dark thoughts on human relations.
His concerns for human fragility are reflected in the various
ephemera that were his materials, i.e, coal, bottle caps,
bits of lingerie and lace, plastic ashtrays, nail polish,
liquid eyeliner, cosmetic glitter. While he was dealing
with his approaching AIDS related death he was very aware
of the pain and complications caused by the prescribed treatments.
It was his opinion that he didn't actually begin to get
sick until he started to see a doctor about the disease.
It was a confusing time for Jerome and he bravely kept painting
and exhibiting and dancing almost up to the end. Jerome
died in 1995 after his work had been exhibited at SFMOMA,
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Diego Museum of
Contemporary Art and the Berkeley Art Museum. His work is
in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution's Archive
of American Art, and a monograph titled Jerome After the
Pageant was published in 1996.
David Cannon Dashiell was born
on July 4, 1952, in Tokyo, Japan. He was the grandson of
author Dashiell Hammett. Dashiell's father was a cartographer
for the United States government and lived, primarily, in
South East Asia from the American occupation after the Second
World War until the height of the Vietnam War. Dashiell
thus spent his childhood abroad, returning to the United
States in 1968 when his father felt East Asia was becoming
dangerous for non-military Americans. He spent the next
several years moving from state to state before finishing
his high school years in Florida.
Dashiell attended the California Institute of Arts (CalArts)
in Valencia, California, where he worked with John Baldessari.
From CalArts he received a BFA in 1974 and an MFA in 1976.
After graduation, Dashiell moved to Los Angeles and worked
at an architecture firm. While establishing himself in the
field of graphic and industrial design, Dashiell sought
deeper exploration of his sexuality. Identifiying San Francisco
as an ideal setting for such a life setting, he moved to
the city in the early 1980s.
He resumed his studio practice in the context of the spreading
AIDS epidemic, and with the sense he might be infected with
the virus at a time before HIV testing was available. Throughout
the 1980s and early 1990s, Dashiell was a productive and
respected conceptual artist; he focused on themes related
to the AIDS epidemic, including sexuality, disease, medicine
and apocalyptic symbolism. His works were exhibited at many
galleries across the country including Beyond Baroque in
Venice, California, and the New Langton Arts in San Francisco.
In 1993, he received the prestigious Adaline Kent Award
from the San Francisco Art Institute, which occasioned the
completion and premier of Dashiell's masterpiece, Queer
Mysteries.
Queer Mysteries is a larger than life-sized mural in the
round that mutates the imagery of the Dionysian mural at
the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii into a contemporary
social statement regarding sexuality, gender, segregation,
self-pity, disease, self diagnosis, cannibalism, cloning
and perfecting of the body. Queer Mysteries is painted in
vibrant, contrasting and complimentary colors and imagery.
Early 19th century imagery of a cannibalistic, homosexual
male society mingles with futuristic images of a green-skinned
lesbian society. Expressive of the non-linearity of memory
and self-image, Queer Mysteries graphically displays Dashiell's
interest in the problems and possibilities of autobiography
while avoiding the idioms of self-portraiture and traditional
narrative. Queer Mysteries is a very smart work that I think
is heavily influenced by Dashiell's interest in post-modern
literature and his own extensive autobiographical writings.
David Cannon Dashiell died from AIDS on 30 June 1993, just
a few days before his 41st birthday. His works are included
in many private collections as well as the San Francisco
MOMA, University Art Museum Berkeley, and the Whitney Museum
of American Art.
I dedicate this exhibition to my dear friend Nick Debs,
who has continually championed and supported AIDS activism
and artistic practice for several decades now. Thanks to
Sono Osato for her assistance with the Estate of David Cannon
Dashiell. And thanks to Gallery Paule Anglim for assistance
with the Estate of Jerome Caja. I also dedicate this exhibition
to my dear friend and colleague Reynold Pritikin and the
staff and volunteers of Visual AIDS, especially Amy Sadao
and Nelson Santos.
Arnold J. Kemp is an artist and writer living in New York
City and San Francisco. His work has been collected by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Studio Museum
in Harlem.
Kemp is currently exhibiting his own work and curating a
separate exhibition at the Portland Institute of Contemporary
Art's Time-Based Art Festival, 2007. His work was most recently
exhibited at Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. His writing
has appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni
Review, Mirage #4/ Period(ical), River Styx and Nocturnes.
Kemp was the Associate Curator at San Francisco's Yerba Buena
Center for the Arts (1993 - 2003).