By Dave Hickey (Artforum)
June 27, 2009 – HONOLULU, HI – After going AWOL for seven hours, artist LG Williams admitted Wednesday that he had secretly pedaled across Honolulu to visit three female nihilist-nudists, online admirers who initially contacted him through his website: www.lgwilliams.com.
Wiping away tears and drinking imaginary beers, Williams apologized to his friends and family (none in attendance) and “all sentient beings and extraterrestrials in the entire universe” and gave up for a week his national leadership of The United States Avant-Garde Association – but was silent on whether he would quit art altogether for the remainder of the month and go on another debauched rampage.
“For seven hours, I’ve been unfaithful to my life, journey, surfing, Jesus, Starbucks and art,” he said in a news conference in which the 29-year-old creative genius ruminated on fucked-up imposters, Duchampian aesthetics, complementary shadows, the high ground of low moral pursuits, the supremacy of Japanese condoms, Chico’s finest beer (Sierra Nevada), Arjuna dressed in drag, the difference between Northern and Southern Oahu wave patterns (convex vs concave) and the never-ending necessity of following women’s hearts until climax. He said he spent the last seven hours “alternating between raucous reveries and crying bong water filled tears somewhere just outside Honolulu’s exclusive Black Point gated community.”
Williams, who in recent months had been mentioned as a possible artistic candidate for a MacArthur Genius Award, said he would resign as head of the The United States Avant-Garde for a week.
By disappearing and leaving his position without formally transferring power, art critics and museum curators said he neglected his supreme artistic pedigree and authority and put Art at risk (by the way, ‘and’ spelled backwards is DNA). It wasn’t clear how his staff could reach him in an emergency since he threw his cell phone in the ocean upon arrival (biking across paradise the artist, terribly drunk, sleep deprived and wonderstruck mistakenly thought he arrived on the set of a Corona television commercial).
At least one homeless man called for his resignation, citing the need for “artistic legitimacy” and then “my five bucks” for being quoted by this reporter as citing the need for “artistic legitimacy.”
Williams described the women who he visited with in Honolulu as “dear, dear, dear, dear beer friends with big, big, big, big really, super big, super massive plastic coconuts ready to burst at any moment (but, inversely, with skinny little long legs each radiating from their respective eye of the tiger”) whom he has known for about eight beers or years (his pronunciation becoming slurred at this point to this reporter’s missing ear) and been romantically involved with for about seven. He said he has seen them or their exact alien duplicates about three hundred times since the affair began.
Many art newspapers published steamy e-mails between Williams and the women, neither of whom got royalties for the cliché riddled printed rubbish. He did not identify them, nor did he definitely say who they were; however he did grunt a couple of times, hump the podium, thrust his pelvis like Elvis, wield around violently, wildly pretending to ride a bucking bronco while sticking his tongue in between his fingers, and, finally (while appearing to run out of gas) made a face like a rabid baboon in heat (this reporters personal favorite). Photos can not be published of the women because they are Nudists For Art, a secret, clandestine organization which believes strongly (despite their precious hourglass appearance) in nothing more than exploring the intersection between nude bodies and alcoholic spirits and the written word and a whole bunch of stuff I forgot like world peace and recycling and crystals and children and making money and run on sentences using the same conjunction.
“What I did was wrong. Period,” he said. None of Williams’s art was present during the news conference, and his Los Angeles Art Dealer Jenny Saypaugh said she asked the artist to leave and stop speaking to her two weeks ago like so many of the artist’s other former stupid fucked-up dealers. However, this dealer said she wants to reconcile or recoil or recon since Williams has earned or burned a chance to resurrect their artistic relationship – if he would sell something of value to pay what he owes her.
“This trial separation was agreed to with the goal of ultimately strengthening Williams’s Art,” she said as everyone yawned (well, actually, said homeless man just left to get a 48 after getting paid).
Williams did not answer directly whether the relationship with the Hawaiian partial-lesbian nudist colony was over. But he did pump his fists in the air, howl, and quickly turn his head back and forth along a horizontal axis.
Williams’s announcement came a day after another prominent artist, John Stinksign of Nevada or Indiana, apologized to his mommy for being bad.
# # # # #