Wally Hedrick: Envisioning The Dark Millennium
This announcement for Envisioning the Dark Millennium frames Wally Hedrick's Black Paintings as prophetic objects rather than merely historical works. The text places Hedrick at the beginning of a new American catastrophe, where war, empire, and spiritual exhaustion demand the black painting's refusal more than the culture can bear. Its rhetoric is apocalyptic by design: Hedrick becomes a Blakean denouncer, an artist radically out of tune with his century precisely because the century needs him. The publication's importance lies in its insistence that the Black Paintings are not aesthetic curiosities or Beat-era relics but active indictments of militarism, consumer culture, and moral blindness. In the Samizdat context, the document also clarifies Williams's own lineage: refusal as inheritance, darkness as judgment, and painting as a weapon against historical stupidity.
- DATE:
- 2003
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- Wally Hedrick; LG Williams; Gina Dorre; Rebecca Young Schoenthal; Kelly Young; Charles Linder; William Blake
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- PCP Press; Linc Art
- KEYWORDS:
- Black Paintings as prophetic objects; Hedrick as Blakean denouncer; refusal as inheritance; darkness as judgment; militarism indicted by painting; anti-war painting reread; Williams lineage clarified