LG Williams Rallies The Changey-Hopey-Arty-Farty Faithful
This press release turns the language of post-election political regrouping into a drunken avant-garde rally in Fresno. Williams addresses the United States Avant-Garde National Committee as though leading battered activists after a hard year, urging them not merely to lick wounds but to drink, endure, and kick ass. The text's repetition, profanity, and call-and-response "Oorah!" transform a winter meeting into a ridiculous campaign revival for High Modernist Art. Snowstorms, cougar collectors, museum officials, dealers, and activist cliches are all folded into the same comic spectacle. The piece mocks hope-and-change rhetoric by replacing uplift with art-world vulgarity, suggesting that the avant-garde's future may depend less on consensus than on noisy refusal.
- DATE:
- February 6, 2010
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Essay / Critique
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Elf O. Plenty
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- The Estate of LG Williams; United States Avant-Garde National Committee; Fresno; Waikiki; museum officials; gallery directors; art curators; dealers
- KEYWORDS:
- post-election avant-garde rally; High Modernist Art as campaign cause; drink and endure as platform; Oorah as art-world chant; avant-garde leadership as political theater; Fresno as unlikely avant-garde capital