Ken Starr Report, Fine Art

My Mona-Clinton paintings are unfinished color sketches at various stages of finish. They were for a show called WIENIES, which was unceremonially canceled by an angry gallerist who was told I messed up a printing job, and for some reason the dealer believed him over me. I imagined moving toward suitably "presidential" quality oil portraits. I imagined them hanging in the halls of power. That's my crazed vision. The Ken Starr report was the cover for a journalistic graphic novel based on the very odd text, THE KEN STARR REPORT. A giclee print, limited edition 15, 39" x 25", $750. My painting falls under institutional critique: complex, culturally relevant, politically sensitive, class-conscious institutional critique.

When events create a visual media-vacuum, "I want to see it". Seeing a much older man, seeing his wedding ring, a couple groping in a Federal building, the queasy disparity in age, class, chauvinistic power -- evoke concerns unmanifested in the sterile words of Ken Starr's lurid book. Sterile, in omitting the visual signifiers. In paintings, I can compound manifold class conflicts within a single painting, instantaneously. Lurid embrace, sexual exploitation, class privilege, cheating husband, potent President, abuse of power, vengeful other women, non-event, crime, comedy; it refutes labeling.

Certain factions of faux-liberals, political sports fans who identify as Democrats without demanding democratic agency, complain that the rapacious Republicans have killed so many people of color in every illegitimate war during my lifetime (Pentagon Papers, Afghan Papers) should be targeted, not sexy non-warring Bill. Ethically, I fully support them painting their visual metaphors, we need them. From my point of view the Clintons gave America and the corporate right this inexhaustible supply of steamy pulp to exploit; a visual narrative expressive of the exploitation at the nexus of business, politics, militarism and class.

Clinton's is an American, individualistic drive to pleasure, at the heart of consumerism and media spectacle, and reveals the backbone of elite privilege; the super-rich own everything and everyone. Bill owned this girl before they met. He takes her, as so many before, without conscience or risk of repercussions, because he's an elite and no broken woman or court can touch him. Starrs report wasn't legal, it was throwing legality out the window to the court of public opinion. But Starr wasn't interested in the affairs political science meaning, he was interested in smearing Democrats.

We, the 99 %, exist for their exploitation, enrichment, and pleasure. The dark side which Hedges states bluntly is, they own everything; if we won't hand it over it's viewed as "aggression" and the elite kill us. Kennedy, King, RFK, X, Assange, Snowden, etc. For Lewinsky, young, poor, and ambitious, the affair seems consensual and advantageous; but visualizing their physical and economic disparity, makes her "will" to power, seem no will at all.

The president's preponderance of power throws the affair into a bottomless relief which seeing reifies, but literature obscures.