Fluxxus notable added to Art Invitational roster

Keith Buchholz is a last-minute addition to the artist roster for the 2008 Poetry Scores Art Invitational on Friday, Nov. 21 at Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, 3100 Sutton Blvd. in Maplewood. The event will run 6-10 p.m., with free beer partly donated by Schlafly.

The title of his piece will be "Is this the hero whose photo-shopped picture you want on the front of a Wheaties Box. Is the dawg you want to send to Disneyland?" The image above is other work poached from Keith's blog, titled "Broken," not the piece going into the show.

Keith's title, like the titles of all of the pieces in the show, is drawn verbatim from K. Curtis Lyle's great poem about 9/11, Nailed Seraphim. That's the idea behind a Poetry Scores Art Invitational: artists respond to the same poem, title their work with a scrap of language from the poem, then we hang their pieces in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the title appears.

Keith's title falls roughly in the middle of the poem, so I expect we'll hang his piece roughly in the middle of the exhibition. Here is a little more context for the lines he chose, which appear in a prose-poetic breakout section:

"Mortice Juwan Menifee was a dope smoking, woman abusing drunk, who was descended – peripherally - from a gambling, murdering, Mississippi pimp cum Cuban Communist revolutionary (by proxy), who probably raped a beautiful but confused white woman and made four half-breed babies. To top this off , he had the nerve to die in his bed with his boots on, on his one hundredth birthday like some crazed nigguh Zen Buddhist priest. Now America, What do you think of this? Is this the man you want lighting the torch at the Winter Olympics? Is this the hero whose photo-shopped picture you want on the front of a Wheaties Box. Is the dawg you want to send to Disneyland?"

Kind of reminds me of something St. Louis Republican Ed Martin would have tried to sell on Barack Obama before his candidates got buried by the real America.

Keith is a Member of the International Union of Mail Artists, FLUXUS and a bunch of other no doubt noble groups I've not heard of until now and has shown work in over 40 countries in the past year. He was recently chosen as one of 30 American Artists to show their work in Kennedy Center, Washington D.C. as a voice for Global Warming. His Artist’s Book “Velvet" was Published By LaLande Press in Paris in 2007.

As remarkable, this highly accomplished artist approached us to be in our show. That's cool.

Keith currently operates Fluxus/St. Louis as a home base and studio, and an outpost connecting St. Louis to the world Fluxus network. Come chat him up next Friday at Hoffman LaChance.