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Play Salieri ("Im just a jumping punk" version) (for Flannery)
On 7/25/2020, Flannery included this direction in an email related to developing an idea for this painting commission:
> I also like little guys a lot. Only recently has my lizard brain evolved to appreciate art that does not include a smiley face somewhere. I like your art because I feel like it alludes to the presence of little guys even in the absence of little guys, but I might gently request someone, somewhere in there. That is my only formal demand.
Somehow I immediately connected this to her review of Amadeus (1984), from 2019, where she wrote:
> Asa said this is the best film about mediocrity, which made me think more about how mediocrity is usually comparative and most always relative to greatness. [...] If you’re a court composer and frickin Mozart breezes into town, it’s not like you can just make a weird tape and waddle around town selling it for five bucks [...] If Salieri was working in the 20th century doubtless he would have made some memorable jingles and been maybe like Barry Manilow but it was “back then” and there was no cheap technology, nor viable alternatives, nor hobbies, apparently, only superlatives, the men made for them & plebians pissing in the street. [...] It’s not that Salieri isn’t trying, it’s that he’s trying and failing. He prays to God and God ignores him, giving His gifts instead to a vulgar imp who farts through life. Mediocrities are hyper-aware of greatness. They are the most informed critics of true talent. No one feels the pain of virtuosity greater. [...]
...and the image for this painting appeared fully-formed. For Flan I'd be making an Elton John-like figure leaping up onto his piano bench to bang out a Salieri jam, on stage in a sold-out concert hall, with a rapt crowd watching, and some members experiencing profound recognition and joy in the art experience, as flames explode from the instrument. In the lower section of the painting, on the stage boards, the shadow of the Leopold Mozart death mask intersects with a selection of my house-style "little guys" (aka "cousins") and letters that read "PLAY SALIERI".
I heard Flan saying that for Salieri, the tragedy isn't so much his mediocrity obliterated in history by his proximity to the brightness of genius, as it is that he wasn't allowed to do his thing at the proper scale, and that his "trying and failing" has to do with being in the wrong venue. In the scene where Mozart elaborates virtuosically on Salieri's theme, this is played as a humiliating dunking-upon. But what if Salieri viewed it as collaboration and exchange? As an esoteric artist in a relatively small community ("I am just a jumping punk") that contains many, many geniuses, I like the idea of a painting inverting the idea of Salieri's supposed failure, imagining a Salieri whose community ecstatically demands he be played (then waddle out into the red velvet lobby and buy the tape). This painting rejects "genius" and "great works" as being rare, heroic, or timeless, and instead foregrounds & celebrates the "minor" contributors that healthy art ecosystems require, which give ground to the more visible things that grow out of them from time to time.
...
PS: This painting took me an absolutely psycho 3.5 years to finish - the longest time I've held a complete painting idea in mind, by far the longest I've taken to finish something for someone else... but in my defense there's been a lot going on. I worked on it at President Street, Studio Judy, Seward Ad Hoc, Pleasant Ave Blue Room, and Studio Billy before finally finishing it in the unnamed weird room off of the kitchen, here in my house. It rode west out of my last life into this new one in the same car with my cat (now gone), and contains the entire process of these years, vaporizing, blowing on the wind, and coming back into solid form, and then at last, getting back into a working studio. It's the first painting I'm finishing this year, and since my 1026 show wrapped the entire previous ~decade of work; as such, its reaching "done" functions as a kind of healthcheck that I do in fact intend to keep going 😈. I think it's really nice that all of this is in this painting too, and I love that it's going to be in the care of an extremely real one - Flan and I met and became irl friends in the course of this painting's production too. Thank you Flan for never once asking when this would be done. For those who don't know, check out New Flanland on WFMU.
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