SHOOT YOUR DARLINGS

I have to talk about Justin C. Beckman, and in order to do this I have to talk about Mericah:

The world this art was born into was red stated - the thin webs holding our blue balls together. To make a vintage point, this not-never quite purple won't mix right now, the differing advantages sought here are cells dividing, or vinegar and water: a society without society where everything I damn well please comes without my neighbor having no right to talk shit, but also climb-to-the-top asslickin industryland where every man's on his way to being richer than god. In these words, our most metropolitan and most agrarian of all peoples are hopelessly drawn along by the latter tendency while fantasizing about the former. Beckman's objects were born into the family (it's always a family) of the red stated, or uncompromising America, driven by the id of the market. This is a show about him and his industrial dream implement, the gun:

He says of himself: "self-reliant, beer-chugging, oversexed, car-loving, god-fearing, bible-thumping, resiliently unfashionable, undefeatable" - he is a creature of hollywood, but always a past hollywood, because he was typecast long before birth, and the present hollywood is probably too lefty gay. He has left practical reality far behind him on the open road, and makes up his propulsive ideology as he goes along. He is less interested in what reality is than with how he is to master it.

"God made all man different, Samual Colt's 45 made them all equal" - a six-knuckled extension of the fist, a good pistol puts a lipstick-sized hole through anything in sight, and that's about how far distant every creature or cowboy ought to keep themselves. Before Hollywood, these arms were a symbol of the state and their histrionic wars and questionable police to much of the world. Only in the wide open mouth of the American west were they the proper implements of lawlessness, and by the 50s, we had shown the whole world how to use them thusly, even if only in dreams and fantasies of every little boy unknowingly rediscovering his penis in Clint Eastwood. Which isn't to say that the artist didn't handle a few, or that the object is all idea to us that still live in America: to some that unnervingly muscular recoil and hours spent honing one's aim on a tin can represent raw meat that we can strap to the hood of our car, or a necessary protection for one's storefront, above and beyond the heroic bringer-of-death that every wannabe soldier is hopelessly attached to.

 It is significant that alongside our endless circulation of the image of the gun, we also sell more real guns than anywhere else in the world (guns that are paradoxically manufactured in pacifist Sweden for the most part). But if the latter might make us equal, it's the former that makes us think we are:

Shortly after Obama's inauguration, the then new 'tea baggers' held a coming out party, rallying a 'militia' to bring guns as close as they legally could to the whitehouse to support the second amendment.  40 years before, the black panthers pulled a series of similar PR stunts. For better or worse, the most effective implement of lethal force an individual can possess is firmly in the hands of either Sarah Palin types or foreigners, and if it doesn't find itself their, it is in the hands of nostalgia itself, which is the conservative's most heroic stance.

 Everything above encapsulates what I saw in the work of Justin Colt Beckman, free of judgement or gallery-experiential adornment. I aimed at writing it not as a critic, because I feel far too free of the dynamics at work in his art, being a blue-stater myself, and thus I hope I am writing the work in such a way that he might see his art accurately and viscerally represented in it. 

His show is at Punch gallery on 3rd and Perfontaine in the TK building. You can see it tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.