Jeff Perrone “Let 10,000 Tires Burn: Work 2008 -2018”

Marinaro

[Image: Jeff Perrone "Overthrow Not Occupy" (2009) Mud cloth, buttons, and thread on canvas, 20 x 20 in.]

This event has ended.

I acknowledge and celebrate the First Peoples of Manhattan, the Lenape, on whose land I live and work.

This body of work was set in motion in 2008 as one form of direct action opposing the regime of the more effective evil, which immediately began administering policies typical of the imperial terror state.

All the great traditions of calligraphy, including Graffiti Art, take into account the risk of illegibility, abandon, and improvisation.

After contact with European fur traders, Plains Native women incorporated geometric motifs found in oriental carpets into their beaded moccasins: the Silk Road extends to Nebraska.

The thrift of grandmothers and de-accessioned storage vaults of abandoned New England clothing factories intersect in a recycling site called the flea market.

In African tourist folk art, the discards of capitalism’s waste reverberate with the reminder that, as archeologists say, “There is no ‘away’.”

In the tradition of shell, quill, and bead work, tile setting, piece quilts, mosaic, rug knotting, hooking, wrapping, marquetry, inlay, and embroidery, the time of making is marked out as the time of holding and touching as the tempo of seeing: a coming into focus, a cumulative mob of stubbornly, materially distinct shiny, matte, reflective colors, sizes, shapes, textures grouped by affinity.

Letters are formal scaffolding, a bone structure that requires a filling-out, making the skeletal juicy.

Anchored to the ground by and on Malian mud cloth, woven by men, dyed by woman, sturdy enough to support both the material and the message.

The earliest known button is a 5,000-year-old curved shell ornament found in the Indus Valley; buttons were not used as fasteners until 13th century Germany, when fashionable men displayed themselves in tight-fitting clothes.

Steve Jobs suffered from koumpounophobia, a fear of buttons; he expropriated the touch screen for the iPhone in order to avoid button-pushing.

This body speaks in dialect, in pidgin clusters, patois, creole, with an accent. Art is idiolect. In an interwoven globe, the only truly functional utility is code switching.

Let quotation be rewriting, reutilization.

Those who said the Egyptian revolution was peaceful did not see the resistance and even force the revolutionaries used against the police to defend their spaces: 99 police stations were put to the torch, thousands of police cars were destroyed, and all the ruling party’s offices were burned down.

This temporary constellation is dedicated to Mohammed Naeem Abu Amr, artist. Rest in power my beautiful brother.

Jeff Perrone (b. 1953, Atwater, CA) has had solo exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; Sperone Westwater, NY; Holly Solomon Gallery, NY; Charles Cowles Gallery, NY; and Cheim & Reid, NY. Perrone has lived and worked in New York since the 1970s.