- In the confines of my sunlit studio in Brightwaters, it was a 'getting even' activity, a kind of vehicle that started me thinking about the ironies contained in this work I was doing. I was seeing aspects of it that highlighted the injustices I was witnessing all around me, saw parallels with my frustrations and disappointments. The porn I made seemed to me a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado: the Lord High Executioner's song where he joyfully sings he's got a little list, and none of them be missed, and his executing them being a bit of 'innocent merriment.' This work of mine was that kind of 'innocent merriment' aimed at my little list of Philistines I knew whose presence I would not miss. This was my getting even art work, subversive and defiant. My provincialism as my bit of answer to the provincialism I felt had swallowed me whole. There was so much in the world that was really obscene! The art I was making, my pornography didn't hold a candle to it! This was my attitude governing pretty much of what I made from the late 40's on through and beyond the middle 70's, the period I reached my greatest fluency and productivity. Much of what I've newly scanned into my computer and endeavored to make available in my lists of book titles comes from the middle 70's into the following decade.
- What began with pen and markers in drawings books and then translated into copier art reproductions and making computer generated art in multiples, was for my eyes only — it flaunted and defied the protocols and the production requirements required of real commercial artists who made a living doing this work. My multiples are in editions of a half dozen or so artist's proofs. I got experience making mail art and then designing work I could hand color (as-needed) for collectors and libraries. I got to sell some books to the Museum of Modern Art. Got some distributed (on consignment with Printed Matter on Wooster Street in Greenwich Village (now in Chelsea). At no time before or since those early days had I contemplated creating a pseudonym or otherwise attempted anonymity. I was always signing my work. Now I not only sign but date and number every damned thing. It's as though I owed it to that researcher or historian who might some day far into the future need to gather all of this together.
- Yes I was making this for my eyes only, but for a posterity too. Not for any 'great majority' or for Americans. But for a posterity who'd find my point of view during this dark period in historic time an interesting perception as to how people dealt with issues dealing in sex and identity, conformity, art and self expression, the existence of pornography, and its delineation from the arts.
- The "gender thing" stands out in my work — is the most prevalent and persisting motif. What began as inadvertent investigations into pornographic mind-sets, premises, broadened its associations and inferences. The fantasies I played with had a sci-fi flavor even before I labeled it as such. It made my mind whirl with all sorts of H.G Wellesian takes on the biology and the technifying of human reproduction. Sex need not be required in the evolving of future human progeny. Sex as pure recreation was a distinctly doable possibility. Men could revert to having sex with boys without posing any threat to the Darwinian survival of the species.
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