the smear campaign

a certain gentleman at a very questionable organization -let's just call him peewee- got very emotional today at a job meeting, and decried a smear campaign against him. all because peewee gave a small raise to his girlfriend, and got her promoted right to the s department. (the organization flow seemed ever more clear to me, the s dept is on top rather than say, other similarly disreputable orggies like the iXf, etc.) everybody at the bushies seemed to be fairly distraught about this, and we sincerely suspect that the "smear" accusations have been engendered first by charisma karl's snout.

we wonder what a smear campaign looks like.

of course, in art there are precedents for smear campaigns.i'm just thinking about questions of precursivity here: in america the first thing that comes to mind is jackson pollock's action painting. of course, this was no smear campaign, it was drip painting, that transformed the canvas into an arena (in critic harold rosenberg's words, the picture shows one of hans namuth's famous pictures of pollock at work for Life magazine).

this weekend, while v was in LA, a more to the point example showed up: shiraga from the gutai (or "concrete") group of japan in the early 50s, inspired partly by pollock, but also in a wild departure from the notion of canvas, literally swam in mud and paint.

i can think of another artist active in the early 60s, nikki de saint-phalle, and her amazing "tir" or "shoot" paintings, prepared canvases in plaster containing little sacks of pigment at which she would take aim with a rifle and shoot in public actions.

i can still think of quite a few more recent examples that could help us visualize smear. but the beeb carried in its note a quiet reference to a certain mr bennett in peewee's entourage. it reminded v of a certain blue gap dress.