Die (from "Signs")

David R. Julienne

From a series of works titled "SIGNS", done throughout the 1970s. In an exhibition postcard sent by the artist for his show "SIGNS" at the Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco, he stated: "SIGNS is a series of messages containing broad elements of 60's Pop, 70's Minimalism, and the verbal emptiness of contemporary advertising. The SIGNS are manufactured on sheets of archival Rives BFK. The virginal white art paper has an overall candy-like coating applied by the industrial screen printing process, obliterating its truth. With the most minimal amount of craft possible, the text is formed by the rapid and violent bomb-like combustion of ignited gunpowder burning the surface of the print."

The intent is to create a complicity between the SIGNS and the audience, oblique and autobiographical, public and private, self-revealing yet stylistically anonymous...SIGNS are in a state of arrested self destruction, unprotected, vulnerable. To these means Signs are merely to be pinned to the wall, much like that of a handbill left to twist in the wind."