Exchange of Values

Exchange of Values
acrylic on board 48'X96'

"Structure of Color Perception"

"Structure of Color Perception"
48'X96' acrylic on board

Thursday, December 2, 2010


This billboard is up in Myrtle Beach, S.C.:


I read this roid-raged Jesus billboard as an imaginative update on Kazantzakis’ novel, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” But here, rather than just becoming a reformist Rabbi, settling down with Mary Magdalene, and pursuing the life of quiet scholarship (being nine years into his dissertation on “Messianic Motifs in Post-Maccabeen Revolutionary Folk Songs”) as Nikos imagined it. Jesus, just before giving up the ghost, ‘man’s up,’ shatters the cross, and clubs to death his Roman guards with it like Sarah Palin dispatching a flip-flopping Halibut. Then He sweeps Maggie up into his arms and with the help of reincarnated velociraptors, as well as Chuck Norris on Huckabee-laced steroids, He liberates Jerusalem from the Romans (and settles some scores with many of those recalcitrant Yids to boot). Next, He marches across the levant where he enlists that apologist for empire ‘Saul of Tarsus’ who becomes the Carl Schmitt of the new Jesus-Reich. Upon reaching Rome, Jesus (coached by Mark Driscoll) goes mano y mano against Caesar Augustus in a ‘no-tap-out’ cage fight, defeats him, and is crowned the new Uber-God/Man-Emperor of the world. Later, after setting plagues of microbes loose in the Americas to cleanse and prepare the land for his faithful minions by killing off it’s heathen inhabitants and any emergent and post-colonial theorists, Jesus moves the Reichs-Vatican to Montgomery Alabama and begins a righteous struggle against universal health care and for a lower marginal corporate tax rate, as well as rooting out the last redoubts of the hippie/socialist followers of Saint Francis and the few surviving pacifist Mennonites. After establishing dominion in the USA, He uses the erotically purged U.SA. as a launching pad towards Meggido and the ultimate smack-down against the Kenyan-born, Liberation-theologistic, Marxist/Leninist, LGTB, Harvard educated, Anti-Christ!!! Oh yes, there will be blood, up to the floorboards of His up-armored Pope mobile, as Jesus and 144,000 ‘promise-keeper’ shock troops, covens of free-range twilight vampires, and republican nazi re-enactors left behind after the rapture, smite with furious vengeance all those secular humanists who replaced ‘merry christmas’ with ‘happy holidays,’ and the last surviving stiff-necked Jews, who after 2000 years of mollycoddling by feminized “Christians” still refused to invest in Thomas Kincaid giclee prints.


(of course, given all that, what would be substantially different about much of conservative American Christendom if it were truly so?). Obliged Daniel.