Infantile Disease(2007)
Let's assume the picture is a self-portrait. You know what artists are like, navel gazing. Pseudo intellectual. Communist. Scheming. Duplicitous. A urinal is a fountain. This is not a pipe.
So if the boy is the artist what are the measles? Why is he barebacked? Why is his hair so vigorously brushed? And by whom? His mother? Whose mother? The artist's mother or the boy's mother?
Forget about the mother.
Let's get back to the measles.
What do they represent? Sickness? Too easy. A map of life's slights, a graph of the inaccessible "itches" of regret? What? No. Too la-di-da.
Is it a join-the-dots puzzle? I'll try.
No it isn't.
It's not about politics, is it? I hate it when it's about politics.
Oh, wait, is it a face when you turn it upside down?
No.
I don't now then.
--Richard Wilkinson, from the new issue of Juxtapose
