Since 1968: William Weege’s Long Live Life
February 4, 2009
by Vince Tripi, III
The Center is hosting an art exhibition bringing together selections from the UWM Art Collection with the UW-Whitewater Crossman Gallery that will run until February 12 in historic Mitchell Hall, room 154.
These pieces, complex and intricate works on paper and paintings, are a summary of “the aftermath of 1968,” which, among other things, meant expansive social reform movements. Almost as influential to these pieces is an experimental, abstract, and juxtaposed look at what is art, speech, what is good, true; they also ask something larger, who are “we,” as a people, as a nation, as a political entity, as human beings. The following poem was written in response to William Weege’s “Long Live Life,” which is shown in the exhibition.
LBJ being sworn in on Air Force 1, Lady Bird Johnson cropped into the photo, Jackie Kennedy cropped out.
A Charlie Chaplin Hitler surveying a floor-mounted globe, as if about to dance with it.
Motion capture of a sprinting cat.
A nuclear blast as seen from the air several miles off.
A ventriloquist’s dummy.
Six colors flipped horizontally, flipped vertically.
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
“Sitting on a sofa On a Sunday afternoon Going to the Candid…”
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY WAR IS PEACE IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Rows of scores of soldiers.
LONG LIVE LIFE 1984
And number 12 from a baseball team.
Dissections of human heads and pelvises and noses.
Jet planes.
Radar screens.
Porn stars bending and lounging and spread-eagling across the entire 16 panes.
some panes are numbered
some panes have dates
how advanced are we from this asymmetrical sprawl of colored panes
how powerful we are–despite our ignorance of colored panes
how enlightened we are to have so few wars
Bright pink cogs and engines behind a nicely centered penis
This is our iconic modern history: porn and war
Ben Franklin would be so proud
