Two premonitions at a fork
Around 1995, at the close of the birthday self-portrait ritual (1993-1995) and just before the SFMOMA guerrilla installation and subsequent travel, the artist made two works he has come to regard, in hindsight, as premonitions made at a real fork in the road. The SFMOMA piece (uncatalogued, likely never recovered) anticipated something about the artist's eventual relationship to the art world and its institutions. Self Portrait 1995 (BB-OGP-1995-010), examined in this session, appears to anticipate the vantage-migration arc that would not have its later chapters (Deutsche Stadt, Skate City) until 2021 and beyond. At this hinge point the artist consciously chose to carry his original, self-taught artistic spark forward rather than abandon it for a different direction -- a decision he connects directly to why an archive-legible throughline exists to find at all, three decades later.
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