DISNEY DOES MORRISSEY

The Day Morrissey Sold Out by Gina Disney. Still living near Downtown L.A. and still wonderfully persisting, but rumor has it she’s got herself a bike and she rides the train and she’s been sleeping better these days.

The willowy figures are resigned, fatigued, forlorn. The Morrissey show has been sold out OR Morrissey is a sell out. Let’s pray we’re talking about the show and not the man because, well, Morrissey is a deity.

Who else can conjure the slow assault of life’s letdowns than the Moz, the crooner, Morrissey, the king of ambiguity who calls L.A. his home. The sun shines out of his behind.

Disney’s painting presents comic book-like borders only to have them broken by the humanoid figures. The hand extending down, the elbow on the line. Confined yet not.

Then the figure at the upper left, the one with a defined face tired, and hair cropped. Is this the artist? Why is it that the figure with a face lacks breasts and a body? Are we either lamenting carnal forms or delineated figures formless and in attitudes of tragic resignation, sleeping? Or are we the synthesis of this triptych of forms, this triple negative so devastating on the surface, it’s almost funny, uplifting, absurd in its dourness. Like Morrissey. He’s so dramatic he circumnavigates the spectrum of emotions and senses and becomes almost funny.

And if a double-decker bus
crashes in to us
to die by your side
is such a heavenly way to die
and if a ten ton truck
kills the both of us
to die by your side
well the pleasure, the privilege is mine…
from “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths

The compounded futilities, like driving in L.A. swerving to avoid that, yes that’s a huge canvas in the road just before the 2nd Street tunnel in Downtown, a big ass canvas face down in the right lane. Reentering the lane only to veer around the minivan backing up at full speed from the middle of the tunnel, hazards blaring (how considerate). Art dashed, lives risked and no one flinches, we just avoid collision, then maintain our lane that best defines our path from work to home. We settle back into our broken hearts or our empty stomachs or our insufficient bodies or our dashed ambition.

Disney’s painting does something like that.

Her other work discussed on Ambigutrex can be found here