A Guerilla Art Exhibition, 1999

Sometimes art has more meaning in its brute ugliness. It’s much harder to paint a piece of crap than it is a cow and make it look good. This is a record of what happened during the Summer of 1999 in Chicago. It was the truest artistic statement I could make at the time, celebrating the commodification of art.  People try to sell you crap everyday, only I was being a little more transparent and not disguising it very well.

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When I first created “Cow Pies in Parade” I called it a guerilla art exhibition because it was an unsanctioned and unofficial public act of cultural criticism. This is a documentary of that series. Everything I made was eventually stolen or carted off by security guards. The negatives and prints of this project were destroyed in a flood. Everything was lost except for a notebook of my favorite photos. I think it has a Midwest sensibilty about it, in that it cuts through all the bullshit. I still think it’s a relevant artistic statement even though it happened at the end the last century.