It’s a pleasure to be back amidst its pages – they published my first ever text-image sequence a few years back, WHEN I WATCHED HIM HANG THE HORSE, which can be read here.

This Beauty issue invokes our dearly beloved Francis Bacon: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The best beauty lies disguised in ugliness, is what I have to say – and every fairy tale in the history of humanity. Although the cover of the beauty issue leaves little room for irony, I’m sure it’s shoe-horned in there somewhere nonetheless.

My KRETCHMAR story is about the real-life Kretschmar family who, finding their newborn infant son to be un-beautiful, gained permission from Hitler to have him murdered by the family physician, aka Karl Brandt, whose rotten ghost I hunted throughout Germany last summer to mediocre avail. For some of us, the most we can do is still not enough. For others (such as Brandt) the little they do is more than enough. And such is the injustice of life.

At the moment, my Kretschmar piece is evolving into a much larger project about eugenic medical killings all around the world. Yet for the time being I am at great personal discipline limiting myself to creating a live performance and video installation conglomerate for this summer’s opening/exhibition in NYC. I’m in the factory with Martin Jago‘s narration, and Isaac Schankler‘s exquisitely unnerving music, and something will emerge that is grotesquely exquisite.

As for little Gerhardt Kretschmar, I’m trying. No way to bring him back to the land of the living (it’s over-rated, here, as he discovered) but I hope his short, bleak life leaves a residue of unease for any of us who go to the doctor and leave feeling a bit of the freak.

Stand your ugly ground, my dear abnormal ones.