Scott MacLeod Posters 1995-2000

This month's exhibit concludes the show of posters that I produced for my own performances & readings. Clicking on an image will open an enlarged version in a new window.

Two distinct types of posters are represented here. Many of you will have attended the events or performances that some of these posters advertise. I also produced several posters that didn't advertise anything but were themselves complete works. I posted or mailed hundreds of copies of these over the years. I still have far too many copies of the "Mayakovsky-MacLeod" poster pictured above.

The performance titles below event posters will usually be links to documentation of those performances. Click these & other links for more info & images.

An Atmosphere But For An Instant, Southern Exposure, 1/25/95

Two posters for a performance that I did inside my gallery-sized installation Even If Such An Object Outside Us Were Unimportant. This performance was in some ways the last of the Brief Amaze performances that I had made in Europe in 1990.


Paintings & Small Objects, Sneak Gallery, 3/29/95

I started smearing paint around on plywood & found canvases in 1993. I'd work on writing projects in my office at the front of my large flat in Dogpatch & when I got tired or blocked, I'd walk to my tiny back-porch studio to flail my arms around & get high on spray paint & varnish, which would give me ideas & I'd go back & do more writing.

Eventually the house filled up with paintings & I started wondering what to do with them, so when Cid Pearlman & David King moved out of the storefront studio below my house, I convinced the owner to let me have it for three days gratis. I hung everything up & had a one-night only exhibit. I offered to give away all the paintings for free, first-come first-served.

Patti Davidson & Tommy Hicks were the first ones there & made a beeline for a painting called Lombards 1. They have discerning eyes; almost everyone who attended asked me if that one was available. Patti & Tommy have since put together maybe the largest collection of my work. Anyway that night I gave away almost 40 paintings.

Very few redeeming qualities to this poster. But I think everyone should be able to toot their own horn at least once. And who's to say it's still not possible?

One of my favorites. Someday I'll get around to offering this slogan on coffee mugs on Cafe Press. The image is from Thread, a performance I did at Shedhalle in Zürich with Yvonne Austen.

Shrewd Little Angels, Collision, 8/24/95

Shortly after my friend Nina Iskrenko died I began having dreams that she was lost & desperate in a kind of fog or ether. One morning after the third or fourth of these dreams I started making paintings of angels to guide her. I made nearly sixty angel paintings in a couple of weeks & the dreams stopped. I figured Nina didn't need them anymore so I should try to give them to people who did.

I convinced the nice young people at Collision Gallery to show these paintings. The interior of Collision reminded me of a forest cabin in Wisconsin, so instead of an opening reception I had a slumber party. About 15 people "slept" over with me till the next morning.



Anne Frank In Jerusalem, 111 Minna, 8/7/95

At Galerie Theuretzbacher in Vienna, Mark Hudson, one of my collaborators in the Feed-Back-And-Forth project, slid his tongue down the length of one of the corners of the room. Actually, a couple of other artists had held him up in the air & rubbed him like a pencil on the wall. About halfway down, his tongue became so abraded that it started leaving a trail of blood on the wall. It was great & I wanted to do that too somehow. So here at this reading I had my chance. I would read a section from my novel Anne Frank In Jerusalem & then turn & lick the wall behind me for awhile. I'd rubbed my tongue with sandpaper beforehand so that I'd be sure to start bleeding in good time. I did manage to leave a bloody smudge on the wall but it was very much inferior to Mark's action.

The images used on the poster are from a performance I did with Yvonne Austen at Galerie Theuretzbacher the same day Mark's tongue bled.

Just a simple collage flyer designed to be posted in public. A poem, an image of Josef Beuys, xeroxed fake flowers. There was no particular intention here, just a quickly-made thing that immediately charmed me & still does.

Sometimes one word can do so much. When newspapers serve up fat ones like this little series of images of Sen. Robert Packwood, I find it difficult not to take swings at them. I sometimes suspect, and hope, that I am responding to intentional decisions made by subversive newspaper editors. Carla Harryman liked this one & I appreciated the fact that she told me so.

One of a series of flyers I made using sloppy two-color registration to make the visual properties more complex and the text a little more ambiguous. I found the real motives of Czech soldiers serving as peacekeepers in Bosnia to be a pertinent shading of the professed USA & NATO agenda, and in keeping with my cynical perceptions of the cultural transitions occurring in Eastern Europe after 1989.

I can’t remember what book I appropriated this text from. It's a good book; this selection pretty much sums up the writer’s basic thesis & I wanted help disseminate his attempt to deflate the romance of historical architecture & re-inscribe that architecture from a perpective focused on the human cost of colonial practice. Here I used sloppy registration to make the text harder to read, mirroring the difficulties of re-reading common assumptions. The image is of a Kipper Kids performance.

A slightly cautionary celebration of beer. Text is caption of a photo of stone carvings found in Sakkara, photo is Ladislav Baxa hoisting a pint of Radegast.

During the week or so after any given performance, a couple people would invariably come up to me, apologize for missing it & very enthusiastically state their intention to come to the next one. Always lacking for an audience for my work, I decided to stir the pot a little by abusing this tendency for people to be more enthusiastic when they missed something than when they didn’t.

I sent the Appointment poster out the afternoon before the performance, guaranteeing that no one would get it in time to attend & thus stoking their interest. I went to the designated place at the designated time & made a performance for no audience. When people came up to me expressing their regret for not making it, I told them the performance had been “great.”

I then sent out the Disappointment poster in plenty of time for people to be able to attend this sequel performance two weeks later. About 12-15 people came to the deserted corner by the train tracks at 10:30pm. I stayed home, in bed, reading a book. My spy, Michelle Rollman, reported that Jean-Louis Pearson, the director of Show-N-Tell Gallery, ran around the entire neighborhood, peering into dumpsters & muttering “I know he’s here somewhere.” After 30 or 40 minutes, Aaron Noble said “I don’t think he’s coming.” To which Nelson replied “Ohhhh. I’ve been to performances like this before.”


It seemed too bothersome to try to collect the 150 or so paintings of mine which were in private collections, find a place to exhibit them etc., but I wanted to have the feeling that all those collectors were taking a few minutes at an appointed time to reacquaint themselves with the paintings they owned. I guess I needed some affirmation. I have no idea if anyone actually did as requested. I am a sucker for shelving. I love having lots of it & I enjoy building it. So this photo of Conlon Noncarrow in his studio was like hardcore shelf-porn to me.

These are the two sides of a poster I sent to all my friends in England inviting them to a reading & performance I made at Ingrid Swenson’s art space Production in London. A photo of a Russian legislator barricaded inside Moscow’s parliament building in 1993 on one side, Sirhan Sirhan on the reverse.

I was driving my mom around on a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. On the grounds of the Wright house at Kentuck Knob, Lord Palumbo has a sculpture park which includes a section of the Berlin Wall and this Andy Goldsworthy piece. I’m a fan Goldsworthy’s work & couldn’t resist taking one small stone from the wall & replacing it with similar stone that I found on the ground a few feet away. In our bed & breakfast the next morning in Columbus, Ohio, Mom & I watched Princess Diana’s funeral on television. Lord Palumbo was interviewed for awhile on that broadcast. Never having heard of Lord Palumbo before, I thought this was an interesting enough coincidence to commemorate by issuing this poster.

This image of me doing a private performance at Shedhalle in Zurich was one of several images that I used on small cards announcing my 15-hour A Violin In This Dark Shed performance at the SF Art Institute.

Another series of newspaper photos that I just couldn’t let slip by unremarked upon. And, having been something of a horn-dog in my younger days, I felt I should implicate myself as well.

I guess I must have been having some issues relative to the horn-dog thing. None of the statements in this flyer were entirely untrue.

Another spontaneous newspaper detournement.

Just a straightforward announcement for a reading.

The version of this puerile diversion that I sent out highlighted several quotes from the article, including: “There aren’t too many places where this kind of organ can go,” and “…the organ is just too huge.”

For this flyer announcing an event at The Make Out Room, I collaged a photo of Virginia Dare with a photo of my father & his buddy on board ship during their Coast Guard service. Here's also a link to the Wannabe Texans - Brad & Mary were in the Wannabes before they started Virgina Dare.

An atypically sloppy attempt to conflate the Tienanmen Square massacre with gentrification in SF’s Mission district.