Tip of the Knife

I was, am, and always will be a surrealist. Strange juxtapositions, automatic writing/drawing, the power of dreams, zero reason. These elements don’t make up my work, they make up my life, so it’s only natural that I would use them in my role as editor of Tip Of The Knife. If a painter came to me for advice, I would tell them to be a writer. If a dancer came to me, I would tell them to be an architect.

The contributors to TOK 9 have not come here for advice; they’ve come as peacock jewels and butterfly priests, enlightening us with a blazing purple sun. We offer a circus of pataphysics, from calm zen reality to frightening mental disruption, from comic book dada to religious ecstasy. Breton, Ernst, Bunuel, Dali: our forefathers. There’s no way to explain it, nothing to describe it. As de Chirico said,

“What shall I love if not the enigma?”

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CONTRIBUTORS

Adam Braffman
Trevor Pawlak
David Chirot
Bobbi Lurie
John M. Bennett
Paul Pacak
Nico Vassilakis

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Adam Braffman

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grease

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Trevor Pawlak

Trevor Pawlak is a 12 year old nonverbal artist affected with Autism Spectrum Disorder and an overwhelming desire to paint, write and create. Because he is denied body movement and speech, his tools are not brush and pencil, but soul and love. He focuses on Abstract Impressionist art because that's what his body can manage. His emotions burst out like an atom bomb, and like the bomb, which reaches down to the nuclear level, Trevor reaches down to his own nuclear core and returns with the golden fleece (I love the way he uses that gold in his paintings). Enjoy these works- they're pure, and they make us pure again.

Desire

Happiness

My Mind

The Love of Christ

Never Leave Me

David Chirot

I have and work with a profound faith in the Found. I work with materials directly on site/sight/cite in the environment or, smaller, carried home, using a lumber crayon for "rubBEings" or clay for impressions spray painted on paper. Touching paper on one side, materials touching on the other, work is a collaboration, an uncanny enounter out of which emerges a "Third Mind," "I is somebody else," the Other." Visual Poetry is a way of life, a continual revelation amidst the ongoing flux everywhere around one, hidden in plain site/sight/cite,"getting in touch" with materials and artist meeting at the site/sight/cite of the paper, side to/by side.

For Heraclitus--The Most Beautiful World Emerges in a Dying Copper Mine in Vermont

Prisons, Inc

Death from this Window #1

And the Afternoon Wore/War On

Enigmatic Being: For the Human Shadows Forever on the Walls of Hiroshima

Bobbi Lurie

John M. Bennett

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JMB cardboard 11 2011

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Paul Pacak

reeds and water #1

reeds and water #2

reeds and water #3

Nico Vassilakis



AN ARMOIRE IN THE
TYPEWRITER’S BREAST POCKET




There is a smooth
distinction here, one that warbles inside the conduit.

Rapport continues
blamelessly in the stutter of dance steps well taken.

The placid deception
of sculpture parks hinders ones right of way.

Conversely, during
shifts, a proposal requires the high terrace of attraction.

An elongated subway of
erasure only cleans one calamity front to back.

Desertion acquires
silent coils that wring out the moisture of the left.

The card read lunar
hemorrhage brings a figurine next to the saltshaker.

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DRAW BLOOD OR GO HOME

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13 MOVIE QUOTATIONS ABOUT VISUAL POETRY
(as I see it/them)

1. The Thin Red Line

“Darkness, light, strife, love, are they the features of the same face? Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out at the things you made, all things shining.”

2. Un Chien Analou

“Art doesn’t have to be pretty to be valuable.”

3. The Departed

“Do you know who John Lennon is?”
“Yeah, president before Lincoln.”
“He said, I’m an artist, give me a fuckin tuba and I’ll get you something out of it.”

4. Run Lola Run

“One answer will give rise to the next question.”

5. City of God

“Can you read?”
“Only the pictures.”

6. Art School Confidential

“It has the singularity of outsider art’s conscious rejection of spatial dynamics and the intimacy of picture making.”

7. The Ring

“Sometimes children yell or cry…or draw pictures.”

8. Wings of Desire

“Tell me muse, of the storyteller who has been thrust to the edge of the world, as an infant and an ancient, and through him, reveal everyman.”

9. Pi

“It was given to me. It’s inside of me. It’s changing me.”

10. Ghost World

“What are you studying? You were always such a smart little girl.”
“I’m taking a remedial art class for fuck ups and retards.”

11. Basquiat

Andy Warhol to Jean-Michael: “I don’t know what’s good anymore!”

12. Cinema Paradiso

“The princess told the soldier, "if you can wait 100 days and nights under my balcony, then I shall be yours.” So he waited night and day, through rain and freezing cold. Then, on the 99^th day, he stood up and went away."

13. Apocalypse Now

“Where’s the dog!?”

If you have one, share it with us.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Scott Davenport
Bárbara Mesquita

Bruno Neiva

Gustave Morin

Joel A. Lipman

Joel Chace

Peter Ciccariello

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Video Poem by Scott Davenport
(click on link)