“PLEASE WARM UP, little raconteur,” began the item in the “Missed Connections” section of the Reader’s Matches ads for January 14, 2000. The cryptic 50-word poem was followed in subsequent weeks by similarly arcane postings: “HANDSOME, 26 Y.O….relatively minute but possessed of Tatlinesque love. Eats iron, breathes perfume. Seeks young revolutionary willing to cut a few hearts.” “BABY-BLUE SLEEPER, I watched you on the Northbound red. All silence. The walls rung down across the bell of the light.” But after several ads ran–garnering no responses–the jig was up for local poet Greg Purcell. He was contacted by a Matches staffer and, he recalls, advised that “If you really want to connect with this person maybe you should do something like describe their hair color.”
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Artist Gabert Farrar, meanwhile, had been busy depersonalizing pornographic images, taking crotch shots from magazines like Club and Gallery and reworking them as glyphlike geometrized line drawings. When Purcell, a friend, saw the work he was struck by how both projects turned on what he describes as “taking something that is the most obvious endeavor–the mating ritual, and sex–and turning it into an abstraction,” yet one with “its own use.” Farrar, on the other hand, says he was moved by the idea of turning “accepted forms of sexual expression…into something useless.” The two teamed up, somewhat furtively acquiring additional research materials at Exotic Books on North Avenue. When buying, say, Fifty Plus, says Farrar, “You can’t really say, ‘Oh, it’s for art.’”
Purcell characterizes his work as “serious and prankish”; the latter’s perhaps more evident in a second personal-ad series contained in the exhibit’s tabloid newsprint flyer. “Replacements” was generated when Purcell, at the time a temp, employed his computer’s search-and-replace function to alter the Reader’s “None of the Above” ads, substituting “rabid” for “sincere,” “blind” for “attractive,” “Himalayan” for “muscular,” etc. The absurdist results transform the section’s foot fetishists, voyeurs, and would-be oral service providers into towering Heideggerian mangroves and height-weight preoccupied wirecutters beguiled by sizzling summer terror. “FEARING MS. WRONG!” reads a representative item, “39 y.o. gullible measuring fears a fluttering playpal.” One recipient of the exhibit flyer sent it back, indignantly scrawled with “I did not order this.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nathan Mandell.
