On the Attack
But by the time he went to nearby Webster University in 1990 to study drawing and sculpture he’d become “really reactionary, always trying to one-up everybody.” One day a classmate presented a door spattered with paint and said, “This is what life’s like under a microscope, under glass.” Ortmann decided to show them what life is really like under glass. So he pressed some roadkill–a whole dead fox, complete with maggots–between two pieces of Plexiglas and sealed it with resin. One girl vomited, he says; an older student left and came back a week later to complain that she hadn’t paid good money to see such filth.
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The Nihilist releases kept on coming, even as Ortmann headed back up to Saint Louis and finally to Chicago in late 1998: split singles and LPs with like-minded musicians (including San Francisco cardboard-and-electronics group Rubber O Cement), a CD by stage-shy nuisances the Strangulated Beatoffs, and a B-52’s tribute album featuring Harvey Sid Fisher and Cheer-Accident, Metalux, and Government Alpha.
Postscript
