A Critical Dialogue: Waka/Jawaka in MS Paint
Seraphina Voss-Bellamy & Vernon K. Bleakridge in conversation
SERAPHINA: Vernon, I have to say — the moment I laid eyes on this piece, something cracked open in me. Right here. [gestures to sternum]. The green. That green. It isn't simply a background, it's a declaration. It's the green of a municipal bathroom that has decided, against all odds, to become sacred.
BLEAKRIDGE: It's the green of a man who found the paint bucket tool and held the mouse button down.
SERAPHINA: Exactly. The commitment! No blending, no hedging, no artistic cowardice. Pure. Uncut. Conviction.
BLEAKRIDGE: The sink — and I use the word "sink" in the same generous spirit one might call a potato sketch of a sink a "sink" — appears to have been drawn by someone who had never seen a sink, had a sink described to them over a crackling telephone line, in a language they were still learning.
SERAPHINA: It haunts with its plumbing. Those taps — "HOT" and "RATS" — oh, Vernon. Oh. Do you see it? Hot Rats. The 1969 album. Sitting right there on the faucets. It's palimpsest! It's Zappa speaking to Zappa across time, and the artist has encoded it so gently, so slyly, into the very infrastructure of the image.
BLEAKRIDGE: I noticed the faucets, Seraphina. I noticed them the way one notices a parking ticket on a car that is already on fire.
SERAPHINA: [clutches pearls and a nearby catalogue]
BLEAKRIDGE: The text at the top — "FRANK ZAPPA" rendered in what I can only describe as a font that is slowly losing the will to live — appears to be melting not from any intentional surrealist impulse, but because the artist discovered the distortion tool approximately forty seconds before they needed to stop and have dinner.
SERAPHINA: The letterforms breathe, Vernon. They are alive. They are doing what Zappa himself always did — refusing to behave. Look at that gorgeous, lumpen, hand-hewn quality. This is the typography of someone who has felt music, not merely listened to it.
BLEAKRIDGE: The rose petals — or what I initially assumed were rose petals, before entertaining the possibility that they are bloodstains, or perhaps small wet gloves — are scattered across the image in a pattern that suggests not composition, but distraction. As though the artist grew bored and began dropping things.
SERAPHINA: Gestural scatter. It's practically Twombly.
BLEAKRIDGE: It is practically nothing, Seraphina. It is the visual equivalent of someone saying "et cetera" at the end of a list they have already abandoned.
SERAPHINA: And the figure at the bottom! That extraordinary dark form emerging from beneath the sink — all afro and suggestion — it's Zappa ascending, or perhaps descending, it doesn't matter, because either direction is mythic.
BLEAKRIDGE: The figure at the bottom looks like a man being slowly consumed by a piece of bathroom furniture. Which, I grant you, may be the most avant-garde thing in the image.
SERAPHINA: (breathless) Vernon. What if that's the point?
BLEAKRIDGE: My point is that Ralph Rumpelton — whose name appears in the corner in a font size that suggests he was either modest or embarrassed — has created something that Microsoft Paint will, in its infinite mercy, allow anyone to create, and yet almost no one thinks to. And I am not certain whether that makes this outsider art or simply an outside decision.
SERAPHINA: (stands, visibly moved) It is BOTH, Vernon. That is the miracle of it. Ralph Rumpelton looked at a beloved Zappa record, opened the most democratised art tool in human history, and said: I will honour this. In green. With faucets. And I think — I genuinely think — Frank would have loved it. He would have put it on an album cover. He would have called it correct.
BLEAKRIDGE: Frank Zappa spent considerable money on professional album art.
SERAPHINA: (already weeping) He would have made an exception.
BLEAKRIDGE: (long pause, staring at the image)...The soap dish in the middle is actually rather well-observed.
SERAPHINA: (gasps)
BLEAKRIDGE: I said what I said. Good evening.
Seraphina Voss-Bellamy rated this work ✦✦✦✦✦ — "transcendence via pixel." Vernon K. Bleakridge filed no formal rating but kept a printed copy, facing down, in his coat pocket for the remainder of the week.
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