Elvis Aaron Presley Visual Art Amalgam
The Press Release
Press release for the Main Street Museum as part of their All Elvis Art Show in White River Junction, Vermont in August of 1994, c.e.:
For immediate release:
Well, here I am, sitting here, writing a press release for Elvis. All kinds of options here: “Elvis as paradigm”...“gross fat singer eating bowl-fulls of mashed potato and bacon with his hands”; well, why not? throw caution to the wind...
THE MAIN STREET MUSEUM OF ART is indescribably pleased to announce the long awaited opening of its All Elvis Art Show and a REALLY COOL OPENING RECEPTION with live music from seven and nine p. m.
Saturday the Twenty-seventh of August, Nineteen Ninety-four, from six o’clock til eleven. with a special appearance, at nine of Elvis Aaron Presley with his four piece band.
Thats right, by an astounding coup of such Machiavelian dimensions that we are embarrassed to discuss them publicly, The King himself will at long last end his voluntary seclusion and re-enter the entertainment profession with a special concert in White River Junction to kick off his World Tour: “Elvis, Come Back ’95”
Mr. Stephen Connolly and his band Blue Suede Shoes will be in attendance and boy, they are really something to see. Willy D and his Bluegrass Mutineers, a country band with a thrash-metal inclination, will provide an opener for this spectacle at seven o’clock.
Elvis Presley—still alive—going to sing in White River... Well; we’re getting serious now, no backing down, "steaming right along" as F. H. Gillingham used to say; and Im not even one quarter of the way through this thing. One thing’s for sure: the Main Street Museum has always given value for investment, or volume for your time, as the case may be.
The response to our little “CALL FOR ENTRIES” being nothing short of overwhelming; we are pleased to offer, as well as Elvis, an assortment of oil paintings, drawings, artifacts and tiny, dried fragments of human bodies (relics) forming a witless sampling of regional art talent thematically organized around “the most influential man of the 20th Century.”
Just a few of the LOCAL GENIUSES presented are attached herein: GRETCHEN ABENDSHEIN, a painter who has been laboring for ten years over densely meshed handmade books flogging the iconography of the King will hang her drawings for the duration of the show and have her books to be seen for the opening only; STEPHEN CONNOLLY will honor us with his masterpiece, a self-portrait/portrait of himself/Elvis in oil on canvas; framed sheet music will be generously loaned to our «vernesage» by MR. PETER DABROWSKI; MR. STEVEN DUNNING, who will be exhibiting his works in a national Elvis-Marilyn Monroe art show in 1995, will show his exciting pop-constructions; MS. MARY FUSCO of Reading, Vermont, has gone nearly blind stitching together an awe-inspiring quilt entirely of Elvis fabric; SLUGO MANASHEVITZ GAGARIN will again exhibit his lush, hand colorized photographs in homage to Wallace Nutting as well as to the King of Rock and Roll; PAUL LAFFOLEY internationally known painter has consented to lend for the opening two panels from his monumental “life of the King” series; the museum considers itself very fortunate to have obtained the expired Vermont registration plates from the automobile of R. W. MARTIN, of Waterbury, come and see why! HARRY PEARSON, one of our gracious neighbors on North Elm Street, will grace us with his sculptures, which altho pygmy in size are anything but diminutive in world-view; DAVID POWELL, famed for his obsession with all things Presleyesque, is currently presenting on of the show stoppers of the exhibit--ninety-nine bottles of genuine Shroud of Memphis Holy Water (guaranteed to be wet); ANITA REDIC, of Pateville, Georgia will ship her paintings and T-shirts from the national Elvis Art Show at Graceland, Memphis, Tennessee to the hallowed halls of the White River; CLARE ROBICHAUD, our friend from West Roxbury, Massachusetts has produced a pencil portrait of the King that is constantly marveled at by all who see it; DANIEL SAGAN, noted engineer of Terra-firma Inc. and a blushing newlywed, will feature his unintelligible Presley assemblagés; MR. SAM SEBREN of New York City will feature his special Elvis Dream expressionist painting with glamorous gold tint; MS. LI SHEN, a skilled potter of Thetford, has unearthed quite startling sculptural representations of Elivs Aron and his little twin brother Jesse Garron (the only known example of an actual impression of the child-king’s features--a death mask of his poor little gene-pool duplicate); plus, by special arrangement with TARA and the CURATOR OF THE MUSEUM, various artifacts--TRUE RELICS of the body and clothing of the King (the gall-stones of the entertainer among other unmentionables) will be presented for the elucidation and enjoyment of the population of our region. Just another example of the community spirit of the MAIN STREET MUSEUM
Alright, lets recap: Elvis back from the dead, performing live and jamming with a punk rock bluegrass band, a lot of paintings, drawings and concept-deprived constructs (ART), munchies, and all
FREE AND OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC.
May it please you at THE MAIN STREET MUSEUM
The Catalog Essay
The following is an exerpt from the catalog for the All Elvis Art Show at the Main Street Musuem, August, 1994, c. e.:
"At Dawn, Ill be gone; but I wont stay long; Ill be coming back..." —Elvis
We were lucky to get him. I guess White River Junction sort of reminded him of Tupelo. It seemed fitting that he should start again in a small town, on a Main Street. It was Main Street America, it was Main Street the world over, that always loved him; that still loves him and that always will love him. A rekindling of love, as it turns out, is the subject of this brief essay.
His public life was impressive. His private life was bizarre; yet I hope to dwell on neither fluorescent and neon Vegas or the deep seclusion of a Memphis bedroom, with windows taped shut, as I sit here this evening and listen to the rain dripping in an alley-way in a little Vermont town; what I do hope to get at is something terribly ineffable and fragile, something that will suffer from writing it.
Our visions of Elvis diverge, clustering into two rough camps: there is Elvis fan club mentality that delineates mundane trivia as a kind of homage; and then there is a kind of cynicism, and this is a primarily Northern prejudice, that leads intelligent artists and writers to define the entertainer as just that and to judge a Phenomenon, a Myth, by the standards Rolling Stone magazine applies to Todd Rungren. Elvis is bigger than either of these approaches; I am interested in neither.
"...a man identifying himself as Elvis telephoned a production secretary who screens calls for a TV talk show in Detroit. The secretary said the call left her 'weak kneed.' Later when the camera panned over the studio audience some were sobbing and others were visibly upset. Looking into the camera, one man yelled, “Elvis, come back. We love you!”
A choice bit from the book of Acts, Jesus, months after his death, standing upon the shore coaching the fishing team; a Christ sighting, would be appropriate at this juncture but I doubt that it is necessary, at this late date, to flail away at the Elvis/Jesus thing anymore. All of us are acquainted with the essential story; the hero that escapes death, Orpheus-like and crosses the river into the vale of tears and returns to us. The logical question to ask is not why societies create these almost identical stories, across continents, from century to century, but how they get there in the first place; what is the slow particulate progression of sediment into limestone; and who is anointed for this priestly (presley) task.
"Seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you."
At our reception and concert in White River Junction there will be many people who love the King and every single one of us can call up, in our minds, his laugh, his eyes, his clothes, describe his private life. Indeed, our relationships with Elvis are dialogues, which indicates that this Janus-headed creature is something so rich and varied that it mirrors the endless complexity of Nature itself, an organic process which defies any attempt at explanation. For all who knocks he enters in--which indicates that perhaps he is already there to begin with. We talk to Elvis and he replies. And none of us knew him. And none of us were there. So perhaps it is ourselves that we are looking at when we stare into those limpid pools, those heavily lidded brown eyes.
Elvis is not like those one-way mirrors he had installed in Graceland. He is two-way.
Rabbi Harold Kushner is often asked, “Where is God?” and feels that the hackneyed answer, that God is everywhere, or that “theres a little bit of God in everything,” is insufficient. Instead Kushner says, he believes that God is “between people.”
I am uninterested in most of the trivia surrounding Elvis Presley. I dont know how many records he had in the top 10. I don't know the nicknames for all of the Memphis Mafia. Yet I am not so disillusioned to imagine that all there is to his Story is a tacky, sweaty buffoon surrounded by fat old drunks from the Corn and Bible-belts in a Vegas night-club. Instead, I see the wall at Graceland and marvel at the words inscribed over every inch of it. I look over this country, and over the whole world, and see thousands of Elvis impersonators singing in clubs, going to the store, eating cheeseburgers. I look over our landscape of malls and highways and see Elvis sighted in Michigan, in Oklahoma, in Tennessee, in Florida, in Germany, and even Vermont and it is that moment between the Story and the People Telling It that thrills me. I dont pretend for a minute to understand it, but it is that unknown, alchemical trigger that trips between Elvis and us, Prometheus and us, Glascup and us, Gwan-yin and us that haunts me and makes me not surprised when the university professors of the country are poled they call Elvis Aaron Presley the most influential man of our Century.
"Minds which are separated pretend to blend in one an other’s language. The marriage of souls in concepts is mostly an illusion. Thoughts which travel outward bring back reports of You from outward things: but a dialogue with You, uttered through the world, always ends by being a dialogue with my own reflection in the stream of time." —Thomas Merton.
And tonight, through these conversations with our own faces “in the stream of time” we focus on the place between things rather than on the superficial attributes of things as we perceive them. Tonight, through the medium of an entertainer that is said to have died sixteen years ago this month, we find illuminated some of the small shadows that make up other peoples lives and perhaps they turn out to be not so different from our own lives. Our own lives; other peoples lives; Elvis’ life; perhaps they are all one in the same after all?
