Devin Envelope Art

Back in the 1980's, before there was email or any other electronic forms of communication, when we all began going in different directions (and then sometimes the same directions), we kept in touch with the U.S. Postal Service. We wrote letters to each other and those letters included words and drawings and things that we would cut out and things that we would collect, so every few weeks we would all get a little bit of each other in an envelope in our mailbox and that was always such an indescribable moment. You could see and feel that person in that paper, in those marks, in the gum that had to be licked to seal the envelope. It was like that person was whispering to you from far away, and you could almost feel their breath on your hair it was so close and so intimate. Try doing that with email.
This is the envelope of a letter I received from Devin after he moved to Minneapolis and when I was still in Bozeman. His triangle glasses artist character is laughing and I was probably giggling when I opened it up because inside would be some magical bit of Devin that had floated all the way from the metropolis to my basement apartment in the Bozone and it was all for me to read and look at and read and look at and puzzle over again and again. And then it ended it up in a box in my basement thirty years for me to rediscover, damp and discolored, a couple months ago. And then the magic, that bit of Devin, that voice and that breath, could once again giggle like a boat on the water, and I'd feel it and almost see and hear it.

Meanwhile Back in Bozeman, Montana...

Devin's triangle sunglasses artist character has snapped his fingers and landed back in Bozeman, Montana, where the locals hang out on the street corner and talk or catch spiders on their tongues. This is another one that Devin made into a postcard and most likely sold at Cactus Records on Main Street in Bozeman. It's even signed and dated by him. This was made somewhere around the time when he started moving back and forth between Montana and Minneapolis. Bozeman was maybe looking a little strange after being away for a few weeks.

It's Weird

Here's another comic about art. In it, Devin's artist alter-ego character, a recurring character in his cartoons, is getting some feedback on his latest artist creation from an audience of critics who are actually much stranger than they really think they are. The audience may be even crazier than the crazy art that the crazy artist has created, which is definitely a dilemma that artists who flirt with the weird, like Devin did, must alway face: what if your conservative audience of critics is really stranger than the strange art that you are trying to make to blow their minds?

Jesse Helms Safe Art Museum

Devin was always political and not afraid to blast those who were using their power in crazy ways. Here is is mocking Senator Jesse Helms, who in 1989 blasted public funding of art because of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

DVS 1984

Here is Devin in 1984 in my apartment in the basement of the Evergreen Building after or in the midst of some art-making.

Devin's Face Taped to the Wall

This piece is, of course, incomplete. That post office quality packing tape did once secure Devin's face to the wall, if for only for a few moments. I think this is a leftover of the Beatnik party that I held in my Evergreen Building apartment in 1985. Later in that party, Devin ceremonially burned the White House, at least the one made out of cardboard that I had taped together from the back of a cereal box.