Orson Welles v. The Burning Dumpster

Teh Trial

The whole Orson Welles body of work is quarter turn past gleeful tempting of the fates to flex their irony muscles. A bit of theater, a bit self-delusion, a bit of trolling. It’s about genius, holy icons, idolatry, martyrdom, infamy and celebrity; it’s about me, self-destruction, self-reflection, self-aggrandizement.

These paintings and the book originally appeared in mid 2007 at Sala Diaz in San Antonio. The vinyl-letter people who put the title and the artist onto the window misspelled both mine and Orson’s last name.

Self Portrait as Orson Welles #4Self Portrait as Orson Welles #1Self Portrait as Orson Welles #2Self Portrait as Orson Welles #3Self Portrait as Orson Welles #5Self Portrait as Orson Welles #6Self Portrait as Orson Welles #8Self Portrait as Orson Welles #7Self Portrait as Orson Welles #9Transcendental Shame over a Burning Dumpster

Portrait of the Artist as Orson Welles

Other Sets

Orson Welles has called The Trial one of his best movies. Here we have a highly deteriorated version of the film, shot over and over and over again, until all the sound one hears is the sound of the auditorium in which it was recorded, and the video becomes an eerie dance of compression and artifact and stupidly improbable color which is not much more than a miscalibrated projector further falling out of whack; until the shade of feeling the original movie elicits changes to something new, until the movie ceases to be an Orson Welles movie through sheer mechanic re-digestion by another artist.


Creative Commons License Everything here is made by a Stevan Živadinović
of some sort, or otherwise righteously stolen.