"Life as Art"

Peter Tunney may not be real, but he is, he has to be. Life as art, he is a manifestation of our collective desires, fears, hopes and admirations, rolled up into what you can only let yourself believe is a semi fictional character, a counterpoint to the perceived limitations of human existence. But this fictional character breathes the warm breath in the real world, and as with every fictional character, there is a story here, and this story is currently taking place in none other than New York City. More specifically, downtown Manhattan, and when you zoom in (picture the opening shot of Hitchcock's Psycho), it's happening on Leonard Street, in an art studio.

Zoom in further, and Leonard Street begins with wood and brick and mortar. You can see the wood, smell it rotting, get pieces of it in your skin. One of the few places left in a city of high-rise glass cave dwellings where you can still get a splinter. Where you can still kick up dust. A place, still left, that isn't ashamed of its own decay. This dying space breathes, this breathing last breath upon last breath place. A musty coffin, happiness caked with paint, and lined with the musings of a rich man gone poor, gone rich, gone everywhere it seems, who tells stories with a gleeful panic one would have thought reserved for the jug sluggers in a Kerouac masterpiece. They still exist, these Cassidies, they still walk the earth marked with the colors of their genius - Cain never stops walking, never stops living, can't stop, can't die, here since the dinosaurs. Very much like a shark, Peter Tunney.

Recalling Gilbert and George's "Living Sculptures", Peter Tunney, as simply as possible, but possibly so simply that you can't quite dig it, shows how an exhale, how when each and every breath is tinged with the gratitude of a last breath, shares the same artistic punch as the pronounced light and shadow on a Caravaggio canvas. With something as natural as breathing, Peter Tunney will make you shudder with his ability to call the importance of being into question, it is a breath that serves as a reminder to the forgetful nature of man, a breath that creates a reluctant awareness of such forgetfulness, diagnosing the amnesia of the soul, and saying "I am here, right now, where the hell have you been?" And then, if only for a moment, others too can share in the romantic ecstasy of knowing all the answers, and then a pen is grabbed, and then paint is smeared, and then "Peter" is signed, and then art is made.