GERALD LAING

Selected Citations and Comments

Chicago, based upon the image of a large drop of blood, was created for a 1968 exhibition organised by Richard Feigen in the wake of the the violent attacks on demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention by police and the national guard under the command of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. The exhibition was named ‘Richard J. Daley’ and featured the work of many artists who had recently been part of a city wide artists strike in protest at the violence, including Claes Oldenberg who had himself been beaten by police. Laing was cynical about the exhibition, viewing it more as an act of opportunism than of genuine protest, and came to see the work as ‘too beautiful’ to be an adequate response to events. He describes his subsequent response: ‘In desperation, I pressed my penis in an inkpad and made my first cock print, right in the centre of a large sheet of Arches paper. It seemed the closest I could get to an appropriate response to the whole sorry business.’

Gerald Laing, 'Gerald Laing: An Autobiography', unpublished manuscript, 2011, ch.31