The Drunkards

When Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare was shattered/damaged/transformed upon being relocated to the Brooklyn Museum, through this violent act, this accidental fracture, a new manifestation of the medium was born. So too in LM Rivera’s The Drunkards is there violence against the body, not in and of itself, but the body as symbolic mover; and in the interplay between intoxication and violence, in being intoxicated on one’s own violence, so too do violence and transformation become habituated in art. This intoxicated personhood transcends the divisions of the biological self, elevating consciousness to the selfless space of The Book, a constantly unfolding interiority in which the self’s unspecialness is allowed to touch the sublime.