by Bowen Craig

The ringmaster of the mildly homeless free-spirit.  Fun-loving, but a bit sadistic. Athens’ favorite garbage artist and founder of JOKERJOKERTV.

Local multi-media artist Mux Blank has been called many things: Genius, jack-of-all-trades, “Hey, you, bearded hobo, park your house bus on someone else’s lawn.”  They all apply.

Mux Blank and his merry pranksters descended on Athica in June. 

Aside from his expected bank of non-working TV sets (an image I will forever associate with Mux), he has lined the walls with his visual creations. If this were a traditional art magazine, no one would read it but they’d leave it sitting around somewhere prominent in their home, so their friends would think they’d read it.  Athens Uncharted is not that.  Luckily, Mux Blank is, definitively, also not that. He’s just a guy trying to move the inside out.  Fortunately, his insides are, much like his outsides, weird, interesting, dark, muddled, hazy, ultimately positive, but you’ve got to journey a little to reach that conclusion.

Mux Blank has journeyed.  He’s lived in a bus.  He’s been on tour with his band, Rat Babies, whose new album, Live From Ellijay, was released in October.  He’s wandered through deserts, back alleys, mental pathways, farms, fields and suburbs.  His resume is the curriculum vitae of The Classic City.

Mux gave my co-editor, Mark, and myself a little tour of his artwork.  Personally, I like the twirling stick of happy verbal nonsense the best, but even his truly black-hearted, nerd jubilant stuff is surprisingly appealing in its own way.  “I used to work in a factory that made artist canvasses.  And I was a sticker kid, I’d put them on all my notebooks in school, along with this flow design of a thorny flower.  I’d put that everywhere.  I don’t even know what kind of flower that is.”  Let’s call it a Flowering Id, scientific name carnivales occultitus. 

From mutilated Barbie dolls with translucent pill bottle heads to twisted metal shingles once-employed-as-roofing-now-finding-new-leases-on-life with pandemic skulls and the initials of his recently-deceased loved ones, there is always a message…

…BUT, and this is a big BUT in the art world, it’s never pretentious.  Never.  Not even close.  Given that we live in a college town overflowing with cliché wanna-be gangsta rap and rancid college girl break-up poetry, Mux’s work is refreshing in its complete lack of pretension.  He’s just bringing the inside out.

And he always has.  “Even before I ever took an art class, I already knew what was going on.”  In high school, Mux’s art teachers didn’t know what to do with him.  “Yeah, I loved art class.  They’d give us an assignment that would take the class a week, but I actually wanted to learn how to make better art, so I’d get mine done in a day, maybe two.  Then I’d beg the teachers for new canvasses, new supplies.”

Mux Blank incorporates the world around him.  His most poignant and most localized “pandemic” art piece is a Calendar page from a Flagpole in 2020, where he redacted all of the events with black marker and drew little death figurines in the picture box.

His cartoon homage to the long-dead local comic strip, “Migraine Boy,” is a spot-on replica of the character, which he carved entirely himself, with the standard background fence and top of house. 

He even tracked down the man who wrote and drew the original strip, Greg Fiering, despite his being a true 21^st century recluse (re: not easily-found online), and asked the man if he could make a little homage. 

Remnants of his varied former lives litter his creations:  a so-terrible-it’s-perfect 1950’s tablecloth wallpaper design inside a kitchen drawer as backdrop for his mangled Barbie doll depiction of pill-addled college girls, ubiquitous former roof shingles, charred wood backdrop pieces of his home/mementos of a house fire, wood he found while wandering the California sands of Joshua Tree,  pieces of the bus which was once, famously, his home.

So many skulls.  So many dreamscapes.  So many relatively-obscure pop culture references from 20 years ago.  

Mux Blank is a tinkerer.  While this is clear in almost everything he creates, and even clearer when you examine what he made it from, I have to say that it’s the most obvious in his Polaroid display from 2004.

 “I do weird exposures.  I’d cut the Polaroid open and dump strange chemicals in it, just to see what it looks like after.  I submerged this one in water and then put it in the freezer.  This one’s my hand [putting his actual hand up to it, not quite lining up], no wait, it’s this hand.  I took it in a dark room.  I like to lift the picture goo off the backing and use it in something else, but you’ve got to be careful with the jelly fish front, it’s delicate.  Once I created a pin hole camera [old-timey camera you’re probably most familiar with from Western movies] from an old Polaroid attachment.  I took the Polaroid back off and created a pin hole around it.  The subject had to stay totally still for twenty minutes, just like back then.”  His pin hole picture of his ex-girlfriend is pretty enticing, as art, not just because she’s cute and appears naked.  

His 4-panel courtship ode to his ex-wife, with two bodies intertwined, rimmed by a poetic homage relating the feelings of a pre-sexual scene, the opening paragraph of a Penthouse letter, the warm-up before the hard core stuff begins.  “I’ve never sold my art because I like it so much.  It’d be like selling a finger.”

Mux Blank might scribble you if he sees you out on the town.  His “scribble art” is mainly Muxish impressionistic sketches of Athenians he secretly spied on in classic Athenian locales: the old downtown original Jittery Joe’s, or Georgia Bar.

On a road trip with his band, Rat Babies, to record an album in musical mainstay, Joshua Tree National Park, in between studio sessions, Mux walked the shifting hot California sands, picking up whatever he could spy, and, having forgotten to bring any art supplies, he made do with what he had, hammering desert treasures and remnants of others’ road trips, more commonly known as garbage, into wood with heavy rocks.  “People don’t realize there’s trash everywhere in the dessert.  I like to make art out of found materials.”  It’s not message art, he’s not trying to make some grand point about recycling, though if that’s what you, the viewer, take away from it, he’d be fine with that. Art’s subjective.

The best advice Mux has ever received about his work, “Use more paint, make it thicker, textured. Make it bumpy,” sage wisdom from Calvin Orlando Smith, rockin’ opera singer whose career is equally as weird as Mux’s. “Calvin liked my art. When I first got here, I moved in with a friend of his. Calvin gave good advice, simple and to-the-point. It stuck.”

I like his space-age, deep blue “Dead Flowers, Monsters and Man,” named after the various incarnations of the piece before it was finished.  “I’m not a big fan of brushes.  Usually I just use my hands.  This one, I just started moving paint around with my fingers.  

First it started to look like a bouquet of dead flowers, but then I kept going and it started to look like a monster. So I squirted more paint and pushed it around, and finally I saw the moon and the caped man with the top hat.”