The World-Famous Harry Adams Patented Finger of God Painting Machine

The best things made at L-13 are either heinously misunderstood or woefully unrecognised.

Few people properly understood the pointedly confusing anti-rhetoric of ART HATE (as discussed in the previous blog post here), and fewer still had the joy of seeing the bewildering installations in the flesh at L-13. Admittedly, we didn’t make it easy. Our press releases were intentionally unintelligible, we did no promotion, and our opening times were limited to a just a few awkward hours during the week (13 minutes only on one of the days). I also heard stories of people failing to find us hidden away in our bunker at the bottom of Eyre Street Hill, or unable to sum up the courage to ring the bell if they found it.

Another of our outstanding failures is a series of on-going paintings made by the Patented Finger of God Painting Machine. Although there are a few visionaries who collect these remarkable paintings and some who properly understand our glee in making such things, mostly they are overlooked in bafflement or willfully ignored.

So, what is the Patented Finger of God Painting Machine?

This one I can answer. Though it was press-ganged into ART HATE service for a short while, (where it gained some notoriety courtesy of Mr Childish’s involvement), its genesis was as a creative problem-solving exercise by Harry Adams.

When we took over the L-13 space it came with various pieces of light industrial equipment and some safes that had been left behind by previous tenants. Left because they were too heavy to be easily removed, and kept by us for the same reason. One particularly cumbersome piece of equipment was a cast iron metal stamper that, without any amendment, resembled a Dada readymade. So much so that we signed it Milo Butt in homage to Duchamp’s R. Mutt urinal and left a big book of Dada on it. Not satisfied with it as a gallery ornament, and deciding it looked like it should function in some way, we set ourselves the task of finding out what that function was. Adam Wood experimented with some ideas and found that with the aid of a short stubby brush, some paint, and a square sheet of pulp paper placed on the big book of Dada, the machine could make paintings. Miraculous, automatic paintings, untainted by human hand or eye.

We named this machine the Milo Butt Patented Finger of God Painting Machine.

Duty-bound to make the world know about this amazing development in Western Culture we decided to make a series of 13 paintings: each one a different colour, each as a multiple in varying edition sizes, and each accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. The first being an open edition: Milo Butt’s Ultramarine.

During one of Billy’s regular visits to L-13 he said that Reginald Dada would be a better name, so we decided that each new painting in the series would be by a different artist. Thus, the second edition in the series was Reginald Dada’s Manganese Violet with Pink Glitter (it was Christmas time, hence the glitter).

Billy also chose the name and colour for Marcel Douchebag’s Crab Fat Grey and at that point we decided it should become part of ART HATE. The paintings were rubber stamped as such (marking them as File Copy Facsimiles from the Art Hate Archive), we made an ART HATE instructional film demonstrating the painting machine in action, and it became a centerpiece of the ART HATE installations.

 

Following Crab Fat Grey came Fanny Oppenheimen’s Breakfast Bristle (a ‘colour’ made with bristles cut from a paint brush and glue), Crom Oxide-Dix’s Oxide of Chromium Green, and then, after a 5-year hiatus we finally got to  Heiryenormus Cock’s Study for the Antiquities of Rome in Violent Pink.

This new colour is currently available in a small edition of 31 from our on-line shop (as of Mayday 2017).

We plan to finish the series in 2031 with an open edition of Kizmy Sevenvinch Maledich’s BLACK.

What comes between now and then only God’s Finger knows.