Text for Self-Portrait as Herm, mid October, 1981. 
In the latter part of September and through mid October I was invited to 3EP Press in Palo Alto to make a series of monoprints (the specialty of the firm).  The only condition was that I make a self-portrait as a gift for H.A., who had given 3EP the very large etching press on which the monoprints would be made.  I had been invited to press the year before to make monoprints, but had instead made the Tarot of California portfolio of etchings.  So, this time it was to make monoprints, and the aspect that interested me was the self-portrait—I imagined myself laid out on the bed of the press, and my own body being the ink of the print squeezed onto the paper.

Not planning to die in the pressure of an etching press however, I decided to make a monotype drawn from my self-image as it had been developing in the large watercolors of the previous months.

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Note: A monoprint is made by painting on a smooth metal plate (any smooth non-absorbent surface can be used) and then running it through the press.  A monotype is made by etching or engraving an image on the plate before painting on it.  The etched or engraved image remains through all the subsequent images, no matter how the painting is done.

3EP did not want to spend the money on a life-size plate for the portrait (then why did they have such a big press?) and so I bought a large sheet of Plexiglas to use, first to engrave my portrait on, and then to ink for the monotype process.

I began with the idea that there would be my body image with text all over it and the background telling what I am.  I wrote the text (it follows) and then made the plate.

For a Portrait of the Artist at the Age of 54.  I am the old post, silver with age, stuck in the sands by the shore.  The tangle of my nerves is the chronicle of my years; I am Be Beggar, I beg endlessly to Be.  And when I wake, a world arises, and when I sleep, another takes its place.  Through all these worlds, I am.  I have lain in the gutters of the world; I shine everywhere in dusty tenement windows.  I am in the fire of those who lust, I am in the souls of those who dream.  I am the herm at the center of the four fields; I am the Hesper Tree in autumn, I seed the earth with the storied richness of my year.  Spring and autumn, summer and winter, my names are the seasons.  My breath is day and night.  I have never seen my face.  Venus was my mother, Dionysus was my father.  I take after both sides of the family: I am Priapus.  And I am the autumnal fruit and the blue mountains above it.  I dwell in old cities, my veins are clogged with ruin and my mouth with dust.  My days are the leaves of a great tree in autumn, they fall in golden torrents.  I am a statue among the trees in an old park.  My life follows the spiral, I live by its line.  I am a bone in the sand; I last long, but then I will be gone.  With every surge, the sea pours through me.  I am a bird perched upon the high cornices of the world.  I am the whispering in the mind, the murmuring in the blood, the fleeting images in the dreams of Everyman.  And I will die, my body will be dispersed to the four quarters of the globe.  It will never return.  With Caesar, I will be a bit of clay to stop a hole to keep the wind away.  And I will be also in the blood, the memory and the sperm of generations yet unborn.  I am of the river of the fathers; I am of the womb of the mothers.

 When I looked at the plate with all the text, I did not like it at all.  I bought another sheet of plex and made a version of the image but without the text.  Soon enough, I took it to 3EP to print, working with Ikuru, the master printer there.  We printed the first one and Ikuru said that M. —one of the Three Equal Partners (and the one whose husband had given the very large press)— “would not like this.”  (The image was of myself as a statue, a headless herm with broken wings, a sunburst in my belly tangled with a heart just above, and with an erect phallus wound with a ribbon.)  Pretty soon P. —the one of the Three Equal Partners who managed the press— appeared to look at the first print we had pulled.  She went away and came back a few minutes later to say that they could not publish the print—but she would love to have one for her personal collection.  By that time I think we had pulled four prints.  I gave P. one of them and we stopped production.

Click here for the print