Remembering Russert - And the apparent Conger Curse

above: Rob Conger's "Tim Russert," 2007, 56 x 36 inches, woven acrylic on quarter inch mesh.

It's not a coincidence that an artist who has made portraits of several living people will eventually see them pass away. However, a few people have died shortly after my having made a hook rug of them.

The first known death of my subject was Mr. Rogers. He was old, it's no great shakes that he passed away. However, as he was a part of a series I (loosely) titled, "good people and bad people," it does seem somewhat telling that more of the "good people" are no longer with us than the "bad people".

The next death was Johnny Perry. He was "The World's Strongest Man", or almost. The actual world's strongest man wasn't as photogenic, and oddly, Johnny Perry was an intuitive choice. In any case, I have my reasons why I put Fred Rogers and Johnny Perry in the same show, but those reasons have faded from importance, if they ever had any. Perhaps more interesting was that he died while the show was up. I called the Associated Press reporter in North Carolina who wrote the story about his death, who said that he died in the family trailer next to the house (no, I didn't ask if it was a double-wide or single-wide). It was apparently a tragic drug overdose of performance-enhancing drugs and possibly alcohol and other substances. His girlfriend was with him at the time of death, and she called the gallery and was really touched that a fan had immortalized him.

The show I had after Johnny and Fred was about death at Disneyland. I had thought about the show for years, but I went ahead with it, instead of a few other ideas for a show, after the weird fog of the news items hovered over the last exhibition. When I was doing the Disney show, I went to Trinidad for some help on the rugs. This isn't as sinister off-shoring as it seems. My girlfriend's dad has a spare room in his house, and we hired a neighbor of theirs to help me hook the rugs.

Long story short: There's someone there that didn't like me. Every morning when we woke up, we would see little flecks of what appeared to be rust on my bed and clothes. We washed them, and they showed up again the next day.

We thought it was the washing machine putting rust on the clothes, but it didn't do it to anyone else's clothes. Then, Danielle got a spark in her eye, and went to a fortune teller that she knew from high-school.

"Yes. It's chicken blood. Someone is putting a curse on him. And frankly, it's a fairly pricey curse, so he must really be out to get him." The curse involves, among other rituals, spattering chicken blood with a feather on the accursed's belongings.

So, I was covered in chicken blood while doing the Deaths of Disney rugs... from a voodoo curse.

Finally, you may have heard, Tim Russert has died.
This posed a particularly troubling issue for me, not only because I watched his shows pretty religiously, but because I was looking to him as the "mainstream needle" that gauged zero on the political spectrum. He pointed American-hegemony-north, represented exactly what was acceptable to ask and not ask, in this country as normal and "the correct path" (much like Alan Greenspan did at one time, much like a very strong person would when we invaded Iraq). In addition, I thought that my show at Mixed Greens was going to foreshadow the elections as more and more people switched off American Idol (as well as Fox News, and Keith Oberman) and turned to Meet the Press to see what "normal" meant. I thought it was very obvious: people would see Tim Russert in the window and go "Why? oh, duh. election year." Now, the rug has a really different meaning, because of his emphasis on father-child relationships. This isn't a terribly pressing issue in my mind, but I now challenge Mixed Greens to match me on a donation to Big Brothers Big Sisters upon sale of the thing.

-Rob Conger