An Aesthetic Operation

Please join us in saluting Jon Henry, a great artistic hero:

ìSpeech for the End of Timeî
Randall M. Packer
Secretary, US Department of Art & Technology
Wednesday, April 23, 2003, 7:30 pm
Johns Hopkins University, School of Arts & Sciences, Room LL07
1717 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC

Jon Henry is the National Chairman of the USA Exquisite Corpse. He is dead.

Jon Henry was killed fighting the war machine, but his spirit lives on. His spirit remains strong. So strong in fact, that he is about to lead the Experimental Party in 10,000 Acts of Artistic Mediation.

Jon Henryís epic journey to deconstruct a new medial state begins tomorrow evening (April 23) when his spirit is released into the night, during my ìSpeech for the End of Time.î

In this speech, I am calling on coalition artists to " to inspire other artists into action by undergoing an aesthetic operation as a form of magic designed as a mediation between our strange hostile world and the human spirit." Jon Henry will lead that effort.

The new Jon Henry, the young artist from Baltimore, inspired by the old, legendary John Henry, continues the brave fight against the machine in Operation Artistic Freedom.

Here then, is an excerpt from Jonís Manifesto:

"WAR is the ultimatum of capital. It is the result of the energized spectacle of money. God/Money is the fuel that will drive us into the ground. Gain is intertwined in the roots of this cancerous tree of America. And they called the mechanized vacuum of the wretched rich freedom? As the past became history the new Jon Henry saw the object of spectacle in front of him and he knew that in order to be free he must fight against his assimilation; he must face the war spectacle and battle it to his death." ñ Jon Henry

Randall M. Packer
Secretary, US Department of Art & Technology