On December 4th, The New Inquiry, BOMB Magazine, and ForYourArt hosted a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten’s visionary first novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, published in 1972. During this five-hour festival at the Jane Hotel in the West Village, the full text of Tuten’s avant-garde masterwork was read aloud by some of America’s most notable artists, novelists, poets, actors, filmmakers, and musicians, among them A.M. Homes, Laurie Anderson, Cecily Brown, Patricia Marx, Vito Acconci, Walter Mosley, and Wally Shawn.

The unstoppable visionary and Founder of The New Inquiry, Rachel Rosenfelt, proposed that I match my interest in Tuten’s work with my new box art making direction. The result was the piece Mao over Mao, shown here, completed in time to be given special feature at the December 4th event.

Mao over Mao represents my attempt at weaving Tuten’s abstract dance of fact and fiction in The Adventures of Mao together with my personal take on the blood, poetry, and women that swarmed in and around one of history’s most controversial figures. Two boxes are stacked, the top work representing the Long March, the War, the Red, Industry, Revolution, Proclamation. The bottom, Mao’s fascination with the feminine and his continuous pursuit thereof.

You’ll notice Marilyn Monroe making several appearances in this work. Apart from my natural inclination to select the most popular sex symbol in the Western mind to speak to Mao’s sexual prowess, The Adventures of Mao contains a supposed interview with Chairman Mao in 1968, in which he is reported to have said the following: “Marilyn is the feminine Mao; she is, dialectically speaking, the victim, the exploited, that what-would-have-been Mao had he lived in the United States and been a beautiful woman. Mao/Marilyn would be an interesting person, I think.”

Mao over Mao is Available.