Pete Yahnke

Pete Yahnke
Yet You Expect Me to Fight for You
$50

click here for larger image of the print: View image

This is a print I made a few years back that I realized I still have some copies of and thought I'd put them out here on justseeds. This litho is a dark drawing I made in the early days of the Iraq war. The text is from a xerox transfer onto the stone of an amazing page of writing from the book The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen. I happened to be living at the time in Milwaukee Wisconsin, which has amazing alleyways full of discarded treasures, one stroll through the trashways I happened upon a water damaged copy of this book. At the time I had never heard of Patchen, but the cover was intriguing and there was another book of his in this pile which was of his drawings and poems. This book is an incredible hallucinatory work written during WWII, and is a scathing critique of war and humanity in general. Albion Moonlight was his first novel, written in a powerful surreal, hallucinatory, dream-like stream of consciousness style, which can make for difficult reading. This is a challenging read, and may not be for everyone. Reminded me of reading Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow but even darker, something you need to be in a certain head space to get into.

The text used on this print is a brilliant dialogue between the narrator (moonlight) and a recruiting officer (number seven) full of great quotes such as:

"Number Seven: Oh that's it! so you're just pain afraid, eh?
Moonlight: Yes I'm plain afraid and fancy afraid, but that's not my reason for refusing to fight in an Imperialist war.
Number Seven: Ahha, so that's it - a Red.
Moonlight: Yes I'm a Red and a Black and a Brown, and a Yellow, and a White: I'm a Negro, a Chinaman, a German, a Spanish and a Swiss.
Number Seven: Don't get cute...
Moonlight: I'm the grandson of a man who was killed in a coal mine because the owners saved a few dollars on timbers, I'm the son of a man who worked thirty years on a farm and was buried in a pauper's grave; I'm the friend of a man who was lynched because he had a black skin...and you sit there on your flabby ass and ask me to sign a paper saying that I'll take a rifle and shoot down my own people...I said my own people... I refuse to kill in your defense - so long as there is war between the nations, the working classes of the world will be blinded to one simple fact: that they have only one enemy - the German people, the English, the Dutch, the Japanese, the Mexican - one common enemy; and that is Capitalism."

here's an interesting blog post on Patchen.

stone lithography print
on gray Rives BFK paper
10" x 14"
signed/edition of 15