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Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
I’d make one of canvas and sticks

        —Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’ 
        (Buckow Elegies)

Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too. 
        —Rainer Maria Rilke

My head is my only house unless it rains

[...]

        —Don Van Vliet


Then, courtesy of the artist. 
The Story of Maize
Raúl Guerrero

A road / a reader

Edited by Jon Auman 
with Dominic J. Jaeckle

Tenement Press / Yellowjacket 29
978-1-917304-18-4 / 150pp [Approx.] / £15.50.


PREOrder direct from Tenement here.

(Forthcoming, 01.10.26)


A near-novel / 
a travel companion /
a diary / 
a manifesto / 
a major event in a minor key.


*        *        *


Remember passing Gila Bend on your way to Phoenix? You’re living in the Garment District reading Diary of an English Opium Eater. You traveled through Franco’s Spain on your way to Morocco. Africa continente misterioso. Taken Winchell’s for breakfast. A chorizo combination plate with Robert Irwin for lunch. Part-time work as a carpenter, plumber, cab driver. West Berlin, Madrid, Manhattan. Detectives. Bars. In the valley of Oaxaca… You thought of Wild Bill Hickock, General Custer, Calamity Jane and Francisco Madero. The reality and myth of the American continent, viewed through the dusty window of a bus.

What Am I?
Where do I come from?
Where am I going?

This is written to you. 


*        *        *


Raúl Guerrero, ‘Sonoran Desert—Flora, Fauna, Artifacts,’ 
(Flying Studio, Los Angeles, CA, 2019).
Guerrero is a pragmatic conceptual artist: he aims for the maximum emotional and mythopoetic impact using a pithy economy of means. 

[...]

[By] using the tools of conceptual art such as appropriation, quotation and mimicry, Guerrero is able to explain cultural circumstances and rectify colonial mythologizing [by] utilising many of the objects and images that confused and caused those misunderstandings in the first place.
       —William Corwin, 
        The Brooklyn Rail


Raúl Guerrero, ‘Las Indias’ 
(Cue Art Foundation, New York, NY, 2006)


*        *        *


Pages from ‘The Menu of the Future,’ a 
sequence of drawings and texts included in 
the Tenement / Prototype anthology project 
Seven Rooms / Assorted Materials from a Paper
Hotel (Tenement Press / Prototype, 2023). 


[I]        May 1975




TRANSCRIPT.        The art that the society was developing had no parallel in the history of human kind. All of the materials that were used to develop it were the most synthetic possible. They had no straight lines, there were no seams or surface markings to indicate the technology that produced them. They had no beginning nor end. The most impressive of these was one that had been fabricated out of stainless steel and aluminium, representing the Holy Bible. Every page had been anodised and rewritten to change the context of the original scriptures. This work then, symbolised the ultimate aesthetic acquisition for the art patron, to look at and contemplate.
        How long the suicidal direction that they were evolving into would continue no one could possibly know as they were so immersed in the style that it became more and more difficult to develop it into another form. There were some persons that were fighting the trend, but they were few and far between and in totality could not compensate for the rapid flow in the prevalent direction.

[The] dream had no end. The sky was yellow, pink, purple and indigo. The landscape was the colour of rusted steel. The stainless steel roads glistened in the [scenario], they crisscrossed the land like a web.

A metallic rocket shot through the sky and quickly disappeared into time.

A green glow cut through the evening sky, a demonstration that an artist was having of his light work. It pulsated to the rhythm of the star of Denarius in the Orion constellation.

Time, time, time, time ...


[II]        August 1977




TRANSCRIPT.    /    Given to the Universe    /
It was seen falling from the black sky. As it came closer and more luminescent it became so much so that the night sky became bright as day. An extraterrestrial object, glowing colours never before seen in this epoch of the planet. What could it be? Was the question everyone asked. The end of the world, a new weapon from the reds or ... An invasion from outer space. It became evident that the anticipated explosion, if indeed it was a weapon, did not occur... it landed on the outskirts of the city, the largest that humans had ever created—Modular Structure Neuve. The walls of this magnificent environment were slice as ice, fortunately they weren't because the heat of the intrusion from outer space would have melted them. No, the walls were made of an heat [resistant] alloy developed back in the 25th century. To repulse the new weapons that the reds had developed.
        The walls were suddenly crowded with rubberneckers come to see what the commotion from the sky was about ... all that could be seen were millions of [luminescent] dials from the time pieces that everyone wore. On closer inspection it could be noted that the luminosity might also be coming from the radioactive teeth that were the current vogue among the affluent in this city.
        What they saw on the metropolis' edge squashing one of the tomato fields that were planted around the city for miles, was ... an antiquity from the past, that everyone immediately recognised, as even photographs of this were the ultimate collectors item. An iridescent 1952 Nash [Rambler].

 


The sun was harnessed to provide the electrical needs for the societies of the planet. The energy and resources were equally distributed, making the planet utopian. [Free] from economic instability, free from hunger, no longer tied by necessity to the drudgeries of life, of having to work for a living.


[III]        January 1977
              Inglewood, CA.





TRANSCRIPT.

Mercury vapour lights illuminate Century
         Boulevard,
the shiny cars glistened as slithery, beautiful
black women inquire about a date. 
The planes overhead on the on their way to 
         the port
roar by continually, their noise never ceases, 
man I'm about to go insane.
Winchell's for breakfast, it's not continental,
one glazed, one chocolate covered cake and 
a large [cup] of coffee, black liquid reflects
         my existence.
The centre of the vortex, going round and                    round.  


*        *        *


Now, Elon Schoenholz, © 2025. 

(Praise for Raúl Guerrero.)

Making paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, photographs, and videotapes, [Raúl Guerrero] has forged an expansive, ever-evolving vision—one that combines technical innovation with symbolic power. Although his style ranges from early conceptually based abstraction to recent narrative realism, Guerrero’s self-described ‘search for the poetry of life’ is a constant in all of this work. Travelling and reading voraciously, Guerrero continually engages the histories of culture in the United States, Latin America, and Europe, culling images and ideas for his art.
        —Toby Kamps    







Raul Guerrero (b.1945, Brawley, California) has made work informed by his experiences navigating cultures as an American of Mexican ancestry in Southern California for over four decades. In his paintings, photographs, video, and performance works, Guerrero utilizes language and cultural signifiers to examine notions of place as a way to understand personal concepts of self. An aspect of his work depicts—and critiques—colonial narratives in the Americas such as the settlement of the Great Plains, the history of Latin America, and imposed notions of the American ‘West’ / ‘west.’ With compositions fusing Mexican, American and European visual traditions, he incorporates influences ranging from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp to conceptually-oriented practices associated with a preceding generation of California artists (including John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha) who emerged from Guerrero’s alma mater, the Chouinard Art Institute. A long-time exhibiting artist on the West Coast, Guerrero reflects an intellectually rigorous approach suffused with humor and a deep engagement with legacies of visual art from Southern California and the Southwest. Guerrero has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Plataforma, Guadalajara, Mexico (2025); David Kordansky Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Ortuzar Projects, New York, NY (2018); Air de Paris (project space), Romainville, France (2014); Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, San Diego, CA (2001, 2007 and 2013); CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY (2010); Long Beach Museum of Art, CA (1977); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (1989); and San Francisco Art Institute, CA (1977). Recent group exhibitions include 50 Paintings, Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (2023); California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold, Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2022–2023); and A Universal History of Infamy, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2025), an NEA Photography Fellowship (1979), and the San Diego Art Prize (2006). Guerrero lives and works in San Diego.




MMXXVI