Nowhere is safe from noise and entropy!!!!
Francisco Lopez with GX Jupitter-Larsen
Venice Beach, CA
2000
Noisy Joe-40,000-Murphy had 40,000 pictures of himself with other people; all kinds of people. His enormous assemblages of images of snapshots, publicity stills, cartoons and other printed matter documented a fabulous world of banquets, braided uniforms, mink-clad actresses, showgirls in evening wear, and professional wrestlers.
He was just a regular guy from Bridgeport, but he lived his life as one long special event as he built a private monument to it in his flat in the old Lithuanian section of Chicago.
GX Jupitter-Larsen with Achim Wollscheid
San Francisco, CA
2003
In two dimensions it shines, this lifetime of inconsequential encounters with the famous, the strong and the beautiful documented in thousands of photographs, accumulated and annotated obsessively; a combination of professionally shot 8x10s, snapshots and what appear to be newspaper out-takes .
Murphy framed the pictures behind glass in prodigious quantity, marking them up with notes, decoration and other jottings. He occasionally cut out individual figures and often drew red, white and/or blue frames around the edges, whether the pictures were to be combined into collages or framed individually.
Where the images were out of focus or otherwise unclear, he completed and improved them, adding colour to clothing and backgrounds and definition to faces, always trying, it seems, to rescue them from the haze of memory and photographic indistinctness. Faces often were tinted, usually in pink, and lips drawn over. Eyebrows were added when necessary. Walls were decorated with ball-point patterns that trace the wallpaper or represent entirely fictional coverings. Ties and other clothing were outlined as well.
GX Jupitter-Larsen with Rowdy Roddy Piper
San Francisco, CA
2002
Pictures were stapled to cover the ceiling, and Murphy lined the walls floor to ceiling with wooden rails set up so that framed pictures could be slid between them. Newspaper photos taken over a period of decades picture him showing off this room.
Murphy's environment was destroyed before it could be properly documented. Evidence of its scale and brilliance survives in hundreds of fragments, though, as well as in a stream of newspaper articles and photos and in the memories of those who saw the actual environment. That evidence points to a unique artistic vision.
Joe Colley (Crawl Unit) with GX Jupitter-Larsen
Hollywood, CA
2000
GX Jupitter-Larsen with former WWA title holder Pepper Gomez
San Francisco, CA
2002
GX Jupitter-Larsen with the greatest heel of all time Stone Cold Steve Austin
San Francisco, CA
2004