Jackass

by Salvador Smalí

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Little Jackass was special. Why else would he be captured in a five foot tall portrait in oil on canvas. He might have carried mesquite branches that otherwise would never have gone to market where they sold and might have paid for stuff like bags of marbles and scissors and Texas Instruments calculators and books by authors like Upton Sinclair. Maybe Jackass parlayed his strong back into revenue that enabled a little girl to read Sinclair's The Jungle where she discovered the tenets of Karl Marx's das Kapitol in a story about the meat packing industry of Chicago. Maybe the book that failed its purpose of waking America to the exploitive strength and flexibility of capitalism, but in its observations became the book that inspired the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, motivated a little girl to say fuck America. Maybe Maria rejected the abject poverty of rural Mexico and joined 160,000 other students at the University of Mexico City where she, ever grateful to Jackass, became an artist and painted the sentient dummies picture in oil on canvas that mysteriously ended up in the meeting room of a private restaurant for wealthy condo owners living next to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN.

Cogitating this curious piece of art is perfection. Thanks Jackass, for everything,