From 1973 to 1987, in order of appearance: Melvin Herrera, Chris Newman, Paul Russell, Richard Bonita, Dan Suth, Donald Giller, Antonio Suarez, Allan Howe, Peter Sternschwager, Kelly Sollo, among others—unmarried men, uniformly unpleasant in character, hard to employ, estranged from their families, who were located, transported, slain, prepared, stuffed, and mounted by the predatory billionaire D.R. “Flip” Perkins. Perkins did not attempt to conceal the figures. Rather, he claimed that they were sculptures fashioned by Konstantinos Malokinis, a Greek artist who had started as a Color Field painter but had been consumed by envy in 1961, the year that Morris Louis showed at the Guggenheim, and was consequently impelled to shift over to fabricating realistic full-body effigies at roughly the same time as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea. Malokinis, a drug addict who was never clear of the stuff, a bad gambler who was often in debt, took a considerable amount of cash from Perkins in exchange for letting the rich man pretend that these ghoulish tableaus were artworks. “In a sense, they were,” he was fond of saying. Both men disappeared in June of 1987, days before they were to be arrested. A car parked at the airport contained a note that authorities believe was penned by Perkins but that consisted entirely of a quote attributed to Lincoln Steffens: “Morality is only moral when it is voluntary.”
©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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