When Earth gives up her last barrel crude oil....

[Henry Whalley]

Greg Murphy's glass jar of motor oil will be a priceless objet d'arte. Who remembers the original show at the DIA?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ac/26...df96f6c5e1.jpg

[Lowell]

I don't remember seeing that item in a DIA exhibition. When was that?

I knew Greg Murphy. He left for NYC in the early 1970's when many of the artist of the Cass Corridor art scene migrated there in hopes of gaining support that Detroit couldn't offer. He was a brilliant an troubled soul brought down by his alcoholism that sadly reduced him to being a street bum in the end, or so I heard.

Nonetheless, he was a key figure in creating the Detroit art scene and the seminal Willis Gallery where so many Detroit artist, myself included, cut their first-exhibition teeth.

GREG MURPHY [[b. Wilmette, Illinois 1936, d. 1988)
Excerpt of Greg Murphy’s bio, written by Nancy Mitchnick.

Greg Murphy was born in 1936. He was a very critical and difficult man. That has to be part the reason few people remember him from the Cass Corridor days. But without Murphy there would have not been a Willis Gallery [[something else may have evolved, but not the particularly vital scene we love to recall.)

Greggi was mysterious. He went to U of D, he took classes at Wayne State. But none of us really knows how his life worked before we met him in the late sixties. He was around. He was brilliant and thought about world politics. He was an avid chess player. He planned and schemed. He knew there would be an oil crisis back in 1971, he knew China would be a dominant world player. He explained why, mostly from a bar stool at Cobbs Corner. We thought he was daft and a bizarre fantasist. He drank too much. He could not face an audience. He was a subtle and gifted pianist but when asked to preform, he made the commitment, then disappeared. Greg Murphy was a behind the scenes guy.

Greggi had polio as a child and lived in an iron lung for over a year. He walked with a limp. He read voraciously. He had time on his hands. I don’t think that we knew about the syndrome that returned to adults that had polio as children. Greg Murphy was ill and in pain a lot of the time. He didn’t hold steady jobs. Yet somehow he was radiant, hilarious, and inspired.

Murphy introduced Sam Wagstaff to the artists and the scene. They talked politics, art history, philosophy, trash, and figured out how to support the gallery. The Cass corridor community came together in bars. John Egner remembers meeting Greg within weeks of arriving in Detroit. I don’t think he ever had a real studio. He hung out. He analyzed. He made interesting work that disappeared. He didn’t leave much of a record.

[Henry Whalley]

I don't remember seeing that item in a DIA exhibition. When was that?

Not certain of the year. Was it when Jim Gustafson used his body to test the matter-over-mind factuality of a plate-glass door at DIA's Farnsworth Street entrance?

As I recall, Greg Murphy's motor oil jar wasn't presented on a pedestal or wall, but rather sat in the middle of a parquet floor; and my only take-away was a memory of how the parquet shined.

IME Greg was a good guy who suffered from Freudian Thanatos, an occupational hazard of many fine artists and musicians: Death drive - Wikipedia

[Richard]

If he knew there was going to be an oil crisis or predicted it in 1971 would that follow the timeline of the oil in the jar?

The oil crisis was in 1973,if he was predicting it in 71 I could see how that would reflect in his work at that time.