Propaganda Waster Press is a performance by artist Peter Max Lawrence. Derived from his piece Paper Waster Press, where the artist is installed at a table for hours on end drawing skewed images of American superheroes, this performance sees Lawrence in the same position but scrawling fragments of written propaganda on pieces of paper. Each sketch is a work in itself, a scrap of verbal sensationalism that deliberately conceals its object of reference. Casting them each onto the floor surrounding him, Lawrence composes a carpet of disjointed propaganda that audiences are invited to peruse at their leisure. Fragmentary and nonsensical, when held together in audiences’ hands the pieces of propaganda form absurd warnings of menace and hyperbolic appeals to national identity. Ultimately, the performance proposes a cheeky, ironic engagement with propaganda’s delegation of meaning to its addressees—its constituting subjects of consumption rather than objects of identification.

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Peter Max Lawrence is a contemporary media artist working in painting, video installation, sculpture, photography and drawing. He is the creator and curator for THE ONE and LID OFF FILM FESTIVAL (Lucas, Kansas).