Steven Parrino / Amphetamine monster-mill

"To enter the world of Steven Parrino is to be immersed in American culture, particularly in its lower ends, its lower, murky depths. Like other artists born in the mid-to-late 1950s, Parrino is a child of television, of cartoons, cop shows and idiotic comedy - everything from the Roadrunner to the Three Stooges, with all its sophomoric, exaggerated violence-and of the commercials between every program. Well before TV remote control and "channel surfing," the impatient changing of channels could turn even the youngest of these children into highly sophisticated editors, capable of rapidly tossing one image out after another - the adolescent equivalent to Godard's "jump cut" and Warhol's "strobe cut." For children of the TV generation who grew up to be artists, the lessons of how to put pictures together came early, lessons which could not have been as effectively taught in any art school. The subject matter alone, not only in the programs but in the endless product advertisements, was a crash course in Pop for these artists, many of whom would go on to define post-Pop art - the critique of the commodity - in the 1980s" extract from the text by Nickas.