Thursday, December 17, 2009

Banksy's cheetah


Video documentation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IpriP5Bl20

This is a piece from Scott's earlier post.

'A dimly lit room housed Banksy’s caged mechanical sculptures, some displayed last year in his storefront fake pet shop in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. A mother hen watched over her chicken-nugget little ones pecking away at a synthetic-looking sauce in a fast-food plastic container; encased raw sausages, salamis and hot dogs writhed and squirmed in a sickly sexual manner; what looked from the back like a cheetah curled in the branches of a tree was chillingly revealed to be a fur coat. ... Judging from the long queues spilling out of Bristol Museum every day and the great enthusiasm displayed by visitors, the artist’s decision to come indoors for a while was only good. The strength of Banksy’s work lies in the fact that, even in a museum environment, his messages are direct enough to reach anyone on the street.' [www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/banksy]

Robert Waters's Control



A possible follow-up to Maurizio Cattelan's The Ninth Hour... 'Control (2008) features a small resin sculpture of the late pope, John Paul II, creeping along, holding up a crucifix as he confronts another mounted on the wall. From the end of the pontiff’s robe extends a serpent’s tail, sliced like a sausage to reveal a meaty interior. The effect of this meticulously painted, paper-and-balsa-wood protrusion is unusually visceral. Is Waters’s pope otherworldly, or somehow more earthly than ordinary humans? Or is he maybe even monstrous? ... Titled “Taparrabo,” meaning “loincloth” or, literally, “cover your tail,” Waters’s exhibition includes a dozen works, some in series. Finely crafted, and executed in a range of mediums and formats, they also reflect the postmodernist, appropriationist mode of art-making still prevailing in Mexico, in which humor mixes with social commentary, and self-conscious cleverness borders on gimmickry. Waters plays down the latter tendency, instead emphasizing an inventive use of materials and allowing for interpretive ambiguity.'
[Edward M. Gómez in www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/robert-waters/]

Postmodernist critique is over??? Here's the official notice. Postmodernism is over. In the past. Dead as objects. Did you think it would last forever? C'mon it's 30 years old -- you weren't even born yet... So what now? Hybrid-beyond-abject-virtually-positive (e.g. Ryan Trecartin) interventional (Yes Men) relational (Burning Man) new media art?

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Ryan Trecartin's I-BE AREA


Videos at www.youtube.com/user/WianTreetin

Check out "Craig-Ricky I-Be the Original I-Be2" whose sound translates well over the net. These videos curiously made me think of Beckett's Play (Anthony Minghella). I-BE AREA was shown at the Hammer and at the "Younger Than Jesus" show at the New Museum. 'Ryan Trecartin’s videos uncannily reflect his generation, which was raised using the Internet, digital television, and interactive video games. He mixes cheap special effects with absurd narratives in which he and his cast of collaborator-friends act out a sort of Lord of the Flies for the 21st Century. He tells sad love stories and bizarre family dramas utilizing technology to heighten the action and reflect the information overload we all experience today. In his latest work I-BE AREA, 2007, Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, life-style options, virtual identities and larger questions of an existential nature.'
[hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/74]

Friday, December 11, 2009

Luc Tuymans at SFMOMA 02.2010


Image: Iphone, 2008

'[Tuymans's] most famous piece is an empty, otherwise-anonymous room with the chilling title "Gas Chamber". ... [He uses] banal, decontextualized images as stand-ins for some of history's most troubled moments. ... Helen Molesworth, the co-curator of this exhibition said, "When you stand in front of his paintings, you can't believe how beautiful they are. They have an eerie quality of developing before your eyes, like a photograph in a darkroom tray, and an uncanny sense of light and fluidity. They make you think about how just about anything in our culture can be turned into a pretty picture, and how used to it we are."'
[Monica Khemsurov, "Seeing is Believing", T Magazine (Fall 2009): 56, www.davidzwirner.com/artists/9/press.htm.]

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Cao Fei's Cosplayers

Related to yesterday's discussion of Myrina's photos are these video stills from Cao Fei's Cosplayers. She's featured in Art 21: Season 5.








Also related to Myrina's project proposal are Gregory Crewdson's staged photographs.

Projections: Tony Oursler & Laurie Anderson

Hilde & Nick, yet another idea is to project both your video images onto sculptural stand-ins who're watching the TV's, recreating the scene as a sculptural installation. Examples are works by Tony Oursler and Laurie Anderson, who did a monologue via her video projection. The projection volume can be tweaked to include the having sex part, with the yet-to-be-projected portion of the volume also serving to hint that something else will happen later.






Image: Laurie Anderson, "From the Air", 2006

Vending machine camouflage dress

Related to yesterday's critique is this vending machine camouflage dress. In Japan, there are vending machines on the street selling anything from a hot bowl of noodles to porn.




Source: www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/world/asia/20japan.html

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Larry Johnson

Relating to Brett's work are some pics of Larry Johnson's prints that involve text/jokes. This excellent catalog of his work has most of the pieces in his Hammer retrospective curated by Russell Ferguson.







1984

Relating to our class discussion yesterday, here's the Apple 1984 ad: youtube video, wikipedia entry. Why PC = Big Brother? Probably because PC's dominate the computer market (hackers unleash viruses for PC's and don't even bother with Mac's). Bill Gates is considered the Thomas Kincade of the computer world (using marketing and monopolistic advantage to force people to use crappy software).

Also related: Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint, and performance of climbing on the ceiling of his gallery like a fly using suction cups on his hands and feet.