Arts Starting with the Falls
posted by on October 13 at 11:05 AM
1. It’s not just because my parents honeymooned there that I’ve loved MAN’s series on Niagara Falls art this week.
2. Closing this weekend:
This image is a still from Wyndel Hunt’s video Auto-Interrogation and Explanation Without Verification. We tried to convert the video to YouTube so we could share the whole thing here on Slog, because that’s how funny and smart it is, but tech stuff prevented us. That means you really should go to Crawl Space before 5 pm Sunday to see this installation.
In the video, Hunt talks about the small, serious, black-on-black marker drawings shown on the walls of the gallery. Or, he tries to. While his words—which establish an argument for the meaning of the works, then tear the argument down—appear onscreen like subtitles, those same spoken words are sped up to the point of nonsense, and the artist’s movements are sped up and manipulated to the point of slapstick, as he delivers a self-mocking turn on a witness stand of his own making, talking into the microphone like some self-conscious art version of Oliver North.
Will Ryman’s Private Moments at Howard House is the New York artist’s series of cartoonish figures ranging in size from smaller than human scale to an embracing couple 10 and a half feet tall. They’re made of magic sculp (a material like Sculpy but harder), paper mache, pvc pipe, wire, and acrylic paint. Try as I might to consider them in the vein of, say, the caricatures of Thomas SchĂĽtte crossed with the gestures of Giacometti, I couldn’t get hooked on these. They felt overly lighthearted, sometimes plain adorable, and posed in the stiff fashion of people joining together in a staged photograph. Anyone who’s seen them have other thoughts?
3. “I studied the meaning of life for a year.” That’s the photographer Alice Wheeler talking about her formative year at Evergreen State on Eva Lake’s radio show Artstar, recently archived here.
"I studied the meaning of life for a year."
What kind of bullshit artspeak is that?
My six-year old is having a blast with his legos. Same difference.
uh, i think you mean evergreen bullshit. olympia, wa: where the bullshit is evergreen.
um, that was snarky. what i meant to say is, listen to the podcast, dude. it's a joke.
Right Annie
Bullshit = Artspeak = Joke
I'd throw in Podcast too, but would be too snarky. Plus(+), we're waiting until 2nd grade to advance our math.
Jen, you don't have to cite any acknowleged Great Artists when you're saying someone's exhibition shows no sign of any effort in materials and reveals no substantial attempt to understand the putative subject matter.
When someone is trying to foist lazy bullshit off on us as art, your job stops at calling it for what it is.
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