Kim Joon, Island Alligator (All Photos By Gail)
Korean artist Kim Joon has shifted his artistic direction dramatically since last year’s exhibit at Sundaram Tagore, Blue Jean Blues, in which he explored Pop Culture themes of Iconic Films and Classic Rock Bands in sculptures executed on fine porcelain, and pristine photographic renderings of those sculptures.
Continue reading New Works By Kim Joon Featured in Sundaram Tagore’s Natural Selection
All Photos By Gail
It’s not every day that you walk by an art exhibit whose title is the front end of a Meta Joke, and in this case that title is exactly what drew us in to Hasted Kraeutler Gallery for a quick look at Marc Dennis’ latest collection of hyper-realist paintings, playfully entitled An Artist, A Curator and a Rabbi Walk Into a Bar . . . Continue reading Marc Dennis: An Artist, A Curator and a Rabbi Walk Into a Bar…
Ross Patterson Stars As Darnell Dawkins
If the cast of Saturday Night Live set out to make a feature-length skit that aspired to be the This is Spinal Tap of the Woodstock generation, they might come up with something similar to Darnell Dawkins: Mouth Guitar Legend. This fairly clever and rather historically accurate (as satires go) ultra-indie Mocumentary traces the remarkable story of “mouth-guitar” legend Darnell Dawkins (played by Ross Patterson, who also wrote the script).
Continue reading DVD Review: Darnell Dawkins, Mouth Guitar Legend
On This Date, April 6th in 1998: Wendy O. Williams, outrageous vocalist and front woman for The Plasmatics died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after attempting suicide on several previous occasions. She was 48 years old. As the chief focal point of Plasmatics’ live performances, Williams was infamous for her wild stage theatrics which included blowing up equipment, partial nudity and chain-sawing television sets and guitars onstage. RIP Wendy, you were one of a kind.
“Hurry Up and Wait”
Last year, I attended an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art by performance artist Marina Abramovic. The Artist Is Present, as it was called, was a retrospective of her very controversial and outrageously pretentious body of work. Not only did the exhibit feature more nudity than you can even imagine (live nude models, films of people in various states of undress), which was far less interesting and titillating than you would believe, but the entire run of the exhibit featured an ongoing “staring contest” where guests of the museum could wait on line to sit in a chair across from Abramovic and stare into her dead, stoic eyes. The show created a media frenzy as the surrounding hype incited people – including many high profile celebrities – to line up for hours and hours for the chance to have a silent, one on one audience with Abramovic. Art!
Now, I am not a video game player although I love the lol video game, and waiting in line at a museum seems like a pretty uninteresting point around which to create a video game, but Pippin Barr, a computer game research professor, blogger at the Armchair Empire and author of the upcoming book How To Play A Video Game has made a “subversively boring” game inspired by (and named for) The Artist is Present which simulates that very experience! According to an interview with Barr up now on Slate.com at This Link, the author reveals that he “wanted to make a video game about art, [and] few works of contemporary art have that kind of famousness and stature that this [exhibit did]. At first I just thought a game about this would be hilarious, but then I realized there could be some seriousness to it as well. No one has ever really made a video game about the experience of contemporary art.”
Source: gamingbuff.com, according to Slate, Barr insists that the game is not some kind of practical joke about the act of infinite waiting. “You can actually make it to the front,” he offers. ‘I did it yesterday and it took 5 hours, but once you get to the front, you can stare into her eyes for as long as you want.” So, got 5 hours to kill? Visit Pippin Barr’s website at This Link and play the game for yourself! The Artist Is Present– The Video Game is set to the museum’s hours, so players can only enjoy it when MoMA is open (Eastern Standard Time, of course). It’s also closed on Tuesdays, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Thanks to The Awl for The Tip!
