From the
Hyperallergic blog:
About a year ago, a conspicuously inconspicuous blue rectangle appeared amid the usual procession of selfies, news articles, status updates, event notifications, and advertisements in my Facebook feed... The rectangle was part of a project, “A Refusal,” by the early career artist who goes by the deliberately overdetermined name of American Artist. For a period of one year, American posted blue rectangles to his Facebook page in lieu of the photographs he would ordinarily post; the text portion of his status updates was similarly redacted, crossed out in black and unreadable. Viewers, an artist’s statement explained, could only see the actual, un-blue images by arranging to meet the artist in person.
For quite a while I've been engaged in a similar artistic endeavor. However, I've taken it one step further by not posting to Facebook at all. I call my project "An Absence."
February 1958: A jury of "celebrated painters" convened for the Mona Lisa Grand Prix awarded the title of "Mona Lisa 1958" to Luce Bona. What made the award slightly unusual is that Bona hadn't been a contestant. The judges just happened to see her as she was walking by outside and decided she was the one. At least, that was the story reported in the press.
Louisville Courier-Journal - Feb 19, 1958
Here's the winner from the previous year, Maria Lea. Apparently the gimmick of this contest was that the winner posed in a picture frame, which made her somehow like the Mona Lisa.
The Lincoln Star - Jan 13, 1957
Later in 1958 a jury of French mystery writers selected Luce Bona as the girl with the "Most Devilish Eyes." I'm assuming she was actually entered into that contest.
I can't find any references to Luce Bona after 1958. Perhaps she gave up modeling, despite such a promising start.
Wilmington News Journal - Apr 12, 1958
In September 1966, the first ever
"Destruction in Art Symposium" was held in London, highlighting the work of the self-styled Destructivists. Basically, they destroyed things and called it art.
LA Times staff writer Robert Toth delivered the following report from the Symposium (
LA Times - Sep 11, 1966):
The artists say they create by demolishing objects and even killing animals. Destruction seems a negation of art, but they say it's creative destruction — "like when you burn a picture you create ashes," one explained.
But to justify slaughter of a flock of chickens, more pretentious words are demanded. Said one abortive chicken killer, Ralph Ortiz:
"Destructivist art gives our destructive instinct its essential expression while coming to terms with destruction's most primitive maladaptive aspects — aspects that ordinarily would prove to work for the destruction of the species rather than its survival."
After those words, which seem to mean emotional release for him, the American "artist" looked absurd when the law intervened to prevent the massacre (which, incidentally, was to have bloodied 10 elegantly tuxedoed men as an added attraction).
Ortiz came up with a lone canary but no, not that either, said the RSPCA inspector.
Could he let the bird out the window? No again, for it was a cold night.
The frustrated Ortiz settled for showing a film of a chicken-killing, but not before the coup de grace was administered.
Why not stomp a caterpillar, suggested an onlooker. "I'm not a caterpillar-killer," huffed the affronted artist.
His less ambitious colleagues have fared better. One broke a chair to smithereens. Another created a hole with an ordinary shovel, and promptly priced it at $350.
Ortiz did, however, help axe a piano apart.
In 1996, Raphael Ortiz (he was no longer calling himself Ralph) re-enacted his piano-axing performance at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art... but with one small change. According to
NY Times critic Michael Kimmelman, he was now accompanied by "a woman in pigtails and ruffled apron standing on a ladder dropping eggs into a bucket and chanting
Humpty Dumpty."
Ralph Ortiz destroying a piano — 1966
Incidentally,
literary critic Robert Grossmith has noted that one of the reasons for the obscurity of the Destructivist Art movement is that "not a single Destructivist work of art exists. There are no primary sources. Not a solitary Destructivist novel, poem, play, story, painting, sculpture, film, dance or piece of music was ever produced or, if produced, allowed to survive. In fact if a Destructivist work of art was to turn up today, its very existence would automatically disqualify it from being considered as genuinely Destructivist. There can in short never be a Destructivist work of art, in any accepted sense of the word ‘be’."
I'm assuming all WU-vies will want to shell out $345.00 for this figurine as the perfect Xmas gift for that lazy brother-in-law, son, uncle, or father.
Home page here.
Artist Mar Cuervo has created an
art installation in which she destroys various desserts (cookies, marshmallow peeps, chocolate rabbits, cupcakes, etc.) by smashing them with her hand. She explains:
Destroying this gentle objects is a ceremony where I funnel my inner outrage and dissatisfaction against the elements that create them in the first place.
Gallagher comes to mind as one possible source of inspiration. Perhaps also that
woman who smashes her face into bread.
via
konbini.
This portrait is intended to depict what mythical deity? Hint: not an Asian religion.
The answer is here.
Don't throw out your old beer cans. Use them to generate prayers:
image source: Box Vox
While living in Los Angeles, German artist Lucie Stahl made trips to the desert to collect cans that had been rusted, tarnished, and bleached by the elements. Suspending the cans with a central rod and affixing them to the wall, Stahl displays her series of cans in a way that allows them to rotate, referencing the Tibetan prayer wheels that are inscribed in Sanskrit with Buddhist mantras to accumulate good karma and purify bad karma. By elevating found garbage to objects of mysticism and reverence, the artist challenges flippant and passive attitudes towards consumerism and pollution.
—
Artspace.com
Several years ago I posted about another creative way to recycle beer cans:
Home heating with beer cans.
Which regional magazine of the fifty states decided this would be a good way to illustrate the pleasures of summer?
The answer is here.
Recently another case
made the news of a valuable piece of art thrown out by overzealous janitors at an art fair who didn't realize that the art in question was, in fact, art. (I'm pretty sure that Chuck has reported on a number of similar cases.)
In this case, the work was a sculpture by
Will Kurtz titled
Keep America Great Again. — valued at $8000. The janitors got confused because the sculpture featured "a raccoon next to a trash can brimming with brightly colored rubbish."
The janitors didn't throw away the raccoon — only the trash in the can.
Actress Brooke Shields, who was curating the show, realized what had happened and was able to find the missing "art" — because apparently this kind of thing had happened at the show before, and so the janitors had been trained to temporarily store all trash in clear plastic bags before disposing of it permanently.