Movement? Whatdya Mean Movement?

Episode 2 of Work of Art: The Next Great Artist kicked off with mentor Simon de Pury charging into the artists' rooms, declaring "Wakey! Wakey" ...To which the BF yelled out "And come with me! Oui! Oui!"  Hey. At least he's having fun with it.

The artists are lead to a park and given a quick demonstration of New York Parkour, basically a way of running and jumping around a park.  I've always heard it called Free Running, but in any case, rock on exercise.  The challenge this week is to create a work of art based on movement.  The artists will be split into two teams, but they're only joined in theme; they'll each be creating their own piece.  They were kind of arbitrarily split down the middle of where they were standing, so Team 1 was: Leon, Young, Jazz Minh, Katherine, Tewes, and Lola. Team 2 was Michelle, Sucklord, Bayete, Dusty, Sara J, Sara K, and Kymia.

They immediately split up and analyze the concept of movement. Team 2: Michelle wants to do something with poo. She likes the idea and claims pooping is movement. So Team 2 comes up with a concept of digestion; each artist takes on a different part, such as chewing, swallowing, digesting... yeah. Simon says yes, it IS movement, although very slow movement, but is it too complex? Are they thinking too much? No whammies! No whammies!  EEEHHHT! Whammie.

Team 1 discusses movement in terms of migration, people moving from place to place. Jazz Minh starts doing handsprings while an artist takes photos for her, she wants to incorporate that into her painting. They all start wandering around the streets, picking up debris that they can incorporate into their art. Leon is really happy with a piece of glass he found.  Katherine, AKA Guts Girl, comes up with a wonderful concept of...guts movement. You know, like digestion. Wrong team, honey!  EEEHHHHTT Whammie.

Simon calls all of the artists together and gives them a stern talking-to.  He points out that the pieces are supposed to have more to do with movement in the literal than in the abstract. Make stuff with boingy  parts and springy parts and not contemplate bowels or herds.  Take two!

Team 2 scraps digestion and goes with a park theme. Sucklord goes to Coney Island in his mind and makes a sculpture where you pull back on this stick and launch a fake rat into a jar. He paints "Flip the Rat" on the side and bam! Good to go. Dude actually surprised me this week. He actually had some good management skills. He commented from the get-go that they might be off course, but still kept on task. He was a pretty reasonable manager, and not nearly as potentially annoying this week. He was safe.

Michelle made a creepy wooden statue, with a large photo of a park hanging behind it, and it was to signify pervs in the park. It had a wooden dowel erection. And when you pulled certain weights under the...dowel, his hands rose up.

Dusty made a lonely teeter-totter. He made a giant cut-out of himself and sat it at the end of the teeter-totter. He misses his wife and kid. I hope that doesn't become an issue next week. I do like Dusty!

Team 1 decided to scrap migration and go with Circles. Everything had SOMETHING to do with circles. Bayete went out on the roof and spun around a bunch of times, pointing a video camera at himself, until he wanted to puke. He then looped the video into two side-by-side boxes and projected it on the wall of the gallery. And, after being in the bottom three last week: Bayete won! It was simple, not too thought out, and the judges liked it. It moved! (And I kind of liked him murmuring, "C'mon render...Render!" a phrase often murmured or yelled at my day job).

Tewes made something with a hose coiled around a bucket and a hand in a circle on the wall. The hand was supposed to spin but didn't. The judges weren't pleased. Lola made a ball out of shredded paper that just kind of sat there. Meh.  Young touted his curator skills all the time and made a silvery flag with a circle sewn into it to symbolize Japan's flag and it flittered in the air, and said...something...about the earthquake there. 

Speaking of nuclear disasters...Guts Girl had a complete meltdown. She wanted to fling guts at a plastic sheet, while video taping it. It had nothing to do with circles, she kind of lost it when the artists pointed that out. She didn't even want to do the video part, just have guts on plastic (again!) but the artists pointed out that was soooo last week and had nothing to do with circles. So she said that she would make her first-ever video, because looping video is kind of like a circle, right?

Wrong. It was a mess. The judges called her out on it, that, hey! We've seen this before! If Ugo was derivative of Keith Haring, Guts Girl was derivative of herself. She started doing some kind of weird sobby crying in front of the judges, explained in her commentary that she has Crohn's disease and that's her fascination with guts and blah blah and she's harder on herself than anyone and this crushes her and blah blah blah she went home. If you're on a contest show like this, and can't bust out of the same thing week after week, it's good you go home early. No matter how hard you tried when you filled plastic with dough and jelly and called it a small intestine. Sorry. Harsh. But I wasn't very impressed on week one, still not impressed in week two.

And next week, we're promised a double elimination! Oooooo...

Kitschy time!

Alright, it's been nearly a week. Hey! Stuff got in the way! But...Wednesday marked the start of the second season of Work of Art:  The Next Great Artist. Yay! No, really. I loved the first season. Think Project Runway, but with artists instead of fashion designers.  The show, produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, gathers an eclectic group of artists, of various media, and has them compete against each other, week after week, challenge after challenge, for a nifty prize and a show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Last year, during Season One, I was rooting for a young artist, the likeable Abdi, for the win. And guess what? He one. Yay!

The first episode of Season Two was titled “Kitsch Me If You Can.”  This was our introductory episode, with each artist submitting, prior to the show, a self-portrait that is hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Some of the more interesting ones included Arkansas art teacher Dusty’s crayons-stuck-to-the-wall rendition of this own face, and Chicagoland’s Young Sun’s photograph of himself standing naked with a slimy covering, with his dying parents (cancer) laying on hospital beds in the background (he said this was their last family portrait together…). He must be vying for this year’s Nao. 

This year’s “Miles” is…The Sucklord. Yup. That’s what he calls himself. And if you call him by his real name, Morgan, as mentor Simon de Pury made the mistake, he will quickly emplore you to address him by his formal title.  On the one hand, this guy is hilarious. He identifies with the nerd culture, making art out of disassembling Star Wars action figures—apparently is quite successful at it—and has quip after quip of never ending sarcasm. But…It borders on the pretentious. That’s one of the fun aspects of this show: Groaning at the super-pretentious artists, and appreciating the down-to-earth artists. That’s a big reason why I rooted so much for Abdi last year: He wasn’t that pretentious, he was a real guy. The Sucklord, well I’m glad he wasn’t eliminated this go-round, he’ll add a lot of humor to the show, but I don’t see him winning, and his antics may get old quick.

There was Chicago graffiti artist Tewes, who was amazed by the décor of their studio. He said he’d worked in abandon buildings, rooftops and …jail, so this was all very neato.  He had a cool painting of a pink spray painted hand on a wall, in his body of work.  But the trick here is that the challenges aren’t just geared to painters. Some artists are photographers, some are performance artists, some are, actually painters, but the challenges will often force people out of their comfort zone, such as the first one did for Tewes: He had to make a sculpture. With a cheesy cat.

For The Win!

Each artist was challenged to take a piece of ‘kitschy’ art and rework it into something more acceptable for a gallery. I’ve read many reviews where people were actually standing up for the artistic value of the kitschy style.  And leave it to The Sucklord, he stood up for it. He loves crappy art! (He got a wizard painting, declaring it Gandalf and Lord of the Rings to be a religious experience).

There were several female artist with dark hair, they kind of blended together for me. Sara J tended to have a hang up on inner pain, and expressed it with watercolor paintings of a style I just usually refer to as “Nightmare Before Christmas.” Little big-headed people all weepy and…wah. 

There was a woman who knew real pain, Michelle, who apparently was in a car vs. bike accident (she was on the bike) a few months before the show and had developed a new appreciation for life. She had an interesting technique of creating paper sculptures. Her kitschy piece was a wood carving of an eagle. She painted it grey, making it look like a tombstone and created a paper skeleton to lay at its base. She was the challenge winner.

This sent Ugo home.

Ugo was the evening’s looser. He went home. His work was declared too derivative of Keith Haring. And it was. It was also very red-on-red, and when he took the red back panel off the piece at the end of the show, leaving only the plexiglass with red…thingies…painted all over it, the judges looked like they felt they made a mistake. Almost.  And Sucklord got into their sights for his lack of defense defense of sucky art. He and judge Jerry Saltz are going to get along great! (sarcasm).

Oh yeah and then there was the girl that creates art by creating guts sculptures. Yuck. And according to the season’s previews, she cries weird.

In the end, for this first episode, it comes down to the question of “Who do I root for?”  It’s not so simple. I don’t have any immediate favorites like Abdi. I just had a good vibe on this guy.  I’m kind of liking Leon, the deaf Malaysian guy, but I’d like to see more of his work so he’s not just a reality TV novelty.  Tewes has a neat style, I only hope he’s versatile enough to make it. Other than that, Dusty does have some of that ‘good guy’ appeal, and his crayon thing was really cool.  I quizzed the BF and he (really really enjoyed his first time watching the show!) picked Kymia (one of the brown-haired chicks that has yet to make herself more memorable to me), Leon, or Michelle, the challenge winner. He also likes Jazz Minh’s painting style, but also worries about her versatility. And, as he put it, he fears the judges are “too snooty for her stuff.” I guess that's a synopsis of what this show is about. Art...but for the masses (the BF describes himself as an art appreciator, but no artist. He especially marveled at the idea of being challenged to complete a certain project like the show requires. He said he could take on high-pressure work environments or video games, but never ever creativity on demand!)


Snooty versus regular folks. Kitschy versus gallery-ready. Ding! Ding! Ding! GO!

Noah

This is Noah.                               And this is “Noah’s Farm.”

My first foray into baby nursery décor, I did this three-piece for the newborn son of my good friends, Gary and Sarah Gallinger.  It was his “Welcome to Earth” present.

Gary is a farm kid, I believe he knew how to drive a tractor before driving a car, and, of course, is a fan of the green and yellow. Sarah has a background with the horsies, especially dapple ones (and I got to find out what a dapple-colored horsie looked like).  So of course this kid was going to be spending his rooky years in a farm-themed nursery. 

I designed the three to be tied together with the fence at the bottom, but yet be placed around the room as they fit, should the family ever move. Initially, this project was supposed to be a mural, but they and I decided on some canvas work, as a keepsake, as mobile art, and, as Gary likes to joke, an investment in Noah’s college education fund (heh, yeah right! I’m waiting for my art to still pay off MY college education!).

So in the end, we have here, a dapple pony with some li’l chickies peeping at her, two cow buddies, and a John Deere, put-putting away on a faraway field. Either little Noah is going to grow up loving farms and animals as much as his parents, or he’s going to be forever creeped out at animals staring at him. Either way, I had fun doing it, and the grown-ups like it, and there may be one more addition to this project (though not on a canvas!) in the future. By Christmas…If I start on it now….And given that Noah was born in March, I had been working on them before that, and only finished them when he was five months old…I better get cracking!