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...