Friday, May 12, 2006
28. -30 APRIL 2006 (SAVE THE DATE WEEKEND)
This is a late post since the night of openings, but hey, time is somewhat relative in an age where we have virtual spaces to post within them. I only had enough time to go to walk around on the friday opening night, but was glad to see throngs of people at every location on the map given for the 28. -30 APRIL 2006 weekend. Opening nights like this are a bit of a spectacle and giving away free beers and selling bratwursts outside the gallery bring out the carnival aspect (What? No pony rides!) I hope someone had a bratwurst and filled up on beer before going into John Bock's installation at Klosterfelde. A staged suburban living room is turned into a carnival house of carnage, complete with blood soaked carpet, splatters of blood dripping down the walls, and body parts strewn about. With this folding of two worlds, the displaced suburbanite dwelling and the type violent display reminiscent of images of the floors of Abu Ghraib jail cells, it parallels the disconnect we
have to the actual horror that is shown in those images. But, maybe the wrong-ness about this wannabe Paul McCarthyist work is that it plays it too safe, but unlike McCarthy, it's not taking the television medium *or in Bock's case the medium of performance art). Making it into a spectacle or a live, performed house of horrors that entertains without breaking the security of the picture plain. Costume vampire teeth are not sharp and like this piece, they don't bite very deep.Next door to that photos of dwellings of homeless people and large paintings of transcripted text from video testimonials by the homeless people are hung (if a work sells maybe you should buy the guy, whose cardboard box you took a photo of, a sandwich or something, huh artist-guy!?). This show at least covers all the bases hedging its bets between video pieces ($), large scale photographs ($$), and large, though poorly stretched, paintings ($$$).
Hip and trendy Mitte plastered posters around for rock star artist Elizabeth Peyton's show, where the second largest crowd of the night and enough empty beer bottles to make it look like there was a rock show going on. Which I guess is the point of her popularity, because the paintings offered little more than what I had already expected to see.
There were a few hardcore works that I give my "Huts ab!" to. Unfortunately, it was late by the time I got to the the machine guns carved out of gravestones-- but I will perhaps review this work in a later post because it deserves it. But for the moment the blogger is giving me a hard time about loading more images, so instead of yelling profanities at it I am going to go for a walk and enjoy this lovely spring day.
# posted by Ryan : 5/12/2006 09:41:00 AM
