Some thoughtful press agent forwarded me this video interview with Shepard Fairey of Obama poster fame talking about art and activism. Click here if the video doesn’t work.
How does his marketing campaign for Saks fit into this spiel?
Kudos to Mr. Fairey for his excellent graphic design. As for his activism, the less videos made, the better.
ArtObserved reminded me of a work I saw recently and wanted to share, if only because it strikes me as such a departure from how I thought of the artist. Entitled Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles In the Darkness of His Mind, Takashi Murakami has taken over the wall of Gagosian’s 24th Street location. This painting is massive, intricately colored and textured, with a storyline from Japanese legend.
When I saw the Murakami exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, including the work above, I was totally turned off. His paintings there were done in saturated color in a super flat style, and accompanied by a Luois Vuitton boutique no less.
This new painting is interesting to look at, which I couldn’t have said before. I’m not saying the skulls and dopey-faced lion aren’t kitsch or that the colors don’t straddle a line between apocalyptic sewage and Rainbow Bright. But the surface and the application of paint is beautifully done. It’s worth seeing in person just to marvel at the texures. This may or may not be a saving grace, but it certainly counts for something.
Some reviewers have commented about how the aging artist is seriously wrangling with the themes of death and mortality. This is hogwash. Just because the painting delves beyond otaku culture into older Chinese and Japanese symbolism (or the artist says he is tired) doesn’t necessarily make it weightier or more personal. Murakami does not produce earnest, lyric art; he maunfactures an appealing and accessible view of Asian culture with a pop sensibility. That is what I see in his latest picture, and that is what I see in clips from his latest project, a music video remix of Turning Japanese with Kristin Dunst:
Sidenote: The rest of the gallery is devoted to works in the spirit of the 80s ala gold lamé MC Hammer pants. Enter at your own risk.
Ah, the purity of roses in the sunlight! I can almost smell the scent wafting over me. But is that a cigarette butt I see at the bottom of the stem? Oh yes, it is. It seems things are not all peachy keen in Will Ryman’s oversized hyperbolic rose garden. Up at Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea through October 10, these sculptures by Ryman are well worth a wander through this quasi-fairy tale world, if only for the fun of it.
Some signs of garbage and bugs might about, but all the same the rose garden strikes a happily note. How can you argue with ballet pink and Venetian red? The bugs are kind of cute, even the bag of Wise potato chips and the crushed Starbucks cup seem colorful and cheery.
The artist was trying to create a rodent’s perspective on a NYC rose garden, which I have to say makes the experience almost too literal to be interesting. Walking through the clusters of roses makes you aware of their overwhelming stature and it increases your sense of being in some kind of wonderland. One can only think the black aphids and cigarette butts are meant to disturb that experience. It misses that mark, but maybe it is supposed to be more ambiguous than that. Entitled A New Beginning, perhaps this installation is meant to be hopeful.
What do you think?
