Humor
Anthony Goicolea’s Pre-adolescent Boys
Anthony Goicolea’s photographs of “pre-adolescent boys” question childhood & school-life with transgressive and erotic imagery. Goicolea himself portrays all of the boys in his photographs through the astute use of costumes, wigs, make-up, and post-production editing via the software Adobe Photoshop.
“You and What Army” I act out childhood incidents such as fight scenes, first kisses, and deranged play dates. These works are simultaneously rooted in nostalgia and science fiction.
Anthony Goicolea
You and What Army Series: Class Picture
1999
Many of the sets are constructed to depict suburban environments in which the cast of characters are seen undertakeing painfully awkward transformations as they undergo the journey from childhood to adulthood.
Yasumasa Morimura: Requiem for the XX Century
The self-portraits by the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, Requiem for the XX Century: Twilight of the Turbulent Gods, examines an array of historical figures and political events that have been significant in shaping the 20th century. Employing his usual methodology, Morimura uses costumes, make-up and props to create unconventional and bold renderings of iconic images from history.
While Morimura’s work has traditionally investigated femininity through iconic depictions of women from art history and popular culture, this body of work examines widely disseminated images of prominent masculine figures from the last century. Each protagonist or event is cast in a moment of apogee, when history is being made and visually captured. Substituting himself for ideologues, dictators or brilliant minds such as Einstein, Lenin, Che, Mao or Trotsky, Morimura reflects on his personal encounter of these images during his lifetime as well notions of masculinity embedded in politics and war. By re-contextualizing portraits and events into present day, Morimura offers a fresh look at these prominent men who, moved by wisdom, hate, ideology or idealism have carved a space in our collective psyche.
John Waters’s artwork
John Waters is an American filmmaker well known for his provocative movies – among them Pink Flamingos (1972), Hairspray (1988), and, A Dirty Shame (2004). Recently I discovered his contemporary art work and I was fascinated with his sense of humor and clever concepts.
Vik Muniz: Early Objects
http://www.vikmuniz.net
Early Objects by Joshua Decter
The polysemous work of Vik Muniz participates in the vicissitudes of this paradoxical re-investment of exteriority with the signs of interiorized meditation-there ϭystification of the commonplace. It is a practice infused with the non-equivalencies of the consummately hybrid condition, the tautologies of non-closure and the vacillations of indeterminate signification. Through a material and symbolic re-construction of untrenched objects-in the world, Muniz constructs a game where in the obviousness of resemblance of the literary of similitude is exaggerated beyond recognition into a theater of subversions. Estrangement and de-realization occur in subtle doses. While not unrelated to the paradigms associated with the surrealist object of symbolic use, Muniz’s objects appear to repudiate the primary of the unconscious-or the de-sublimated tokens of the dream-state-in order to engender a neutral sign of ambivalent reference-vis- -vis the meta-readymade construct.
Clown Skull | Relics | 1987
The notion of the “crisis of the object” has become a reified historical category, abstracted into a succession of stylistic codes and conventions; Muniz’s work operates as a meditation upon this condition, evoking Breton’s exegesis concerning the de-rationalization of everyday objects 9i.e., a subversion of the equivalences obtained between the Rational and the Real):
Ashanti Joystick | Relics | 1987
For Muniz, a subtle material translation coaxes the recognizable object into an unstable physical and symbolic identity, displacing the rational prohibitions which administer the bureaucracy of predetermined correspondences. Muniz re-configures the tactics usually associated with bricolage into strategy of playful, unpredictable subversion; trail and error are utilized in incorporate elements of heterogeneous origin within an architecture of inflectional metastasis. An overarching order of clinical presentations (e.g., the stabilizing economy of the pedestal/display case) offers the guise of closure.
Big Book | Relics | 1987
Pictures of Clouds | Skywritting | 2001
Scissors | Earthworks| 2002
Ruler | Earthworks| 2002