WILD ART

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CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION STREE T SM ART ADORNING THE SEL SELFF GO APE! AII IN GOOD TASTE FORBIDDEN ART WASTING AWAY WILD ART CHITECTURE ART AGAINST TIME MAKING A SPECTACL E THE BIG AND SMAL L OF ART

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This tricked out, pimped out, glittering, crystal Car was designed and ‘encrusted’ by Crystal Art, a company that specializes in crystal covered greetings cards. It took six months to stud this special Mini Cooper with shimmering Swarovski crystals. This has to be one of the most blinding and fantastically customized cars anywhere. It is the ultimate statement in vehicular customization; a trend that has seen owners of means stylize and personalize their rides from rock stars to music icons.

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In this image of the Mondrian Car, the artist’s famous lines and primary colour motif are used to form an instant mobile reference. This is a spectacular example of art history and popular culture merging into one another. This mini mobile art museum tells volumes about the popular legacy of one of high modernist history’s most enduring artists.

Unsurprisingly, many art historians who specialize in this artist tend to look upon such art forms with disdain, and lament upon such demonstrations of poor taste; the license plate itself reads ‘MNDRIAN’.

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‘MADE U LOOK’ is what the graffiti writer, Utah, wrote next to this double-take inducing piece found on a wall in Queens, New York. This clever design incorporated the distinct look of the wall into the letters themselves, an unusual take on graffiti, which usually seeks to cover, rather than reveal. In 2009, Utah was caught and sentenced to jail for her graffiti, ultimately serving twelve months. After her release, when asked about what she thought about graffiti she replied: Um, I think it’s awesome! Wait, is that the wrong answer … darn, a year in jail, and I still can’t get it right … Seriously though, I don’t feel any differently about it than I did before. Which is to say I don’t really feel any way about it, beyond that it’s a super fun thing to do.

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Argentina-born, Bologna-based artist BLU is known for his massive murals, often with nuanced political messages. The scale of his works is created through the use of house paint and telescopic rollers, and the collaboration of helpful friends. The artist has participated in some gallery shows, but prefers to paint directly for the public. One recent run-in with the ‘official’ art world is revealing when BLU was invited to create a large outdoor mural for MOCA’s Art in the Streets exhibit in Los Angeles. Because of the unsubtle political content of the mural, it depicted the coffins of soldiers draped with dollar bills, and the potential for upsetting the community near the mural (it faced the Veterans Affairs Hospital) it was abruptly ordered to be painted over by the exhibit’s curator, Jeffrey Deitch. BLU refused to paint a new mural.

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In Sofia, Bulgaria, this marginalized Soviet-era monument attracted newfound attention when an anonymous street artist spray-painted the figures of a World War II memorial to Soviet soldiers to resemble a legion of mythological American icons: comic book characters ranging from Santa Claus, to Ronald McDonald, to Superman. The artist meant to ‘update’ it to reflect Bulgaria’s current capitalist obsessions, as his slogan below read, ‘In Step with the Times’. It is interesting to note the political charge of this impressive anonymous graffiti: on both sides of the

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ex-Cold War polarized world, graffiti has served to deliver a usually caustic, bitter message against whichever dominating system. Here, under the pretext of ‘updating’ a memorial, this sophisticated public intervention conveys that there is not an exit out of the pan-Americanization of world culture. Suggesting that the real victors of Stalingrad in December 1942 were not the Soviet Red Army, but a band of characters whose existence is nothing but the product of American brains and fantasies.

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In China, a wild fad is taking a paintbrush to your pet! This dog was painted to look like a tiger in Zhengzhou, Henan Province of China, 2010.

While this pooch is taking on the fur of a tiger, others masquerade as pandas, and even Spiderman!

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Grooming ones pet is an activity that can take on extreme aesthetic dimensions. Dogs turn into living sculptures, and a variety of shows become highly competitive aesthetic platforms to show off each artist’s work. Here, award-winning Sandra Hartness shows off Cindy, who has become a swan, a camel, a peacock, and altogether an exotic garden scene - all fused into Cindy’s rich, hybrid appearance.

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Kentaro Nishino ‘Family’ (50.0 × 72.7 cm, Acrylic on canvas, 2009).

Japanese artist Kentaro Nishino paints fantastical and idealized scenes of nature, featuring outlandish colours rendered in acrylics and

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airbrush. Depictions of wildlife, particularly white tigers and wolves, in striking blue arctic landscapes are to be a mainstay in ‘kitsch’ art.

Nishino has taken this to the next level.

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California entomologist Steven Kutcher uses insects as living paintbrushes to generate his ‘participational’ paintings: part bug/part human.

Kutcher delicately loads the bug’s legs, be it a fly, cockroach or other creature, and sets it loose on a prepared canvas. Using non-toxic materials, the bugs scamper around until the paint is gone, having created their ‘masterpiece’ while remaining completely unharmed.

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Elephant painting in Thailand began in 1998 when Richard Lair invited the conceptual art partnership of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid to teach selected elephants at the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC) to paint. Elephants had done this before in over twenty zoos and circuses around the world, but this was Thailand’s first time, and the partnership was able to bring it to prominent media attention.

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Here artist Jason Mecier uses various types of rice in order to make a mini-portrait 7.6 x 10.1 cm (3 x 4 in) of Condoleezza Rice. The choice of rice as a material provides a visual pun commenting on this powerful woman’s name.

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Breakfast of Champions by Hank Willis Thomas and Ryan Alexiev is a portrait of President Barack Obama, made out of breakfast cereal. The artists say this mosaic represents what a healthy balanced democracy should be. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery of New York City; this is his only collaboration with Alexiev.

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Dimitri Tsykalov is responsible for these photographs of meat guns and outfits. The bloodiness of the meat makes a statement on the violent

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nature of guns – and reflects the blood lust of the artist’s depicted soldiers – or viewers.

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Norma ‘Duffy’ Lyon (1929-2011), was an Iowa-based artist who sculpted butter as in this photograph of her Last Supper. A regular fixture at the Iowa State Fair, she also created private commissions for celebrities and politicians. Lyon used to run a dairy farm with her husband in Toledo, Iowa; the initial context for her highly skilled experiments with creating creamy artworks.

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Among other media, artist Kevin Van Aelst creates various artworks from foodie beginnings including a Mondrian-looking slice of bread, and a Krispy Kreme donut highlighting cellular separation. In Local Times we can use these cracker clocks to keep up with the rest of the world.

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SPECIFICATIONS BINDING: HARDBACK FORMAT: 270 X 180 MM, 10 1/2 X 7 INCHES EXTENT: 4 6 4 PP NUMBER OF IMAGES: 350 COLOUR ISBN 97807 14865676 PUBL ICATION DATE: OCTOBER 20 13 PHAIDON PRESS L IMITED REGENT’S WHARF AL L SAINTS STREE T LONDON N1 9PA © 20 13 PHAIDON PRESS L IMITED WWW.PHAIDON.COM About the authors DAVID CARRIER is an American philosopher and art and culture critic.

He was formerly Champney Family Professor, a post divided between Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Art, and prior to that a professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written extensively on the history and philosophy of art writing, raising questions about the relativism of art writing in different eras by comparing texts written about the same artwork and analyzing changing styles of interpretation. His works include Principles of Art History Writing (1991), The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s (1994), Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries (2006) and A World Art History and Its Objects (2009). He has written for Apollo, artcritical, ArtForum, the Brooklyn Rail and Burlington Magazine.

JOACHIM PISSARRO is currently the Bershad Professor of Art History and Director of the Hunter College Galleries at the City University of New York (CUNY). He was formerly a Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His teaching and writing presently focus on the challenges facing art history due to the unprecedented proliferation of art works, images, and visual data.

His recent writings include the book Individualism and Inter-Subjectivity in Modernism: Two Case Studies of Artistic Interchanges: Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne: Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and the essay Joseph Beuys: Set Between One and All. In 2012 he co-curated the exhibition Notations: The Cage Effect Today, at the Hunter College Times Square Gallery, organized to coincide with the centennial of John Cage’s birth.

Back cover quote taken from Barry Schwabsky ‘Signs of Protest’, The Nation, 2 January 2012.