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September 18, 2007
The Underminer Covers the Mass MOCA ¡SHITSHOW OF THE CENTURY!
Classic stuff c/o Mike Albo:
Hm? Oh I'm here with my close close close friends Matthew Marks and Perry Rubenstein and Leo Castelli. We are just having a strategy sesh about my work and also celebrating our close close close friend Roberta's masterful piece in the Times about the whole Mass MOCA scandal, which I am not sure you read because I know you don't really follow-- You did? Oh, no sure sure sure. Sorry I didn't mean to make it sound like you were clueless or anything! Ha!
I mean, can you BELIEVE Mass MOCA!? How DARE they cut the funding of my most brilliant colleague, Christophe Buchel, when he went over his 160,000 dollar budget, two times over, and delayed the opening of his work by months with his strange requirements? So what if he demanded near impossible things like a fuselage of a 737, a two-story Cape Cod cottage, a leaflet-bomb carousel, an old bar from a tavern, and a vintage movie theater? He is an artist, and has no choice but to follow his vision. How do they expect an artist to CREATE in that kind of environment!? We really live in an oppressive time. It's like Entartete Kunst all over again. Deplorable.
People like Buchel and I are ARTISTS! And we ARTISTS are allowed to do whatever we want because we make ART! Watch.
Hello? Sir? Yes, you there. What do you do? Oh, you're a high school teacher. Commendable. Well, I'm an ARTIST. Now get on your knees and drink my saliva.
See? I make ART.
Who can deny the power of Buchel's dirty, trash-laden historical dioramas? I look at the way he dumps crumbled cinderblock and dry wall into a pile and I just WEEP at the authenticity. And that authenticity takes money and time and creative freedom!
If they wanted something cheap, they should have just gone down to New Orleans and scrounged some poor folk artist's oil paintings out of the trash. Or simply exhibited pictures of The Ninth Ward or Baghdad or the Minneapolis Bridge disaster, which, I have to say, are sort of GOOD as art pieces, but don't quite capture the pain and anguish of the human soul as well as a Buchel diorama.
More here. Buy his book (illustrated by the one and only Carl J. F. - man behind the splash page and logo of THIS VERY WEB SITE) here. Brushed once again by the loosest possible connection to notoriety, I am.
Posted by Bree at September 18, 2007 03:10 PM