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4 matchs for gnomes:
Artist and Bodenstandig 2000 musician drx (Dragan Espenschied) has stepped up to the plate and showed us his gnomes.
I think if the uptown Abstract Expressionist who was hiding his gnomes had done ones this good his dealer wouldn't be screaming but thinking of ways to reinvent him as an artist in the Peter Saul/Basil Wolverton school.
From the blog vault: "Show Us Your Gnomes."
"Show Us Your Gnomes."
I know a woman who works at an uptown, blue-chip-type gallery in NYC. She tells the story of a major Abstract Expressionist artist--she won't say who--that for decades had been selling nonrepresentational paintings for the big bucks. One day he invited her to his studio and said, "You know, I have this body of work I rarely show anyone that I've been doing for a few years now. It's really different from my abstract work but I'd like for you to look at it and tell me if you think it has any potential." So the woman looks at it and at this point in the telling of her story she literally screams and says "Oh, my god, it was these GNOMES! These horrid cutesy drawings of little men! Etc Etc sarcasm abuse..."
I find this story really poignant and compelling. The gnomes are probably the guy's real art, what he actually feels and cares about. But his market is this fake art that may very well have emerged from a place of sincerity 40 years ago but now is just a simulacrum he's doomed to repeat because it's his "job." So he's stuck. By not revealing the gnomes sooner, and attempting to gather support among critics and fellow artists (say, by covertly sponsoring shows with portentous titles like "Unpacking Little Men: The Content Paradox"), they're forever his dirty secret, bringing him only ridicule from the guardians of uptown taste. As the dealer's scream implies, to loose them on the world now would be a devastating career ender.
This gave me the idea for a curated exhibition called "Show Us Your Gnomes." It would consist of work artists are hiding from the public because they find themselves locked into a "signature" style or sensibility. It would essentially be a free pass for them to exhibit their gnomes, or gnome-equivalents, before it's too late. Work they care about but find embarrassing that might actually turn out to be more important than their accepted work. Talk about a minefield. (Pictures accompanying this post found by searching "gnomes" under Google/Images. For illustrative purposes only. That top one's pretty good.)
UPDATE: Edited slightly to reorder sentences and remove a gratuitous classist swipe.
UPDATE 2: This is not an actual call for work, just an idea.
Sue de Beer, Making Out With Myself, 1997, color video short.
Sue de Beer, whose work will be appearing in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, started her career with some fairly blunt, often violent imagery, circling around the theme of the doppelganger. (An essay I did on Heidi 2, her collaboration with Laura Parnes, fills in some background.) She is fascinated by the late-90s high-school shootings and adolescent trauma in general. Her 2-channel video installation last year at Postmasters, Hans und Grete, featured a male and female actor, each of whom played two parts: a Gothic and a "normal" teen. Highlights include a sex scene with giggle-inducing prosthetic ejaculation, the bloody dismemberment of a stuffed dog, and some seriously wack guitar playing, taking place mostly on charmingly handmade sets littered with heavy metal posters and bits of Teutonic kitsch such as plastic garden gnomes. Two stock "bored teenagers in class" scenes used sampled teacher-student dialogue taken from Nightmare on Elm Street (a discussion of Shakespeare) and Halloween (a much headier colloquy on Thomas Costain and free will with brainy Jamie Lee Curtis nailing the answers). The video shifts back and forth between good kids and bad kids, all of whom seem equally alienated, with much mawkish diary reading and eventually, gunshots.
An issue de Beer wrestles with is the impossibility of a true outsider stance, in a world where goth, punk, and goth-punk moves are heavily recycled, researched, and marketed. Like an art world version of Quentin Tarantino, who equates film and life, she makes no distinction between real teens and media teens, and the boredom we sometimes feel listening to/watching their existential dilemmas mirrors the vacuity of popular entertainment, from coming of age films to reality TV. It made little difference to me to learn that the parts of the script were taken from writings as diverse as Ulrike Meinhof's and Kip Kinkel's; it all sounded like bad TV dialogue of "disaffected youth" to me. Whether the kids shoot up a school or become CEO of Raytheon, they (we) all wade out of the same sludgepool of media cliches. The banality of the dialogue is belied, however, by de Beer's complex mise en scene mixing game imagery/sounds, cult insignia, scrambled architectural references, and pop culture bric-a-brac from both sides of the Atlantic.
De Beer's next work shows signs of brightening up: perhaps her trajectory will be the reverse of Cindy Sherman's ingenues-to-vomit trail. Below is an image from a new installation titled The Dark Hearts, "a nostalgic romp through punk coming-of-age in suburban America. Part road movie, part Mike Mills romance, the loose narrative revolves around two teenagers sneaking out of their parents' house to go prowl the neighborhood." Looking forward to seeing where they go (and she goes).