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A work from my personal collection: The Art Guys' Goatee Off, ca. 1990. It's documentation of a performance piece where the Houston-based artists grew goatees and played a round of golf, shaving bit by bit as a way of keeping score (go tee off, get it?). Their beard hair is what you see glued to the golf balls. Meret Oppenheim, drink your tea.
Continuing our Art Guys series, this is a review I wrote for Art Papers when I lived in Texas and never sent in because I couldn't make it work...until today. It's a bit late for the magazine's deadline so here it is online:
"Jets," by The Art Guys
Dallas Museum of Art, November-December 1991
The main concourse of the Dallas Museum of Art ascends in a series of broad, gently sloping ramps, creating spaces reminiscent of airport architecture. Appropriately, that's where the Art Guys placed their installation Jets during the 1991 Dallas Video Festival.
Sixteen TV monitors fanned across the ceiling over the ramps, linked by black cables to a neat bank of VCRs on the wall. Each monitor faced down with its back securely bolted to the ceiling--or so we hoped. The screens glowed pale blue, green, or violet, the ambient colors of footage taped from the sky at different times and places, and intermittently roared to life as an airplane passed across the screen.
The artists phased the tapes so at a given time some screens showed empty sky and others tracked commercial aircraft landing or taking off in wobbly, hand held fields of view. The random distribution of the zooming images along the corridor kept the viewer off guard: as you followed the progress of one jet, another would loom unexpectedly behind you.
The network of cables crawling across the ceiling and down the wall to a controlling ganglion could emblematize the global transportation and communication systems on which we are so dependent, while the fragility of the systems could be felt in the nervous-making Damoclean placement of the monitors. That's one level of interpretation.
Yet sitting beneath them for a few minutes revealed something a hurried passerby might have missed: their curious kinship to natural phenomena. The random lightening and darkening of screens and the antiphonal whining of the jets became paradoxically calming, like stars blinking or insects chittering in the breeze. Thus do our daily threats become reassuring background texture.
Third installment in The Art Guys series, these are photos from their current survey exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art. The cluster of portraits originally came from a show they did in '90 called "See Through Us," an open call where other artists were invited to render them in various media. As a participant I tried to be as thift store painting-like as I could, hence my canvas of Michael Galbreth with oversized Mr. Spock ears and Jack Massing with crab appendages sprouting from his head (look, I'm in a museum now!). Although the painting above and to the right of it with Jack's face growing like a wen from Michael's forehead is far more successfully "thrifty." The tasty installation of these paintings is by Jade Dellinger, who curated the show. On the right in the lower photo is Smushed Faces, 2000, printed vinyl.
Mood Ring, 2007, GIFs, HTML
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"Abstract Thinking (Photons)" [mp3 removed]
Another variation of this piece, incorporating a special effect sound from, let's just say, a popular televised science fiction drama. There is now an added "tripped out" middle section with some layered sputtering LFO noise and a snare run through an effect-pedal octave sequence.
Update: Added a new synth part to this. I think I'm still working on it (see comments).
Update 2: the piece is pulled for further tinkering. When it rises Phoenix-like it will probably have a new title.
Update 3: Or not. I put it back up, with the original, underlying synth tracks all sliced up and made to obey the meter.
Untitled (Chris Ashley), 2007, GIFs, HTML
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At the Whitney Museum coat check, I swear my recollection is they just take your bag and give you a plastic chip. At MOMA they make you open your bag, ask you about the contents, and reject certain items! Here's how a recent visit went down:
"Sir, you have to open your bag."
"You're kidding. OK, check it out. There's a scarf in here, a music software manual, my Daytimer..."
"What's in that pouch?"
"Checkbook..."
"I'll have to ask you to carry that."
"You're kidding. Say--when did you start doing this, interrogating people about their bag contents?"
"I've only worked here six months but" (eyes widening) "of course all bags have to be inspected since 9/11."
"Yeah, right, but that was six years ago!"
At this point some tourists were looking over uneasily, wondering what the "scene" was about.
Thanks, MOMA, for setting a friendly, contemplative mood at the entrance to your museum.