Being English, Thanksgiving doesn’t have the same warm & fuzzy meaning for me as it does for most around me, although I do like having a bit of a break from the office to hang out with the family...plus I like eating.
As a family we’re real homebodies, and it's a major achievement to get all four of us (at one time) motivated to go anywhere.
So I was quite surprised when I suggested a trip to the MoMA, & all were on board. My logic was that because it was Black Friday the majority of the population would be beating the crap out of each other to save 25% on something that they absolutely must have, thus leaving the MoMA spacious & airy. Of course, I’d forgotten about the tourists.
It was crowded, but not unbearable. Being with an eight year old makes it hard to stop long enough to read anything. So when we rushed past the entrance to "Sturtevant: Double Trouble" & I started seeing Warhols, Rosenquists Harings & other contemporary masters, I simply thought it was a curated collection of works owned by the MoMA.
But seeing this black Marilyn made me stop in my tracks & try to understand what I was looking at!
This is the explanation (directly from MoMA's site) of a Sturtevant’s work, an artist I’d never heard of, but now love:
Sturtevant (American, 1924–2014) began “repeating” the works of her contemporaries in 1964, using some of the most iconic artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for the exploration of originality, authorship, and the interior structures of art and image culture. Beginning with her versions of works by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, Sturtevant initially turned the visual logic of Pop art back on itself, probing uncomfortably at the workings of art history in real time. Yet her chameleon-like embrace of other artists’ art has also resulted in her being largely overlooked in the history of postwar American art. As a woman making versions of the work of better-known male artists, she has passed almost unnoticed through the hierarchies of mid-century modernism and postmodernism, at once absent from these histories while nevertheless articulating their structures.
All three of these are by her.
The design history floor has some really awesome music-related artifacts & ephemera, including some punk & new wave posters that were doing a bit of reappropriating themselves.
Today, Eve I took a trip to the LES to check out a small group show at Con Artists Collective called "Action Figures: Objectified.”
Def worth a trip if you like culture jamming, or simply DIY weird art. The show includes works by SUCKADELIC, Wizard Skull, Tone Tank, Sean Gallagher, HEALEYMADE, Dean Millien and Weird Luke. Below are just a few in the show.
Eve in conversation with a new friend.
My fave works would have to be these tiny (about 3") tinfoil guns by Dean Millien.
Funniest art of the whole weekend was in this pile stuff for sale on the Flatbush sidewalk, with a couple of attempts at Warhol flowers.
