Vostell, an artist of international repute, has a history of casting expensive devices in concrete to "cancel their presence." Television sets are a favorite target, but he once sealed an entire Cadillac in cement in Chicago. At LAICA, some of the sets are dead or completely covered in concrete, but most have at least part of their screen exposed. They drone on and on with soap operas, talk shows and afternoon Westerns...
Vostell means to contrast the sophistication of TVs and turkeys. The birds win handily. He also feels we can learn more from reputedly stupid turkeys than from television, but the comparison may not be a fiar one. The TV drone is so familiar and the programming so low-level, we quickly accept it as easily tuned-out background noise. Turkeys, on the other hand, look downright exotic to city folks who have never encountered one off a serving dish and wearing its feathers.
Art historian Susanne Meyer-Büser argues that a 1941 work by Piet Mondrian has been hung upside-down for the past 75 years. The work, made with colored adhesive tape, has traditionally been hung with the closely-spaced bands at the bottom. Meyer-Büser says that these should be at the top, "like a dark sky." A photo of Mondrian's studio from 1944 supports her interpretation.
However, there are no plans to turn the work around, due to its fragile condition.
I recently had the chance to visit this roadside oddity in Arizona. It's located about 20 miles east of Kingman on Route 66. Artist Gregg Arnold created it in 2004, modeling it after the giant heads on Easter Island. He created it, he said, "because the place looked like it needed something like this."
1961: Artist Niki de Saint-Phalle attached bags of paint to her paintings and then shot at them with a .22 caliber rifle, causing the bags to burst and the paint to ooze down the canvas. She called these her "shooting paintings."
She explained:
I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinated watching the painting bleed and die. I shot for that moment of magic. . . Red, yellow, blue — the painting is crying the painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It is reborn.
The "portable oasis" of Belgian artist Alain Verschueren consists of a small, plexiglass greenhouse that he wears over his head. He came up with the idea around 2005, but only got attention for it in 2020, due to Covid, when he began wearing it around town instead of a mask.
I'll give Verschueren the benefit of the doubt and assume he wasn't aware of Waldemar Anguita's "greenhouse helmet," patented in 1986. The two ideas are basically identical.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.