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The Philadelphia-based artist Jayson Musson’s exhibition His Historical past of Artwork on the Cloth Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia blends the nostalgic familiarity of situational comedies (sitcoms) with a crash course in artwork historical past—but via the artist’s satirical tackle the pillars of the canon.
Within the present’s namesake three-channel video set up, the raucous puppet protagonist Ollie sits down with Musson’s alter-ego Jay to argue about whether or not artwork issues. The puppet, with ping-pong ball eyes, in addition to the set, the props and the costumes, have all been made in-house on the museum’s workshop. Part of the exhibition is the movie’s set the place the animatronic model of Ollie is perched on the sofa, surrounded by the video’s reproductions of historic artworks.
“As Duchamp mentioned, [the] ‘viewer completes the murals’, so give your self a hand for giving which means to this assortment of junk,” Ollie rants. He’s proven alongside an oozing clock rug pulled from Dalí’s Surrealist portray The Persistence of Reminiscence (1931); a foam Pieta chair within the method of Michelangelo’s late Fifteenth-century marble masterpiece; a miniaturised, 3D-printed model of Anish Kapoor’s public sculpture Cloud Gate (2004); and a picket door painted within the spirit of Frank Stella’s enamel portray The Marriage of Cause and Squalor II (1959), amongst different artwork historic nods.
The movie, which Musson shot within the rhythm of basic sitcoms with snicker tracks and one-liners, additionally consists of “cameos” by the likes of Picasso in his signature white underwear and a larger-than-life foam reproduction of the Venus of Willendorf.
Musson, who tells The Artwork Newspaper that his childhood leisure was a mixture of motion cartoons and late-night exhibits like The Arsenio Corridor Present and Saturday Night time Dwell, blends his inspirations into the dynamic between the 2 speaking heads.
“That’s what artwork is: embellishment supported by aesthetics,” Jay declares within the video as his eyeballs flip a demonic black. Ollie’s dismissal follows after a reduce to a fish tank with a crucifix inside, an homage to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987). “Why ought to I care about artwork? It has nothing to do with my on a regular basis life,” the puppet says.
Musson positions himself someplace in between the movie’s opposing voices, with an admitted fondness for Ollie, “just because he’d be extra enjoyable to sit back with”, he says. The artist agrees with Jay’s celebration of “worth on information of historical past”, though “he’s disconnected from the on a regular basis world and derives his private worth from the objects he owns”. The puppet, however, is “grounded”, in keeping with its creator, “however he lacks an ethical compass or ‘lengthy view’ and is sufferer to the fleeting tides of cultural traits”.
A conflict of intellects has lengthy been a pillar of comedy, from Ottoman-era puppet duo Hacivat and Karagöz to Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Hollywood’s Laurel and Hardy. For Musson, nevertheless, the push-and-pull between his characters raises questions in regards to the signifiers of worth in artwork.
“Artwork, very similar to capitalism, has a approach of consuming its opposing forces or divergent practices,” the artist says. “Inside that consumption the ‘exterior’ turns into ‘in’, so it’s not essentially about satirising artwork or its social dynamics however actually me taking part in round making an attempt to determine how one thing can grow to be artwork.”
A satirical evaluation of the canon has lengthy been a motif in Musson’s work. The artist had his breakthrough over a decade in the past along with his YouTube video collection ART THOUGHTZ, by which he assumed the position of the derisive Coogi sweater-donning character Hennessy Youngman, delivering his takes on Spiral Jetty, Damien Hirst or Structuralism. “A deconstruction of vital concept as a result of what else would a grad scholar make,” Musson says of that collection, which he created whereas attending the Skowhegan College of Portray and Sculpture.
Musson thinks the sitcom style, much like YouTube again then, is considerably devoid of a “hierarchal weight inside the artwork world labyrinth of which means”, which supplies him house to articulate his takes on artwork historical past and invite the viewers to ponder his protagonists’ debate.
- Jayson Musson: His Historical past of Artwork, till 13 November on the Cloth Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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