Atomic Elroy

It just dawned on me… I LOVE TV… Not what’s on it. but the medium itself. I’ve been fascinated since I was quite young with TV. I loved the way the device looked as much as I loved Capt. Kangaroo and Sheri Lewis. Yes I’m that old.
Part of the fascination is the fact that my family didn’t have a TV for long stretches of time, it would go haywire and my Mom didn’t have the money to fix it. So up until I was about 9 yrs. old TV was a treat. Since then it’s been a love hate relationship.
After my early teen years I lost interest in TV. There were only 4 or 5 channels, and most of it did not appeal to a Teenage Surrealist such as my self. Then when we moved to Colorado in the late 60′s the star was one of the early adopters of cable TV, which had it’s perks, they broadcast underground FM radio on cable so most everyone I knew had there stereo receivers hooked up to it. I also allowed 24 hr. viewing and it certainly helped on certain evening under the influence of psychedelics to have something other than “snow” to watch.
I took TV production in College and learned camera operations, switching, tape editing, etc. I investigated the physical internal science of TVs, but it quickly went right over my head, I understood RGB, and the tube technology conceptually and not scientifically. Yet This only made my LOVE grow.
The expense of video production at the time was prohibitive even for organizations, let alone individuals. VHS helped but it really was a shitty format and difficult to edit. That never stopped me, I still used TV and most importantly TV sets ( monitors) as an integral part of my theatre/art practice.
The advent of digital video and the miniDV format changed everything and caused the video revolution ( which is being televised sorry Gil) we live in now.
Truly I love the way TV monitors look, I love to see 5 of them in a row, I love to see them lying flat on the floor screen up. I also Love how faces look in close up on a monitor. It just excites me to see Video Installations in museums.
Now here comes the part people are bound to disagree with… TV is the modern canvas. The advent of photography made realistic rendering in painting and drawing useless and quaint. Don’t get me wrong I’m not one of those who every 5 years declares pinging dead, it’s not, and never will be, it’s just… well… antiquated, like wax cylinders or cassette tapes. Yes I a firm believer my AADD is not a malady but a blessing. Things never change fast enough for me.
I am biased my LOVE of TV monitors makes me want to see entire museums with nothing but TV monitors and projectors in them ( hint, hint on my next art venture in NoCal.) So there it is I am a Video Installation artist because I LOVE TVs, Some say I use them to a fault, but who cares when it’s LOVE baby go for it!

Here’s my next Project…
The Grays, A feature length video art installation featuring a collection of 18 male and female plastic figure models (dolls) used by art students for drawing studies. This “species”, The Grays, rebel against their art school overlords, and escape! Entering and wrecking havoc on the art world as we know it. They begin their own “art scene” that disregards all that art academia and the gallery system stands for. Eventually they compete with the academic/gallery system and so quickly begin to overtake, The Art Market rallies hellbent on destroying them and anyone else who won’t conform to the system. They send the dreaded German art critic Art Op to take down The Grays. But who wins this cultural death match? Tune in and find out….

Click through twice on individual image to see it larger.

!. make absurd lists.

@. Is phoniness the new dominate philosophy? ( keepin’ it unreal ! )

#. I cant get half way through a serious art rant blog, with out giving up with a feeling of who really gives a shit.

$Art Academia has really ruined the art world by producing too many artists who want to make a living in art and cannot do so by taking place in the art market so they teach, which creates an art world with over reaching pseudo intellectual academic art philosophies and concepts which take art further away from it actual mission ( simple visual/conceptual communication), making it more and more irrelevant to anyone other than art academics, who want to make a living in art and cannot do so by taking place in the art market… A Mobius Strip of art irrelevance.

%. Ok there I did it, art rant over.

^. Modern economics is too skewered to the few rich.

&. In the 60′s we revered millionaire junkie rock stars, which was kinda cool cause it was such a contradiction, now it’s status quo.

*. Raise the minimum wage and that will stimulate the economy, Corporations will have to do with less profit, Boo Hoo, billionaire CEOs will have to become millionaire CEOs for the good of their country. How’s that for making a patriotic sacrifice make less money for the good of your country ( and fuck greedy Reaganomics maniacs, trickle down is just getting pissed on.)

(. Can’t do the liberal denial dance of “supporting the troops, while being against the war”. The troops carry out the war, they are not innocent, they are not victims, They choose to become professionally trained killers to do our politician’s bidding. They should be neither vilified nor glorified.

). Lists Suck.

Interesting… look at the smashed Piss Christ, do you see a profile of Homer Simpson with mouth agape? I do… It’s like the Virgin Mary on the toast, maybe it’s their God telling Religious Nuts not to be such “Homers”.

A post-neo-dada-modernist-abstract-deco-expressionism-bauhaus-pop-rococo-situationist-baroque-cubist-nouveau-futurist-symbolists-realist-fluxus-op-minimal-surreal-constructivist art work!

” The Imaginary Persecution and Amputation of St. Sissy”

When Pop Culture was the antithesis of the status quo, I found it totally embraceable and would wallow deep in it’s superficiality. Both inches of it’s depth! Now as Pop Culture has become the status quo, I find it increasingly difficult to embrace, like a relationship gone bad.. just going through the motions.
Andy Warhol once, ( for me) represented the cramming of Pop Culture down the establishments throat. Now it sadly seems that Pop Culture has become so main stream as to have gone full circle and now is the status quo.
Hmmm… Back to reading some Artaud, perhaps.

My next body of work is called “Art is Over” ( ala Jock and Yono’s anti-war phrase c.1970), it deals with the fact that, the successful art market now is all performance art, perpetrated by fraudulent “artist” who are actually actors, acting like artists… just like me.
It’s a reaction to the art buying public ( the upper echelon) being all suckers.
ART IS OVER…
no more objects
no more craft
to buy art now
one must be daft.

So while I was in SF last week ZeldaB and I popped over to the SFMOMA to see the current exhibits. As we walked through the Anniversary show in the gallery just prior to the 3rd floor lobby was a stack of offset prints by artist Felix Gonzalez Torres on the floor. What a wonderfully unusual way to exhibit these prints I thought and continued into the next gallery. Whilst there, I saw a young hipster rolling up one of these prints, as his girlfriend looked on in horror. They both glanced over their shoulders and whispered to one another, leaving the gallery almost immediately.
Being quite versed in museum security I immediately knew that these posters ( not prints) were displayed in this manner to allow for their dissemination into the universe. So not missing a beat I walked over to the pile, guiltily glanced over my shoulder, and took one. rolling it up as fast as I could.
As we walked through the museum I noticed quite a few of these posters being carried by other patrons. There still was this overwhelming feeling as if I had “pulled something off” which in and of itself made the work of art quite successful. Later I found this on the interweb: Link

“The original set of copies is Untitled (1992), a stack of large, black-and-white offset prints by Gonzalez-Torres depicting a silhouetted bird flying against the clouds. Museum visitors are invited to take pieces off the pile and use them as they like. The posters are ubiquitous in San Francisco bedrooms; they were exhibited as part of “The Art of Participation” (November 2008–February 2009), and are currently on view in the museum’s 75th Anniversary show. I have one hanging above my desk, which I paid museum admission to obtain. The stack at SFMOMA is ideally eight inches high, and is replenished by the museum every day, so that when a viewer takes a sheet off the top, the impact of this action on the crisp-edged sculpture is imperceptible and temporary.”

I just love post modern art!