Today Moxie and I are being real classy. We’re reading pages on pages of art theory compiled in this book, and listening to Mozart. I really think it’s going to her head.
Walking Gun - Laurie Simmons, 1991
From the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History:
In the early 1990s, Simmons created wickedly funny large-format photographs showing spotlit doll legs topped with various toy-objects: revolvers, houses, cameras, and cakes. By aping the scale and impact of billboards and movie screens, Simmons turns the “directorial” mode of slick staging and lighting against itself, to reveal the spectacle of “woman-as-object” in contemporary culture. Sending up the old-movie trope of representing the man creeping in shadow carrying a gun, the artist offers instead the death-dealing seductress of film noir in miniature, a doll capable of killing its master at a moment’s notice.
(via cavetocanvas)
Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991
From the Art Institute of Chicago:
Felix Gonzalez-Torres produced work of uncompromising beauty and simplicity, transforming the everyday into profound meditations on love and loss. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) is an allegorical representation of the artist’s partner, Ross Laycock, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1991. The installation is comprised of 175 pounds of candy, corresponding to Ross’s ideal body weight. Viewers are encouraged to take a piece of candy, and the diminishing amount parallels Ross’s weight loss and suffering prior to his death. Gonzalez-Torres stipulated that the pile should be continuously replenished, thus metaphorically granting perpetual life.
I’ve always really respected this piece of work for it’s cleverness in dealing with such a serious issue, and really personalizing the experience of having or knowing someone who has AIDS.
(via cavetocanvas)
