Idiot. Kris Martin, 2005.
Kris Martin's work provides a humorous existential twist on the ready-made.
One of the seeds of his current show at Kestner Gesellschaft is Dostoyevsky's novel The Idiot.
For his 2005 piece Martin copied the entire text of the novel in his hand. It took him 5 months!
There was one catch:
He replaced every mention of Prince Myshkin with his own name!
More if the exhibit at Contemporary Art Daily
1 comment:
Ha awesome. I think online is the best way to experience conceptual contemporary art.
During my starving artist days, I was a gallery guard (one of those people who says, "Please don't touch," and "Stay behind the gray line on the floor,"--at The Walker Art Center in Mpls and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
The thing with conceptual art is that it elicits, "My 5 yo could do that," or "I could've done that." And then there's extreme buyer's remorse about the $16+ spent on admission.
And in addition to that, the presentation is often extremely removed, cold, and boring.
I mean, I want to see *all* of those handwritten pages, I want to pick out his name in lots of the pages, maybe see when he was pressing harder into the page in chapter 9 and so on.
Overall, a lot of conceptual art is ill-presented. Besides the Absentee Artist syndrome, (Assistants or minimum wage museum staff scribbling Cy Twombly's stuff on a wall) comes to mind, besides that,--there's the Deadbeat Curator. That is, the person who grabs a pedestal case from the vaults and pops in two stacks of the handwritten pages with a little info tag.
I'm so delighted to get to see conceptual art in the comfort of my home office chair, (and actually learn more about it than squinting at one of those placards stuck on the gallery wall),--it beats shuffling around a sterile, cold contemporary art gallery any day.
:D
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