Just Don’t Look at his Crotch
Yes, it’s time for more of that lovely performance art. Today we bathe in the radiance of Mr Joseph Ravens, a fearlessly non-conformist artist who uses the medium of “action and movement” to “project energy and images with abundant focus.” Not just that, of course. Mr Ravens also “devises highly stylised situations in which images and actions coalesce to produce decidedly poetic, often conceptual, narratives.” It’s decidedly poetic. He says so himself.
Naturally, all this decidedly poetic energy projection is harnessed to “touch on subjects such as materialism, insatiability, conformity, and alienation,” with works presented in “hay fields, school buses, closets, and [on] rooftops.” “My images and ideas are designed to have impact,” says he, “while at the same time embracing depth, resonance, and artistic integrity.” Pondering his own efforts to awe and enlighten, Mr Raven adds, “Only a short time ago I realised that in much of my work I am expelling something from my body. I often produce objects from my mouth, my anus, or compartments within my sculptural costumes. For me, these objects represent creation and the creative impulse.” I’ll just leave that one there, I think.
In the following piece, titled Ravenous and performed in 2012 during the Venice International Performance Art Week, Mr Ravens projects his energies, poetically, with the aid of a marker pen, feathers and a small metallic groin cup. Go on, taste the art.
Feel free to applaud.
If you’re wondering what the black circle is about, and I’m sure you are, the artist reveals its mystery: “A black circle is often present in my performances. Representing a sort of existential hollowness and insatiability (a spiritual void), this symbol is a direct reference to my never-ending hunger to find pattern and purpose within an imposing and random universe.” Other major works include the weighty and thrilling Strange Bird, photographs of which can be seen here, and Fly Away, a towering effort involving “paper, ink and a large carrot,” and in which said carrot is chewed to a pulpy mass and then regurgitated onto a bird table.
Mr Ravens is a “recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Interdisciplinary / Performance Art, the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for New Performance Forms, and an Artist Project grant in New Performance Forms from the Illinois Arts Council.”
It’s a very small groin cup.
my never-ending hunger to find pattern and purpose within an imposing and random universe.
Yes. I can see this quest for pattern and purpose in his work…
or not…
I think this is the artistic equivalent of toddlers playing with feces.
It’s decidedly poetic. He says so himself.
*applauds*
I strive to challenge expectations and champion a dialogue between art forms
If he turned up in my print lab for a dialogue I would turn the hose on him.
Go on, taste the art.
It tastes bad. I think it’s gone off.
Oh, you heathens. Mr Ravens is “embracing depth, resonance, and artistic integrity.” Obviously.
Obviously.
Thanks David, I needed a good laugh.
There’s also a slightly different version of Ravenous in which the artist exchanges his feathers and groin cup for a pair of nasty black underpants. Oh come on, you know you want to.
[*long drawn out sigh*] … Truly, there are more things in performance art, David, than are dreamt of in the minds of Art Councils across the globe.
I couldn’t help myself when I got to Ravens’s Artist Statement I had to do it, I had to click on the link when I read: “Ravens is founder and Executive Director of DEFIBRILLATOR Performance Art Gallery.”
And this on the same morning when I discovered the existence of Adrienne Truscott, a brazen fabricator and exhibitionist who performs her stand-up naked from the waist down apparently.
In other arts news, I stumbled across this:
Ms Bean tells us that her “artistic practice stems from obsessive, paranoid, scientific and anthropological research.” Her work, we learn, is “oscillating the poles of violence/meditation, power/control, movement/home.” And her interests include “performance art with installation, video and textual practices… endurance, queer theory and post-feminist realities.”
If you hurry, there may be tickets left.
Strange to think that these ‘artists’ – Ravens, Bean and (thanks to Nikw211) Truscott – receive applause and subsidy for displaying their mental pathologies. Not so long ago people behaving as they do would have been sectioned and cared for in some bleak mental hospital, along with a collection of gibbering tramps and various psychotics. I tend to view Arts Council grants to performance artists as a form of care in the community.
If you hurry, there may be tickets left.
That one seems to be on at the same time as Full Body Tonsure
Naked fat guy shaving or shaved naked chick err … doing … whatever that is that she’s doing exactly.
What to do?
What to do?
Well, that neglected roasting tin probably needs cleaning. Sorry, I thought a third option might be appreciated.
Mr Ravens is a “recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for Interdisciplinary / Performance Art . . .
Confirms my general unwillingness to cross the Mississippi River these days.
Well, that neglected roasting tin probably needs cleaning.
Heh. Maybe I’ll finally actually be able to eat my dinner off it.
I often produce objects from my mouth,
Uh… OK.
my anus,
Me too! Especially the morning after a vindaloo.
or compartments within my sculptural costumes.
Also known as… pockets?
For me, these objects represent creation and the creative impulse.
This nails why modern art is rubbish.
It’s never about the work itself, it’s about whatever PoMo word salad can be invented to say it “represents”.
“Hmmm… yes. I can see the artist’s cry against the evils of colonialism in this half-melted Cornetto, playfully inserted in his rectum”.
And people look down on poor, superstitious religious folk who think they can see Jesus in their toast or the Virgin Mary in their Cocoa Pops. At least those people are imagining something profound, uplifting and transcendent.
The simple farmer who sees Our Lord in his skirting board is aspiring to something greater than the critic who sees art in a man regurgitating his lunch.
Don’t art luvvies ever get bored of this game?
And people look down on poor, superstitious religious folk who think they can see Jesus in their toast
I like that. I like that a lot.
As I’ve said before, you do have to wonder what’s passing through the minds of the people who actually spend their evenings watching such things, even applauding, apparently in earnest. And of course the people who insist that things like those above deserve public funding.
I like that. I like that a lot.
Seconded. It’s not only funny, it’s extremely astute.
This kind of art, and a great deal of contemporary art (though thankfully, not all of it), is so completely void of any aesthetic that its meaning becomes hostage to almost any interpretation a spectator might care to give it.
Perhaps not surprisingly, this kind of vacuity seems to have been particularly attractive to and fruitful for followers of certain nihilistic political religions. The less meaning there is in the work, the more possible it is to interpret it as a form of ‘resistance’ to the putative powers that be.
Don’t art luvvies ever get bored of this game?
It pays. Sadly.
It pays. Sadly.
But only because taxpayers are paying for it.
Interesting how you never read any of this stuff and see “I explore awareness of a solid work ethic, along with promoting Christian principles and conceptual frameworks of positive capitalist consciousness” or the like. I suspect the conclusion they would draw from this fact is the opposite of the one I do.
I dunno.
It could be seen as a warning of the perils inherent in buying cheap scuba gear on eBay.
It also brings to mind the final scene in a Warner Bros. cartoon, where Daffy Duck has been tricked into thinking a stick of gelignite is actually a cheap cigar, and the explosion blows nearly all his feathers off and his bill ends up at the back of his head.
Mr. Ravens would no doubt find my philistinism “dethpicable”.
Ravens is considered an “artist” and paid by the Government and All.The.Right.People fawn over him.
Norman Rockwell is sneered at as a hack because he produced artwork that sold and is liked by All.The.Wrong.People.
Just one of many reasons I’ve never liked All.The.Right.People
For what it is worth, I watched the entire “performance “, open minded too, to be fair an all that, you know.
What a useless turd of a human being. Sponging off of the labors of so many more worthy than he at the great table of humanity.
On behalf of the sane people of Illinois, I wish to offer a profound apology for this… (tries to find an appropriate decorous polysyllable… fails…) turd in the punchbowl of culture.
(My tax dollars at “work”. Alas, the new governor, while a Republican, is a fashionable tycoon who will almost certainly continue this nonsense, despite the imminent bankruptcy of the state.)
Don’t art luvvies ever get bored of this game?
Hell no. As long as the bourgeois is being épatered, the party goes on.
Because rebelling against your parents is a stage that is just too good to end.
It’s the Dude’s landlord, isn’t it?
Some days I just wake up hating Freud.
The Emperor, he is buck naked…