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Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold
(link)

What had been Griffiths' tents, drapery and sealed wardrobes - alongside the occasionally recurring oversized head - before now's architectural models and fascination with Bill Murray's surface - yeah that's all Bill Murray there* - is still the obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic to as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a head, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but instead heads, the meat structure normally eclipsed by our concern with face. But so, concerning Bill Murray, has there ever been a celebrity whom people have been willing to wear on a t-shirt a giant image of their head? They're incredibly popular, yet a Brad Pitt head t-shirt seems unconscionable. We love the facade of Murray, his likeness, his surface, we treat him like a walking public architecture, a horrifying way to die.

*well not that guy, no. 



See too: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg