Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

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This is the interpretation box of art. (see: yesterday) A object we can't see "inside," so place its empty vessel to skull, ask for clues. From the debris of culture. Making this cargo-cult art. The compostionalized altars of cultural refuse. We are welcome to interpret the reassembly of it. Assemblage meaning. Composition as a device we associate with art, and art with meaning. Therefore these edible arrangement of content makes "art" - which is meaningful, tautologically. Ostensibly. 

See too: Danny McDonald, Cargo Cult

Danny McDonald at Bortolozzi

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since semio-space is more and more dominated by cultural IP whose worlds are tightly closed by labyrinthian legal frameworks. What you can and can't do with Barbie on an advertisement is governed by at least 10 pages of legal, and 40 pages of "best practices." So, like Puppies Puppies for who the rearrangements of our mass-culture mythos are open-sourced against their proprietary wishes. A bricolage of symptomatic sense: The mass majority of children learn of good/evil from summer blockbusters more than any Sunday doldrumming. This is our culture's totems, gods, so why not rearrange them on poles.  Or an exceedingly cynical gesture, compositionalizing and converting to hieroglyphics a culture however unsympathetic that culture may be, like we weren't already scratching our heads at it. The inkblot was deemed to have little psychologic validity besides registering the general gestalts recognized on by a culture. Yet here we are.


See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

(Danny McDonald at House of Gaga)

The toy/action-figure has become a major feature in art.
From Steinbach’s belief in the formal beauty of the product, to Harrison’s abuse of their semantic connotation - demolitioning of meaning - and the cargo-cult pickings arranged as marxist totems, toys now bespeak a Pop-freudian analysis, dredging up the subconscious of culture - a C-3PO with robot tits, an Alien brain tumor, Schwarzenegger slurping a pink dick, the monster made to hold a mirror to itself; that, like a Jim Shaw pop-surrealism in Cady Noland means, becoming assemblage Rorscharchs of what this culture could possibly mean, and fun to boot, the hot new item on everyone's list surely.


See also: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner, Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center