Sunday 8 April 2012

Nathan Anthony: FLUMP NOOSE, 2010





DJR:
The other day I realised that most of the art objects I have seen in my life, I’ve only seen as images. Are they actually 3D, or just cardboard cut-outs pretending to inhabit space, carefully propped up by stage designers? I’ll never know.

Thankfully this art object doesn’t throw me into this dilemma of not knowing of its 3D-ness as it severely cuts its dimensions by being plopped onto a wall.
Its creamy pinkness flat against an equally pink’ish plane tells me that the creator of this either does not know how to make photographs that could be classed as okay, or is so unsure about this creation that he not only cut its dimensions down, he also tries to make it disappear into the background.

JDA:
As Sartre said “there is but only one serious philosophical problem and that is suicide”. Sadly this piece fails to address that. It would have been far more practical to construct the piece out of rope, preferably made from sisal fibres although polypropylene would have done at a push. The artist has clearly realised his error and has not tried to hang himself. This has no doubt caused him further pain and only intensified his suicidal feelings. It is therefore clear that the piece is highly unsuccessful.



Nausea - great summer reading

DJR:
It is unsuccessful to such a degree that it makes me feel awkward. It’s even hanging in an awkward way. Get yourself together, noose! You’re a tool of self-destruction! Take pride in the undoing of the king of all animals, the annihilation of the thinking beast. Don’t just floppily hang about on a wall, unable to harm the flimsiest of people, or at least be used to heighten the sexual stimulus achieved by autoerotic asphyxiation. I’m pretty sure you aren’t even good for that, unless I’d stuff my face and nose with you simultaneously, trying to breathe through the sugar with my pants down.
You are about as useful as getting tips for intercourse from a 15 year old boy. Actually, you have probably been made by a mid-pubescent teen who had his first thoughts about suicide listening to Nirvana in 2006 eating a strawberry Cornetto, whose only profoundly mortal experience he’ll ever have is when the doctor tells him he’s got diabetes, then running home and watching the boxset of Dawson’s Creek/ the O.C. while bittersweet tears run down his chubby face wondering where it all went wrong, just to be found 3 weeks later on the promenades of the grim shores of eastern England: a bloated corpse, binged to death on trifle and shallow thoughts of suicide.



JDA:
First of all I think you should leave the O.C. out of this. To mention this piece in the same sentence as such an emotionally profound show is insulting. Let us not forget those final fateful words, issued by the great Ryan Atwood, played with aplomb by Benjamin Mackenzie.

“Hey kid, need any help?”
Admittedly the piece probably is trying to respond to this great line which has undoubtedly overshadowed the creativity of most of today’s budding artists. Maybe my standards as a critic have just become too flawed by the work of writers such as Josh Schwartz, who also helped develop Gossip Girl.



DJR:
To quote Josh Schwartz’s award winning essay about Steven Spielberg’s Gremlins “Spielberg has done it again”(1) or to extrapolate:
“Although I long for the safety of nostalgia, I am very well aware of the pitfalls of young adulthood - very much like the transition from ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, a tale of a mind not yet ready to digest the wonders of the subject-object relationship manifested in hallucinations of alien visitors, to ‘Gremlins’, a horror story of a boy becoming a man by transferring his sexuality and death-wish metaphorically onto little monsters he accidentally created after midnight in his bedroom - a paranoid fear that his ‘wet dream’ semen grows to become self sufficient, and, as it was rejected unlike the virgin-esque Gizmo, turns on his creator and the whole town seeking to destroy it in pubescent hormonal rage.”

This excellent analysis by Josh Schwartz makes us truly understand the gravity of the quote JDA has provided us with... because what Nathan Anthony is really saying with his piece called Flump Noose is: “Hey kid, need any help? Here’s something for you to snack on after midnight while caressing your furry animal friend.”



We should probably call the authorities.












(1) Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Schwartz

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