Saturday, October 08, 2005
ARTIST EXPRESSES OPINIONS
How might a sensitive leftoid peacenik artist depict the slaying of Nicholas Berg? Like this:
See, the cap is removed from the Evil American Beer to represent Berg’s decapitation! Pretty clever, don’t you think? It’s by Monika Behrens, whose work is currently on display as part of the “Primavera” exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemptible Art. Reader TonyT recently attended, and reports that the exhibition is sponsored by Deutsche Bank, Telstra, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Here’s the SMH review (art links added):
Sydney artist Monika Behrens, who has also been chosen for the exhibition, revels in rendering her landscapes and still-life paintings political. Take her large oil painting Commonwealth of Turdralia, which is a comment on last year’s federal election. It shows yellow toy houses clustered around a spray can sporting a smiling Mr Sheen, who has more than a passing resemblance to the Prime Minister.
Take her large oil painting and set it on fire. Please.
“Mr Sheen is about self-centred voters thinking about their own mortgages,” the 29-year-old artist says. “I’ve always been quite political. I suppose it’s just because of the current state of the world and how we’re bombarded by what’s going on.”
Like, you know, the current state of the world? And, you know, how we’re bombarded with what’s going on and stuff? Monika is the Paris Hilton of the leftoid art community.
She’s also painted Guantanamo, which features an American superhero battling bright orange prawns, representing Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks and former detainee Mamdouh Habib, and Hostage Crisis in Beslan showing Russian dolls with eggs broken among them.
Monika uses a Budweiser bottle to represent a murdered American. And to illustrate Russian suffering over Beslan, she uses—inspiration!—some Russian dolls! This, my friends, is Art.
Behrens researches her current affairs and formulates her opinion, which she says doesn’t change.
Artists are always open to new ideas.
Response to her work has mostly been positive.
Well, of course. Sane people rarely bother examining Monika’s style of spaz-modernism. Here are some further examples:
* Baghdad was a lovely city of flowers before the degenerates arrived.
* The London bombings might have killed a bunch of people, but it’s cuter to think of them as a delightful collision of hot dogs, Thomas the Tank Engine, and foam!
* Join the happy coconut people as they feast on raw meat—which in this case represents those murdered at the Sari Club in Bali two years ago. It makes you think! Reviewer Sebastian Smee was among the minority of those unimpressed:
The grossness of these images—their colour schemes as well as their content—is deliberate. But when you become aware of your brain saying, “This plus this plus this equals what? Oh, that!” you can be fairly sure you are not looking at art.
How unfair. I hope Smee doesn’t review my own MCA exhibition, which will feature a piece in which Monika is represented by a Victoria Bitter can (because she’s Australian!) being attacked by foam coconuts during a rail journey from London to Bali.
