Icons
The icons display various sports teams´ logos and companies’ logos, The Yankees, Starbucks, Mac, Paramount, Coca Cola etc. All these brands define what it is to be American. These logos are made as icons in order to compare these to the religious icons that are worshiped as such. I decided to pick twelve logos and do them as gold icons, twelve being a kind of a religious number. I did not want to pick the companies in order to portray these in a negative way. I picked the companies that have a really strong identity which people have a strong relation to.
Jesus Walks, 2007. 176,5cm x 208,5 cm oil, acrylic, fake silver and fake gold on wood
This is the American crusade over Iraq showing a possible American/Christian victory. Jesus is leading the Americans but he is not depicted as the religious version we are used to but as a character taken from a film where Jesus is hippie-like and fun loving and not like the crucified Christ. I thought this Jesus-character would fit in well in the painting to show the Americans´ crusade into Iraq stepping on dead bodies etc. The Jesus character is taken from Kevin Smith´s “Dogma” (1999) where he is called Buddy Christ.
I have put in some actors who have played soldiers. For example: On top of the dead bodies you see the character Dutch from the movie Predator (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) and George Clooney´s character from the movie about the first gulf war, Three Kings (1999). You also see the helmet from my favourite Vietnam movie, Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987).
In the painting you also see myself with this foam finger cheering on, it is like although many Americans are very aware and critical of what is going on and vote against the government it is not really democracy, we cannot really vote them out. I am showing the American imperialism: a combination of a very nice life style and all the crimes we are responsible for around the world. In the painting I am wearing a Reggie Bush football jersey, number 25 New Orleans Saints. During the Iraq war we had this terrible hurricane, Katrina, in New Orleans but nothing was done because all the focus was on Iraq and the government spent so much money on the war in stead of helping our own people in the backyard. Reggie Bush is a black man, and most black people in the US have the names of the families who used to own them as slaves so Reggie Bush could have relatives who were owned as slaves by the Bush family!
In the painting you also see this Arbusto oil drum. Arbusto was established George W. Bush and one of the major investors was the Bin Laden family! You also see George W. Bush as a cowboy.
Also appearing is Britney Spears (just after painting her hair I heard that she had shaved her head!) as a Dallas cowgirl cheerleader in the position of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, albeit in a white trailer trash version. You also see a bumber sticker “First Iraq then France”. I actually saw this sticker on a car near my studio.
I know Thomas and I are really excited to have Tom’s piece depicting twelve shamed sports stars in similar style to the above NBA Draft portraits. Come and See It!
Elisabetta Benassi examines, through the use of mechanical artifacts, the proliferation of machines in our society. The Roman artist’s ability in multiple media was apparent in her solo exhibition at Magazzino d’Arte Moderna. Two large-format photographs, a kinetic sculpture, and a multichannel video comprise “3,” a cohesive journey into modern myth, with three separate spaces offering distinct perspectives on a single, machinery-based vision in which, nonetheless, nothing is explicitly certain, the result open to visitors’ personal interpretations.
Yield to Total Elation (all works 2006) is a video installation of three simultaneous projections. A vintage red sports car runs around a monumental sand quarry set in a desolate landscape in the Italian Alps. No one is visible in the driver’s seat, making it seem as if the car is being driven by superhuman forces. A white horse and rider briefly appear and accompany the car, adding a dreamy, unpredictable sense of fiction. But the promise of narrative is abrogated in favor of abstract visual strength and vivid dream symbols. In its race against time and natural forces, the car can only be stopped by itself–when the gas runs out. Its journey might be pointless, but the perpetual movement induces a hypnotic state.
Another form of never-ending motion is evident in the sculpture Untitled (La vie a credit) (Life on the Installment Plan). On a wooden table whose legs have been replaced by four long-handled clamps, a mechanical arm continues to lower as its sharp tine relentlessly turns into the surface; this apparently unstoppable process will eventually result in the two-and-a-half-inch-thick wooden tabletop being cut right through. Like a snake that bites its own tail, the kinetic sculpture will end by destroying itself, through a slow yet ceaseless incising. But destruction will give birth to unpredictable new forms that the viewer can only imagine.
Suolo #3 (Ground #3) and Suolo #4 (Ground #4) are large-format digital photographs of the floor of an auto repair shop: Nails, washers, and other metal and plastic parts are viewed from above, like some mapping of urban detritus. The life-size photographs look almost like framed pieces of soil. The refuse forms a surprisingly harmonious whole, as if the composition had been determined by the artist. Disposal and destruction don’t evoke death but rather a continuity of life in objects. In these works, our fears about progress and modernity are exorcised as Benassi constructs an eternal moment that fuses the natural with the mechanical, a permanent circularity that leaves us, as Igor Stravinsky once put it, “no time to hurry.”
The turnout for this promotion far exceeded all expectations. White Sox management was hoping for an additional crowd of 5,000, but 50,000 turned up instead. Thousands of people were climbing walls and fences in order to get into Comiskey Park and others were locked out when the stadium was filled to capacity and beyond.
White Sox TV announcers Harry Caray and Jimmy Piersall commented freely on the “strange people” wandering aimlessly in the stands. Mike Veeck recalled that the pregame air was heavy with the scent of marijuana.[3] When the crate on the field was filled with records, staff stopped collecting them from spectators who soon realized that long-playing (LP) records were shaped like Frisbees. They began to throw their records from the stands during the game, and the records often struck other fans. The fans also threw beer and even firecrackers from the stands.
After the first game, Dahl, dressed in army fatigues and helmet, along with a female sidekick named Lorelei and bodyguards, went out to center field. The large box containing the collected records was rigged with a bomb. When it exploded, the bomb tore a hole in the outfield grass surface and thousands of fans immediately rushed the field. Some lit fires and started small-scale riots. The batting cage was pulled down and wrecked,[4] and the bases literally stolen, along with chunks of the field itself. The crowd, once on the field, mostly wandered around aimlessly,[5] though a number of participants burned banners, sat on the grass or ran from security and police. People sitting in the upper deck could feel it sway back and forth from the rioters.
Veeck and Caray used the public address system to implore the fans to leave the field immediately, but to no avail. Eventually, the field was cleared by the Chicago Police in riot gear. Six people reported minor injuries and thirty-nine were arrested for disorderly conduct.[6] Tigers’ manager Sparky Anderson refused to field his team citing safety concerns, which resulted in the forfeiture by the White Sox to the Tigers. The remaining games in the series were played, but for the rest of the season fielders and managers complained about the poor condition of the field.
For White Sox outfielder Rusty Torres (who had singled and scored the only Chicago run in a 4-1 loss in the first game), it was nothing new: Disco Demolition Night was actually the third time in his career he had personally seen a forfeit-inducing riot. He had been playing for the New York Yankees at the last Senators game in Washington in 1971, and a Cleveland Indian at the infamous Ten Cent Beer Night in Cleveland in 1974.
At least one writer characterized this event, referencing “American Pie“, as “The Day Disco Died”.[7]
According to the 1986 book “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone history of Rock and Roll” the event was the “emblematic moment” of the anti-disco “crusade” and noted that “the following year disco had peaked as a commercial blockbuster”.
Steve Dahl himself said in an interview with Keith Olbermann that disco “was a fad probably on its way out” but that the event “hastened its demise.”
