October 22, 2019 – davidbruceblog #2

Practical Jokes

• Boyd Rice plays such pranks as writing messages on the backs of paintings that he finds in hotel rooms. Often, he will leave instructions for finding buried treasure, mentioning the names of streets found in that city. He says, “I’ve done this all overthe world.” He and some friends once found a lot of doggie pants in a dumpster. (Pet owners put the pants on dogs in heat so that they don’t do anything that will result in the birth of puppies.) He and his friends walked all around the neighborhood, putting doggie pants on every dog they could. One of his friends wanted fruit pie at a restaurant that advertised that it had fruit pie, but every time the friend asked for fruit pie, the servers at the restaurant said that they were out of fruit pie. Therefore, one day Mr. Rice and a number of his friends kept telephoning the restaurant and asking if it had fruit pie. The following day, he and his friends, including the friend who had long wanted fruit pie at the restaurant, went to the restaurant and sure enough, it had stocked many kinds of fruit pie. Mr. Rice’s friend was very happy. In addition, Mr. Rice and a few artist friends named Laurie O’Connell, Steve Thomsen, and Jeffrey Vallance oncehad an art showat the Otis Art Institute on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. They called themselves the Mezoic Group, from the word “Mesozoic.” However, instead of exhibiting their own works of art, they exhibited paintings that they had bought at thrift stores. Actually, Mr. Rice regarded these paintings as real paintings. He says that “it was one of the best art shows I’ve ever seen. It was real people doing real paintings, and they turned out odder and more distorted than if someone were deliberately tryingto create really unusual art.” As you may expect, some of the people who came to the art show were angry. One person complained, “This is blasphemy! This gallery space should be given to serious people trying to say something worthwhile.”

• When Frida Kahlo was a young student, she and some of her friends used to play practical jokes on and torment famous muralist Diego Rivera, whom she later married. Mr. Rivera even started to wear a pistol so that he could frighten his tormenters into behaving. Mr. Rivera was a man of great size and great passion and great impetuosity. At a party, he once decided that he did not like the record that was being played, so he shot the record player.

• Even as a boy, Renaissance painter Giotto di Bondone exhibited remarkable talent. He was apprenticed to the painter Cimabue (the nickname means “ox head”), and once, after Cimabue had painted a figure, Giotto painted a fly on the figure’s nose. The fly was so realistic that Cimabue waved his hand at the fly to chase it away.

• When Hugh Troy was a student at Cornell, he once took a pair of galoshes that belonged to a professor and painted them to resemble human feet, then he covered them with lampblack. The next time it rained, the rain washed off the lampblack and the professor appeared to be walking in the rain in his bare feet.

Prejudice

• Georgia O’Keefe ran into prejudice when she created serious art at a time when many Americans did not think that women could create serious art. At the Art Institute of Chicago, seeing live models — nude — shocked her and made her want to stop taking anatomy lessons, and at the Art Students League in New York, a male student told her that she ought to be his live model. After all, he said, he was going to be a serious artist and she would end up teaching art to females. Another student painted over her art because she had not painted trees in the Impressionist style. Actually, Ms. O’Keefe did not care how the Impressionist painted trees — she was too busy creating her own style — a style that would make her a world-famous artist.

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THE COOLEST PEOPLE IN ART

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Day: October 22, 2019

scary

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David Bruce: The Coolest People in Art — Practical Jokes, Prejudice