Sunday, April 11, 2010

Dump Truck

Apologies for this tardy post. That's how many of my posts are likely to be. I have so many I want to write and so little time, I get behind. I could have just said, fuck it, and not done this post. But if I had done that, I wouldn't be able to post this photo:




Yeah, that's Bill Arning, the director of the CAMH, painting while dressed in an elephant costume.

This was the culmination of a slide show Dump Truck gave on march 25 at the CAMH. Dump Truck is Cory Wagner and Mat Wolff. One of their first pieces was called Dump Truck Divorces a Sculpture--a play off the Art Guys performance The Art Guys Marry a Plant. In this case, they took one of Wagner's solo sculptures, a rather cool cube made of PVC pipe on one corner, and systematically destroyed it with golf clubs in a Houston city park, dressed in white linen suits. They showed a video of this but cut it short, which really bummed me out because I wanted to see the whole thing come down.

Their current project, How to Make Art in Texas, seems much less interesting. You can read about it here. Read it? OK. The problem, based on the snippets they showed us, is that the discussions tended to veer to the silly and self-deprecating--which is too bad because it would be interesting to know how people who promote art, display it, connect artists, enable art events, etc., do what they do on a practical level and on a level of psyching oneself up to actually do it. But maybe that be there in the completed videos. The thing that bugged me was that the sound quality was horrible! They paid a lot of attention to creating a setting but not too much to recording it well.

Then again, I never pay much attention to sound quality myself. As can be seen by this video.

4 comments:

  1. hmm ... still not getting the elephant costume, but I guess I don't have to understand. It IS amusing.

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  2. Believe it or not, there is an explanation. It's funnier without it, but here goes: they noticed that the zoo was raising money by selling paintings painted by elephants. Dump Truck thought they could do the same for CAMH, but lacking a real elephant, they made a costume for Arning.

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  3. Thanks for the explanation, Robert. I'll keep what my own imagination made of it though... :-)

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