No, It’s Art
It may look like a flight of UFO’s, but trust me, I saw it at the National Gallery of Canada, and it’s art.
A few days ago 3 of us went to visit the National Gallery of Canada, there’s some pretty cool stuff there, but this one struck me as being worth putting on the blog.
The display is in a large room with a layer of styrofoam balls on the floor, although you can’t see the wires that are attached to each plastic garbage can lid they are there, and they are attached to little electric motors suspended from the ceiling.
There is a control button that visitors can press that causes the garbage can lids to go up and down, and (to a limited degree) side to side; the breeze created by this action moves the little styrofoam balls around on the floor, and the art creates itself.
I gotta admit, I don’t get it.
Oh dear, SL. Clearly you did not at all understand the avant garde nature of what you were viewing.
“Balls in the Breeze†is a trenchant evisceration of the growing trend toward prudishness in the sexual psyches of North America’s dominent cultural mavens. The artist has deftly skewered current bourgeoisie notions of acceptable public behaviour by baring his balls for all to see, and then impishly waving them in the breeze. The garbage can lids are a wickedly sardonic take on the Religious Right’s condemnation of human sexuality, and using them as the force to create the breeze in which the artist’s balls are so deftly manipulated adds one more layer of surreptitious wit to his unmasking of these modern-day Victorian scolds. The minimalist approach to the room which houses the art clearly shows his contempt for the strictures of aesthetics, particularly as they are refracted through the insipid prism of popular culture.
You got all of that out of some styrofoam packing material on the floor and a few plastic garbage can lids?
There’s really no artistic hope for me at all is there }}}}}sigh{{{{{