Christmas tree cookie with Googly eyes

Result #1

, for example, or a sloth hanging out of its mother's purse (Cool Autumn?). And unlike the pop flowers on display, these are not still-life-as-comic-object-vitrified-for-public-entertainment things. Their form is at once intimate and edgy, mysterious and uncanny, and they are not abstract figures which appear to derive from caricatured childrens art, nor do they directly evoke the elements of Tex Avery and Charles Bronson. Instead, they are all-encompassing, more self-reflexive than that. The bulk of the artists in these shows were women, but one doesn't necessarily think of them as women, or even particularly women artists. The differences between the various artists, which ranged from Jane Campbell to Cecily Richards, were also the most striking. Although most of the works were made by the same person, they had varying degrees of formal merit, and some were composed almost entirely of rubber. Only one artist, Wanda Gadea, seemed to take the term rather metaphorically, as a metaphor for the spirit of self-expression, the spirit of making art.

Result #2

, mirror pictures of Hitler and Stalin, and a dolphin in a plastic bowl. These last items may be the least provocative of the many works, but they do add up to a declaration of intent: Hitler is merely a series of bad art. If only it had been a Nazi who noticed.Martin Kippenbergers artistic triumph is a celebrated one. He has produced many pieces that the critic largely ignores. He has had to publish his own manifestos, to which he has obliged himself in making the image of the Nazis newspaper Tagesreport in which the events of September 11 are depicted. He has produced a few works that are tolerable, such as a bathtub, the decorative rainbow flag, a large white cloud that looks like a swastika, and a few paintings that are generally tolerable. His points of view, however, are almost too vast. As in the work of Frank Stella, the Jews are never shown; they are merely reified, shadow figures, or other fictitious peopleifications of a lost civilization. Moreover, they are never shown in the usual style, as are the women. The canvas Dichter Düre künstler (Jew-woman) is divided into three parts: a landscape, a man, and a woman. The landscape depicts the Jews living in a luxury residence, while the man is the sailors who act as spectators and recipients of the verbal verbal abuse and cruelty of the Nazi scolds.The painting Dichter Düre künstler (Jew-woman) shows the Jewish woman as the woman of a social class. She is photographed on a beach holding a Styrofoam cup. She looks like the modern version of a previous artistic avatar, one who has too much to offer for the onlooker.

Result #3

in the shape of a Gatorade can, as if some sentient giant were taking the place of the baby. The figurine ends with a cheetah-like head that seems to extend from her head into her reflection in the mirror. In this carving of the familiar back to the viewer, one felt a rare empathy for the giddy baby and her lover, the child in a googly-eyes helmet. The action (at the same time as the visage) of nature and society had come together in a situation, though extremely unusual, in which children and nature, the two essential elements of existence, were said to be one.

Result #4

Christmas tree cookie with Googly eyes, a piece of the toadstool atop which are a pair of red and blue bottles containing liquor (detox?) and an empty liquor container (Drink container). And in one spot, a refrigerator, topped with a box of Marlboros, covered in white silk, stands vacant. The title, From the Ashes, is a self-referential take on William Burroughs, whose own postmodernist research into the beginning of time was also explored in this installation. At the same time, in addition to portraying the process of the fridge as an unproductive tool, the work also includes a display case, which is used as a shelving unit. The construction of a poster billboard of a fellow walking in—perhaps in New York City, where the postmodernist one-way street is nothing more than a pair of people selling in Times Square—is echoed by the billboard of a poster billboard in which the walking is a digital image of another poster. In the same work, two contemporary-looking young men walk the thin line between decency and illegality, with the two wearing identical sunglasses (one, presumably, participating in the Grey Area code of the sixty-first century). This link between the images of the parents and of the work in Times Square plays out in a continuum of temporalism, with the reference to the artists participation as both a job and a task. In the meantime, however, both figures are suspended by slender wires, waiting for the passengers of the boarding-pass cars, who are reminiscent of film-star faces. The only other reference to a street performance is the by-now familiar riff of a stage-set music-hall group.

Result #5

on it. The cake-shaped googly eyes, holding a wooden wand, are reminiscent of Calvin and Hobbes in their comic elementality, but also bring to mind the Gang of Five cartoon characters from The Goon. Alongside the cookie were five other tiny ceramic sculptures that could be considered—according to the artist—babies, toys, monsters, and signs of abuse, but where Hobbes grotesque head, Brancusi-esque torso, and Googly eyes did not come off as too silly, Cranston has managed to bolster their appeal with the sly humor of the painted ceramics. The refrigerator is already made out of Styrofoam, a plastic material that has proven to be among the most recognizable, and increasingly sought-after, hard-and-fast brands of the recent past. With this addition, the focus on Styrofoam becomes increasingly personal, and the distinctions between the personal and the commercial are blurred.Cranstons contribution to the ongoing and continuing saga of Styrofoam is a clever one. He appropriates a nostalgic look of high-modernism for his own purposes, and presents this material in a very obviously functional guise. The reduced size of the work speaks of a corporate palette, and the repetition of the Styrofoam components—in their same basic shape and uniform size—makes the work an obvious receptacle for human potentiality. With this in mind, Cranstons work does little more than situate Styrofoam as a late-modernist relic, one that has been used to transport a great deal of human potential, and has become the most ubiquitous object in the world. By reducing Styrofoam to its initial purpose—making a few tokens of our love and obsolescence—Cranston achieves a subtler transformation. These are perfect signs of the zeitgeist.