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Friday, July 31, 2009

Eye Candy Friday: Amateur Hour

Karen Brummund lives in Utica.  She was one of the WOMS artists last year.  And she's turned me onto various interesting items.  The most recent such item is One & Other is a project of Antony Gormley.  Mr Gormley's premise is to fill the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square with living figures in place of the classical monumental statues who over the course of 100 days will constitute a living portrait of the UK.


Antony Gormley on the Fourth Plinth from One & Other on Vimeo.
 
Twenty four hours a day through October, participants will spend an hour atop the plinth doing as they please.  I've just been tuning in sporadically over the past few days and thus far its been a cavalcade of banal and the inane.  Each plinther chosen to stand aloft can do whatever he or she wishes to do with the allotted hour.  As I'm writing this, it's 4 am in London and there's a guy wearing some generic soldier's dress uniform of navy coat, grey slacks and navy coat crossed by a red sash with a saber scabbard hanging from a white belt.  He's holding a flag of  broad bands and squares in tones of sage.   The guy is whistling.  He's now ....stating that what he is doing is an act of treason, at least according to his own view.
The project is yet another consummation in the marriage of the homebound voyeur and the cult of individual in this age of the internet.  Each person's 15 minutes of ostentatious obscurity is stretched to one hour.  Now he's photographing himself.  Other plinthers I've seen have included mostly women (dowdy ones - of all ages),  most of whom have some cause to champion or some point to make - several of them with illegible signs of one sort or another.  Our current plinther's cause is Old Rectoryland
The most interesting segment I've seen thus far featured a guy riding a stationary bicycle.  The vision of this semi- static visual worked more and his continual futile pumping perfectly exemplifies the exercise in its fullest respect - in an a freudian dream analytic way. 
I'm just waiting to see some nudity. But not from this guy. 
Dawn is breaking in London and our man is being picked from his perch and making way for the next superstar.

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