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Season 1
View All PostsJerry Saltz
What's Poop Got to Do with It?
Jerry hopes that Michelle actually gets to make her poop piece at some point this season.
Oct 20, 2011Then reality stepped in again. Kathryn made an okay-enough video of gutty bloody clumps thrown on plastic. I liked the staccato visual rhythms and the thwacking sounds, but it looked almost exactly like the photo she made last week. In the crit I shared these thoughts, adding that I was doubting her willingness to push herself and try out other ideas. Just as I was puffing up my inner critic feathers, all hell broke loose. Kathryn lost it, saying "I know; I know. I was grasping. I know!" She began wailing. Then crying. Everyone glared at me. China stopped the crit. The artists shot me withering looks. Remember that, at the time, I had no notion of her medical issues. Agape, I thought "What the hell just happened?" When I watched the show, I saw exactly what had happened. I had become a douchebag on national television.
There are many kinds of artists and numerous definitions of artistic success. We can't all be, or want to be, a Takashi Murakami. Kathryn is clearly a real artist. Possibly, a very good one. I'm told she's done photographs for this magazine. She lost last night because as a highly cerebral, narrowly focused art-school-trained artist — Yale MFA; Photography, it turns out — she had no business being on a reality TV show. Here she seemed like some kind of out-of-place orchid, an illogical presence more like Kafka's Gregor Samsa than someone on a bizarrely twisted, pressure-compressed reality TV grad-school game show about art. It was right to send her home. And, Michelle, please this season make a poop piece.
Designing the afterlife or creating a religion are amazing ideas. I hope the producers listen to you eventually. Also, I only noticed you were short this week because you mentioned it last week ;)
I would have more interested in Kathryn's work if she made use of anything other than a bloody rag..Hmm..maybe some of Sucklord's dolls?
I just saw this one on demand and am stuck by this whole theme thing so it can be judged like a competition. The looser was trapped by her need to express the pain of her Crohn's disease in every piece she does. Repetition a no –no on the show… yet is encouraged by the art world to create a brand Identity. Didn’t Keith Haring basically repeat the same wiggly doodle baby’s? I don’t like anything done on this episode, the winner being very lucky the theme was motion… something film is great at. What disappointing is that the judges don’t know better that any kind of video loop is “mesmerizing.” It’s called hypnosis… achieved by chanting or repeating numbers or images in your head. I was wrong last week about video guy loosing sooner that later, but I think this is his last time near the top. Video is not fine art as much is it’s what it is: short films with no home.
Thank you for sharing your insights. I have always felt that the work must play so very differently on television. (Thinking specifically of Leon's latest piece at the moment. I would have loved to see that in the gallery!)
Oh, and there is a pooping piece in Michelle's portfolio, Jerry. Hopefully you can content yourself with that because I, for one, am not eager to see another. LOL
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