kamproblema

[kamproblema]

John Waters (1946-)

Like his early films of the 1970s, such as the iconoclastic Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, Waters’ best art gleefully skewers the cherished institutions of American life, deploying the detritus of pop culture in ironic juxtapositions of high and low, sacred and profane to expose the “indecency” of everything the straight world holds dear (family, gender norms, religious mores, domesticity), as well as our pernicious worship of celebrity and fame.

Playdate, 2006

Two figures comprised of silicone, human and synthetic hair, cotton flannel and polar fleece. Here Waters captures an eerie, life-like rendering of the archetypal figures Michael Jackson and Charles Manson.

Justin’s Had Work, 2014

Sneaky J. F. K., 2001

[kamproblema]

Pink Flamingos. John Waters, 1972.

“To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about,” says Waters in one of his memoirs, Shock Value. “If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.”

Pink Flamingos is a 1972 American post-modern exploitation, comedy or strictly speaking camp film directed, written, produced, narrated, filmed, and edited by John Waters. It is part of what Waters has labelled the "Trash Trilogy", which also includes Female Trouble (1974) and Desperate Living (1977). The film stars the countercultural drag queen Divine as a criminal living under the name of Babs Johnson, who is proud to be "the filthiest person alive".

Displaying the tagline "An exercise in poor taste", Pink Flamingos is notorious for its "outrageousness", nudity, profanity, and "pursuit of frivolity, scatology, sensationology [sic] and skewed epistemology."  The film is considered a preliminary exponent of abject art.

Like the underground films from which Waters drew inspiration, which provided a source of community for pre-Stonewall queer people, the film has been widely celebrated by the LGBT community and has been described as "early gay agitprop filmmaking." This, coupled with its unanimous popularity among queer theorists, has led to the film being considered "the most important queer film of all time." Pink Flamingos is also considered an important precursor of punk culture.

[kamproblema]

Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Jeff Koons, 1988.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles 

“I wanted to create him in a very god-like icon manner. But I always liked the radicality of Michael Jackson; that he would do absolutely anything that was necessary to be able to communicate with people.”

The work's material reminds of catholic mass-produced figures of saints which are usually manufactured in porcelain and gold leaf. Thus the sculpture becomes a kitschy object that is appealing for a wide public and the art market. Koons claims that he wanted to depict Jackson as a new redemptive figure who enables people to discover their own cultural mythology.

In 2012 the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt attracted attention displaying Michael Jackson and Bubbles next to Egyptian mummies and thus established an aesthetic and ironic dialogue between the objects.

One was sold at Sotheby's on 15 May 2001, when it was auctioned off to the record price of 5.6 million dollars.

The American artist Paul McCarthy created some sculptures relating to Michael Jackson and Bubbles:

Michael Jackson and Bubbles (Gold), 1997-1999.

Michael Jackson Fucked Up (Big Head), 2002.

The Aesthetics of Frozen Dreams: Kitsch and Anti-Kitsch in Jeff Koons and Mariko Mori:

http://www.art-in-society.de/AS9/TBB_Koons-Mori.html