Stadium

Maurizio Cattelan
1991

Cattelan built an extra long table-football game that would accommodate as many players as an actual football/soccer game requires. I like it just as it is, ignoring the politics of the piece: art world as a mini society, but more sobering (Cattelan's home) Italian team played by Senegalese immigrants who suffered racism in Italy versus another team wearing a Nazi slogan on their shirts. Yes, those points and the game/war comparison make it a more serious piece, but in all honesty, the resounding groan of a lost victory in a World Cup game is far more beautiful to me.

Please water the plant and feed the fish

Juliette Blightman
2008

I would water and feed the hell out of these.

Thinking About Someone Special Who Lost Someone Special While Listening to Dolly Parton

Tad Hozumi
coming soon

I was looking for Tad's soccer paintings in honor of World Cup, since it is the only sport thing that conjures a warm fuzzy feeling for me. Something about many countries, one simple problem, quick recovery from loss, united rooting, and rooting for a country not one's own that does it. Instead I found a more recent work that, far from sport, radiates warmth in itself.

Thinking about meditation or yoga, it's not uncommon for one to hold an idea or person in mind, essentially sending healing energy to it. Thinking About Someone Special Who Lost Someone Special While Listening to Dolly Parton operates similarly, I would imagine, and does so in two ways. First, the consideration that thinking about someone special can help said person heal*. Second, music as a tool to conjure up a certain feeling, and music as a therapy**.

* There have been studies on this. I'll prove it in a forthcoming entry.
** There are studies on this too, but most people have experienced it firsthand.

Words and Years

Toril Johannessen
2010

Norwegian artist Toril Johannessen graphs the frequency of opposing words in academic journals. Underlying the work is an original dichotomy: drama and objectivity. I like Edward Tufte, but the beauty in Johannessen's series lives not only in presentation, but in the inquiry as well. Miracles, crisis, nature, Science, art, logic and love, hope and reality, expansion and recession... these meander my thoughts, but infrequently result in a calm, cool, and collected picture. Johannessen harmonizes the discord. See the series here.

Untitled

Jenny Walters
2006

Temporary Allegiance, a project on the UIC campus by artist Philip von Zweck, was your ordinary flagpole, but with an ever-changing repertoire of wavering commitment. Just as much it was a democratic means for several people to wave their veritable allegiances. LA-based artist Jenny Walters made my fave.

Harness

Robert Wechsler
2006

As the mouse tirelessly runs, the music box plays Brahm's Lullaby.

Grandpa used to wash my hands with gasoline

Clint Neufeld
2010

The exhibition that just ended at Parisian Laundry in Montréal featured the work of Saskatoon artist Clint Neufeld. The gallery's announcement said it best:

Nostalgia and memory play a key roll and act as the contextual impetus behind these aesthetic objects, rendering them useless of their design. They present a dichotomy of a romantic tension of memory and masculine and feminine clichés – delicate motif and car envy. Starting from the personal, Neufeld minds his regional prairie past and relationships with male figures in his life. Men who were not necessarily there emotionally but who, in their ways and language connected the artist to time and observing the extraordinary in the everyday.

The parts I like best are italicized. Thank you.