I went to an “art show” for a friend’s husband where he displayed (for sale!) abstract art that he made out of trash. Most of them looked like various pieces of garbage glued together into weirdly shaped mounds. One was as big as a car & another (possibly the least ugly work) was called “White on White” & consisted of pieces of white trash (crumpled up napkins, cups, paper, etc) all glued together into a misshapen heap.
A favorite weird wonderful artwork: Marisol’s “Self-portrait looking at The Last Supper”. Clever, interesting and reflective.
A least favorite weird “artwork”:
Marina Abramović’s “The Artist is Present” show at New York’s MOMA in 2010
This one looks like fragments of tabletops:
A pile of bones:
People with their hair tangled together
NSFW
Nudes: two in a narrow doorway so that viewers need to squeeze between them to get to the rest of the show; one lying with a skeleton on top; one hanging from a wall
[spoiler]
Anything by Chillida, with my apologies to the gent. Most of it would make an ok paperweight except they’re huge. I live close to the Chillida Museum; apparently he had these supercomplicated theological explanations for all his tubes and cubes but, sorry man, for those of us who didn’t go to art school they’re tubes and cubes.
I’ve been to at least three separate small towns which boast a Chillida piece and the local name for it is along the lines of “el quécojones” because “when people see it they exclaim ‘¿qué cojones?’” (=what the fuck?).
At a New York art museum there was a big installation on the wall. A bunch of black shapes, in a pattern. I approached this cautiously, it being New York. Like, it could have been elephant shit. But it was baguettes, hundreds of them, baked by the artist (burned by the artist in fact, or maybe scorched is a better word) and then arranged in this…pattern.
My husband has had works in a couple of juried shows this summer and each one of them has had some very perlexing stuff including at least one work in each show that made me wonder: Is this part of the show? Is this somebody’s artwork? WTF?
In one of the exhibits, the artist had made papier-mache doll houses and furnished them with pix of furniture from ads, and then peopled them with people from newspaper stories (all black and white photos, some from really old newspapers, like Nixon was there). Below this was a wooden box with a bunch of holes, and an orange heavy-duty extension cord was wrapped around it, in and out of the holes. Actually it may have been more than one orange extension cord, but the thing was, it wasn’t connected to anthing. A wooden box, on wheels, with an artfully (?) arranged series of extension cords. It didn’t have a tag. Was it part of the papier-mache thing above it? Was it a different work by somebody else? Did some maintenance guy just leave it there? I have no idea.
I guess it depends on what the artist thinks art should do. Obviously there are a lot of possible thoughts on this. And note that these juried shows included my husband’s work, which are pretty standard oil paintings (well, they aren’t representative, but they’re oil on canvas, therefore recognizably art, but a complete different world than some of the other things.
In another show, there were boxes wrapped in black duct tape and stacked up on a pallet with wheels. Again, no card saying if this was a work although it had to have been. For some reason it just seemed to me a lot more intentional than the electric cord thing. And it was not the only work in that show that didn’t have an identifying number. The other one was clearly part of the show, and I think the boxes must have been too, but is the point here to get somebody admiring a duct-tape-wrapped box as art and then say, “Ha, fooled ya”?
That electrical cord box though. It kinda haunts me.
Another couple I remember, both at London’s Serpentine Gallery but on different occasions.
The first was in a corridor joining two parts of the exhibition and consisted of several people dressed as old fashioned museum guards with dark gray suits and peaked caps with “Museum” written across the front. They sat on chairs arranged along one wall and just looked into space. It was really uncomfortable to walk past them.
The other was an entire exhibition of life-sized photographs of domestic interiors. Confusing at first working out what was the point, until you twigged that the artist hadn’t just photographed a kitchen or a bathroom, he had modelled the entire scene, life-size and in meticulous detail, out of construction paper and photographed the models. Inexplicably those photographs then became fascinating.
Many years ago at Denver art museum I saw a life-sized 3-D sculpture of an anime woman. She had a big anime smile, and her big anime tits were spraying milk everywhere.
Some years ago I encountered the “Understanding Joshua” photo series on the internet. You can see some of the pictures here, and get a textual interpretation of the series here. I have to admit I still don’t understand Joshua.
When my husband and I went to Innsbruck, Austria, we stopped in a place which we ever after referred to as “the worst art museum in the world”. There was only one exhibit, really, which was spread throughout all the various rooms. It mostly consisted of clear pipes filled with rushing green fluid. One room also had a TV set, showing “snow”, and an empty open refrigerator. There was also a room that the pipes went into and out of, but it was dark. We walked all over this museum, looking for some art, but had to give up.
I saw the one Mapplethorpe show; disturbing it was but I am not sure I would call it weird.
That I reserve for some things like this
dubbed from the beginning “The Tomb of the Unknown Bowler”. I’m sure it has an actual name given it by the artist but I don’t really care enough to Google for it. That whole thing just always struck me as weird.
Not the weirdest by any means, but I just heard about this portrait in the late Jeffrey Epstein’s paedo palace.
Not one to seek out ‘wierd’ art, but did see this while in St. John, Nova Scotia this summer: https://deliciousdivas.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/img_4386b.jpg?w=640&h=687 Apparently there are several of these characters around the city (which is a quite nice place to visit, IMHO), all by the same artist.
Back in 2000 in Sydney, we saw several paintings by an artist who specialised in adding clumps of elephant dung to the paintings. Turns out it was Chris Ofili, who is apparently fairly famous.
There’s also this rather explicit statue of Britney Spears giving birth (spoilered for explicitness):
I Like the “Giant 3-Way Plug” at the Oerlin Art Museum near me: The Official Blog of the Allen Memorial Art Museum • For our final Sunday Object Talk of the academic...
It looks nicer then that photo, very realistic.
I made an art display of my own that I wished I had a photo of. We used to have an employees art show every year. I copied my entire body on a copy machine, one piece at a time. The prints that had my shirt were done on yellow paper, the rest on white. They were just done as best as I could position myself for each print so when I taped it all together, arms and legs were akimbo, not naturally joined. I cut a slit in the shirt pocket and placed a real chrome pen in it. I loved it, but the art committee turned it down.
Dennis
When were you at Frostburg? I was there from 91-95 and don’t remember any artwork that was outside the building. That was one of the main buildings I used when I was there too, that and Dunkle.
Growing up in Columbia, SC, when I did (70s-80s), you learned quickly that people are stupid.
If for no other reason than because it was a relatively common occurrence for people to try to drive into Tunnelvision, a mural.
(The Atlas Obscura article linked from that Wikipedia page is optimistically misinformed. People absolutely have tried to drive into that mural.)
I can’t decide if this is weird or incredibly cool. I saw this in person when it was at Hains Point (D.C.).
[Google some of the images for a better view.]
Not too weird, but affected my best friend and I. In a good way.
Denver art gallery. Probably 20 years ago. I don’t remember the exhibit name. But it was a collection of portraits of archduchess, monarchs and kings and such. All in full dress with sashes and ribbons. All very prim and proper. One, I swear, looked just like Gene Wilder. My friend and I saw it, didn’t say a thing, and just cracked up.
How are you defining “tried to drive into”? Do you mean people have driven towards it and slammed on the brakes at the last minute when they realize it’s not real? Or literally rammed their car into the wall a la Wile E. Coyote? If it’s the former the article does say there have been many close calls.
That wall had several scars from car bumpers the last time I looked at it*. How fast they were going, I don’t know.
- Disclaimer: “the last time I looked at it” was ca. 1988, so there’s every possibility it has been repaired.
I graduated in 1991. It was still there then, because my father commented on it on graduation day.