Second as a farce...
December 25, 2008
2 comments:
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are the second snowballs as wiry as the snowman behind them? If, so there is a striking difference here.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, I imagine what you are labeling as the first here was intended to be enveloped in an irony that borrowed a snow ball roadside sale and mixed it with artist selling what his work; you extend this irony by spotting a redundancy of it through farce. Can irony be used in a further construction to describe a different ironic instance?
There was someone at CalArts who used one of those white-twigs-with-lights mechanical-reindeer X-mas yard-decoration things as an armature for a sculpture. In that case there was a direct relation between the kitsch decor and the art, with the Michael's Crafts object coming first.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of selling snowballs, I would suspect that David Hammons and the designer of the snowman had their clever ideas independent of one another. In both cases, the 'irony' comes from commodifying something that is available (and only has fun use value) in abundance.
The title and line of text comes from a quote attributed to Karl Marx, "History repeats first as a tragedy, second as a farce." I don't think Hamons' act is a tragedy any more than I see the intention of farce in the snowman, so perhaps Marx is a bad analogy.
I guess what I find interesting is that the "Bliz-aard Ball Sale" action fits so well with the shadow economies of lower Manhattan in the '80s--along with the economies of the art market--and then years later it gets co-opted as yard decor--which essentially turns Hammons into a lawn jockey one finds in front of White Southern homes.