LArt MP: Brandon Bird: Celebrity and Humor

"Lazy Sunday Afternoon"

"Arete"

Here's another artist that engages some of the themes I brought up in my previous posts, namely celebrity, humor, and their place in contemporary art. Bird's drawings and paintings range from incredibly detailed to almost childish sketches, but all of them exhibit the same regurgitation of pop culture personalities and imagery. I think that Bird is using this imagery (Norris, Harrison Ford, Lincoln, the Nintendo, the Sega Genisis, etc) as ready-made objects to be placed in a different context. Taylor states that, "Readymade object-sculpture begins from the premise that an existing object presented in a new fashion can be aesthetically more powerful - given certain assumptions about authorship, originality, and "presence" - than a newly crafted one" (Taylor 92).

These paintings also exhibit an opposite approach to depicting celebrity in art than Richard Avedon. Avedon preferred to present his subjects in amazing detail, mostly against a stark white background or in focus against a blurry background, however, Bird's approach depends on the context in which the iconic person is viewed (hence the Readymade connection). For instance, the two pieces above completely depend on the context Walken and Norris are in - Walken is presented as a mad scientist and Norris as a subject in a Rembrant painting. Without these juxtapositions, the pieces would have no potency in their humor.

Bird also utilizes his strange sense of humor in descriptions of his work, preferring to parody the process of dissecting iconography in an image, as seen in the quote below, which describes the painting "Bad Day on the High Sea":

"Here, raw sexual aggression is symbolized by the sperm whale, while the squid acts as a thinly-disguised metaphor for the multi-armed oligarchies of Rockefeller, Hearst, and Morgan. Their battle plays against the backdrop of the sea, standing in for--what else?--the vastness of the unconscious mind."