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Robert LazzariniGuns (2008)
Robert Lazzarini’s artwork springs from a desire to understand the perceivable limits of the material world. Conceptually and formally rigorous, he pushes ordinary objects to their limits by mining the twined threads of distortion and material veracity. By fully devoting himself to these indispensable characteristics, Lazzarini negotiates a place between two and three dimensions that challenges his viewers’ understanding of the physical world and their visual perception. Though often mistaken for mere anamorphism, Lazzarini’s work is in fact affected by multiple mathematical distortions so that his pieces elude finite conclusions and deny normative reads. In Lazzarini’s most recent exhibition, guns and knives at the Aldrich Museum of Art, he has turned his attention forward in two significant ways. The first is a shift within the sculptures, which for the first time conflate multiple objects to further complicate and abstract the forms. The second is an alteration of the actual gallery itself, whose walls are canted at varying angles to subtly disrupt the viewer’s apprehension of the physical space and further offset the distortions of the works themselves.
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Gehard Demetz Stones in My Pocket (2014)
"Stones in My Pocket" (which was shown at Art Miami last December) features a boy wearing rubber gloves, the kind used for dishwashing, but also with a gun in his mouth. Noting that many children enjoy trying on their father's and mother's clothes, slipping into shoes and jackets and such even though they're much too big, Demetz points out that this boy wears the gloves of an adult, but loses his ability to use his hands. "The gun is a fetish idea, like a ball-gag in the mouth. He is trying out same things as adults—but he loses his voice."
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Pedro ReyesDisarm (2014)
Pedro Reyes creates second generation instruments from dismantled guns. With a team of musicians and new media studio, Cocolab, Reyes has made mechanized instruments from these one-time harmful weapons.
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Claes OldenburgRay Gun Wing (1977)
In Claes Oldenburg's numerous Ray Gun works, he has an obsession with the right angle. In addition to creating several Ray Gun sculptures in a variety of materials (plaster, paper-mache, vacuum formed commercial plastics, etc.etc.), he amassed an even larger collection of found ray guns. "All one has to do is stoop to gather them from sidewalks," wrote Yve-Alain Bois, "he did not even need to collect them himself: he could ask his friends to bring them to him (he accepted or refused a find, based on purely subjective criteria).” Ray Gun Wing, published by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1977, documents his collection, and proposal for a museum.
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David ČernýGuns (1994)
By far the most famous contemporary Czech artist, David Cerny has snagged a name for himself as the “bad boy” of Czech art. In 'Guns' (1994), four gigantic “Guns” are aimed at each other while suspended in mid-air. Every now and then, a blast rings out from the guns to the sound of slamming doors, flushing toilets, and car brakes.
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Vija CelminsVarious (1964 - 2010)
'I think I felt that these images belonged to all of us. they were our images. However, I must have been interested in Freudian, phallic imagery of some sort, right? There is a photograph of me taken in 1966. I had been working on a large sculpture of a pencil stub, which is sitting beside me, along with a nude mannequin that someone had brought over for me to decorate for a show. that photo would have inspired Freud! I think many young artists have sex on their minds, and I think I did too. The drawing of the gun [Clipping with Pistol 1968] came from the fact that a friend of mine had been attacked and her boyfriend gave her a gun, so I wanted to do a picture of it. I did some paintings, and then got interested in gun magazines, tore out some clippings, did this one drawing and then lost interest.'-- Vija Celmins
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“Pistol” (1964)
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"Gun with Hand #1" (1964)
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"Hand Holding a Firing Gun" (1964)
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“Hand holding a firing gun (study)" (1964)
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"Table With Gun" (2009-2010)
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Felix Gonzalez-TorresUntitled (Death by Gun) (1990)
While González-Torres dealt with gay rights, AIDS, and a variety of governmental abuses in his own work and as a member of the collective Group Material, the subject of "Untitled" (Death by Gun), and its treatment, is unusually specific for him. Appropriating imagery from Time magazine, it presents 460 individuals killed by gunshot in one week in the United States, and includes the name, age, and circumstances of death for each person depicted. No opinion about gun control is added by the artist. Here an issue of public debate engages anyone who follows the artist's intention and takes away one of his sheets. Dissemination, an age-old function of printed art, is ongoing since "Untitled" (Death by Gun) is reprinted as the stack is depleted.
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Mel ChinHOME y SEW 9 (1994)
“HOME y SEW 9” features a Glock-17 9 mm handgun that Chin transformed into a working first-aid kit. “HOME y SEW 9,” Chin said, came about when he “started thinking about how weapons in our culture, especially guns, have such a tremendous aura — a tremendous presence — in the minds of individuals across the country.” The idea of hollowing out the gun to make room for a first-aid kit struck him as “a better way of understanding our gun culture. The more you deconstructed this weapon, the more you could get closer to saving your life, or someone else’s.”
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Charles GitnickVarious (2015-2016)
He’s not your average artist. For starters, Charles Gitnick is 11 years old. But age doesn’t mean a thing when you have New York, Miami and L.A. gallerists approaching you about your work. Doing art since age five, Gitnick started his ‘career’ by mixing colors, visiting art museums and learning about artists. His most famous work involves the splattering of paint and color over guns–all sizes, too, from petite pistols to heavy machine guns.
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::vtol::GBG-8 (2015)
Russian artist ::vtol:: recently created an 8-bit instant photo gun by combining a Game Boy, gun, camera, and a thermal printer with an Arduino.
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Joachim KoesterThe Place of Dead Roads (2013)
The Place of Dead Roads is a video that follows four androgynous cowboys as they enact a choreographed duel. Staged in a subterranean maze, each subject motions at their invisible opponents with actions characteristic of the Western genre—drawing their guns, shooting, and shifting their bodies to survey their surroundings. Instead of being driven by story, their actions seem motivated by hidden messages transmitted from a world deep within their bodies, a notion that evokes Wilhelm Reich’s idea that “every muscular contraction contains the history and meaning of its origin.” Watch an excerpt.
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Francis AlÿsCamguns (2008)
Francis Alÿs' series of cam guns: a group of wooden rifles that incorporate found film reels instead of bullet chambers, evoking the artist’s confrontational nature, attacking subjects through film but in this case allowing visitors to pick up the “weapons,” making them active participants.
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Karen KilimnikI Don't Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre (1991)
Banal, degraded, abject, or seemingly inconsequential, the objects of Karen Kilimnik's installations together create jarring associations and hybrid perspectives on the issues of her day. In I Don't Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree, or Schoolyard Massacre, 1991, Kilimnick hung, drilled, and painted some components onto the wall, and scattered others, standing and sitting on the floor. These components--including shooting targets, chicken wire, a cassette player and cassette, clothing, photocopies, a whiffle ball and bat, a badminton racket, baton, mechanical toy dog, toy guns, lunchbox, jump rope, rubber ball, pencils, notebooks, gravel, pushpins--together comprise an aggressive, unsettling scene that presents by turns as a shooting range, magazine spread, classroom, child's bedroom, and crime scene.
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John BaldessariKiss/ Panic (1984)
Kiss/ Panic (1984) celebrates the banality of gun-culture evil in a rectilinear mandala that combines black and white images of firearms with a full-color close-up of mouths colliding in a kiss. The picture’s possible meanings ripple out from its ambiguous center in a way that is typical of Baldessari’s taste for paradox.
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Burt BarrDolly Shot Twice (1997)
In the work, an attractive blonde woman (ostensibly named “Dolly”) is seen slumped over in a vintage Cadillac convertible parked in a wooded area. The scene is captured twice, first by a camera slowly moving to the left from a few yards away—in a “dolly shot”—and then again, but close-up, allowing us to take notice of the two bullet wounds in her head, as the camera slowly pans to the right.
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Laurie SimmonsLying Gun (1990), Walking Gun (1991)
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Niki de Saint PhalleUntitled from Edition MAT 64 (1964)
Solicited by Swiss artist Daniel Spoerri to provide instructions for how her multiples should be executed, she responded with a letter written to Spoerri’s collaborator Karl Gerstner enumerating a set of “operating instructions.” Though unequivocally direct, her instructions point to an unusual (though signature for the artist) creative act, one to be explicitly followed by amateur marksmen, museum professionals, art patrons, and other interested parties. They read, in full:
Lean picture against a wall.
Put a strong board behind it (if required, in order to protect the wall).
Take a .22 long rifle and load with short ammunition.
Shoot the color pouches which are embedded in the plaster until they have “bled” (or until you like the picture).
Attention! Leave the picture in the same position until well dried. Then still be careful, as remains of color not yet dry might run over the picture.
The emphasis Saint Phalle gives here to the procedures for producing the work—the precision implied in choice of gun, ammunition, and effects of drying paint—is noteworthy, though rarely discussed in the Saint Phalle literature, both for its level of detail and for its relative flexibility. The identity of the shooter is not classified by gender or any other parameters, nor does Saint Phalle indicate any specified location for the shooting event. Rather, the “instructions” ultimately remain open-ended: aim and shoot until “you like the picture.” As a result, Saint Phalle’s premise for the edition was fascinatingly simple. Her “pop gun” method ensured that the monochromatic white could instantly transform into a polychromatic field of intensity; while the multiplication of the blank plaster canvases provided under the Edition MAT portfolio could offer the experience to unknown others.
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Amir MobedCome Caress Me (2010)
It was performed in September 2010 at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran. Mobed stood in front of a target, wearing a bodysuit with a protective metal box over his head, and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced. Each time 15 visitor were allowed to enter to the gallery and shoot him. Visiors should stand behind one of the three lines that were painted on the floor and then shoot.
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Antony GormleySilence (2012)
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Luz María SánchezV.F(i) n_1 (2013)
Luz María Sánchez's work V.F(i) n_1 is a multichannel sound sculpture/installation. The title is a sort of acronym in Spanish; it means Vis. (un) necessary force. It is the first of the series, hence the number 1. V.F(i) n_1 addresses the subject of violence from the citizen’s perspective. Since media is not covering everyday experiences of violence, people flock to the arena offered by social networks, and share their own sounds and images –the ones that communicate their particular experiences within this context of explicit violence.V.F(i) n_1 is assembled using 74 audio players gun-shaped, that build a large format sound-texture composed of the same number of acoustic logs: shootings recorded by citizens caught in confrontations between law enforcement and organized crime in Mexico. V.F(i) n_1 consists of 74 independent audio channels, and the sound tracks are played individually on each of these speakers. At the end of the day and as the batteries run out of charge, speakers/guns go off gradually so the circle of operation/sound non-operation/silence is restarted. The audio tracks that integrate this sound installation/sculpture were taken from different videos available at the YouTube site.
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Andy WarholGun (1981-1982)
The canvas depicts the exact style of pistol used almost two decades before in an assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas that nearly took Warhol's life. Silkscreened twice, every detail is meticulously highlighted and dramatized in raw and monochromatic screens. This work sold for $7,026,500 at the Phillips de Pury & Company Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York, 10 May 2012.
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Jonathan Fletcher MooreArtificial Killing Machine (2015)
The installation is made up of an array of 15 digitally actuated toy cap guns dangling from the ceiling. A small receiver unit controls the guns autonomously. The toy guns sit dormant until a message comes over the wire from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which collects data on drone strikes. When a strike occurs, the guns abruptly pop into action, and a thermal printer clinically records the strike onto a ledger that dangles to the floor.
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Chris BurdenShoot (1971)
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p.s. Hey. ** Jamie McMorrow, Greetings back from temporarily non-drenched Paris. Yeah, the weather is nuts. They just closed the Louvre and Musee D'Orsay and are having to move all of the art out of the basement areas there in case the Seine overflows and floods the buildings, and the metro stations along the river are closed. I'm gonna walk down and look at the puffed-up Seine today. I love games, too much, so I've been staying away from them for the past few years because they end up eating everything, which I guess you understand. But I've learned a ton from their structures and spacial designs and so on for my writing. Plus, one of my novels is mostly set inside a video game. My all-time favorite games? Hm, off the top of my head, and for gaming systems only, I would say 'Banjo Kazooie', 'Banjo Tooie', 'Conker's Bad Fur Day', Zelda: Majorca's Mark', 'Zelda: Windwaker', 'Zelda: Twilight Princess', 'Eternal Darkness', 'Resident Evil 4', 'Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door', 'Super Mario Galaxy', ... I should stop. That is weird about the post-Springsteen crowd. I thought he was supposed instill hope and exhilaration live and all that stuff. Maybe they were depressed because they missed him so much? Old Hairdresser's? Nice name. Okay, cool, I'll look it up. That would be cool. The film screening went well last night, thank you for asking. Have a ton of fun of some respect today! Love, Dennis. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I like my Zelda better. ** Nick Toti, Hi, Nick! I've never watched any Zelda-spin off TV things. Is it good? Wait, I'll give it a spin in a bit. Thanks, man! ** Sypha, Thanks, James. Your brother loves 'Majorca's Mask', you mean? Me too. It's the trippiest, least linear 'Zelda' ever. I'm totally down with the idea that Miyamtoto is the James Joyce of video games. I think he's one of the true living geniuses. Cool, about that tribute book. I'll pass the tidbit along. Everyone, Here's Sypha with a potentially important announcement. Listen up: 'Exciting news for fans of Weird Fiction/Cosmic Horror: "Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels" is now available to order here. Published by Snuggly Books and edited by Justin Isis, it is, as the title says, a tribute to the work of Mark Samuels, who is, IMO, one of the great living writers in the genre. At 450 pages and 18 or so stories, there's definitely a lot of content. The list of contributors is pretty impressive, featuring such talents as Reggie Oliver, Daniel Mills, Adam Nevill, Quentin S. Crisp, and many more. My novella "Chaoskampf" also makes its first appearance here.' ** Steevee, Hi. That line sounds like it totally qualifies, yes. The sites I tend to use the most to find new music these days other than The Wire are Tiny Mix Tapes, sometimes The Quietus. For more mainstream stuff, sometimes Consequence of Sound is occasionally sort of reliable. For noise/metal/punk, Fucked By Noise is a good resource. Those are the ones I'm remembering this morning. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, it's very weird, all the rain and the flooding and stuff. We're in a brief respite today, but it's supposed to start pounding rain again tomorrow. My apartment is about a three minute walk from the Seine, but hopefully that's enough. Oh, I'm so very, very sorry about your dog. That's so hard. When I was a kid, all of my dogs died tragically, and I decided I couldn't take it anymore, so I've been pet-free ever since. If you need to absent yourself, of course, I totally understand. If talking about it and or being cheered up or anything would help, I'm here and will do everything I can. I'm so sorry. My day was pretty good, just mostly work but then the screening of our film, which seemed to go very well. I hope you manage to find some pleasure or peace or something today. Please tell me about it, if you like. Much love from me, dear pal, Dennis. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hi, Jeff! Welcome back! Oh, god, sorry to hear about the root canal. And the house repairing. Yeah, that assessment of Berlin makes sense to me. Any minute/day we're supposed to hear an initial reaction from ARTE about the proposal. Nothing definitive, but hopefully a sign that we're on track. The gif novel, which will be called 'Zac's Freight Elevator', is close to being finished. You've seen, or might have seen, drafts of the chapters here over the past six months or so. I'm going through everything and revising and reorganizing them to create the flow and build I want to finalize the grouping into novel form. I'm very happy with it, and I'm pretty sure it will be my last literary gif book. I'll probably still make literary gif things because I like doing that so much, but I think my abilities re: gifs are maxed out in terms of advancing the form, and moving that form forward is necessary to me just as it is with written fiction. Anyway, I'm busily working on completing it right now. Thanks for asking, Jeff. What's up with your work? What are you working on? What's new? ** H, Hi. The Zelda games are fun and adventurous and, I think, quite instructive vis-à-vis ideas about space, structure, form, interactivity, etc. I get you about avoiding that for your work. I too need to avoid things of different kinds when I'm working on something that feels precious. ** MANCY, Hey! How is 'Phantom Hourglass'? I haven't played that one yet. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. That GFT looks very interesting. I wonder how one applies to them. I'll look into it. Thanks, Ben! Watch out for the rain. No, we're only temporarily dry today. Paris is having the worse rain/flooding right now since 1910 apparently. ** Postitbreakup, Hi, Josh! Thanks, buddy. Yeah, I don't suspect Nintendo will be porting their games to Playstation anytime soon. If you do seriously want to get a Nintendo system, it's probably best to wait for the new NX system that's coming out early next year. It's supposed to be a big advance, and I'm pretty positive that you'll be able to the play the old Wii and Wii U games on it. Ha, our TV series is utterly and completely sex-free, believe it or not. And I can only guess, but I would imagine ARTE would be quite happy about that. But hey. If VK was involved and sexed-up, it would need to be via a time machine. ** Jonathan Bryant, Hi, Jonathan! That is a vivid and vividly effective memory recounting, yes. Weird, nice. Ah, complicated boyfriends juggling. Do you think you'd be satisfied with only Number One? Good luck with that. And it's great that the writing goes well! Fingers crossed for you that you get paid for something. That's a nice bonus. Take care! ** Right. Today I mushed guns and art together and then riffed. See you tomorrow.