bells and whistles

'bells and whistles' is something a friend says and I try to keep in mind. I hope she doesn't mind. This is what I think she means. Bells and Whistles talks about being florid. Florid in that from the push-pull between information and decoration, technique and device outdoes. Or in the other way an idea knows all about itself with certainty. She uses it about her time in New York, that art there was full of these bells and whistles. It could mean scaling up and down or hyper real . Jeff Koons puppy ......maybe. Or more like "Katie Moore creates ‘wooden’ objects using various materials, none of them actual wood" (from MCA Primavera notes). So bells and whistles can act a quip/tag to explain a practice, perhaps making a galleriests job easier. Though I think I might like Moore's stuff as the notes go on to say "The imitation woodenness of Moore’s sculptures is not sufficiently convincing to reduce the art work to a mere confidence trick". And b&w includes paintings trying hard not to be paintings, or like Tim Doolan's chrome ceramics not looking like ceramics, a kind of po-mo avantgardism. A system that seems to dislocates the object from having been made, in the usual maky way and what its made from.

I wanted to have no name for the blog, but it wont let you. 'White Child' was loaded and I kinda need to be on hand to explain it, I was getting hits from Texas, you know what I mean, and 'Daughter' is so Freud and Pearl Jam. So Bells and Whistles will do it for now.

http://www.mca.com.au/default.asp?page_id=10&content_id=3068

3 comments:

Helen said...

You can have no title by just sticking an empty bit of html in there, ie.

Helen said...

Ha, it won't show the html code in the comment... put the code to make it ie. bold and then close it: triangle bracket - letter b - close triangle bracket, triangle bracket - forward slash - letter b - close triangle bracket.

elvis said...

i am polishing my bells and whistles now -

is the modern term 'bling' ? but even thats so 2007