Continuing Education Blog

I am lucky enough to have a brave friend who just returned home after a month of organizing foreign aid efforts from a military camp in Jacmel, Haiti. From her most recent update: “The most amazing thing so far is how many people have a smile and a friendly word to offer to a stranger walking through their nightmare. It’s incredible.”

Maximizing the resources available to them, the chic chicks Diana Campbell and Julie Ragolia bring us Tools for Thought, a beneficent fundraiser event with lots of hot objets d’art to warm your heart and your briefs alike.  Joined by a few curatorially-oriented and well-connected friends, Diana and Julie invited almost 100 artists to select a tool or object relevant to their work or personal life.

African mask from Gordon Hull

“We are looking for a rather unusual donation from the best artists in the world:  a ready- made object…anything from a tool to a book to an old shoe…that the artist will sign and tell a story about.  That object, no matter what it is, will be sold at a silent auction that night.”

(l-r) Shoplifter's synthetic hair, Dan Colen's crackpipe vase, Francesca DiMattio's papier-mache vase

The event originally was scheduled for February 22nd, but in the days leading up to that, the organizers were overwhelmed with queries from collectors, press, artists, and other art world lurkers.  The promised Patti Smith performance might have something to do with that.  Lo, the extra weeks of prep time enabled them to design an impressive website and nearly double the number of artists taking part, which includes current Whitney Biennialinas Huma Bhabha and Aurel Schmidt; Skin Fruitcakes Dan Colen, Richard Prince, Liza Lou, Terence Koh, and of course, Jeff Koons; the recently repatriated Gavin Russom; and those geriatric giants Ed Ruscha and Lou Reed.

Skateboards by X-Games champs Jeff Koons and Marilyn Minter

Personally, I have my eye on the Ofiliated Voodoo Flag by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge:

Hot

And will cower as far as possible from this monstrosity:

"How High," 2010, pencil, mix CDs, and vitamins on paper

This looks promising and easily worth every penny of the Benjamins you and your date will drop on tickets, most of which is tax deductible.  Apotheke, the downtown cocktail specialists, will provide relief of a different kind.  Total fox Alexandra Richards will DJ (hey, u can brw my mix cds lol!).  And did we mention Patti Smith?

I always wondered what this day would be like! With a world-wide famous star’s death, what could I say? Should I connect it to art and talk about Keith Edmier, who collaborated with her to produce a hot-or-not couple of sculptures?

And then came the bigger news! Jaw still sore from dropping. The King of Pop, the simultaneous culmination of disparate genres, subcultures, and concepts – R.I.P.

Being “death,” it was inevitable, of course, and in his case already a time-stopping advent with irresistible, yet unspoken anticipation from generations of audiences. Then again, he seemed like some otherworldly prodigy orbiting beyond the earthbound struggle between youth and age, for whom plastic surgery and maniacal oblivion defeated wrinkling and sagging, meted out to the rest of us commoners, in gradually disfiguring a previously angelic face.

Pointilistically styled, he was perpetually enshrouded in sunglasses, transfiguring that incognito device into icon-making accessory. Presiding over armies of howling Japanese teens, he transcended “man” and shimmered as “bejeweled Merlin from outer space.” He gave the slip to physics, stunningly striding forward while sliding backward; and he taunted gravity by leaning 45 degrees. Moonwalker was clearly fictional, yet it paradoxically confirmed Jacko as a palpable phantasm, a human-turned-demigod. Preternaturally gifted, benevolent, humanistic, and prophetically post-racial, was he an emissary from the heavens, or the evidence of boundless human potential?

Then it got weird. The rest was a mind-boggling barrage of profligacy and perversion that bowled us through Macaulay Culkin, Neverland, out-of-court settlements, ancestral demigod Elvis Presley’s daughter, inexplicably conceived babies, babies recklessly dangled from balconies, the twisted remnants of a human face, and thousands of offensive jokes ready to occupy a coffee-table book, quickly followed by Volume II.

Michael Bilsborough, Munch&Macaulay Mash-up

So it’s no wonder Jacko became an icon of contemporary art, so fixated on irony, race relations, political correctness, dystopic pop culture, and the technology-compatible body.

We could start our timeline with Andy Warhol’s Michael Jackson, which might set a new auction record for Warhol, if the recent eBay activity is any indication,

W, Michael Jackson, 1984

followed by Jeff Koons’ hysterical, life-size porcelain Michael Jackson with Bubbles,

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson with Bubbles, 1988

Richard Phillips, Jacko (After Jeff Koons)

and then some prescient female artists tuned into a new Jacko generation,

as Meredith Danluck debuted a Michael Jackson video about meeting the King of Pop,

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

and Dawn Mellor revealed a life-long oeuvre of diva-worshipping MJ drawings in a show at White Columns, Other Peoples Projects – Studio Voltaire, London,

Dawn Mellor's MJ drawings

but only after Tara Mateik’s must-see PYT

\’ >PYT‘ >PYT

Oh, and then there’s the cut-up by the venerable Mark Flood!

After Mark Flood

I’m writing this in mourning, so please forgive and notify me: no doubt I’ve omitted many other examples of Michael Jackson art. Where do we go from here? I imagine his corpse will be taxidermied, cryogenically frozen, hawked on eBay cell by cell, or submerged in a tank (like the basketballs, not the sharks).