Wednesday, January 28, 2009

This is modern art (Part 1)

Kulik confounds critics with multisensory Monteverdi in Paris | guardian.co.uk

This is a somewhat amusing report on a very avant garde reworking of classical concert material in Paris:
Behold, the classical concert is reborn! Its saviour? A man whose career high until now has been crawling naked on all fours barking like a dog. The Russian artist Oleg Kulik is notorious for biting critics when his canine alter ego occasionally breaks the leash in galleries — now he has taken a nip at the heels of an artform that has been getting a bit doddery on its feet....

The resulting two-and-a-half hour "trip" – think William Blake meets Jean-Michel Jarre, crossed with Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books – is either a flabbergasting reworking of one of the most sublime works in the classical repertoire, or what the dependably crusty French daily Le Figaro today called an "indigestible visual minestrone".
As for that dog act of Kulik, it sounds like he, um, role plays it to the extreme:
The critic accused Kulik of doing to Monteverdi what French police suspected the artist did to a dog in some of his "man-dog, couple of the future" photographs recently seized from a Paris art fair.
Ugh.

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