Art Night: Paintings, Sculptures, Video Installations, and Bloody Severed Cocks
Art! In Washington! It's a crazy idea, but the kids at artDC decided to run with it. They put a bunch of art in the convention center, then lured hipsters over with the promise of beer and Ian Svenonius!
And we sent Intern Nick and Liz Gorman to investigate justwhatthese so-called "artists" were up to. Liz snapped pictures of the dance party that broke out , and Nick, after the jump, explains the terrible atrocities he witnessed.
The Washington franchise of every international art show you've ever been to opened as artDC last night at the convention center. Imagine an airplane hanger with $65,000 Marc Chagall lithographs and endless booths of "I could do that" type contemporary pieces. But hey, there was a calypso band, and we all know how calypso music reacts with the chemicals in botox to drive rich people into a spending spree.
Yea, artDC is pretty cool. It's probably a lot cooler if you've got an extra $300k or so for a signed Matisse drawing or a bronze sculpture of fat lady squatting. The difference between fairs like this and the "Starving Artist Show: Everything Must Go!" things where paintings are priced by size is really the difference between Pier1 and Williams Sonoma. Once you've outgrown the velvet Scarface poster on the wall, it's just what you can afford. A lot of the work is pretty interesting, you just have to remember that's not the artist standing next to it, it's the gallery owner.
So, after we picked up some goody bags with Parisian hair care products of indeterminate use, we headed to the more human-scaled art space across the street at The Warehouse Theater . In the small shabby-chic (by virtue of actual shabbiness) rooms there was another contemporary exhibit opening. Entitled Supple , it features the work of such local luminaries as Kevin Kepple and Colby Caldwell .
We were beginning to border on art overload when the curator of the show mentioned that a "one time only" performance was about to begin. In the back room we found one white wall with small round hole, and one large plastic tarp on the floor. Artist Adrian Parsons announced that he was about to begin creating a work titled Shrapnel and began pulling hairs from his beard with a pair of pliers and putting them in the whole in the wall. Fifteen or so people are calmly watching at this point, until he PULLS HIS DICK OUT OF HIS PANTS AND SLICES OFF THE "GENTILE BITS" WITH A KNIFE AND STUFFS THE BLOODY WAD OF PENIS SKIN INTO THE HOLE. He then makes a joke about the flesh ball being too big for the drilled hole, tee-hee, tee-hee, isn't that hilarious, and explains that when suicide bombers blow themselves up little pieces of them end up embedded in walls and other people etc. HENCE THE DEEP INNER MEANING.
The aftermath consisted of a trail of dick-blood leading from the back room out the front door, and hopefully to a hospital, as well as local art-fag par excellence Kriston Capps throwing a temper tantrum at Warehouse owner Molly Ruppert for lack of medical supervision or some shit. But the moral of the story is: real art doesn't take American Express.