Bad Bad Bunny

Blues Bunny ©Susan Shulman

Kalicorp Art Mysteries #9

In Issue #9 we continue to evolve our style to include more hand-drawn panels in addition to the usual digital photo-collage featured in past issues. Long time fans will also discover that we have morphed into more cartoon-like characters as we continue our quest to find our fame and fortune in the mysterious ArtWorld.
 
Readers that have been with us from the beginning know that the comic started as our way of promoting our exhibitions in the ads we created for the inside covers. Over time we began to explore the comic format itself as a slow moving blog that featured the background buzz of the current art world as a background story.

As the Epson 3800 cranks out the pages I'll try to re-cap some of the art issues that we joke about. The first section includes a panel on page 3 where we use the face of Georg Baselitz proclaiming, ..."There ain't no great women artists!" Apparently with a new exhibit of decidedly ho-hum works opening at the London Gagosian Gallery, George felt the need to defend his misogynistic remarks from last years interview in Der Spiegel.  We'd link to it but no need to give this overrated troll a boost.  

We made a panel in issue #6 a year ago when Georg's views on woman artists first came to light. From our viewpoint when there are so many great artists that are women it makes little sense that many museum collections are vastly a men's club.

Blues Bunny shows some attitude in this issue as she cleans up those misconceptions. 

From the bar fight on we blend a potpourri of only marginally related idea; possibly brought on by ingesting the pituri, an hallucinogen native to Australia. Oz as we tend to think of it, since we felt compelled to create our own poppy field dream. Bunny's "orgasmic" idea concerning re-inventing Relational Aesthetics stems from a recent experience I had as a juror reading proposals for grants distributed from Apex Arts. Out of the 50 proposals I waded through 49 of them were some type of work creating a social situation that the artist would curate. Almost all as densely worded as Bunny's panel on page 8.

Don't worry if you can't read Bunny's monologue here; it is legible in the actual comic although it's as much bollocks as most of the proposals I read.

For our non-artist readers, Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term “relational aesthetics” in his 1998 book of the same name. Brief definition - "A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

Bunny becomes convinced that the next great aesthetic leap forward should be creating an addiction to her art.  For good measure the means by which this accomplished involves some cross pollination via spin art. Plus, that gave us another opportunity to poke at big dog Damien Hirst; whose spin art isn't half as good as Walter Robinson's or Corrine Bayraktaroglu who were doing it years before Damien became ArtWorld gold.

Since it seems that Jerry Saltz, art critic for New York magazine is everywhere, it should surprise no one that he also appears in Art Mysteries.

Spoiler Alert - Obviously this all ends badly for the ArtWorld outcasts, but not before we make final mention of Matthew Barney's new six hour film, River of Fundament. Invoking Norman Mailer, sex, violence and a whole lot of excrement, the desire of bad boy artists to shock us with their genius causes us to stifle a yawn. 

I'm glad Bunny and I got this all off our chests and now we can return to our regular art making activities; at least until ArtWorld news makes our heads explode....again!

In Bad Bad Bunny Part 2 - Susan Shulman on the development of the Blues Bunny character.