Andrew Maxedon

Art and Influences

[andrewmaxedon]

Keith Obadike, “Blackness for Sale,” 2001

In 2001, artist Keith Obadike auctioned off his Blackness on eBay.  An archived version of the eBay listing, including the full text, can be viewed here.  Bidding had climbed from $10 to $152 by the time eBay removed the auction.  

The idea of selling one’s cultural identity is a fascinating one and is explored effectively with this piece.  The item description is a particularly well-crafted reflection of what it means to be Black in America.  What would change for a white person if it were possible to gain “Blackness?”  How would life get easier?  How would it get harder?  

From the text:

3. This Blackness may be used for making jokes about black people and/or laughing at black humor comfortably. (Option#3 may overlap with option#2) 4. This Blackness may be used for accessing some affirmative action benefits. (Limited time offer. May already be prohibited in some areas.)

.

Warnings: 1. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used during legal proceedings of any sort. 2. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while seeking employment.

The format is well-chosen, combining the anonymity of online auctions while evoking images of slave auctions.  

A great interview with the artist about the piece can be found here.  

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My piece “One Million Years to Forever” was featured in the news.  I’m so grateful to the editor for taking an interest in the piece and writing about it.  

Here’s a link to the write-up.  

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Andrew Maxedon, “One Million Years to Forever,” 2018

I replaced the sand in this hourglass with household items which are commonly thrown away.  The average American produces about 4.4 pounds of garbage every day.  These plastic bottles, cell phones, aluminum cans, and other garbage, when not recycled, end up in permanent landfills.  

The hourglass still measures time, but now it measures the time it will take for everything to break down into small enough pieces to fit through the middle of the hourglass and reach the bottom.  

"One Million Years to Forever," refers to the length of time it takes these items to biodegrade.  According to the National Oceanic and and Atmospheric Administration, aluminum cans take 250 years, plastic bottles take 450 years, and glass items take at least one million years to break down.  Some plastic items might never break down at all.  

This piece will be on display at The Art Center Highland Park from May 4th through June 25th as part of an exhibit about mankind’s impact on the environment.  

[andrewmaxedon]

-Vincent Connare (Designer of Comic Sans)

(x)

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Alisha Wormsley, “There Are Black People in the Future,” 2018

This sentence was put onto a billboard as part of The Last Billboard project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The statement is partially a joke about science fiction’s lack of diversity, but is primarily a powerful, simple affirmation of the relevance and importance of Black people and Black culture.  

Like Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s “Stop Telling Women to Smile,” the backlash from the community shows us just how important and crucial the message is.  The landlord removed it after people complained about its “offensive and divisive” message (and put it back up when people complained about its removal).  

Wormsley’s statement about the piece and its removal can be found here.  

[andrewmaxedon]

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts.

Joseph Addison

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Alex Ruth Bertulis-Fernandes, “Dial Down the Feminism,” 2017

This piece has gone viral in the past few days, and it’s no wonder why.  It’s a pithy reminder of the dichotomy marginalized people face.  It’s admittedly much easier day-to-day to just accept the way of the world.  However, this piece reminds viewers that choosing to maintain the status quo makes them “complicit in [their] own dehumanisation.”  

Standing up for yourself and people like you, whether that gets you labeled something like “raging feminist,” is a necessary part of forcing humanity forward.  Part of this piece’s strength is the choice of words there - “raging feminist” is clearly meant both as an insult and a badge of honor.  

There’s another layer to this piece, which is a middle finger to authority figures who tell artists and activists to be “more palatable” to their audience.  The piece was created as a direct response to her teacher, who told her to “dial down the feminism” in her artwork.  I think this aspect was what captured most of the attention this piece got - we’ve all faced someone who tried to clip our wings and tell us not to rock the boat.  

More of Bertulis-Fernandes’ work can be found on her website.  

[andrewmaxedon]

These are the official portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.  As predicted, they’re the most original and most modern portraits of a president and first lady ever.  The flowers behind Barack are carefully selected, representing Hawaii, Chicago, and Kenya, to celebrate his history and heritage.  

I’m so glad that these artists stayed true to themselves and didn’t try to make their style more mainstream for these portraits.  

[andrewmaxedon]

Andrew Maxedon, “Family Values,” 2018

*Trigger warning: Sexual assault, Donald Trump*

This is a dancing speaker I retooled to look like an elephant, playing the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” audio.  

The GOP is complicit in all of Trump’s words and actions.  They heard the racist, homophobic, frightening things he said before election, including the tape in which he publicly admitted to sexually assaulting women, and still decided he was the person they wanted to elect for president.  

Full version here.  

[andrewmaxedon]

Anish Kapoor vs. Stuart Semple

Artists’ feuds are hilarious.  I’ve written about a couple, like the time an artist replicated Damien Hirst’s piece just to throw it away in front of his gallery and another where an artist made a copy of a copy of a portrait from the 1930s.  I love this one, especially because it’s still happening.  

Do you remember Vantablack, the darkest color ever produced?

It’s so dark that it absorbs almost all of the light that reaches it, making it essentially invisible.  You cannot see this color.  

Anish Kapoor, the artist who created The Bean (“Cloud Gate”) in Chicago, has acquired exclusive rights to the use of that material.  People are pissed off about that.  

Here’s how the creator explains it in the FAQ:

In response, an artist named Stuart Semple created pigments like the world’s “pinkest pink” and the world’s “most glittery glitter” and has allowed anyone to use it (buy them here!), except for Kapoor, who is not allowed to acquire or use them.  

12/23/16: Kapoor then posted this to his Instagram, with the message “Up yours #pink”:

Semple responded by posting this video to Instagram on the same day:

Although whatever is on his hands is not Vantablack (Semple described it as a light-absorbing paint, which Vantablack is not; and Vantablack cannot be applied to skin), his comeback was well-executed.  

12/31/16: Semple posted a Happy New Year message to his followers:

I cannot wait to see what happens next.  

[andrewmaxedon]

Since the last update, Stuart Semple has been hard at work creating more pigments that Kapoor cannot use, like PHAZE, which changes color with temperature, and LIT, which is the brightest glow-in-the-dark pigment ever created.  

Meanwhile, to celebrate Kapoor’s birthday, Semple created an event on Facebook, in which he hopes people will get together, wearing bright pink lipstick, and kiss The Bean in Chicago.  

[andrewmaxedon]

If Einstein had not written down E=mc2, another scientist would one day have done so...but no one else could have written Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Rebecca Attwood, quoting Dr. John Martin’s speech at Humanities Matter: The Campaign for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (x)

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The Simpsons, “Homer Scissorhands”

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Guerrilla Grafters, “Guerrilla Grafters,” 2011

Cities all over the country plant trees in common areas for their beauty, but trees have a number of other benefits.  Like many cities in the US, ten percent of San Francisco’s trees are fruit trees, but they have been sterilized so that they do not produce fruit or pollen.  Cities do this so that they can avoid attracting animals and to keep the area around the trees clean.  Unfortunately, this means that hungry people in the city cannot use these trees to find fresh fruit to eat.  

In order to use these trees to address scarcity and reclaim natural resources, a group of artists/activists calling themselves “Guerrilla Grafters” have begun to graft fruit-bearing branches onto fruit trees, so that in a few years, these trees will produce fruit for neighborhood residents to consume.  

They encourage people to do the same and have produced guides on how to do the same on their website.  If you live in San Francisco or other major city, you can recognize their work by the colored electrical tape they use to protect the new grafts.  

(Above photographs by Thomas Levy and manual by Margaretha Haughwout, Tara Hui, and Ian Pollock)

Check out their website here.  

[andrewmaxedon]

I found a bunch of Pokémon cards I made when I was nine.  

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Wafaa Bilal, “Domestic Tension,” 2007

**Trigger warning: death, gun violence, war**

During the War in Iraq, Wafaa Bilal lost his father and brother to drone strikes. Appalled by the ease with which one can kill a person from another country, Bilal decided to set up a month-long social experiment, with his own body on the line.  (An unrelated, anonymous group of artists addressed the same issue with an enormous portrait - read about it here.)

Bilal, then a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, asked for help from other faculty to set up a remote-controlled paintball gun that anyone could control at any time from a website. Users could aim and fire a paintball at any time, day or night. Bilal lived in a room with this gun for a full month. Paintball guns are designed to be shot from 200 feet away - this one was mounted just 20 feet from Bilal at all times. A test shot just before the opening of the performance pierced a sheet of cardboard. 

During this month, he was shot 60,000 times from people in 128 different countries.   At one point, hackers modified the website to allow the gun to fire like a machine gun. 

Unsurprisingly, the comment section was vitriolic and full of hate speech. Like Abramovic’s “Rhythm 0,” this piece spoke to how easy it is to dehumanize and harm a person. For Abramovic, this was because she did not react; for Bilal, this was most likely because because he is a minority and an immigrant from a country most Americans do not understand and because he was nowhere near the shooters. 

It reminds me of one of Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience.  People were usually willing to obey authority figures when they were asked to hurt someone in another room, but were far less willing when they were in the room with the person they thought they were hurting.  

By the end of the piece, the pain, the loud firing of the modified gun, and the ticking of the gun’s movement caused traumatic symptoms in Bilal.  It is always amazing to me how easy it is to get people to hurt one another and how few of those people would view themselves negatively for having done so.  

[andrewmaxedon]

These are works by the artists the Obamas just selected to paint their official portraits.  

The top three are paintings by Kehinde Wiley, who will paint Obama, and the bottom three are by Amy Sherald, who will paint Michelle.  

If the artists stay true to their unique styles when painting the Obamas, the result will be wonderful and extremely controversial.  I can’t wait.  

[andrewmaxedon]

Andrew Maxedon, “Generational Decay,” 2017

What happens when you keep digitally scanning the Mona Lisa, printing it out, and scanning the new printed image.