4/11/2005
Billy Conklin
Mona, Rochester, MI
The day after the July 7th transit bombings, the artist set up his camera in a butcher shop near Russell Square, near where one of the tube stations had been hit. He realised he had to shoot within 24 hours of the blasts to full-effect. Whoever wandered in the door got their picture taken.
Is London Burning - Portraits taken within 24 hrs of the July transit bombings in London
Art critics and connoisseurs are not known for donnybrooks, but at least one
London correspondent has confided that an interlude of polite fisticuffs
followed a discussion of Billy Conklin’s works at a certain show in the UK.
Conklin is a maverick with a provocative — some say subversive — take on what
art is meant to be in a pluralistic society. His pieces have been occasionally
likened to “the psychoanalytic concept of transference.â€
Conklin's
current offering at the Museum of New Art, is non-transferable, but the ideas and
questions that arise in your head may be freely taken home at the end of the
night. Sweet dreams.
LONDON - The day after the July 7th transit bombings, Billy Conklin set up
his camera in a butcher shop near Russell Square, near where one of the tube
stations had been hit. He realised he had to shoot within 24 hours of the
blasts to full-effect. Whoever wandered in the door got their picture taken.
And, like it or not, got their emotions captured as well.
Within the week, Conklin had also found out about a terror response exercise
held by the government in London.
There were 200 role-playing victims in a
terror exercise here, feigning a range of injuries, both chemical and from
flying debris. A large debris pile itself, complete with crushed cars and a bus,
was erected near the Bank Station where much of the action took place.
Rumor has it that this simulated attack was happening at the same exact time as
the actual bomb blasts.
The second part of Conklin’s project includes some of those actors who’d
performed as casualties in this terror exercise. He brought them into his
studio and asked them to recreate their responses to flying debris and chemical
agents and the like. Whatever was their specialty. The resulting images were
both horrific and burlesque at once.
Anyone who has encountered the art of Billy Conklin will have had the
uncanny impression that there is not one Billy but many. Not only has he adopted
several modernist and more recent idioms in quick succession, but he has also
invented several contradictory personas. Perpetually shuttling between London
and New York, street art and blue chip, Conklin presents himself as artist
and art dealer, conceptualist and craftsman, pragmatist and dreamer, bully and
recluse.
Billy Conklin’s art has an allusive Duchampian wit, a Magrittian mystery,
and a diabolic Swiftian mastery of design. Since narrative plays as a primary
means of organizing people's lives and experiences, Conklin has created a
long string of art narratives that some critics have described as superfictions.
Other critics have suggested that his work is so far beyond what can
properly be considered art, that they use the term “postart†to describe it. Yet
within all these definitions Conklin has set up a powerful negative logic,
aimed to question the nature of art to life, and the world-as-stage to the art
institution. And, perhaps, to question the very culture that builds and decides
such things.
Opening: November 5th from 7 to 10pm
Mona
327 West Second St. Rochester
Hours: 12-6 pm Thursday through Saturday