Studies in Annoying Art: Towards a Possible Load of Crap

 

I. The Flood

 

The Flood (2007) was on display from March 8—March 10 (custodial services were quick to remove it) on the 11FL of Health Sciences West at University of California San Francisco, in the hallway right outside of UCSF Diabetes Center, employer of the artist.

 

While his contemporaries did not understand this conceptual piece, it was an elaboration on Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), in which meaning is imposed on an existing object.

 

 

 

 

 

Detail

Installation View

II. Two Urinals: Modern Therapee

 

The title of Jimmy Chen’s The Glory of Man (2006) not only serves to implicate the entire ethos of postmodern art subsequent to Duchamp’s prophetic reappropriation of a urinal—its patriarchal and self-satisfied title being more than fitting—but moreover, it alludes to the physiological joyful experience of relieving oneself when one must be relieved and/or the visual/manual phallic interface of a penis’ host.

 

A noteworthy difference between the two is that the former one is attached to its plumbing, while the latter has been purposefully aborted from a kind of Russian constructivist functionality so prevalent at the time.

 

Duchamp abandoned art to play chess. Jimmy Chen, a stunted yet enthusiastic chess player, once lost to a 9-year-old Filipino boy at online chess. This disparity can be applied in direct proportion to the two artist’s respective intellectual capacities. The only comparison being made between the two artists is that they both have wee-wees.

Marcel Duchamp

Fountain (1917)

Jimmy Chen

The Glory of Man (2006)