Despised by the rock establishment which they assaulted with every turn, Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics were so far ahead of their time in so many ways it is hard to know where to begin. They synthesized punk and metal before it was cool to do so, used chain saws and other noise put through amplifiers, and their stage shows were second to none. (previously) [more inside]
posted by Trurl on Mar 21, 2012 - 46 comments

After receiving a $20,000 grant from the Australia Council, Denis Beaubois set about creating his artwork, Currency, 2011, by withdrawing $20,000 from a teller at the Reserve Bank of Australia and writing down the serial numbers. The artwork sold at auction yesterday for $17,500. [more inside]
posted by robcorr on Aug 31, 2011 - 75 comments

HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20 is an information art piece. Artist/composer R. Luke DuBois [previously] manipulated the text of individual State of the Union addresses from each presidency, sorting the words according to frequency of use, to generate a Snellen eye chart for each President. [more inside]
posted by Herodios on Nov 20, 2010 - 24 comments

How To Explain It To My Parents: a video series from Lernert & Sander where conceptual artists explain their work to their parents. [more inside]
posted by fryman on Oct 31, 2010 - 5 comments

An article in an art-related blog recently mentioned a new installation by a Columbus, Ohio conceptual artist named Richard Whitehurst: an exhibit reachable only by a tunnel, growing progressively narrower, with the artist waiting to rape anybody who attempted to pass. [more inside]
posted by acb on Oct 1, 2009 - 41 comments

"He spent three days in a room with a coyote. After flying into New York, he was swathed in felt and loaded into an ambulance, then driven to the gallery where the Action took place, without having once touched American soil. As [he] later explained: ‘I wanted to isolate myself, insulate myself, see nothing of America other than the coyote.’" ( documentary yt clip)
posted by bardic on Jul 3, 2007 - 88 comments

Lustfaust, an expiremental noise band from West Berlin has been steadily building an online retrospective archive of band photos, memorabilia from past gigs, and collected submissions of artwork that fans created for their own mix tapes. They can also be found (of course) on MySpace. For those of you in the NYC area, tomorrow is the final day of a show at The Volume Gallery that features artwork created by fans of the underground group . What they've pieced together is a pretty loyal and diverse following for a band that doesn't really exist.
posted by stagewhisper on Jul 21, 2006 - 23 comments

I am still alive. Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara sent these telegrams to friends throughout the 70s. He's most famous for his date paintings, in which he paints the day's date on canvas before midnight. His book series I Met is a 12 volume list of the people he met in the '60s and '70s. His ten volume One Million Years (Past and Future) comprises books with every one of 1,000,000 years (998,031 BC-1969 AD (past) and 1980-1,001,980 AD (future) listed. Reading One Million Years is a series of installations of readings from the books. One was placed in Trafalgar Square, and in a further wrinkle in time, this guy caught it with his pinhole camera. Here is a short essay about Kawara's existentialism, and here's a longer essay (Google cache) about Kawara's art's ontology. (PDF)
posted by OmieWise on Apr 10, 2006 - 51 comments

After Walker Evans Alternatively, After Sherrie Levine. In 1936, Walker Evans famously photographed a family of sharecroppers. In 1979, Sherrie Levine rephotographed Evans' work. Performance artist Michael Mandiberg has reproduced Levine's work online, made them available for printing, and assembled texts and wrote plays to give the site's conceptual art concept - and Levine's work - meaning, and a punchline.
posted by livii on Mar 20, 2005 - 16 comments