(Stay tuned for more updates on Llyn Foulkes and his upcoming exhibition in NYC!)
Last night I had the pleasure and privilege of tripping into the museum on whim and walking on on the super-star artist, Mr. Llyn Foulkes giving a talk to the Hammer’s Museum Fellows.
I slipped right into the group and I got a good scoop, good taste, a sampling of Foulkes’s unique personality: bristling with sparkling genius, totally frustrated with others for not being geniuses, like him. Yet, delighted with himself for being so superlatively gifted as to be a little scary. In other words, a formidable person capable of laser slicing a faulty concept to its quick.
Listening to him to talk about his work, I quickly realized the gulf of experience between this great artist and myself. HIS TECHNIQUE is all consuming madness. IT IS PURE craft, requiring muscle, brains, and relentless WORK!!! (Honestly, I do NOT have the raw LOVE of labor, clearly revealed by Foulkes’s discussion of his rummaging in the world of found-object and eerie transformation of the real-life taxidermic cat or rubber dildo installed in work that inhabits the same general space (wall) of a painting and tricks the casual lazy viewing into believing it is cute, fun, and almost silly cartoonish work. Hah! The joke’s on anybody that falls for it!
Foulkes’s work is aggressively loaded with message. DE-PROGRAM yourself! DE-CODE the lies taught to us, collectively, by big corporate sponsors and specifically, the DISNEY empire which in Foulkes’s accurate yet imaginative representation of a gun-dreaming American society is the source of much evil. The recent work shouts.
His coded visual messages have evolved to this intensity of volume over decades of indefatigable work.
Geez… Foulkes is to a life-long semi-professional “hobby,” artist like me, Frau Kolb a demigod.
Here he is:
