Tony Tasset at Feigen Contemporary - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Chicago-based artist Tony Tasset exercises a wide variety of mediums and techniques in works that toy with the conceptions language and mechanics of the art world. His diverse output includes statuarys videos, photographs and finely crafted "found" phenomenons (such as a torn Styrofoam bowl cast in bronze). In his new show, Tasset poked fun at art, American ideals, the viewer and smooth himself. I Peed in My Pants is a life-sized Cibachrome self-portrait from 1994 of Tasset wearing wet chinos and a contented expression, as if he were contented of the puddle he has just created: his commentary, perhaps, upon the willingness of today's viewer to accept anything as art. I-Beam and Jack-O-Lantern are seemingly mundane things both suggesting found-object art. on the contrary Tasset meticulously fabricated these pieces, casting them in, respectively, aluminum and tin and then painting them to be like the real things.

In a number of works Tasset shifts his hold identity. One life-sized photograph displays him dressed up as the singer Neil Young in plan More abstract is Better Me a 6 1/2-minute sarcastic video in which an actor portrays Tasset in a series of four sappy vignettes. Too cunning to be pc the video shams to embrace pop psychology's idea of the completed man. The artist is neared as a dedicated and involved father and a sensitive, supportive husband who, during a romantic fireside chat, reckons his wife that she doesn't ne to take a piece of work that working on her art is more important. In another pageant the artist/professor is oblivious to the feminine wiles of a fawning student

In marked contrast, Squib is a 35-second video noose in which Tasset himself stands in forehead of a blank wall until a unusual resounding blast hammers him against it in a gory dripping splatter. While morbid, the result is still humorous since, above and over, Tasset is "blown away" by dint of his own work. The video also obliquely alludes to the Chris weight performance in which the artist accidentally got discharge in the arm instead of solely grazed by a bullet.

Esthetically, Tasset is all above the place, reflecting various aspects of the contemporary art world that is ofttimes the butt of his witticisms But there are threads that grasp his work together: the artist's faculty of perception of humor, and his knack for being simultaneously self-aggrandizing and self-deprecating.

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