Nick Black’s Super-Awesome Urine-Recycling Alien

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Artist Nick Black had an awesome kinetic sculpture up at Happy Dog gallery here in Chicago. It’s a giant floating bulbous faced alien with a raygun peeing pink pee into a giant vat. The pee is constantly recycled, so there is never an end to the urinating.

Katie Fizdale took some pictures and kindly shared them with me.
 

 

 
And click here to see the recycling urine in action.

I think this piece fits in nicely with our recent discussion of modernism and post-modernism and comics and fine art. It’s using underground comics references pretty obviously, I think (the alien could be a Johnny Ryan drawing.) At the same time, it’s turning a mechanistic system which might well be modernist and turning it into a representation of itself; parodic/pastiche divorced from utilitarian function and turned into a sign of itself as pornographic pulp. There’s still the nostalgia from the comics, maybe, but the 3-D giant action figureness of it kind of deliberately cheapens the nostalgia…or inflates it, depending on your viewpoint. (The piece was priced, very much tongue in cheek, at over $5 million.)

12 thoughts on “Nick Black’s Super-Awesome Urine-Recycling Alien”

  1. If only Nick Black could have found patronage, he could have made obscene clockwork trinkets to great acclaim at, I feel, any point in history. Though he might have been beheaded for it.

  3. yea, that Johnny Ryan’s cool, I don’t know anything about comics but that seems a better medium for what I’m shooting for. Making giant sculptures a lot of physical work, even a temp junk sculpture like that one. but yea when all else fails throw in lots of dicks, boobs, racist /sexist/homo bashing cliché and you got your basic nick play book I use in my toy bashing stuff and would like to start using more in bigger sculptures. I’m big on ‘goofy’. I’m real interested in doing more stuff that’s a direct contrast to the smarty, rehashed minimalist, art cool-guy stuff that seemto be all you see these days (although I’ve been trying my hand at smarty art lately). ‘Space Spook’ was supposed to be about, no matter how techno advanced we get we’re still haunted by the same old sterotype myths from our past. Space niggers, urchils, nigger riggers, fucken stuff up an hownen out our white wemon. that’s the dude you’d see outside your spaceship window and maybe in your space dreams 60 years from now to never. how the fuck is that ghost still flyen??Not that I suffer from any of those prejudices, yes i suffer from them all. would like to try some more blatant stuff and have always been into the self deprecating, but it’s scary with everything you do being available to everyone 24/7, maybe that’s why art these days is so subdued?. my greatest paranoiac fear is my cop neighbor will find out what I’m doing (sure he’s watching now)and I’ll be real embarrassed. its really rotten territory to cover. beat me

  4. Nick (if you’re still checking these comments), Liz was telling me you thought one thing that sucked about contemporary art was the lack of overt politics. I feel like your piece was a pretty meaningful response to the performance, especially the Afro-futurist spoken-word crap (save it for the NPR fundraiser), but still, I think the two ways one could explain why flagrant stereotype-baiting identity art retreated is A) fear, or B) self-awareness.

    My friend Matt Steinke did an amazing kinetic piece with a Thomas Jefferson puppet controlling a bunch of miniature slave robots. Some crazy art person, maybe his studio mate, burned it. It’s worth talking about, in all this (post/pose)modernism terminology mess, what is at stake? Who gets to be pissed off when about what?

    Sometimes it’s a bunch of privileged art school graduates… if they can be pissed off about anything. Definitely worthwhile. Sometimes it’s Jesse Helms. Also worthwhile, even if it kills the NEA. There are other comunities in the world– just putting it out there for discussion.

    And I remain a staunch Nick Black fan and advocate, for the record.

  5. Also a big Johnny Ryan fan. What’s sneaky about him is that he’s really careful, underneath all the scatological randomness, to always make sure that evil assholes are the target.

  6. I definitely agree that Johnny’s a lot more careful about political issues than he appears to be.

    As I mentioned upthread, I”m reading a book by Christopher Reed about homosexuality and the avant-garde, and he argues that arts retreat from the political is more or less a long-standing tradition linked to avant-garde traditions of elevating individual experience over politics, and to just general cravenness. There’s a great interview with him here.
    I’ll quote the relevant part, which is long but worth quoting, damn it:

    What is far more pernicious than such overt censorship are the subtler forms of self-censorship practiced by museums, commercial art galleries, and individual artists. To return to the example of the recent controversy over Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly video, some of the museums that rushed to purchase and display the video once it was in the news for being censored had themselves refused to take the Hide/Seek exhibition, which was the first major museum exhibition in the US to focus on sexual identity as such — the nearest forerunners I can think of were the much smaller 1982 show Extended Sensibilities show at the then-tiny New Museum in New York and the 1995 In a Different Light show at the museum of the University of California, Berkeley. But no major museum would touch this topic for a show. It was simply too controversial. And the same thinking excluded art that dealt with non-normative sexuality from lots of smaller shows at museums and galleries everywhere. And the same thinking makes commercial galleries turn away from art that deals with the politics of sexual identity. And that makes artists self-censor, both in their art, and in the kinds of things they think and say about their art — I have examples of these dynamics in the book.

    When you have an art world that constantly claims to be promoting and celebrating artistic individualism, but it has ruled expressions of any kind of politics of identity out of bounds, that’s dangerous. Beyond its implications for artistic innovation, it limits everyone’s ability to think about the possible range of their individual desires, passions, and pleasures.

    And I would say that right now is one of the most conservative eras for that kind of censorship. It’s hard to recognize, because we can’t see things that are not being made, or not shown. And it’s hard to think about ideas that are not being discussed. But these dynamics are very clear if we look back to the 1990s, when the art world — because of AIDS — was engaging these issues, and that engagement was rapidly shut down, not just by political conservatives, but by academics and critics associated with the avant-garde. The chapter in my book on that gives some really egregious examples quoting people, like Hal Foster, who continue to be very influential in the contemporary art world today.

    Today is a lot like the 1950s and early 60s in the sense that there is a huge, expensive, authoritative infrastructure of something called the art world, supposedly looking for creative and original talent, but in fact rewarding art that toes the line of very conventional and disempowering kinds of individualism. In the 1950s it was all about existential angst, now it’s all about cynical, prurient humor. But when we look back now on the 50s-60s, we see that there were all kinds of interesting art being made — from Alice Neel to Andy Warhol — that just wasn’t getting out there. It took a social revolution to propel that art into the “art world.” I hope that someday we’ll look back on this era that way.

  7. For the sake of argument, I so think there’s something that identity art bequeathed to us, that the current generation of artists may be benefitting from and using without necessarily upsetting people. The idea being that upsetting oppressors is fine, but upsetting those who may be more properly categorized as oppressed is not fine.

    The art of history and re-enactment, of posed and falsified documentation, of group interaction, can do something besides certify the potency of a provocateur. And I can’t pretend I don’t love provocation, but perhaps there are ways to improve upon what artists like David Wojnarowicz started.

  9. Yes…I would agree with you (and contra Reed) that cynical, prurient humor is a vast improvement over existential angst, not the least because such humor is not utterly solipsistic. (Nick’s piece being a nice case in point.)

    But I love the way Reed links the formation of avant-garde identity with the formation of gay identity without assuming that the avant-garde is actually helpful to, or interested in helping, gay people.

  10. Bert-I’m learning something here about what I try and do and don’t do. Guess I’m really not interested in Political art per say, although I admire and am intimidated ,in some ways, by the aggressiveness of Temporary Services /Occupy type stuff(and what you do with your kids), for me that stuff superposes that artist has a fixed point of view rooted in some moral/ political values in which object are produced to validate those views. I don’t have any, other than being confused and angry. I don’t consider my self liberal, conservative or anything else, my politic views are totally different, rooted in cynicism and miss trust more than anything else(rooted in a lifetime of Chicago self serving corrupt politics for sure). yes theres’ a lot of so called political art out there, for me, done best when the producers are as anonymous as possible, but also can be shear usury, feel good liberalism hypocrisy at worst( as you know, I’ve talked to you about whats happening at UofC (where I grew up) now vrs their past). I really hate righteous art. Noah– theres’ tons of queer/sexual identity art show out there today,(don’t know if the Gallery 400 shows still up?)(there was the 80’s show at MCA, and I’ve seen a bunch others), gay rights seem safe territory for museums and universities, as well as a meriad of other deemed officially liberal cause social subjects. No, for me, I’mnot interested in all that,I’m really interested in exploring the satirical, paranoiac space that exists within self and as an undercurrent in society in general (I spend a lot of time reading Tribune and Suntimes comment pages about corrupt local politics) and my own personal failings. Johnny Ryan got it going on, that’s what I don’t see , not a lack of overt political, but a lack of overt uncensored emotion. everything seems covered up as though folks are hiding in coached art ideas. for me, as a middle age guy w 2 kids looking for a job, fear to be Johnny Ryan is very simple, everything you do is being tracked at some level, you will be data mined, and yes my CPD neighbor is looking up stuff on folks(perhaps me) right now, he told me all about it( to much Homeland Security Money and cops with nothing to do). Chicago has more spy cameras than any other city in US. all of which is a very interesting paranoic space to operate in when you can’t see who’s looken at you. however if you got your gig at a university or some institution than your safe behind the walls, you won’t get fired, so get out the bull horn

  11. Reed would certainly agree that artists use the radical associations of gay politics, or feminist politics, or racial politics, to advance their careers and present themselves as dangerous or edgy. His point, I think, is that actual political engagement has to come out of communities, and that art institutions and many artists are very reluctant to identify themselves with those communities. Political art that is about individualism is okay; political art that is about politics is a lot dicier. The Smithsonian’s craven handling of the Wojnarowicz controversy is probably a case in point.

    Reed argues again that pulp forms or pop culture is much more daring in terms of embracing marginal identities and perspectives than fine art is. Which makes me sort of wonder what he thinks about Lady Gaga.

  12. That’s a pretty great artist’s statement, Nick, and I’ve read a lot and they all, almost without exception other than yours up there, suck balls. I am actually a believer in pledging allegiance to communities that have helped me, and especially if that help in some way embarrasses me and makes me seem less autonomous. I’m willing to identify as a white straight Christian male so that the blood on my hands can cover up my self-imposed stigmata. And still, I can’t claim a political location– the bugbear of Enlightenment ideology, as Noah mentioned in the earlier thread about pomo.

    And I don’t agree that all art is about cynical humor– Nick’s is rather refreshing in that regard. Like he said, a lot of what you see is tasteful neo-minimalism. Occasionally it too can be delightful and tasteless, but usually not.

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