Keen of Pop?
June 25th, 2009I always wondered what this day would be like! With a world-wide famous star’s death, what could I say? Should I connect it to art and talk about Keith Edmier, who collaborated with her to produce a hot-or-not couple of sculptures?
And then came the bigger news! Jaw still sore from dropping. The King of Pop, the simultaneous culmination of disparate genres, subcultures, and concepts – R.I.P.
Being “death,” it was inevitable, of course, and in his case already a time-stopping advent with irresistible, yet unspoken anticipation from generations of audiences. Then again, he seemed like some otherworldly prodigy orbiting beyond the earthbound struggle between youth and age, for whom plastic surgery and maniacal oblivion defeated wrinkling and sagging, meted out to the rest of us commoners, in gradually disfiguring a previously angelic face.
Pointilistically styled, he was perpetually enshrouded in sunglasses, transfiguring that incognito device into icon-making accessory. Presiding over armies of howling Japanese teens, he transcended “man” and shimmered as “bejeweled Merlin from outer space.” He gave the slip to physics, stunningly striding forward while sliding backward; and he taunted gravity by leaning 45 degrees. Moonwalker was clearly fictional, yet it paradoxically confirmed Jacko as a palpable phantasm, a human-turned-demigod. Preternaturally gifted, benevolent, humanistic, and prophetically post-racial, was he an emissary from the heavens, or the evidence of boundless human potential?
Then it got weird. The rest was a mind-boggling barrage of profligacy and perversion that bowled us through Macaulay Culkin, Neverland, out-of-court settlements, ancestral demigod Elvis Presley’s daughter, inexplicably conceived babies, babies recklessly dangled from balconies, the twisted remnants of a human face, and thousands of offensive jokes ready to occupy a coffee-table book, quickly followed by Volume II.
So it’s no wonder Jacko became an icon of contemporary art, so fixated on irony, race relations, political correctness, dystopic pop culture, and the technology-compatible body.
We could start our timeline with Andy Warhol’s Michael Jackson, which might set a new auction record for Warhol, if the recent eBay activity is any indication,
followed by Jeff Koons’ hysterical, life-size porcelain Michael Jackson with Bubbles,
which requires a note about Richard Phillips nine-foot tall canvas Jacko (after Jeff Koons),
and then some prescient female artists tuned into a new Jacko generation,
as Meredith Danluck debuted a Michael Jackson video about meeting the King of Pop,
and Dawn Mellor revealed a life-long oeuvre of diva-worshipping MJ drawings in a show at White Columns, Other Peoples Projects – Studio Voltaire, London,
but only after Tara Mateik’s must-see PYT
\’ >PYT‘ >PYT
Oh, and then there’s the cut-up by the venerable Mark Flood!
I’m writing this in mourning, so please forgive and notify me: no doubt I’ve omitted many other examples of Michael Jackson art. Where do we go from here? I imagine his corpse will be taxidermied, cryogenically frozen, hawked on eBay cell by cell, or submerged in a tank (like the basketballs, not the sharks).