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Jessica Fenlon Ungun (2013)
‘6:36 animation, which is built of 4,000+ broken / glitch images of handguns, an observation of how gun talk “devolves into shouting matches that shatter social relationships.”’
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Andrew Ellis Johnson Rehearsal (2014)
‘Human ears, cast in marble, are plugged with live bullets that have not yet punctured the absence they flank, a silent emptiness that may represent incomprehension or denial, or those departed – whether by suicide or homicide. It consists of metal bookends, cast cultured marble, and live bullets, 5 x 5 x 4.625 inches.’
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Skylar Fein Kurt Cobong (2014)
Mossberg 500 shotgun, bong, tape
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Mel Chin Cross for the Unforgiven (2012)
‘A Maltese cross of the Crusades, made from eight AK-47s, the international symbol of resistance to the West.’
Arthur (2014)
‘This is a Looking (down the barrel) Portrait of infamous killer mobster, Arthur Flegenheimer, AKA “Dutch Schultz”. Historical criminals like him, with their guns and larger than life notorious behavior, contribute much to the American fascination with guns, violence, and gangster attitude. The barrels of two .38 Caliber Colt “Specials” form the empty deadly eyes while the grips of the guns emerge from the back of the head. The guns are locked in this portrait of concrete, a commentary how guns are embedded deep and dense in the head of our own culture.’
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Adam Zaretsky Gene Gun (2007)
‘In the Transgenic Orange Pheasant project, Adam Zaretsky proposes in a letter to His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander to create a “Royal Dutch Transgenic Breeding Facility at the Gorleaus Laboratory in the University of Leiden. These orange pheasants could be intended for the royal hunt. In this installation, four images of transgenic pheasants are shown, alongside a genegun, shotgun, the letter to His Royal Highness Prince Willem-Alexander and two videos.’
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Daniel Joseph Martinez George and Daniel in an insane world … (2012)
‘It’ is an anonymous hand that fires a gun to the head of visual artist Daniel Joseph Martinez (Los Angeles, 1957). It’s a huge hyper-realistic photo which carries the viewer to a stereotyped violent world: Colombia, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan … However it’s none of these places. It’s anywhere. Maybe Los Angeles, maybe Tijuana…’
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Nikki Luna Play Ground (2016)
‘Philippines-based artist and activist Nikki Luna presents a series of cast resin lace sculptures, shaped from actual guns in past violent incidences. Their ghostly appearances act as shadows of the history, trauma, and prevailing issues surrounding culture and gender.’
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Liu Bolin Gun Rack (2013)
‘World renowned performance artist Liu Bolin, aka the Invisible Man, is back doing what he does best: disappearing into his environment. This time, the artist lends his body to be covered in paint in front of a wall mounted with artillery. The Gun Rack performance took place at Eli Klein Fine Art in New York, where Bolin was assisted by a team of four painters, camouflaging him into the background.’
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Jonathan Ferrara Excalibur No More (2014)
Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun, Colorado river rock.
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Renee Stout Baby’s First Gun (1998)
‘“Baby’s First Gun” by Renee Stout juxtaposes an archaic tin gun toy against a cookie-cut-out effigy of a smiling black girl in a pink dress, inside a white-washed wooden box. “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it,” reads a fortune cookie missive at the girl’s feet, its somber proclamation flanked by two little graphic smiley faces, whose expressions match that of the main figure.’
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Sander Leemans Shooting Gallery (2007)
‘The visitor shoots with a carnival rifle at the target in a container. Meanwhile the visitor is filmed from the other side and projected on a big screen above his/her head. The projection differs from the actual situation, it seems you’re shooting from behind a military roadblock. When shooting and hitting one of the targets the projection on the screen changes from the shooting visitor behind a roadblock to a short movie. The short movie corresponds with the target one hits. For instance, the helicopter target corresponds with a short movie of an exploding helicopter in Afghanistan, the farmer corresponds with a short sample of the infamous The Apache Killing Video, Buddha corresponds with the exploding Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.’
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Luke Dubois Take a Bullet for the City (2014)
‘Dubois’ Take a Bullet for the City was an installation which incorporated elements of sound, sculpture, and data visualization. The installation consists of a Walther PPk 9mm hand gun, a steel plate, an engineered mechanism to operate the trigger of the gun, and a minicomputer to pull data from New Orleans Police Department. Over the course of the month the piece was installed, the gun would fire a blank on approximately a week delay every time the NOPD received a report of a firearm discharge.’
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Adam Mysock Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun (Last Judgment) After: Hans Memling’s “The Last Judgment” Triptych (c. late 1460s), Bambi’s mother from Disney’s ‘Bambi’ (2014)
‘Looking Down the Barrel of the Gun forces viewers to do just that (normally quite unadvisable) to see tiny paintings of heaven and hell by Hans Memling, and a drawing of Bambi’s mother, in reference to the artist’s first realization of the dangers of guns.’
The Last Six, Under Six, Murdered by a Gun in the Sixth (2014)
‘It is comprised of six bullet holes, within which there are six miniature portraits of the last six children under six killed by gun violence in the sixth police district of New Orleans, Louisiana.’
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Caroline Brisset Guns (2018)
steel, Corten steel
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Nicholas Varney Onegin (2014)
‘Onegin is named after the Alexander Pushkin book “Eugene Onegin,” which tells of a man whose life was led in the great glamour of the time in palace parties and languid to torrid love affairs. Onegin killed his best friend in an incident over a woman. The gun of cause transformed his life and gave birth to Tchaikovsky’s greatest opera. Juxtaposition is the key element to punctuating any precious stone. Set a diamond in wood and watch it become more striking as a result of the wood serving as its foil. The stone seems brighter and gains importance and a new dialogue begins.’
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Neil Alexander Growing Up in a Gun Culture, My Son (1996-2014)
‘I’ve been making portraits of my son Calder since the very moment he came into this world. Lifted from his mother’s womb and placed on the scale, his pediatric nurse took a measuring tape to him. Click went the shutter. The two images in this exhibition, taken eighteen years apart, are the only formal images I’ve ever made of him naked and the only two of him holding a gun.’
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Roy Lichtenstein Smoking Gun (1968)
‘A revamped version of an earlier work titled Pistol. It even features the exact same hand and gun. Lichtenstein replaced the print’s original red background with a blue background to create the perfect patriotic picture within the bright red borders of “TIME.” The positioning of gun to be aimed at the viewer is supposed to mimic Uncle Sam’s pointing finger in the famous WWI recruitment poster. “I Want You to Own a Gun!”’
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Papas Fritas Ladrillo Angular (2014)
‘Francisco Papas Fritas, the Chilean artist behind a controversial installation in which the dictator Augusto Pinochet dies “machine-gunned” by a hooded student, told Efe today that all his works “are a called to civil disobedience ”, but not to violence. “I think this is the only mechanism that can make rulers understand that citizens are the owners of their power and that they are where they are to manage our goods and our wealth,” said the artist.’
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Claes Oldenburg The Ray Gun Wing (1978)
‘The Ray Gun Wing has the shape of a ‘ray gun’, a laser weapon with its origins in science fiction. Visitors move through the space like a laser beam: The Ray Gun Wing is entered through an opening in the handle and can be exited through the barrel.’
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Peter Sarkisian Recoil (2014)
‘Referencing both Film Noir and still-life composition, Peter Sarkisian’s Recoil begins as a 1940’s surreal tableau, in which a gun rests with other objects on a floral pattern tablecloth. A cinematic element is revealed, as embroidered flowers on the tablecloth appear to flutter gently, then pull free and tumble into the gun barrel. More surface detail soon becomes caught in the suction and is drawn toward the gun; the figure of a man struggles while being dragged from the frame of a photograph; text is ripped from the pages of a book; an egg drains from a ceramic plate. Each element in turn disappears into the muzzle, leaving behind a blank diorama of lifeless grey props.’
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Thomas Lelu What’s up Doc? (2019)
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Tsuyoshi Ozawa Vegetable Weapon (2011)
‘”Vegetable Weapons” is a series of photographic portraits of young women holding weapons made from the vegetables needed to create recipes typical of their culture. The ingredients are then prepared as a meal to be shared between the artist and participants.’
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Pedro Reyes Return to Sender (2020)
‘“Return to Sender” presents three music boxes for which he has repurposed gun parts: Disarm Music Box (Glock/Mozart), Disarm Music Box (Beretta/Vivaldi), and Disarm Music Box (Karabiner/Matter). These new works perform fragments of tunes from composers from the countries where the guns were produced.’
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Gavin Turk Double Gold Pop Gun (2013)
Silkscreen and gold leaf on paper
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Emory Douglas Black Panther, June 27, 1970 (1970)
‘Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.’
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David Cotterrell Prototype II (1998)
‘Sharing more in common with Maillardet’s Automaton than Apple’s G4, Cotterrell’s Prototype II is a mechanical device of finely honed gears, cogs and wheels made by the artist in the London workshops of the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers. Driving a crank at painfully slow speed, the machine cocks the guns, the muzzles of which face directly into one another. The machine’s slipping pulleys continuously spin the chambers until the cocking mechanism traps the chamber in preparation for firing. A complete cycle involving the cocking and subsequent firing of one blank round into the partnered revolver takes 5 minutes. The visual impact of two revolvers staring down their barrels at one another is both chilling and humorous: there is a certain sense of glee in watching a gun shoot one of its own. Essential to the piece is the time it requires of its audience. As the minutes creep past, we begin to feel jumpy. What will happen? Will the whole apparatus come crashing to the ground? Will it blow up and take us along with it? In order to know first hand, we must wait and while waiting, we are forced to look. The machinery is displayed on the exterior of its plinth, inviting study from its audience. Like the internal workings of a clock, Prototype II fascinates with its process: it becomes easy to focus on the movement of individual parts, forgetting that, somehow, these movements will all culminate in an act which is potentially lethal.’
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Lutz Bacher Firearms (2019)
‘The last completed artwork by the American artist Lutz Bacher (1943-2019), FIREARMS is a single work comprised of 58 framed pigment prints, each depicting a different model of gun taken from pages of a manual on gun repair and maintenance. Like a typology of arms, the prints show a direct profile portrait of each gun, together with its name, country of origin, manufacturer, cartridge size, magazine capacity, overall length, height, barrel length, and weight. A paragraph of text describes each gun’s design origin, key features, and history of use. Many guns were developed for the armies and police forces active in and around the First and Second World Wars; certain models are older and historical, others are descendants that evolved from earlier designs, and some are new, state-of-the-art models. They come from around the world-Italy, Great Britain, Austria, Japan, Switzerland, various parts of the Unites States, etc. Hung alphabetically by model name in a line-up around the gallery, the 58 plates reveal the conditions of these violent objects from the 20th Century, explaining in direct, matter-of-fact language the technology, craftsmanship, and use of these weapons in the contexts of warfare, police forces, sporting, self-defense, and as goods designed and proffered for international trade and personal collection.’
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Catharina van de Ven BRT-CFM (2016)
high polished bronze
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Robert Longo Body Hammer (1993)
‘large charcoal portraits of the most popular handguns at the time.’
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Constantine Zlatev The Candy Machine (2013 – 2016)
‘The Candy Machine was made by disabling a Winchester Model 94 rifle and taking advantage of its ingenious, once revolutionary, lever-action reloading mechanism. The idea for this art installation originates from the popular commodity vending machines, drawing a parallel between the accessibility & ubiquity of weapons today to the ease of procuring candy from a street side vending machine. The installation uses a crankshaft system with a small stepper motor to automate the Winchester ’94 receiver mechanism, which has been modified to work with specially designed candy capsules. The gun magazine can store 7 ‘candies’ and each time a token is dropped in, the mechanical receiver dispenses a candy in lieu of a bullet shell.’
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David Hess Gun Show (2019)
‘Four years ago, amid the daily headlines of mass shootings and gun violence, I began building an arsenal of 100 mock assault rifles. The pieces are placed on canvas tarps in rows and viewers are encouraged to walk between them. My mission is to integrate this arsenal into the mainstream public consciousness as a springboard for political and social dialogue.’
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p.s. Hey. ** David, I’ll check my local listings. Sounds great, nice. The Italian interview is kind of good, but, you know, there are a lot of English interviews with out there and more coming. The bank thing/mess seems to be over, amazingly. I’m free, I think. Yes, my sister is very nice. Our relationship is fraught, of course, but, yes, she’s nice for sure. You have sisters. What’s their scoop? You could offer that Nilsen victim’s body on one of the slave sites I search, and I think you’d get a lot of takers. Hope your post-bed stint was a charmer. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Well, the bank mess seems to be over! Hard to believe, but it seems so. Whoop! Ha ha, yeah, the covid wedding guy was the brother of my sister’s husband even. She’s okay. She was vaxed, so it was one of those mild-ish if actual bouts. It was a sneaky love, wasn’t it? I don’t remember why I felt so sneaky yesterday. Ha ha, aw, your innocent love was much sweeter. Love coming across your love’s sleeping date and having a dark night of the soul before somewhat reluctantly calling him an Uber and helping him into the back seat, G. ** Sypha, Well, there should be no ‘shoulds’ in this world, but I think you’d be A-okay with more Millhauser under your belt. Hoping for a story “better than the original” seems like an act of self-sabotage. That is a lot of story in your bro’s novel. My head is spinning just trying to keep track of the twists and turns, which could be a good thing. I like the Fenway Park turn. It’s so random. I like randomness. ** Bill, I think the letter did the trick, and thank you for being so thoughtful through this whole thing. Sci-fi art porn is definitely tricky to pull off. I can’ think of one. Back in the 80s, I co-wrote a sci-fi porn movie with a big gay porn director of the time called ‘Boys from Outer Space’ that never got made, which seems a blessing in retrospect, although it did have the makings of an inadvertent camp classic. Factrix! Very nice! ** David Ehrenstein, He is, yes, indeed! ** l@rst, Hey, big L! ‘Rushmore’ is a perfect movie, I agree. Another perfect movie that some friends and I were talking about last night is ‘Fargo’, at least by my reckoning. Millhauser’s great. I’d start with ‘Edwin Mullhouse’ if you haven’t read it. Big up via-a-vis Thursday. ** Misanthrope, Yep, l@rst came back, how cool is that? Unbelievably the Tax Board thing seems to have been completely resolved, I’m shocked. And waiting for the other shoe to fall, as my grandma used to say. Or maybe it was my mom. ** Brian, Howdy, Brian. Millhauser is wonderful. If you don’t mind tackling a whole novel, his ‘Edwin Mullhouse’ is a fucking classic. So sorry about the ghosting. What’s with people? His loss, not that that helps much. Oh, wow, you’re already almost heading the door? That was short, or, wow, it feels short, but time is … mysterious. I’m glad it’s mostly been fruitful. I bet there’s all kind of payoff you don’t even feel yet. ‘Lancelot’ was the first Bresson I saw, and it made my head and, well, the rest of me, explode on site. I’m so extremely happy to read you speak so passionately about Bresson. Objectively speaking, which isn’t possible, I know, I do think it’s possible that ‘Mouchette’ is his best film. It’s pretty unbelievable. I think I’m out of the Tax Board-destructed woods as of today. We’ll see, but I think so. Man oh man. I’m very curious about what I’ll think of ‘Titane’ too. It’s so divisive. I don’t know anyone who loved it. I know people who liked it pretty well. I do know people who really hated it. Yeah, curious. It would be a boon if you commenting here more often fits happily into your schedule, needless to say. But it’s all good. I hope you have an amazing today. ** Okay. I found some more guns and ‘guns’ for you. See you tomorrow.
Steven Millhauser Dangerous Laughter
Now available in North America 