Thursday, July 18, 2013

Coat tales

How prescient was et al. when they donned a lab coat to be photographed for Art NZ back in 2001 and to accept the Walters prize in 2004? Now you can't move in the art world without coming across a lab-coated artist or artist’s operative. Our most recent sighting was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art when we spotted a group of lab-coated assistants off to help people into James Turrell’s light chamber. The owner of the art lab-coat is of course Marina Abramovic with her bevy of LC’d assistants.

Images: top left, et al at work, top right, the closing moments of Marina Abramovic's The Artist Is Present at MoMA. Second row, Brazilian artist Luciana Brito. Third row left, Yiorgos Zafiriou at Sydney’s Artspace and right, performance artists Near Future. Bottom, off to the Turrell at LACMA.