Opie - Our Greatest Installation Artist

A Beautiful Mind 3

Ron Howard Installation 4

Screen grabs from Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind. In the depths of paranoid schizophrenia, mathematician Russell Crowe sees patterns in newspaper and magazine clippings and sets out to "break the code." Twice (that we see) he fills a room with printed matter and scrawls numbers and diagrams all over everything--above is the second episode, in the tool shed. Of course, the art world is full of people doing this kind of thing, from Kurt Schwitters to Robert Rauschenberg to Thomas Hirschhorn (see below). Director Howard hired some pretty good people to channel this activity as simulated madness. Instead of the Modernist paradigm of "artists taking inspiration from the insane" this is the reverse process, sort of, bringing the visual vocabulary of the art elite (Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone) to a mass audience. Hence, the title of this post.

Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn, Plan Moi

- tom moody 5-07-2004 7:42 pm





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