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I love the work of Joshua Allen Harris. Using wind and pretty much trash bags he makes some crazy sculptures that everyone can enjoy. Thanks to the blog world Harris has caught some fame for his works, prompting him to take the medium way past its humble beginnings. Check out this video for a great compilation of his sculptures and interview.

Remember when the 1980’s were dominated by hair, glam, heavy metal? Of course you do! Deny it all you want, but I guarantee you know all the words to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and Poison’s “Talk Dirty to Me“. Those were great times fueled by aqua net and cocaine, but it all came crashing to an end. Everything died because everyone looking to make a quick buck just produced cookie cutter copies of what came before them. Any sense of originality the bands of the decade had were destroyed by the over flow of water downed crap versions into the market. People got sick of it and turned their radios off!

That is the best metaphor I can think of to describe the state of the art world right now. Every no talent hack is out there blending the talents of those with originality who came before them into a nauseating pile of vomit mixed with puke and some throw up on top. Apparently if you put up a wheat paste poster in LA and NYC you are bad ass and brilliant these days!

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By now, it’s no secret that the retrospective of 90 works by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami has arrived in Brooklyn after its celebrity-studded stay at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. And equally known is the fact that there is a Louis Vuitton store stationed in the middle of the show, offering bags and purses designed by the artist at luxury-goods prices. Taking second stage to the shop is the art, which has been given the lobby and several thousand feet of gallery space, but barely registers the same degree of provocation as the high-end accessories.

Murakami, often called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is his own favorite brand, a reputation he’s pursued from the outset of his career in the early 1990s. (Exhibit A: 1992’s Signboard TAKASHI, in which the artist took an advertisement for Tamiya model makers and replaced the brand name with his own, but kept the tagline: FIRST IN QUALITY AROUND THE WORLD.) Murakami swallowed Japanese popular culture whole, swerving between ultracute kawaii and sadomasochistic otaku (or nerdy obsessives devoted to anime and manga, violent animations and comic books). He developed a theory he calls Superflat, which equates these pop genres with 17th-century Edo-period painters, flipping the criticism that Japanese art lacks perspective and dimensionality on its head. But instead of keeping the debate academic, he turned it very real by opening his own Kaikai Kiki Company, which mass produces T-shirts, stuffed toys and other products emblazoned with the artist’s designs.Much has been made about this merger of art and commerce, though in Japan it really isn’t that unusual where exhibits regularly take place in department stores. It’s also typical for Asian artists to wear several hats—creator, curator, businessman, critic—as Murakami has done. However, as wildly popular as he is in Japan, Murakami’s real audience is here in the West, where he knows that blending art with business will push our puritanical buttons. So it is sort of perfect for this show to find a home at the Brooklyn Museum, an institution once criticized for blurring boundaries by hosting the Star Wars exhibition.

Some of the work is superb and goes beyond the tired arguments about “selling out.” It doesn’t matter how commercially successful Murakami has become when looking at his pair of riveting and aggressively sexual statues—the pneumatic female, Hiropon (1997), with her streams of breast milk splashing through the air, and the priapic My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), with his lasso of jizzum. Nor does it matter how many production assistants were employed to create the 23-foot-tall Tongari-kun (2003–04), an extraordinarily imaginative character with an onion-shaped head, standing guard over the museum’s entrance. This work was originally installed in Rockefeller Plaza and it caused me to think about all of Murakami’s output as a massively effective form of public art.

One reason Murakami is so accessible—in a good way—is that Japanese pop culture has a global reach. Anime production companies took their cue from American cartoons, specifically Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and Disney films, and put their own spin on the form, seamlessly integrating international influences that would later prove popular with audiences around the world. Murakami recycles more than four decades of groundbreaking anime into his own designs. His favorite character, DOB, started out looking like Mickey but winds up as a toothy and demented Sonic the Hedgehog. The repeated use of mushroom clouds evokes the specter of nuclear war evident in almost all anime. Mannequins look like oversize Transformer dolls, readily available at sci-fi hobby shops. And yet as a fan of both Akira and the ever-upbeat Speed Racer, it’s hard for me to see what Murakami adds to this already deep and stimulating material.

Still, this exhibition will be popular, even with school groups, despite the presence of some edgy material. It would be easy to hold that against this artist, just as it is easy to criticize him for his business savvy. My problem, I realized, is that I hate Louis Vuitton bags but once owned a Hello Kitty wallet, making me predisposed to dislike some of Murakami’s productions while being charmed by others. It’s a question of taste, which in the end is all that matters when one goes window-shopping.

Written by Barbara Pollack via Time Out New York.The Exhibit runs through July 13th. For more information visit the Brooklyn Museum website or the official site of Murakami.

Joshua Allen Harris has followed up on his small scale and cute plastic bag animals with, well more plastic bag animals. Except this time around they are bigger and badder. The first video is a large scale monkey, ok, not that intimidating, but the second video is of a classic lochness style sea monster - and yes it scared me! (I think I seen a real sea monster living along the L train).

Thanks to the Wooster Collective for the vids!

Apparently the world is in chaos. There are terror threats, wars for oil, sky high gas prices, a recession, house foreclosures, the Pope, and New Jersey. In other words there is a lot to stress about. Let the DROP help you keep on breathing in the event of chemical warfare, or Uncle Joey’s late night White Castle run, with the latest and greatest of all things gas mask! Sure you could rock that drab black or green unit from the local hardware store but then who are you impressing? NO ONE! Check out the designer gas masks from Diddo Velema and show up your neighbors when the apocalypse hits!

Link: designegasmasks.com

Via Wooster Collective, here is a great video of the inflatable plastic bag animals of Joshua Allen Harris in action.