Category: Crazyology

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“Parting Shot”

A Broken Cellphone for Art Basel 2024

At 5:00 PM on Sunday, Dec 8th —precisely one hour before the closing of Art Basel Miami Beach 2024—an subversive intervention took place that both echoed and challenged one of the fair’s most notorious moments. Artist David Normal, in a calculated act of institutional critique, affixed a broken cellphone to the wall using silver duct tape, creating an unauthorized installation titled “Parting Shot.”

The piece deliberately referenced Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous “Comedian” (2019), which had sparked international debate about value and legitimacy in contemporary art when it sold for $120,000 at Art Basel. With “Comedian” recently resold for $6 million, Normal’s intervention—priced at only $2.4 million through an attached QR code—arrived at a particularly resonant moment in the ongoing discourse about art market valuations and institutional power.

This guerrilla installation joins a distinguished lineage of unauthorized artistic interventions, from Marcel Duchamp’s submission of “Fountain” to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition (1917) to more recent acts of institutional critique, such as Banksy’s “Love is in the Bin” (2018), which self-shredded at auction, “Parting Shot” uses guerrilla tactics to question art world systems of value and legitimacy. By choosing the fair’s final hour for his intervention, Normal added temporal poignancy to his critique of art world mechanisms of visibility and value.

The following documentation and artist’s statement present this significant moment in contemporary art discourse, documenting both the physical installation and its conceptual framework for historical record.

Artist’s Statement:

“Parting Shot” interrogates the contemporary relationship between artistic identity, social media presence, and institutional power. By duct-taping a broken cellphone—the essential tool of the modern artist-as-influencer—to the wall at Art Basel during its final hour of operation, the piece creates a dialogue with Maurizio Cattelan’s “Comedian” while extending its critique into the digital machinery of art world visibility.

Where Cattelan’s banana pointed to the absurdity of art market valuations, “Parting Shot” examines the mechanisms that create such valuations in our hyperconnected age. The cellphone, typically the artist’s lifeline to social media promotion, networking, and digital brand-building, here appears in its broken state—a shattered mirror of the contemporary art world’s dependency on constant digital presence and performance.

The piece’s stated value of $2.4 million—exactly 40% of “Comedian’s” recent $6 million sale—functions as both satire and commentary on the relationship between artistic legitimacy and market valuation. Like a digital-age Trojan Horse, it infiltrates the prestigious space of Art Basel through simple materials and audacious gesture, its absurd price tag highlighting the equally absurd values assigned to established names.

In the tradition of Duchamp’s readymades, “Parting Shot” transforms a personal artifact into an art object through context and declaration. But where Duchamp’s gestures were eventually sanctified by institutional recognition, this intervention asserts its legitimacy through the very act of its unauthorized insertion into the institutional space. The attached QR code leading to Venmo serves not merely as a bid for transaction, but as a pointed commentary on the mechanisms of art world commerce.

The title “Parting Shot” operates on multiple layers: it references the phone’s role in crafting the careful social media shots that build artistic careers, while literally marking the final hour of Art Basel 2024—a last gesture of artistic insurgency as the fair closes its doors. Installed at 5 PM on the fair’s final Sunday, the piece becomes both a farewell and a defiant last word, a guerrilla intervention at the moment when the art world’s attention is already turning elsewhere. Through its broken screen, the piece reflects back the fractured nature of contemporary artistic legitimacy, where success is increasingly measured in followers, likes, and shares. The piece ultimately asks: In a system where both institutional recognition and social media influence determine artistic visibility, what happens when we claim space in the fleeting moments between legitimacy and erasure?

Bananaphone

Bananaphone explores the connection between phones and bananas.  A classic playful correlate.  The broken cellphone taped to the wall subconsciously evokes the banana.  This video celebrates that odd connection.

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July 2024 – Print of the Month Club

“Wings over the World” and “Sugar and Spice” July2024 selection for Print of the Month Club

This is the July 2024 offering for Patreon Print of the Month Club.

This theme is especially appropo on a personal level for me at this time since tomorrow I will indeed take wing over the world and fly from my home in San Francisco to Surabaya, Indonesia with further destinations in Java, Bali, and Sulawesi.

These images are part of the ”1943” digital collages.  Each month Patreon “Print of the Month” subscribers will receive an 8.5 x 11 in. print on Moab Entrada Natural cotton rag paper.  The print will feature two collages with variations of the similar elements.  It is $15. a month to subscribe and that includes postage and handling for the monthly print sent directly to you.

You can join here:

https://patreon.com/davidnormal

If you would like to order a specific past print from the series, please contact me at:

davidnormal (at) gmail.com

About the “1943 Collage Series”

During the Pandemic, my friend and collector, Josh “Doggy” Norman, gave me a stack of old LIFE Magazines all from the year 1943. Of course, in ’43 the world was plunged into the depths of WWII – the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, The Japanese defeated at Guadalcanal, and, in the Fall of ’43, after the resignation of Mussolini, Italy made a truce with the Allied Forces.
Even as the war seemed to turn in America’s favor, at home, and certainly in the pages of LIFE Magazine, nothing was certain. It is strange to view this era through the looking glass of its advertising because the advertisers, whose stock and trade is illusion, swing fervently between efforts at buoying up an All-American status quo that is faltering*, propagandizing against the enemy, and rallying the citizenry – especially the women whose men were fighting overseas – to patriotism and sacrifice. It is difficult for me not to feel a poignant empathy for this time, the generation of my grandparents, and the period in which my own parents were born. Despite all the many momentous things that have happened since then – atomic power, space travel, political and cultural revolutions, computers and the internet – 1943 is not a year from the distant past. Not only are the cultural values expressed in these images still relevant, but the entire world continues to feel the consequences – good and bad – from this momentous period.
Yet, in making these collages I have not sought to make a statement of any kind. Rather, I just sought to playfully re-combine the imagery of the period into new configurations that evoke the dream of the collective consciousness (or “unconsciousness” – if you will) of America. Nor did I create the images to be static finished pieces, rather the images are what I would call “instances” of imagery as though they were just stills of a film (or perhaps keyframes of an animation). For this reason the work remains “Work in Progress”, or as my hero, machine artist, Jean Tinguely, would put it: “Remains static in motion”.

*Has the American “Status Quo” ever actually existed?

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June 2024 – Print of the Month Club

“Sentimental I & II” June 2024 selection for Print of the Month Club

This is the June 2024 offering for Patreon Print of the Month Club. These images are part of the ”1943” digital collages.  Each month Patreon “Print of the Month” subscribers will receive an 8.5 x 11 in. print on Moab Entrada Natural cotton rag paper.  The print will feature two collages with variations of the similar elements.  It is $15. a month to subscribe and that includes postage and handling for the monthly print sent directly to you.

You can join here:

https://patreon.com/davidnormal

If you would like to order a specific past print from the series, please contact me at:

davidnormal (at) gmail.com

About the “1943 Collage Series”

During the Pandemic, my friend and collector, Josh “Doggy” Norman, gave me a stack of old LIFE Magazines all from the year 1943. Of course, in ’43 the world was plunged into the depths of WWII – the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, The Japanese defeated at Guadalcanal, and, in the Fall of ’43, after the resignation of Mussolini, Italy made a truce with the Allied Forces.
Even as the war seemed to turn in America’s favor, at home, and certainly in the pages of LIFE Magazine, nothing was certain. It is strange to view this era through the looking glass of its advertising because the advertisers, whose stock and trade is illusion, swing fervently between efforts at buoying up an All-American status quo that is faltering*, propagandizing against the enemy, and rallying the citizenry – especially the women whose men were fighting overseas – to patriotism and sacrifice. It is difficult for me not to feel a poignant empathy for this time, the generation of my grandparents, and the period in which my own parents were born. Despite all the many momentous things that have happened since then – atomic power, space travel, political and cultural revolutions, computers and the internet – 1943 is not a year from the distant past. Not only are the cultural values expressed in these images still relevant, but the entire world continues to feel the consequences – good and bad – from this momentous period.
Yet, in making these collages I have not sought to make a statement of any kind. Rather, I just sought to playfully re-combine the imagery of the period into new configurations that evoke the dream of the collective consciousness (or “unconsciousness” – if you will) of America. Nor did I create the images to be static finished pieces, rather the images are what I would call “instances” of imagery as though they were just stills of a film (or perhaps keyframes of an animation). For this reason the work remains “Work in Progress”, or as my hero, machine artist, Jean Tinguely, would put it: “Remains static in motion”.

*Has the American “Status Quo” ever actually existed?

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Totems of Dystopia

Interactive 3D printed totem poles of dystopic futurism.

Based on my “Virtual Assemblage” technique of 3D junk sculpture, and building on the mechanics and interactivity of my popular Cathenge “Catolith” Cat Statues (cathenge.net), the “Totems of Dystopia”, would be a set of (3) 10′ tall 3D printed totem poles arrayed in a triangle. Within this array is a zone of intricate interactivity facilitated by the use of LiDAR (as deployed successfully in Cathenge) that triggers a collage of sound samples and lighting effects. The goal is to create an atmosphere of beautifully unsettling discord and majestic suspense that is both fascinating and cathartic to the audience.

The images below are quick 3D sketches that are “for example” and are not the finished design. Potentially, they will be 3 individually different totem poles. Also, the color and finish in the render is only provisional – the finished work would be painted and illuminated differently. The specific details of this project are to be determined, but these images, and the brief text give an idea of the projects style and concept.

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Miami Art Basel: David Normal’s Futuristic Installations

Documentary and Interview by Julia Schroeder

In December of 2023, I brought artwork to Art Basel Miami for the first time. It did not go unnoticed! Art historian and videomaker, Julia Schroeder, spotted it and approached me about doing a short video about my work. Over the Spring of 2024, we conducted a number of interviews and sifted through project documentation and last Friday, June 21st, the finished video popped up on the web.

It focuses on my adventure of bringing the Kittolith to Miami Art Week and displaying it in The Maze installation at Hotel Faena’s beachfront. Full story here.

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Kittoliths Grow Up To Be Catoliths

Refurbished Catoliths with new bases and “KISS” (Kittolith Interactive Sound System) adapted to the Catolith

It’s only natural that cats should have kittens, and plastic cat statues should therefore have their progeny too. The Coven of Catoliths gave birth to a Litter of Kittoliths.

After 5 years of design and production I feel that the Catolith is at last nearing its potential. The newly refurbished Catoliths that were just installed at KALW with their LiDAR based interactivity, battery operation, independent control via Raspberry Pi computer, and lighter more mobile wooden base actually exceed what I imagined for this artwork 5 years ago.

Below is a table showing the progression of techniques from one iteration of Cathenge to the next.

Component
New Catolith (2024)		Kittolith System (2023-24)Catolith System (Patricia’s Green 2022)
Catolith System (BMan 2019)
InteractivityLiDAR (“Time of Flight”), Raspberry PiLiDAR (“Time of Flight”), Raspberry PiPassive InfraredCapacitive Sensing by Theremin Barney
PurringSolfeggio Tone BasedSolfeggio Tone BasedPurr Data interactive composition by Jacob TonskiPurr Tones by No.e
3D PrintingPETG/CR-10 S-5
Self-Printed		PETG/CR-10 S-5
Self-Printed		PETG/CR-10 S-5
Self-Printed		PLA by Titanic Design
3D Modeling“Voxel Modeling” for 2-ply model with “shiplap” joints.“Voxel Modeling” for 2-ply model with “shiplap” joints.“Voxel Modeling” for 2-ply model with “shiplap” joints.No joining system!
BaseWooden BaseWooden BaseConcrete BaseConcrete Base
SoundTransductive Speakers/Inverted Sub Mounted in the BaseTransductive Speakers/Inverted Sub Mounted in the BaseTransductive Speakers/Bazooka SubCar Audio Stuff

The Vision of Cathenge

From the beginning, the vision of Cathenge and of the Catolith Cat Statue has been exceedingly difficult to realize because it combines lighting effects and interactivity in very specific ways and is dependent on the large format 3D printing to achieve. However, each installation of Cathenge succeeded in communicating this vision in different ways, but never completely to my satisfaction, and that’s why I have continued working on the project.

The goal has been to express the concept of “Holofelinity: Universal Cat Consciousness”. Holofelinity is the magical power of the Ancient Lyran Space Cats to manifest their minds over matter and to transform themselves into any shape. This is expressed in the artwork as “Harmonic Purring” (AKA; “Purrbration of Holofelinity”), an evocation of the capacity of the Space Cats to purr their visions into material form.

Ancient Lyran Space Cat materialized as Bastet idol levitating pyramid using chromatic spectra of the Purrbration of Holofelinity.

The Kittolith

In order to reach this goal, it was instrumental to create a smaller version of the Catolith, the “Kittolith”:

The Kittolith at Miami Art Week

Because the Kittolith presents as a single statue instead of a circle of statues (as in Cathenge) it has been necessary to condense the interactive harmonic purring system into one sculpture. This has been done using LiDAR. People interact with the LiDAR beam extending from the collar of the Kittolith and trigger different frequencies (“Solfeggio Tones”). The infographic below shows how the Kittolith works with the use of Solfeggio sound healing tones:

From Kittolith to Catolith

The “Kittolith Interactive Sound System” (KISS) was adapted for use in the Catolith. The photo gallery below documents our process of creating the New Catolith. Essential to this process was the design and construction of a new wooden base for the Catolith.

CAD drawing of wooden Catolith base

This new, lighter base not only facilitates a wider range of possibilities of exhibitions because of its much reduced weight (compared to the previous concrete bases), but also resolves acoustic issues since the wooden base acts as a ported speaker cabinet for the subwoofer installed in the base. Below is a gallery of photos of the new Catolith and its new base under construction:

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Sonnets – Illustrated with AI (MidJourney)

Since 2022 I have been writing sonnets. A total of 45 to date. I’ve been experimenting a little bit with using the sonnets, or phrases from the sonnets, as prompts for AI art program, MidJourney.

I’ve taken the results from 4 of these experiments and overlaid the entire sonnet. I’m not completely satisfied with this. For me, so far, making stuff with MidJourney (of the various LLM image generators MJ is the only one I’ve worked with, but I have experimented pretty extensively), is semi-random. I toss in phrases and other parameters, and the bot spits out its many different interpretations. I don’t think it has much capacity for metaphor, simile, or narrative. I guess what I am really experimenting with is how to test what capacity it has for these qualities of poetic language.

I’d like these experiments in illustrating poetry with AI generative art, to lead to a curated use of poetic language in an interactive and immersive theatrical context where the audience can explore the poetic vision and help evolve it through their participation. I’m not being very specific here, but I guess you (or I) could enter the preceding sentence into ChatGPT and ask it to expand on the topic.

IXX.

Behold the elephant bearing many dreams!
He farts profoundly and expands very greatly
Consciousness that floats like incense streams!
Like strings of pearls! Like jewels beheld innately!
Like harem girls spinning tales spoken ornately
Of a certain Sultan they served exclusively,
Who, arriving a little drunk, and only very lately,
Ad-libs an odd soliloquy spoken effusively,
“Death is but a mirage!” he states conclusively.
Tottering, his ivory tower trembles and it cracks
And across shimm’ring sands he stumbles elusively –
Like a drunken elephant covering up his tracks.
The fleeting visions of distant lands so strange to remember,
Like warming your hands by the glow of an incense ember.

XXVI.

Jealous wind sweeping away grieving sand
Revealing her sleight of a severed hand
Clasping the eyeball of his mountain mortal
Where shadow castles loom ungrateful grand.
Clown bordello cum unanimous chortle
Of troglodytes ‘pon the spacetime portal
Encucumbered by mystic contraband
Shameless gender-bender gerrymand.
Gothchick debauchka stylishly putrid –
Creature teacher’s pet beyond reprimand.
Dimestore detective lust pinup lurid
Half-eaten sandwitch word salad stupid.
As for his victims she left them nameless,
For her achievements he was but blameless.

XXX.

Die countless deaths – love’s not mummified!
On the contrary, love is glorified
To persist beyond all earthly bounds.
Love is the essence of life electrified!
Music of the spheres, all celestial sounds,
Hooting of night owls, baying of sad hounds,
All sing the song of death inevitable –
And dance the mortal dance incredible!
Splendor that subverts the rule of reason –
Vainglorious love inestimable!
Every flower has its own season,
And each lover commits some small treason
To just live or justly die for something –
Loving someone, somewhere, somehow, some dumb thing.

XXXIII.

Count each grain of sand, the joys of springtide!
Inner conflicts wrestle as we sit ringside
Reminiscing, wagering, who did stand
And who was blinded and who fell tongue-tied.
Prophets and exiles of that promised land
Where milk, honey –  even heroin – grew bland.
Like ghosts smoking cigars of the good life –
Gimcrack pulp fiction superpower strife –
We wander and wonder and mostly muddle,
Mix things up, mistake your best friend’s wife
For a beluga, or platypus to cuddle.
With strange bedfellows we conspire and huddle
To gravely confound the New World Order
And hail Jupiter from Ganymede’s border.

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Pulp and Circumstance

“Pulp and Circumstance” is the title I gave to a set of collages made in the winter of 2017-18. Life’s circumstances had led me to recoil from the outer world and retreat into the haven of collage. I made most of these collages laying in bed using (miracle of technology) a “Wacom Mobile Studio Pro” graphics tablet. I surfed the web for old pulp magazine covers and similar illustrations to use as source material, and worked up one design after another which I posted on my Instagram profile as soon as they were ready.

I’ve always been enamored of the pulp magazines; sci-fi, detective, and otherwise, and otherwise. The sheer fecundity of the outpouring of imagination into these cheaply printed publications is astonishing, and the imagery, with that hunky-dory all-American robustness, has a certain homogeneity which I find useful for the “seamless” style of collage that I favor. What I mean by “seamless” is that the finished collage looks as though it is not a collage at all, but the illustration work of one artist. A successful example of this is “Insanity Claws” a kind of Norman Rockwell-like Xmas satire:

“Insanity Claws”, digital collage, 2017

This image combined the cover of a sleaze paperback novel about a Parisian prostitute with a saccharine vintage Christmas Eve image of an elfin Santa beaming over a couple of small children sleeping innocently in a green easy chair. A lot of careful retouching had to be done to get the girl to fit in the chair. I added the Freddy Krueger style fish-knife gloves, and replaced the children’s book illustrations with kinky porn images. The result is a pretty “seamless” collage that gives the illusion of being the vintage relic of one demented illustrator of yesteryear.

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May 2024 – Print of the Month Club

Print of the Month for May 2024:  1943 Series Collages

This is the May 2024 offering for Patreon Print of the Month Club. These images are part of the ”1943” digital collages.  Each month Patreon “Print of the Month” subscribers will receive an 8.5 x 11 in. print on Moab Entrada Natural cotton rag paper.  The print will feature two collages with variations of the similar elements.  It is $15. a month to subscribe and that includes postage and handling for the monthly print sent directly to you.

You can join here:

https://patreon.com/davidnormal

If you would like to order a specific past print from the series, please contact me at:

davidnormal (at) gmail.com

About the “1943 Collage Series”

During the Pandemic, my friend and collector, Josh “Doggy” Norman, gave me a stack of old LIFE Magazines all from the year 1943. Of course, in ’43 the world was plunged into the depths of WWII – the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, The Japanese defeated at Guadalcanal, and, in the Fall of ’43, after the resignation of Mussolini, Italy made a truce with the Allied Forces.
Even as the war seemed to turn in America’s favor, at home, and certainly in the pages of LIFE Magazine, nothing was certain. It is strange to view this era through the looking glass of its advertising because the advertisers, whose stock and trade is illusion, swing fervently between efforts at buoying up an All-American status quo that is faltering*, propagandizing against the enemy, and rallying the citizenry – especially the women whose men were fighting overseas – to patriotism and sacrifice. It is difficult for me not to feel a poignant empathy for this time, the generation of my grandparents, and the period in which my own parents were born. Despite all the many momentous things that have happened since then – atomic power, space travel, political and cultural revolutions, computers and the internet – 1943 is not a year from the distant past. Not only are the cultural values expressed in these images still relevant, but the entire world continues to feel the consequences – good and bad – from this momentous period.
Yet, in making these collages I have not sought to make a statement of any kind. Rather, I just sought to playfully re-combine the imagery of the period into new configurations that evoke the dream of the collective consciousness (or “unconsciousness” – if you will) of America. Nor did I create the images to be static finished pieces, rather the images are what I would call “instances” of imagery as though they were just stills of a film (or perhaps keyframes of an animation). For this reason the work remains “Work in Progress”, or as my hero, machine artist, Jean Tinguely, would put it: “Remains static in motion”.

*Has the American “Status Quo” ever actually existed?

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Hellmouth – 3D Sketches

Here are some initial 3D assemblages for the “Hellmouth”.
Hmm . . . So far it doesn’t look so hellish does it? That’s because it ‘s just a start. I made the cubicle gate inspired by the Mayan design, and now I’m adding various models as I experiment with different designs. I think what’s needed is some teeth and an overall face to tie it together.