Lot 10: BANKS VIOLETTE

Lovesongs for Assholes (Jack Daniels)
This work is from an edition of one plus one artist’s proof and is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

3 x 45 x 50 in. (7.62 x 114.3 x 127 cm) approximately as illustrated. Installation dimensions variable.

<br>Salt, cast salt and epoxy.

2005

Brussels, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, on black wings/six-channel bleed (with Stephen O’Malley), November 18, 2005 - January 7, 2006

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels

"My work proposes to analyze a particular event or phenomenon in a way I would call literary or operatic. Mostly I end up referring to things in the world that get read too easily or become miscues, models of information in transition. For example, murders related to heavy metal culture are about a sort of overt theatrical excess that gets literally enacted. When singing figuratively about killing turns into a literal command—I should really kill somebody—it becomes a miscue. And, ideally, the same potential for misreading is set up for the audience of my work (hopefully not to the point of inspiring someone to go stab their sister), but it has to be grey and fuzzy enough to go wrong in some way,"  (Banks Violette quoted in J. Tumlir, “Banks Violette,” Artforum, October 2004).
 
The delicate contours and stark white substances which form Lovesongs for Assholes (Jack Daniels) lie in direct contrast with the gloomier subject matter referenced here and throughout the artist’s work—the shady underpinnings of American youth culture. Violette’s infatuation with teenage angst, heavy metal, suicide, violence, and drug abuse reflect upon his childhood, and this work is no exception. The artist plays with the idea of duality, black and white, and the grey area in between where good and bad, healthy and sickly, light and dark are indistinguishable.