Lot 303: Lovesongs for Assholes (Jack Daniels), 2005

Lovesongs for Assholes (Jack Daniels), 2005
Salt, cast salt and epoxy.   Approximate installation dimensions : 7.62 x 114.3 x 127 cm. (3 x 45 x 50 in).   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.

 Brussels, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, on black wings/six-channel bleed (with Stephen O’Malley), 18 November 2005 – 7 January 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 in an interview with Jan Tumlir, Art forum, October 2004.)
 
In his relatively new but fantastically prolific career, Banks Violette has become known for his slick, dark, cool aesthetic accomplished through a plethora of material to translate his narrative. Sourcing his inspiration from
the darker side of American culture, the violent connotations of his work are shuttered by the subtle beauty in which the work reveals itself, which sometimes borders on the minimal. Violette’s works present the viewer with
complex constructions that seamlessly intertwine the immaculate with the undesirable, drawing up narratives from cultural underbellies and allowing them to re-emerge to the surface as romantic and sublime moments, provoking his audience into a state of wonderment. The present lot, Love Songs for Assholes (Jack Daniels), is a quasi-forensic scene of mass culture, stripped bare, remaining of only piles of salt and fragments of society
remain, antagonizing its viewers with its simplicity and transient nature. The transience and restrained beauty of this lot is reminiscent of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, in particular Untitled (Lover boys), a pile of candy
in the corner of the gallery. We are presented with a blurred line between fantasy and reality, and although simple, a state of excessiveness resonates from the work impregnating the space with an addictive aura. Banks Violette
is an emissary of the dark beauty that lives in the subcultures of society.