The night before Halloween, the good doctor and I went to see the second-to-last night of the Banksy exhibit, The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill. We weren’t exactly sure where we were going and wound up in a as-seedy-as-the-West-Village-gets part of the West Village full of gay bars and fetish shops and thought we were soooooo cool for going to such an underground, out-of-the-way showing. And then we realized it was actually on 7th Ave., right beside a SushiSamba and a Jekyll and Hyde. Lame!
There was a bit of a line, and some British-accented douchebags walked by and yelled, “You’re waiting in line for this?! It’s not worth it!” But a minute later, we saw him perched outside one of the windows, taking photos with everyone else. We were hoping one of them was secretly Banksy.
The sign outside welcomed us in for some mechanically-retrieved meats,
and the walls inside beckoned us to buy treats for our pets:
From the outside, a sleeping cheetah, complete with a swinging tail and belly that inflated and deflated to show breathing:
From the inside, a cheetah-print coat. AMAZING!:
A chimpanzee watching a pair of other chimpanzees on television, pausing during the humping parts:
An ancient-looking Tweety Bird, his feather lying at his feet:
A spider in a gumball machine, inexplicably:
My absolute favourite, a pair of swimming fish sticks:
This is the thing that–when I saw a video of it online–made me say, “I HAVE to see this!” And it was even better in person:
Many types of snakes, made of many different kinds of sausages, including baby snakelets:
Chickens made of nuggets, pecking at their sauce:
And a rather disgusting/awesome nugget just hatched out of its egg:
A pretty bunny:
A video camera bird with its birdlings in a nest:
Love the flashing “liquor” and “wines” sign in the background.
The obligatory penis in the guestbook:
And finally, a netted dolphin that we swear is actually always outside of Jekyll and Hyde and accidentally became a part of the exhibit:
I managed to talk Dr. Boyfriend into riding it while I videotaped, but I forgot to ever hit record. To compensate, he allowed me to take this picture, which is, I’m sure, the only time he’ll be near a farm. Even a faux one:
Funny how mechanical food can somehow seem cute, huh? I didn’t take away any bigimportant message about the ethical treatment of animals or anything, but I did take away feelings of amazement and awesomeness and a whole lotta gladness that I live in the city I do.
9 Comments
Funny. I never even got the idea that it might be about ethical treatment.
I just thought it looked crazy-awesome.
We’re bad people, right?
Yeah, no, I didn’t think anything of it until Sonya mentioned the possibility to me. This is why I’ll never be an artist, right?; I think it’s good enough to make things for the sake of having cool stuff to look at. Artists’ statements of intent are just a formality to me.
I think there are plenty of artists out there who aren’t that self-important and who don’t have any agenda other than that something looks cool.
I think that’s why I like pop art so much. It’s the most fun to look at, and there’s not much need to translate it into something meaningful.
Hey Babe,
This post is showing up as a mish mash of code, errors and text on the lj feed. I had to come ALL THE WAY OVER HERE to see what you had to say.
~ Lori
Thank you for letting me know, ma’am; I thought maybe my friends just weren’t into mechanical food-animals like I am.
Too bad I have NO IDEA how to fix it over there. Maybe I’ll just repost directly to my LJ and piss everyone off.
In spite of the coding snafus and because I am fabulous and you are too I have made you internationally famous via my very own livejournal.
I am having fishsticks for dinner.
Takeaway messages?
1) Hot dogs are weird
2) The meat we eat ain’t too meaty
2) Monkeys are funny
I think I already knew that stuff …
The baby chicken nuggets make me sad.
the ooooh vs ohhhh quandry is a good one. I guess I would have to say that we’d have to use capitalization based on vocal modulation in that case:
Oh (like eww) tends to be louder at the END, while Oh (like, um.. “oh”) tends to be louder at the beginning
Maybe we could settle for ooOOOh vs OOooh ?
P.S. – The word verification code next to your comment was “Lush Fu,” which I think would be an awesome title for a wine & food critic blog. Thoughts?