Skip to main content

John Waters: Indecent Exposure at
Baltimore Museum of Art

In October 2018,  the Baltimore Museum opened an exhibit John Waters: Indecent Exposure, the first major retrospective of the artist’s visual art in his hometown of Baltimore featuring 160 works that span 30 years.
The same month, the art world news repeated many stories of the Banksy painting “Girl with Balloon” that went for $1.4 million and then went up in self-destruction.  
What Water’s exhibit has is a painting that does something else.  You stand too close to the picture of the flower on the wall to see it better  and it squirts water in your face.   Titled appropriately “Hardy Har.” 
Rather than groaning at the story of a painting that seems like a waste of money the moment it is sold, Waters’ watery flower keeps giving people something to laugh at.
This is a show that is playful with objects that re-cast our sacred icons and symbols, one that will make people laugh, squirm, grimace— at the discovery of the irreverent, indecents and just well plain awful taste that is —well -what we buy into all day as culture.
The humor is not just the subject matter or the words or the paint or the paper but that Waters uses the same media format itself.  His Library Series  have taken book covers like God’s Little Acre,  and renamed it, perhaps more accurately, as  God’s Little Faker. That a book should be so pretentious when a mere letter change makes it absolutely ridiculous is hilarious.
Waters is maybe best known for his made in Baltimore movies,  which are featured in this collection.   Much of his art pokes at Hollywood movies. 
If art becomes meaningful when we can bring to it some of our life experience,  there is hardly anything in this exhibit that no one has not seen already many times.  This stuff blasts at us everywhere, in the ads and the objects and the formats so pretentious as those books.  
This is not  satire but something much more human, something that is outrageous in our ordinary stuff.    
Nor does one does not leave the exhibit impressed with the artist’s genius— but rather with a good chuckle to return to the outer world where there are so many objects and icons awaiting us,  our eyes now wider opened by the wonder that is John Waters’ art.

WANT TO KNOW MORE
John Waters: Indecent Exposure at The Baltimore Museum of Art, until

 Jan. 2019.

Popular posts from this blog

  Once is here again!   The Brooklyn Gallery Players reach into the treasure chest of great musicals to bring Once alive and on stage in Brooklyn (until to December 17, 2023). Director Mark Gallagher , and Music Directors David Fletcher and Brendon McCray have crafted a vibrant production, seamlessly integrating the 15 member cast in roles  as both actors and musicians. Set in Dublin, the  formula for the poignant love triangle  is simple. Patrick Newhart  plays Guy, an Irish musician who has given up  on love as he sings the award winning classic  Falling.  Newhart mastered the bombastic busking guitar style and performed each of his songs with intensity and passion Sophie Smith-Brody  is Girl,  a Czech woman  who will inspire him to try again both in  love and with music. Smith-Brody performed each of her disparate songs with aplomb,  from the opening classical piece to her plaintive solos – If You Want Me and The Hill.  The performance starts  with an “ impromptu”  p
Read more
               TINA - THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL  at The National Theatre              In the 1970s, I  had spent weeks climbing around ruins in Peru.  I heard music of the Andes all over.  I  was  finally at  Machu Picchu to spend the night so I could get up early  and climb to see the sunrise from the top of the ruins.   As I got to steps by the gatekeepe,  I could hear his boom box blaring across the Andes “I Wanna Take You Higher”  by Tina Turner.   You don’t have to go climbing the Andes to hear her songs — Tina-The Tina Turner Musical  isright here  at the National Theatre, Washington DC,  until  Oct. 23, 2022.    The show has broken all records with the awards it has received since in premiered in April 2018 in London.  No one questions that Tina is a musical legend but  for this show  accolades to  the stars Naomi Rodgers and Zurin Villanueva who alternate in the  spectacular role.   At every performance there will be people  who remember seeing Tina “back when” and
Read more
  Sarah Ruhl’s Orlando — sparkling wit and ageless wisdom —   at   Constellation Theatre — gone but not forgotten In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando A Biography ,  the eponymous hero undergoes many changes over the centuries— from roles in society and relationships to sex change.  Since the time travel gender bending work was published in 1928, this his/her story has continued to undergone adaptions to its original form, from analytical scholarly critiques to crowd pleasing  movies and stage plays.  Constellation Theatre Company continued  the tradition with its amazing presentation of Sarah Ruhl’s narrative play Orlando .    Five actors  take on dozens of roles as characters or in the  chorus to keep the story at its rapid pace,  condensing events spanning almost five centuries into 100 minutes.   Orlando (Mary Myers) is  ever the aristocrat whether as a page in the court of  Queen Elizabeth I (Alan Naylor)  or involved with a mysterious Russian princess (Edmee - Marie Faal) or pursued
Read more