The Weird Art of Christiaan Zwanikken

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Maybe it's just as well I lost my notes.  

I went to Jinxed Gallery on Friday to see the new Christiaan Zwanikken exhitbiion and, quite frankly, I loved it a lot.  Zwanikken is a Dutch kinetic sculptor who combines robotics and (often) dead animal parts to create sculptures that are dark poems made physical.  As you can see above, they're a little bit Goth, a little bit steampunk, a little bit influenced by Survival Research Labs.

I liked pretty much everything on display.  I scribbled down the (rather long) titles.  And somehow, rather mysteriously, every scrib of those notes disappeared into the black hole of my notebook.  I just can't find them.

In one sense, it's a pity because Zwanikken's titles are clearly meaningful.  The talking hare pictured in yesterday's blog had a title something like "A Dead Rabbit Head Explains Art."  Which was a response to "How to Explain Art to a Dead Rabbit Head," a piece of performance art by Joseph Beuys.  So, yeah, I'm definitely missing out on something here.

On the other hand, look at the video above.  Or the one below of two ram's skulls.  They work better freed of verbal expectation, dreamlike, afloat in their own wordless mythic realm.

Tomorrow, almost certainly, I'll write about the piece of his which really hit home for me.

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