Tobias Wong, Witty Designer and Conceptual Artist, Dies at 35
by William Grimes
June 2, 2010

Tobias Wong, a designer whose outrageous sendups of luxury goods and witty expropriation of work by other designers blurred the line between conceptual art and design, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 35.

The office of the chief medical examiner in Manhattan ruled the death a suicide.

Mr. Wong first came to the attention of the design press in 2001 when he turned a Philippe Starck Bubble Club chair into a lamp, softly glowing from within. Adding spice to the stunt, “This Is a Lamp” was shown the night before the actual Starck chair was presented to the public for the first time.

A provocateur by nature, Mr. Wong operated at the fringes of the traditional design world, creating objects like a stack of 100 $1 bills, bound in peelable glue like a notepad; a gold-plated McDonalds coffee stirrer (a riff on the company’s plastic version that was apparently popular among drug users before being withdrawn); and an engagement ring with the diamond mounted upside down, so that the wearer could use it to scratch graffiti.

“As time went on his work became more and more ironic, sarcastic and pointed,” said Paola Antonelli, senior curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design. “He had an enfant terrible style of design that was very fresh in New York. Today you see all sorts of people doing conceptual design, but he was one of the first.” (more…)

Readers can now follow The Art of the Prank blog on Facebook. Comments are welcome there.

Jumping the Snark
by Dave Gilson
Mother Jones
November/December 2009

In an age of Yes Men, flash mobs, birthers, and fake pundits, is the prank dead?

What’s a good prank worth? How about $2 billion? That’s how much Dow Chemical’s stock value dipped in just 23 minutes on the morning of December 3, 2004, after its spokesman went on the BBC to announce that the company would make amends for the 1984 Bhopal toxic-gas disaster “simply because it’s the right thing to do.” (Dow had acquired Union Carbide, the original owner of the Bhopal chemical plant, in 1999.) Within the hour, the flack was exposed as one of the Yes Men, a duo that’s spent the past decade perfecting the art of anti-corporate trickery. The feat cemented their reputation as the world’s preeminent political pranksters (a reputation they recently reaffirmed by pranking the US Chamber of Commerce). It also proved that a punch line can occasionally pack a real punch.

The Bhopal stunt kicks off the pair’s new film, The Yes Men Fix the World, the follow-up to their self-titled 2004 movie. But don’t let the puffed-up title fool you into thinking that the Yes Men believe their hijinks are actually making the world a better place. A better title would have been The Prank Is Dead. (more…)

Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture
National Portrait Gallery
March 27 – August 2, 2009
Washington, DC

From Artdaily.org:

Washington, DC – This groundbreaking exhibition casts new light upon Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), one of the most influential artists of the recent past. This show demonstrates that Duchamp harnessed the power of portraiture and self-portraiture both to secure his reputation as an iconoclast and to establish himself as a major figure in the artworld. (more…)

Note to our contributors, friends and fans:
In celebration, we have moved the entire blog to a cloud server. This will help us accommodate more volume and more traffic. Since we’re making big changes, we decided to change our Web address at the same time. Why not cause the maximum confusion for the most people?

You can continue to count on us to bring you the profound, the profane, and the pathetic, that is — the widest spectrum of artful pranks; culture jamming & reality hacking; creative activism; literary, media & political hoaxes; truth that’s stranger than fiction; prank instructionals; and loads of practical jokes and mischief.

Please update your bookmarks and those of your friends’. If you are a subscriber, you don’t have to change anything. Email and RSS feed subscriptions should continue to function as usual. If you’d like to be a subscriber, please join us via email or RSS feed. You’ll find the subscription links on the right hand column of this page.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.

From Rhizome.org at the New Museum, posted by Marcin Ramocki

Every religion, political ideology, philosophy, and scientific theory embodies a set of structured beliefs. These belief systems maintain a symbiotic liaison with the arts. Throughout history, communal beliefs have relied on music, theater, painting, and dance in order to propagate accepted doctrines, and the arts in turn have shaped the articles of faith.

The conference brings together artists and scholars in an unusual forum. The arts addressed deal primarily with media, the major art form that has only come to the fore in recent decades. The scholarship concerns antique matters, such as Sumerian music, early Egyptian medicine, and the omens, codes of law, and creation myths of Mesopotamia. The divergent perspectives of the participants augur well for innovative ideas emerging from this close encounter between scholarship, the arts, and the belief systems of early and modern times.

Participants: Mel Alexenberg / Netanel Anor / Michael Bielicky / Bazon Brock / Yiyi Chen / Michael Cohn / Brian Dillon / Dragan Espenschied / Dmitry Gutov / Jenia Gutova / Wayne Horowitz / Th. J. H. Krispijn / Bo Lawergren / Olia Lialina / Barbara London / Naomi May / Luke Murphy / Muzaffer Ozgules / Marcin Ramocki / Morty Schiff / Irene Sibbing / Joey Skaggs / Peter Weibel / Martin Williams / Jocelyn Wolff / Henry Zemel

Presented by Caeno.org/newagain

Appreciation: Humor was Bruce Conner’s art
by Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
San Francisco Chronicle
July 11, 2008

Having announced his death on two previous occasions, Bruce Conner actually did die on Monday at 74.

The false alarms were part of his continual toying with the nature of personal and artistic identity. Conner liked to have control – the neatness of his house attested to that – and the nearest he could come to controlling public information about himself was to inject it with ruses and contradictions.

The shaggy look of his early assemblages earned Conner a place in the Bay Area tendency briefly known as Funk art. But that shagginess is deceptive. The unflinching, albeit intuitive, control he brought to those works’ composition accounts for the inventive power that still burns through their period quality when encountered half a century later.

Long before the shaky ground of selfhood became a theme of postmodernism, Conner was working and playing with it. The work in his 2000 retrospective at the de Young Museum was so diverse that, as I wrote at the time, “it could almost be taken for the output of a movement rather than an individual.” (more…)

The Art of the Prank is one year old today!

Many, many thanks to all the supporters, contributors, readers, and friends who have made it such a great success!

images: party balloons, zombies

April Fools’ Day is extended to April 2 and 3!

If you’re in San Francisco, don’t miss:

The First Annual Pranks Film Festival
April 1, 2, 3 at The Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street by Valencia, San Francisco CA 94133
Tickets $10 per day for all shows.

The 1st Annual Pranks Film Festival is a three day celebration and tribute to the “Art of the Prank” and those pranksters that have courage enough to pull them off. [Editor's note: Footage of Joey Skaggs' exploits will be screened Thursday, April 3 at 5pm]

www.pranksfilmfestival.com

RE/Search Publications Presents:

The First Annual Pranks Film Festival
April 1, 2, 3 at The Roxie Cinema
3117 16th Street by Valencia, San Francisco CA 94133
Tickets $10 per day for all shows.
www.pranksfilmfestival.com

The 1st Annual Pranks Film Festival is a three day celebration and tribute to the “Art of the Prank” and those pranksters that have courage enough to pull them off.

The Festival will screen films about the masters like Alan Abel, John Law, The Cacophany Society and the Billboard Liberation Front and short docs from the newest infiltrators and prankster, like the Yes Men, Harmon Leon and Joey Skaggs. This is a festival that is both humorous and political.

Check the schedule here. Benefit for RE/Search Publications and Todd Blair of SRL.

Editor’s note: Video about Joey Skaggs will be screened on April 3 at 5pm.

Editor’s note: ArtofthePrank.com editor Joey Skaggs appeared at the 1st Influencers event in 2004. You can check it out here.

Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG and Bani present:

The Influencers, a free three day event, Thursday, February 28 – March 1, 2008, at the Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB), dedicated to imaginative subversion of contemporary mediascape. Focusing on the first hand testimony of some of the protagonists of the international scene, the festival is a selection of the most subtle, elegant and visionary proposals of parallel narratives in the realm of media and global popular culture.

The Influencers explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism.

The key to The Influencers is found in its guests and stories: impostors, pseudo-totalitarian musicians, conceptual hackers, deviant geographers, anarchitects and actors from invisible theatre. In these three days they are going to present their work, show known and less known material and speak with the public about challenges, goals and strategies.

See you all in Barcelona!

Editor’s note: Artist and ArtofthePrank.com editor Joey Skaggs will be joining the online class the week of February 18. Check it out!

Tricksters and Pranks with R.U. Sirius – February 11 – March 23, 2008

Pranks and Pranksters, Tricksters & Tricks — the brilliant ones open up a space in the world for magic(k), ambiguity, and novelty. They encourage us to Question Authority and better still, they cause us to Question Reality.

In this course, we will discuss the history of pranks and pranksterism in the contemporary world. We will examine mythical and world historic tricksters like Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Crowley, Puck, Heyoka, Papa Legba, Lucifer, and more. And we’ll explore and discuss the role pranksters and tricksters play in cultures. I will also discuss some of my own pranks and tricks and legendary pranksters Mark Hosler of Negativland and Joey Skaggs will be dropping in on the course to answer questions.

Finally, we will plan pranks, make pranks, and maybe even leave the course with a dedicated prankster cabal. No fooling.

For more information visit the Maybe Logic Institute. If that link doesn’t work, go here.

Related links:

Vilnius, Lithuania – The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center (JMVAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania proudly announces its premier exhibition, The Avant-Garde: From Futurism to Fluxus, which opens to the public on November 4, 2007 and runs through February 3, 2008.

The exhibition highlights the history of the avant-garde through some of its most pivotal figures and a wide array of mediums including film, film stills, installation, Fluxus objects and documents, sculpture, video, and poetry, which cooperatively stimulated new ways of thinking about art, culture, and society. Furthermore, the exhibition represents a celebratory homecoming for two of Lithuania’s most prolific artists: pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas, the impresario and “Chairman” of the 1960’s international art movement Fluxus. (more…)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Alfred Jarry (September 8, 1873 – November 1, 1907) was a French writer born in Laval, Mayenne, France, not far from the border of Brittany; he was of Breton descent on his mother’s side.

Best known for his play Ubu Roi (1896), which is often cited as a forerunner to the theatre of the absurd, Jarry wrote in a variety of genres and styles. He wrote plays, novels, poetry, essays and speculative journalism. His texts present some pioneering work in the field of absurdist literature. Sometimes grotesque or misunderstood (i.e. the opening line in his play Ubu Roi, “Merdre!”, has been translated into English as “Shittr!”, “Shikt!”, and “Pschitt!”), he invented a science called ‘pataphysics.

Biography and works

A precociously brilliant student, Jarry enthralled his classmates with a gift for pranks and troublemaking.

At the lycée in Rennes when he was 15, he led of a group of boys who devoted much time and energy to poking fun at their well-meaning, obese and incompetent physics teacher, a man named Hébert. Jarry and classmate Charles Morin wrote a play they called Les Polonais and performed it with marionettes in the home of one of their friends. The main character, Père Heb, was a blunderer with a huge belly; three teeth (one of stone, one of iron, and one of wood); a single, retractable ear; and a misshapen body. In Jarry’s later work Ubu Roi, Père Heb would develop into Ubu, one of the most monstrous and astonishing characters in French literature.

Read more about Alfred Jarry at Wikipedia…