100 Days Urn is the newest artwork to be placed on The Fifth Column of the White House. “The urn has been produced by the internationally renowned British artist Grayson Perry. It will collect metaphorically, and perhaps one day even physically, the ashes of the first one hundred days of the Trump presidency. It will act as a repository of all that is incredibly wrong in contemporary society,” Lanfranco Aceti explained. Named Curator Of The United States (COTUS) by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Aceti announced this new curated installation forty-nine days after his first installation at the White House. Entitled The Finger to the US, this first installation exhibited L.O.V.E. an artwork by Maurizio Cattelan, an Italian enfant terrible of the international art scene.
“This new installation reflects on the frivolity of present times and on the hyper-mediated sensationalism of fake news, which twists words irrespective of their contexts and intentions in order to enforce corporate hierarchies of power.” Aceti asserts, “let’s make it clear—this is not a right wing, not a leftist, and not a centrist political installation. The choice fell on Grayson Perry because of his ability to command the viewer to look at an empty container and reflect upon the reality of the words that adorn it, filling it up with one’s own knowledge, meaning, and experiences.”
Adorned with words and phrases like: “The Frivolous Now,” “cyber-bullying,” “VIP,” “cute YouTube clips,” “soft power,” “botox,” “mental illness,” “FaceBook,” “Body Armour,” “Leisure Industry,” “CCTV,” “allergies,” “Product Launch,” “Battling Lancer,” “Porn,” “CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER,” “privileged elite,” “online casino,” “anti-social behaviour,” “respect,” “Twitter,” etc., the vase symbolizes all the contained madness of a society which President Trump wants to make great again. The Frivolous Now, Grayson Perry’s glazed ceramic vase, was exhibited in 2011 as part of the show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum. The urn is similar in many ways to the frivolous image of President Trump and the politics of global entertainment produced by the US and endorsed by a public that pours its own inadequacies, frivolity, superficiality, and ideological fascisms into the metaphorical container of the president and the presidency.
“As #COTUS,” Aceti explained, “I have enjoyed developing this exciting project and bringing it to the attention of people who otherwise would not necessarily engage in social conversation that goes beyond divisive politics. If I had to choose what to place in the 100 Days Urn, I would place in it the ashes of fascism—containing the cremated remains and crisped falsehoods bequeathed both by the crazed, unreasonable right and the rabid, moralistic left. I would also like to add to the urn the burnt remains of the frivolity of contemporary protests, which have substituted the wearing down of a committed body via the daily grind for substantial and sustainable change with political protests as social media entertaining contexts of self-promotion. I would really L.O.V.E. to place in that urn the ashes of this vacuous present and pee on it.”
100 Days Urn will stand on The Fifth Column for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.
#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #100days #100daysurn
