DUH-HEAD!
Free entry
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square
1 Mar 13 – 1 Sep 13
TASTE , an installation by Aleks Danko explores the idea of beauty and who decides what good taste is and how an art audience can be DUH-HEADS!
Who decides if something looks good or is in good taste? 250 years ago in London, artist William Hogarth, made a book about the idea of beauty. Included in it was a picture of a face with eyes that stare with a startled expression. It was about someone looking at art but not thinking or making up their own mind, just following the fashion of the time. Years later Aleks Danko copied the face to make the sculpture TASTE. The DUH-HEADS! are looking at the audience, but they are not making sense of what they are seeing. Like theatre props, the faces on sticks, or masks, are initially seen from the front, and as we walk around them their presence and being dissolves to black. They disappear and become just shapes on sticks! Taste, simply an illusion?
Children receive an Aleks Danko mask and are invited to respond to the art works on display by drawing their DUH-HEAD!