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Douglas Fishbone
Douglas Fishbone will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket infoDouglas Fishbone - Biography
Doug Fishbone is an American artist living and working in London. He earned an MA in Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths College in 2003 and was awarded the Beck’s Futures Prize for Student Film and Video in 2004. He is perhaps best known for his project 30,000 Bananas - a huge mountain of ripe bananas installed in the middle of London’s Trafalgar Square and later given away free to the audience - in October 2004.
Fishbone’s video and performance work was included in the last year’s British Art Show 6, a national touring exhibition held every five years to feature the best in contemporary British art. His work places the viewer in an slightly awkward position. His monologues use structures that seem to evoke contexts and strategies of various speakers, ranging from bad stand-up comedy, a self-help tape, a session with psychiatrist, a corporate slide show or a guy sitting in a bar next to you.
He moves between these ways of speaking, adopting contradictory positions, telling stories, truisms, cliches and racist jokes that feed and loop around each other. With this monologue a series of related images that illustrate, contradict or twist the meaning of his speech, appear behind him in the manner of a news reader or university lecturer, regulated to the pace of his voice.
His position veers wildly from pole to pole, narrating grey areas between our perceived notions of fact and fiction, myth and propaganda, comedy and advertising.
While Fishbone altruistically turns our attention to corporate greed, saving the dolphins and pornography, the work ultimately functions (best) as propaganda for the artist and his sex life.
He had his first major solo project at Gimpel Fils in London in October of 2006, and performed at London’s Hayward Gallery in February of 2007. Upcoming projects include a live performance at the ICA in London in July of 2007, as well as group exhibitions in Switzerland, Japan, and Korea. He was recently voted one of the Future Greats of the art world in the annual survey of Art Review magazine. Fishbone was born in New York City in 1969.
Doug Fishbone 'Everybody Loves a Winner' (2004)
Douglas Fishbone will perform at The Big Chill festival 2008 A-Z line up | Ticket info
Written: 15th Apr, 08
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