Canadian Blood Artist Taken Into Custody and Evaluated for Vandalizing Exhibit at Whitney Museum
By: Christina Mancuso Aug. 21, 2014
A Canadian blood artist splattered paint on a wall of the Whitney Museum's Jeff Koons show yesterday. Istvan Kantor was taken into custody and then to a hospital for evaluation.
Kantor's own work in the late 1970s and early 1980s consisted most notably of the "Blood Campaign", an ongoing series of performances in which he takes his own blood and splashes it onto walls, canvases or into the audience, often in combination with singing electropop songs that mix elements of new wave and industrial music, Hungarian folksongs and Neoist manifesto lyrics, combined with para-military clothing and punk hairstyles. Kantor expanded the theatrical, opera-like quality of his performances through the medium of video which gained him international recognition and awards as a video performance artist from the 1980s until today {fact}. At the same time, he continued to work within the Neoist network, co-organizing and participating in a series of Neoist festivals, which began as Apartment Festivals ("APTs") between 1980 and 1988 and were continued in 1997 and 2004. Just like his enemy Stewart Home, he has been controversial within Neoism for allegedly using the movement as a publicity vehicle for himself.
Jeff Koons' RETROSPECTIVE is on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art through October 19, 2014. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, popular, and controversial artists of the postwar era. Throughout his career, he has pioneered new approaches to the readymade, tested the boundaries between advanced art and mass culture, challenged the limits of industrial fabrication, and transformed the relationship of artists to the cult of celebrity and the global market. Yet despite these achievements, Koons has never been the subject of a retrospective surveying the full scope of his career. Comprising almost 150 objects dating from 1978 to the present, this exhibition will be the most comprehensive ever devoted to the artist's groundbreaking oeuvre. By reconstituting all of his most iconic works and significant series in a chronological narrative, the retrospective will allow visitors to understand Koons's remarkably diverse output as a multifaceted whole.
This exhibition will be the artist's first major museum presentation in New York, and the first to fill nearly the entirety of the Whitney's Marcel Breuer building with a single artist's work. It will also be the final exhibition to take place there before the Museum opens its new buildingin the Meatpacking District in 2015.
Jeff Koons: A Retrospective is organized by Scott Rothkopf, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs.
The exhibition travels to the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris (November 26, 2014-April 27, 2015) and to the Guggenheim Bilbao (June 5-September 27, 2015).
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