Hipnostasis, a collaborative installation by Raymond Pettibon and Yoshua Okon, currently at the Armory Center for the Arts in Los Angeles has been described as both “celebratory and baleful”, using several cultural images and ideas to examine what it means to live a life of freedom. The installation, which features three elements – several TVs featuring videos of six scraggly, bearded men; a large phallus-like structure upon which the words “dead end” flash in and out of view; and pages from books by Jack Kerouac, Rudyard Kipling and Laurence Sterne as well as Samuel Beckett’s novel “Malone Dies”. The word “Hipnostasis” is scrawled somewhat haphazardly on the wall. 

The installation “reads like a mash-up of hippies, hypnosis and hypostasis” and obviously has a masculine feel to it, due to the phallic symbol, videos of men and “lost boyish” writings all by male authors, however  the deeper message is something most can relate to – aging, wanting to be free forever – these are classic desires of all humans that have been explored in art and literature for ages. Pettibon and Okon’s work seeks, it seems, to examine the all the good, bad, melancholy and beautiful sides to this desire, as well as pay homage to those who have explored it.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Arts, Exhibitions, Gender and Sexuality, Identity, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.