Wednesday, March 09, 2016

I robot

You know OTN is lookalike central, but who'd have thought we'd score a lookalike of an art dealer so close to home? Maurizio Cattelan once famously made a replica art collector and dumped it face down into a swimming pool, oh, and also gaffer-taped his dealer to the wall, but make another version? Not so common. Callum Morton, the Australian artist, went there. A decade ago, for his last Christchurch outing, he showed with chilling prescience a huge rock crashed through the roof of a shop, and now he has twinned Anna Schwartz in his latest work Reception. The robot Schwartz is looking a bit wonky on it (more farmer skinned by aliens in the opening minutes of Men in Black than Japanese Otonaroid) but Morton says this is intentional. 'It's a little bit Thunderbirds in a way and I kind of like that clunkiness.' Given that Anna Schwartz, is pretty much the opposite of clunky they’ll be easy to tell apart. You can read more about the good robot Schwartz and Morton’s work here in the SMH and, even better, some Roboschwartz live action here.

Images: Top, Roboschwartz. Middle left, Schwartz and right, Schwartz.01 and Bottom
, left MiB farmer and right Otonaroid.