{"id":59484,"date":"2021-08-16T12:25:43","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T18:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=59484"},"modified":"2021-08-25T10:19:56","modified_gmt":"2021-08-25T16:19:56","slug":"m-m-murdock-welcomes-you-to-the-wigglestick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/m-m-murdock-welcomes-you-to-the-wigglestick\/","title":{"rendered":"M M Murdock Welcomes You to the Wigglestick"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nFor centuries, “installing” art meant screwing a painting to the wall or a sculpture to a block of stone. Installation wasn\u2019t art, or even something unique to art. Then Marcel Duchamp hung a lot of art high on the walls of a pitch-black room full of ladders and handed out flashlights to the visitors, and the INSTALLATION was born. Today, Installation is hot and a lot of galleries call whatever happens an Installation, if only for want of a more accurate term. M M Murdock is not one of those, however. Unlike them, the (frankly) Mysterious M M Murdock knows that an Installation is a chance to combine what\u2019s in the show with what surrounds it, thereby creating a slice of the world in place of a dry gallery of well-behaved art. And so we have Welcome to the Wigglestick<\/em>.<\/h4>\n

The subjects of Welcome to the Wigglestick<\/em> are many, and not just because each of the two dozen or so wall-hung panels has something different painted on it. Painted AND WHEELED, it should be said, for each panel is in fact the body of a theoretically functional skateboard. But for all the creativity invested in the board designs, there is also a lot expended on creating an atmospheric skateboard store, complete with a glass case full of crudely carved wooden wheels and other credible accessories, topped by a cash register (and not an i-Pad), a hard-wired telephone, and an actual, functioning Rolodex. Take me back to my childhood . . . or at least to 15 minutes ago. Other bits of relevance include a ramp and several televisions, endlessly showing skateboarders in action. Just outside \u2014 their presence as much as anything marking the division between “inside” and “outside” \u2014 are a couple of newspaper vending machines and a fireplug. One imagines that in another lifetime, the Wigglestick store might also feature some stair railings and a bench complete with those fins that are meant to spoil it for skateboarders, but actually just raise the level of the challenge. A “No Skateboarding” sign might also be a nice touch. With wheel tracks across it.<\/h4>\n

Whatever disrupts the capitalists’ need to ruin the things that people create for themselves is, after all, serving a sacred task, so M M Murdock\u2019s store is also a church, in addition to an encyclopedic assortment of graphic strategies and tactics. It should on no account go unvisited.<\/h4>\n

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M M Murduck: Welcome to the Wigglestick<\/em>, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>, Salt Lake City, through Oct. 21.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For centuries, “installing” art meant screwing a painting to the wall or a sculpture to a block of stone. Installation wasn\u2019t art, or even something unique to art. Then Marcel Duchamp hung a lot of art high on the walls of a pitch-black room full of ladders and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":847,"featured_media":59527,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/IMG_5813-scaled.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-07 18:09:55","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/847"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59484"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59549,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59484\/revisions\/59549"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}