Animal Collective’s Guggenheim: Weird Creatures, Macabre Light

Photo by Justin Bishop. When Animal Collective announced that they would take over the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, which would be given a makeover by longtime visual collaborator Danny Perez, a lot of people lost their shit. The event sold out so quickly that they added a matinee. The name of their piece, Transverse Temporal Gyrus, was appropriately weird for the Baltimore-bred, Brooklyn-based trio whose seminal 2009 record Merriweather Post Pavilion saw them reach a broader audience while still knocking the socks off their diehard fans. When they arrived at the Guggenheim last night, expectations were high, faces were painted, and some girl who had apparently ingested an undesirable amount of hallucinogenics had her head in her hands and was rocking back and forth in a corner on the third floor. This was neither a concert nor an art exhibition. It was a “site-specific performance” that transformed the “museum’s rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment.” If you aren’t fluent in P.R. speak, that means that the walls of the Guggenheim’s iconic rotunda were dripping with psychedelic video projections, white-horned creatures gyrated on the bottom floor with glowing old televisions in their stomachs, and fans stood around in a trance, their blank faces bathed in macabre light.

Read full article »

Share

Related posts:

1. Out in the Field: Animal Collective Inhabits the Guggenheim Museum Last night in New York, the Guggenheim's rotunda played host to the band Animal Collective and its frequent collaborator Danny Perez for a performance...
2. Guggenheim to pick 20 YouTube videos for museum display In the newest installment of Prestigious Institutions Slumming It (remember when the Library of Congress acquired Twitter's archives?), the Guggenheim Museum has announced that...
3. Animal Prints Jackets This Fall – Follow your Animal Instincts This fall follow your animal instincts like the celebrities because it is all about animal prints this season. Whether you wear zebra, leopard or cheetah,...
4. Starbucks’ Vanilla Frappuccino Light – Yes, light!! Ever crave the Starbucks Frappuccinos but didn't want to consume all those calories? Well, I have good news, it now comes in a light version!  Starbuck's...
5. Fierce Creatures ...