Jim Shaw — The Ties That Bind
(c)Jim Shaw, The Electronic Monster and Thirteen Ghosts, 2024 – film still - image copyright: Jim Shaw. Courtesy the artist and M HKA
The Electronic Monster and Thirteen Ghosts (2024) is a new work created for the exhibition, inspired by the memories of a double-bill horror movie Shaw saw at the cinema when he was nine years old. The installation brings together singing wigs, an aggressive vacuum cleaner, catalogue models, cavemen, a half-cake, half-intestine figure, and the ghosts of industrial power and consumerism in a last, grotesque, and outdated dance. The work resurfaces American society’s debris and components, like an adrift yet very much present floating ideology. It is apparent — in this piece and many others — that Jim Shaw’s oeuvre is marked by a vintage aesthetic that reveals how important the 1960s were in forging his vision as a young artist, while he now uses this aesthetic as a poignant means of both depicting and undermining “the mythologised golden age of patriarchy in post-war America, where white men ran everything”. The present spectacle confronts viewers with a typically European standpoint: hungry for and critical of a stereotypical America, existing beyond a reality one can’t quite grasp.
Credits
Editing, Animation - Kane Lafia
Videography - Daniel Hawkins
Music mixing, looping etc. - Kane Lafia
Music - Jim Shaw, D’redd D’warf (Dani Tull, Brian Randolph, Daniel Hope, Jim Shaw), Kalle Nemvalts
Voice Recording - Corby Gallegos
Voice Editing - Alan Tofighi
Catalog models written dialogue - Colette Weber Shaw
Catalog model Script editor - Akela Munson
Set Photographer - LeeAnn Nickel
Performers
Amorphous head Puppeteer - Daniel Hope
Book - Kelsey Kuykendall
Cake - Kane Lafia
Cavemen - Marnie Weber, Kane Lafia, Daniel Hope
The Electronic Monster - Jim Shaw
Vacuum Cleaner - Daniel Hope
Wig Puppets - Tanya Haden and Mariah Csepanyi Cool
Vocal Performers
Catalog model voices - Conor Murphy, Blake Bailey, Corby Gallegos, Jim Shaw
Crackly puppet head voice - Tanya Haden
Cake and Vacuum voices - Corby Gallegos
Cigarette men voice - Blake Bailey
Parking Meter Voice - Jim Shaw
Smooth puppet head voice - Jim Shaw
Costume and Puppet Fabrication - Daniel Hope, Kelsey Kuykendall
Assisted by: Shelby Date, Javier Espinoza-Lopez