Abraham Cruzvillegas - Autoconstrucción: The Optimistic Failure of a Simultaneous Promise

Cruzvillegas has created a series of new works for Modern Art Oxford that respond to the diverse contexts of the city of Oxford and the artist’s own personal background: The Optimistic Failure, a large-scale suspended sculpture in the form of a ‘mobile’, adorned with representations of Amazonian tsantsas (shrunken heads) made from animal dung, grass and soil collected from Port Meadow, Oxford; and The Simultaneous Promise, a mobile sculpture constructed from a tricycle and sound system that plays recordings of the artist’s interpretations of songs from his childhood and new songs by Oxford bands. These commissions are presented alongside two other new works: Blind Self Portrait as a Post-Thatcherite Deaf Lemon Head. For 'K.M.', in which found paper items are layered in thick monochrome paint and pinned to the gallery walls in a geometric pattern; and Untitled Scratching Relief with Builders Groove 3, a drawing incised directly onto the walls of the Upper Gallery and inspired by the route explored by Cruzvillegas’ during his visits to Oxford.

Guffwatch amused me today. Poor MoMA. Still the Deaf Lemon Heads would make a good name for a band. It reminded me of a guy called Victor Wynd, vendor of oddities, who owns a unique shrunken head of a European, priced (cheaply I would think) at £35,000.