The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
No Fun’, the infamous Iggy Pop and the Stooges sang in 1969. Tony Garifalakis, on the other hand, seems to be having lots of it, even if much of his audience misses the point.
It’s all too easy to brand-name Garifalakis’ work as ‘macabre’, ‘gothic’, and ‘grotesque’. There are those who take one look and think the poor lad is quite mentally unstable, and the Vatican went so far once as to ban his work. But Garifalakis is far from the sinister figure he has been depicted. He is in fact one of the more considered and well-crafted artists of his generation. Garifalakis is softly spoken and generous to a fault and his work is imbued with a wry and intelligent humour and a knowing sensibility that reflects the times in which we live.
He arrives to our meeting with three folded $US20.00 notes. ‘The internet is a fantastic place!’ he enthuses. He has discovered a maniac in America who has worked out a way to prove the ‘9/11 Conspiracy’ via origami and US currency. Fold a $20.00 note a certain way and lo and behold, there is the World Trade Centre aflame, smoke billowing, ditto the Pentagon—there is even a way to fold the currency and come up with the name ‘Osama’. It’s true—I saw them!
Garifalakis has this tendency, always with a wry smile, to dig out conspiracy theories, potential and past Armageddons, to spot the zombie in the beer garden (all too common, alas). His work is a morass of skulls, candles, religious icons and murderous texts rendered with a tight graphic sensibility that seems to hit home. The reason for that is, of course, that we... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline