nicholaus arnold

Brief Thoughts From a Curator

In my opinion a rather biting statement from a curator about my work . . . pretty fun though, the guy let me do whatever I wanted.

Nicholaus Arnold is an artist who reacts to the world around him. His work is based around inside jokes and a commentary that is truly his own. Much of his inspiration comes from the experiences and conversations that happen to him throughout his life. These experiences drive his work to become self referential to the point where you get drawn into it, yet in reality he is quietly laughing inside. Perhaps his work is better viewed from the perspective of a slightly intoxicated individual, here they might have a quick honest opinion rather than over thinking what is placed in front of them. This quick rationing is what Nicholaus has developed and applied to his work and places it all out for your enjoyment.

-Michael Giannattasio

The Silkee Saga

Walking through what seemed to be a tropical bar in what may have been Florida or California Ashley Jonas and I ran across our friend, Major Arnold. Major Arnold was a gentleman who we came across in Dayton, Ohio during our short visit there on a karaoke night at the establishment known as Blind Bob’s. Major Arnold was a semi-crazed, hard partying individual on leave with his group of enlisted men. He offered a three way to Ashley and my best friend Frank, and then hung out with us for the rest of the evening spending most of his time hitting on Frank.

Anyway, Major Arnold began telling us of his most recent adventures and apologizing for our cab ride with him (an event which didn’t occur, but we let him believe did), and introducing us to his new found friend “Silkee”. Silkee was an African American tattoo artist, who had big plans for himself, and those who he knew. He was dark skinned, and quite a flashy dresser. His purple suit and feathered Stetson testified generously to this fact. I attempted to order a couple of dirty vodka martinis straight up from the bartender while sitting through an interrogation I really didn’t need from Silkee. After a few cocktails my memory of what I was saying to him became a haze.

Ashley and I ended up back in Dayton, Ohio staying in a strange version of my mothers home. Silkee it turned out the next day was attempting to find me, and intimidate me into helping him start up a rehabilitation clinic, as he believed I was a doctor of some sort. I wasn’t into the idea of helping him or even contacting him, and it seemed that he didn’t want to talk to me directly. Instead he used some fairly antagonizing alternative methods of getting to me. He intimidated my brother while he was at work, left messages with neighbors to be delivered to me, and eventually began leaving tokens of his distaste. These tokens of distaste involved usually melting large numbers of small plastic army, and cowboy men onto my car. This would have upset me a great deal but for some reason it didn’t. The old brown Pontiac I was driving in my dream, had a fairly dusty paint job, and the melted plastic peeled off generally easy.

This interaction lasted for a bit until apparently Ashley contacted Silkee about possibly acquiring free tattoos, for my participation in his project “rehab clinic”. Silkee took this to mean something more drastic than what she’d proposed, and the next morning I came out to find my car broken in two, covered completely in even more melted plastic soldiers, and then the melted remnants covered with magnets that I’d spread around the town of Dayton, with all of the images of my face scraped off. I realized we’d crossed a boundary with Mr. Silkee, and I needed to fix my car.

I walked around Dayton, searching for a way to adhere my car back together that day, luckily coming across a 10 foot long steel I-beam on casters that I was pretty sure would patch everything together. Not having any method of travel though I decided I would push it to the top of a hill, and simply ride it home. I found the beam on Seiben thaler Avenue and realized the quickest way back to the house was down Syracuse St. (little bit of strange displacement there). So I pushed it around the corner of Syracuse with heavy traffic following me and hopped on. It obviously wasn’t as easy to control as I thought it might be. Once riding the large steel I-beam downhill, I realized there was no real way to steer it, other than leaning my weight which wasn’t all that effective. This I was able to control though for several blocks until a group of dogs began chasing me . . . this threw a wrench into my plans of making it home to fix my car.

The dogs gave solid chase to my steel ride, and leaped around and atop me as I travelled down Syracuse St. Their paws dug into my back but they seemed more enthralled with riding atop me than nipping or trying to get me off.

The larger of the dogs pushed into me while the smaller ones followed along with great speed, considering most of the smaller ones were Dachshunds. Then came Silkee . . . and his crew. They chased me, riding behind the group of dogs which seemed to prevent him from catching up and pulling along side of me. His crew shouted words of encouragement to me, as Silkee himself asked, “Why you gonna lie like that?”, obviously referencing the fact I was indeed NEVER a doctor.

They chased me all the way back to my Mom’s house eventually giving up because of the large number of dogs I’d acquired in my journey. I parked the I-beam next to my broken car figuring I’d done enough for one day, and decided to call it a night, by drinking cocktails in the bathtub.

I proceeded to relax in the extremely large bathtub with all of my clothes on, sipping a nice Jack and Coke. Then I had to rinse all of the purple dye out my hair, which ruined my awesome yellow shirt. Stupid fucking dream.

newspaper

check it, yo.

deception

A weird happening at a show last night where Adam Rohr pretends to be the artist who creates my work. Special thanks to Lindsay for unknowingly participating.

brokendayton

is back! and is in it’s original form, which is as an artist group of Dayton, Ohio artists. It’ll get better here in the next few days. Then I’ll post a link to it.

write-up

a write-up on my project from artist Michael Berlant

Have You Seen Me? an installation by Nick Arnold

Have you seen me?

We have seen him everywhere but we have seen no one at all. We see but a mirage of a façade, a flat inkjet grin of bobble-head proportions, a mask with no holes for the eyes, a face on a stick — an auction paddle to wave, a pin, a sticker, a propaganda campaign, an advertisement for flatness, an easily traced cutout, a bat signal complete with dramatic distortion.

So we look beyond the face value, look for the significance of the notion of face/ interface, a surface outlet/inlet, the means of processing and connecting to the outside world, reducing it to the scale and terminology of the body. The face is often a put-on, a front that conceals what lies within the mind. The human face is instantly recognizable both as a symbol and an individual attribute – it is visual shorthand for identification of other people and basic awareness of oneself.

The face we see needs no name, it is an eerily reproducible version of oneself, taking on a life of its own. As it continues to spread, it grows more and more abstract: becoming a cutout, expanding in size, distorting its contours, morphing into a symbol, a signifier of loss…

The loss of self has never been so evident, before the manic dispersion of eyeless doppelgangers to far-flung corners of the world. The Face was lost but not when it was taken by the two supposed thieves. They have only done what the Face was waiting for all along: to spread like fire, like a viral image, a trend not to be missed — personalized yet anonymous, inclusive yet oligarchic.

This face has been lost since it was captured and converted into digital bytes, set down on paper, distorted into two-dimensionality, and rent from its corporeal foundation.

We laughed at Indians as we stole their souls with pictures, but we had already stolen everything else and now our souls are being stolen as well, this is but an extreme representation of dehumanization by reproduction. We have seen your face but we have not seen you because you do not exist and neither do we, as we take on the Face, hold it up for the camera, blanking our identity with the sheet of anonymity. When brandished by random people in random places, the Face becomes a shield that conceals the wearer’s physiognomy, having a homogenizing effect on groups of people, making each one look like another.

At the same time this piece negates the exclusivity of the artist-subject’s identity by taking a highly personal aspect of him, the shorthand for who he is, and putting it everywhere and on everyone. This is nothing but loss of face, in all its possible ways and meanings, and a futile, ineffectual attempt being made to replace it. The lost and found odyssey of the giant face print is merely a premise that presents an overarching narrative, what is really at stake is the dispersion of the facial iconography and the garnering of allegiance to the face.

Having no intention of recovering the original print, the project has more in common with the narcissistically obsessive widespread signatory markings made by graffiti artists. The nature of the image however, turns the anonymous aspect of graffiti on its face, and puts its graffiti onto our faces and bodies, truly a physical graffiti. The type of printed surface is the only variable, but the Face renders its vehicle meaningless, and in case we miss or forget, there is always more and more Face; we don’t seek it, it finds us, attaches itself to our clothing, leaps onto our car, wedges in our minds, suffocates us in our sleep, infects us…

Have you seen me? Yes, for you have spread yourself microscopically thin, you are each face, you are each one of us who partakes of the face fad, and you are for us — I have seen you and you are I. You became me when I became you; we all belong behind the face, with a pin on our hearts, a magnet on the door, a sign of loyalty to the horde – the self-sustaining, self-perpetuating critical mass of image saturation. It is coming, the new cult: Kilroy, Bob Dobbs, Shepard Fairey, Big Brother, Stalin and Mao rolled into one. It is a cult of personality, it’s religion, but behind the face we find what we really crave – safety and invisibility.

The effect of this project is that it disguises, disseminates, and de-personalizes the identity of the artist, along with everyone who chooses to make contact with the Face. It exists in the space between the exclusive — the face of an individual, and the egalitarian – the Face as an equalizer and eradicator. This work is a statement about the loss of identity – the artist’s, via his stolen face, the identity of the printmaking medium — steeped in replication and repetition, and the identities of us all — living in a faceless, homogenized, endlessly replicated and mediated world.

Mike Berlant

new name, old stuff.

so i’ve changed the name of the site to nicholausarnold.com. the link just finished updating so . . . brokendayton.com will soon be no more (maybe). I still own the name for awhile but this site will transfer to being my professional artist page, as opposed to being my professional artist page with a strange name. So the title changes will probably come before thursday. Cool? cool.

-nick

nicholaus arnold will never be a rockstar . . .

I’ll be pushing the “have you seen me?” project into the background for a bit while I begin work on some new projects over the break. Right now I’ve got a few ideas I’m throwing around including a title I’ve mentioned in the title of this post. If you have any ideas to send my way or things you think I should look into, let me know.

Magnets!

I plastered around three hundred magnets in the lower east side of Manhattan last weekend, and ended up hitting the armory, the met, and the whitney. Hope they’re seen.

giantface.info

Check out the newest project I’m still developing and fleshing out tentatively titled “Nicholaus Arnold Has Lost his Giant Face”. Creating the website is what wiped this one out temporarily, but everything seems to be back in order once again. So check out the new project on giantface.info. The site also includes links to other directions the project has been moving.