Art & the Quotidian - James Angus

James Angus is/was (not that he's dead, but i think he's in New York now) a Sydney based artists, put a MACK truck in AGNSW, painted a rhino fluro yellow, lectured at SCA and is an all round rad dude.


He has two works that I absolutely quite like, AND they fit in with Art & the Quotidian so that’s a freebie. The first one is Bugatti Type 35 (some references included 'Accident at the end) and is a recreated 30's style race car (the Bugatti Type 35 to be specific and redundant) that is skewed 30 degree's to the right. A car is, I would argue THE MOST QUITODIAN object of the all the quotidian objects, so if this blog was (and i suggest it should be) a competition, I would obviously win.

It's interesting for it's simple complexity, the idea of skewing a car 30 degree's to the right is quite simple, but his actually materials practice becomes mind boggling complex, every circle becomes an ellipse, every square and rectangle, every right angle becomes obtuse. He didn't buy a Bugatti and distort it, that would be expensive. He completely recreated every visible section of the car (I assume he didn’t build a skewed engine which would then be hidden). He did the 3D modelling on all the parts, he had the fabrications of the parts outsourced and then he assembled them with help.

This work clearly makes reference to early 20th century photography and That 70's Show. I like his confident artistic bravado of suggesting "Ok, how about a car, 30 degree's... to the right", rad.

The other work I'm going to include is Soccer Ball Dropped from 30, 000 feet, another of his seemingly spontaneous situation suggestions (alliteration, YES!) where he thinks I wonder what a soccer ball will look like if i drop it off an aeroplane, so he asked a friend of his to create a mathematical model that would input various variables and would come out with a 3D model of a what a soccer ball would like at the exact point of stoppage, where it's hit the ground, it's compressed and it's no longer going up or down. What happened was nothing, there was a small bump on the bottom but essentially nothing happened. I just like that clever sort of anti-climactical result of a ridiculous situation where I was expecting shards of soccer ball to ripple out and explode, but no... so yes, rad,