You're an Asshole for Buying This: The Suckadelic Art Toy Universe

You're an Asshole for Buying This: The Suckadelic Art Toy Universe

Tuesday, Jan 11, 2011 - Sunday, Jan 23, 2011

Location:
Boo-Hooray c/o Steven Kasher Gallery
515 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor
New York, NY 10001

The work presented in this exhibit is a documentation of my struggle to reach the top of a sinister pyramid scheme; a culture-jacking enterprise where ruthless-yet-compelling super-criminals compete for the imaginations of fickle consumers and a relentless media machine.  – Excerpt from the Sucklord’s artist statement

In 2011, Boo-Hooray reluctantly announced the first Suckadelic retrospective gallery exhibition, “You’re An Asshole For Buying This.” The art-toys of Suckadelic are intentionally confusing, misleading, disappointing and really funny. The pieces are limited edition parodies of action figures that reverberate with a vicious wit and are oddly eyeball-pleasing in the manner of all kinds of toothsome 20th/21st century collage and montage art.

The art of Suckadelic is produced by the Sucklord. Their aggressively situationist piss-take packaging comment on pop culture commodification and the consumer habits of compulsively shopping kidults: The very process that made KAWS, Takashi Murakami, and Michael Lau art-stars on the Art Basel Miami/Armory Show/Venice Biennale tip.

One of the most respected despised and influential figures in the art toy movement for the past decade, the Sucklord has been producing handmade bootleg action figures in very limited runs, each selling out immediately. As the plot thickens, the work of the Sucklord is widely collected in fine art circles, and has been auctioned at Christie’s, Freeman’s and Phillips.

This exhibition marked the first time the entire Suckadelic catalogue was exhibited in one place. For the duration of the exhibit, a Suckadelic Suck-Shoppe pop-up store was open. Original artwork, sculptures, silk-screens and paintings were also for sale. If you showed up on opening night, you had the opportunity to meet the characters from the Suckadelic universe.

A 100 page exhibition catalog was available as a limited edition of 500 numbered copies. A deluxe signed limited edition catalogue of 50 copies with an exclusively created Suckadelic figure was also available.

For the Closing Sausage Party, the Sucklord presented his new performance art piece, “The Sucklord is Present,” a 3-hour static, silent piece, in which he sat immobile, while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite him. Suckadelic Supervillans Vectar, Gay Homotrooper, Mary Paper$, and Another Bitch were on hand selling signed headshots for $UCKBUX. $UCKBUX could be earned at the party, as Boo-Hooray Gallery was happy to pay you $UCKBUX for your SUCKADELIC fan artwork. You could bring your pieces, or make them at our SUCKADELIC crafting table.

I’m putting this shit in a safe for the next few lightyears now that I have celebrity clients like famous movie director boy and famous art collector boy…  – the Sucklord

BOO-HOORAY exhibits both at home in New York City as well as internationally. We also stage collaborative exhibitions with the Hayward Gallery and Rough Trade in London, Tsutaya Daikanyama, Hysteric Glamour, and United Arrows in Tokyo, Galleri Operatingplace in Stockholm, Colette in Paris, PopMontreal in Montreal, Mishka Los Angeles, Printed Matter at both MOCA/LA and PS1/NYC, and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, the New York Public Library, the Grolier Club, and Milk Gallery in New York.

Boo-Hooray exhibitions have included shows featuring Larry Clark, The Velvet Underground, Ray Johnson, Afrika Bambaataa, Jonas Mekas, Ed Sanders, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage, Spencer Sweeney, Houston Rap, private press vinyl, Wallace Berman, anarcho-punk group Crass, Jason Polan, Jack Smith, cult-filmmaker Ed Wood, and Situationist Times editor Jacqueline de Jong.

The exhibitions are drawn from cultural archives that Boo-Hooray excavates, organizes, and places in institutions such as Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Cornell University’s Division of Rare Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.