Pot Luck

Unsigned. Painted terracotta.



Another objet trouvee, this time a piece of pot glued to a cardboard backing sheet and framed. This comes from a hotel in Tucson, Arizona, and is presumably meant to evoke some kind of Native American vibe, patterns as old as time and all that. Perhaps it's meant to look as though it was just stumbled across in the desert, almost an archaeological specimen, a broken remnant of a broken people, poignant and mysterious. Except of course that it's clearly brand new and never used - it was obviously specifically made to be broken and framed. To the artist's credit, it does look as though the pot has been genuinely handcrafted, though probably by some purple-haired hippie chick in a downtown studio, and not a wizened old Apache with a hand-turned potter's wheel. It's a $5 pot bought from a craft store that someone has smashed and framed a piece of, and then presumably charged Marriott $100 for it. Excellent work, amgio!

The cloth with a thousand uses

This one isn't strictly from a hotel room, but since this blog documents bad art I encounter on business trips I've stretched the definition a bit and included it anyway. In fact it's from the BA lounge at Chicago O'Hare's 5th terminal.

Now, is it just me, or has someone framed and mounted a J-Cloth and hung it on a wall?

Excitingly, this one has pencil notes at the bottom indicating that it is no. 29/60 in a limited series. There was another one a yard or so away - it was a blue J-Cloth. Congratulations to 'R. Imodel', then, for a Duchampian feat of dadaism, like the urinal placed in an art gallery, of taking an everyday found (or indeed in this case presumably *bought*) object, and turning it into 'art'.

California Dreamin'

To Long Beach, the port of Los Angeles. LaLa Land is not renowned for its restraint in matters of taste, so I had high hopes of finding something noteworthy here, and I was not disappointed. Here there is a triple whammy in what the receptionist assured me was a *very* recently refurbished room (and I could still smell the paint when I first arrived, before I was able to air the room a bit). This leads me to conclude that I may well have been the first guest to gaze upon this amazing tryptich.

First the art above the desk;

(Emulsion on natural wood, unsigned)

Pretty harmless geometric abstracts, I guess, although not something I'd share house space with. But Long Beach is a port, don't you see - you can see the RMS Queen Mary at her berth from the window of this room, so the designer felt the need to put in a maritime touch, which may explain this:

(Print on wallpaper)

A strange snakelike musing on fishing nets and rope which dominates the bathroom. And it probably also explains the fact that this six foot edifice has been erected over the bed:

(Print on canvas, unsigned)

I like the way that the blue/grey colour scheme is repeated from the bathroom, but a six foot print of stacked ISO containers? I'm not sure who thought that was a good idea. Subliminally it is reminding us that standardisation has robbed our world of its individuality in the name of efficiency, and nowhere is that more true than in the world of hotels. And as hotels, so the world - we are now all just interchangeable shipping containers full of iPhones and sweatshop fabrics. Pleasant dreams, dudes.

I Dream Of Djinni

Our journey takes us to the exotic Persian Gulf, and the oil rich sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi. Islamic art is renowned for its geometric complexity and beauty; the fabulous tiles and carvings of Morocco and the calligraphy of Arabia. On the other hand, it also comes up with giant concrete coffee pots on roundabouts, and, in a hotel on the east side of the island of Abu Dhabi, this...

Oil on canvas, unsigned.

What to make of it? A potato and some rings left by paint cans? Was it a coincidence that this was hung in the toilet? As we regard its unfathomable shallows, we may never know.