Olaf Breuning: Home Published by JRP|Ringier.
Edited by Lionel Bovier. Essays by Inge Lindner-Gaillard and Brian Kerstetter. Swiss artist Olaf Breuning's videos revel hilariously in adolescent antics and pop culture. In a recent work, Wayne's World types don masks, eat dog food, and throw m&m's at pets, and in another segment, a gang invades Amish country, strips a passerby, pulls a mask over his head, and chases him into the woods. Like Mike Kelley before him, Breuning seeks not just to erase the line between our media-saturated world of film and television and high art, but to blow it to smithereens. That doesn't mean he isn't thoughtful and thought provoking: Inventive composition and technical mastery inform all his pieces, whether videos or large-format photographs. Inspired by Doug Aitken, Matthew Barney's early work, and filmmakers such as John Carpenter and John Waters, Breuning has learned both how to get a laugh (and a scream) and to plumb the deeper human comedy (and horror).
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