5-June-99 Fox Games

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I'm wearing my strangest T-shirt today. It's a picture of Sandy Skoglund's Fox Games installation. I got it about a year ago at the Smith College art museum when we were in Noho for my stepniece Elysse's graduation.

Sandy Skoglund does large installations, about the size of a room, and photographs them. This one is the interior of a restaurant, all painted a flat gray, gray chairs, gray tables, gray baskets of gray bread, with red-orange foxes running over everything: Jumping from table to table, sniffing the baskets of bread, fighting each other on the floor. In the background are three real people, a couple sitting normally at a restaurant table giving their order to a normal waiter. The shirt is strange, but it's nothing compared to the installation -- though when we saw the installation a year ago it was a different version, with blue foxes instead.

I'll only mention the bathroom installation in passing -- it was paved in thousands of real eggshells -- and move on to The Revenge of the Goldfish. This was a bedroom painted in blues and greens, sort of a wavy, watery texture. Again everything was about the same color, including the dresser, the bed, and the blankets. It could have been underwater or a bedroom aquarium. In fact, it must have been an aquarium. Suspended from the ceiling were dozens of eighteen-inch-long goldfish swimming all over. All over, including under the bed and coming out of an open dresser drawer.

I won't be so blunt as to recommend you go out of your way to see a Skoglund exhibition if you have the chance. Maybe it's not your kind of thing. It sure made an impression on me, and I'd be happy to see another.

The museum had a T-shirt of The Revenge of the Goldfish, too. Darn! I should have got both.