Introduction

The scene is well known: the tape of a pop song is running and someone moves their body and lips as if they were the original performer. Pruitt / Early, two American artists of our day, make this situation the scheme of an artistic work. Friends from the New York scene sang and danced to the music of Madonna, The Snap and Otis Redding to make a video clip. This resulted in various colorful flickering music films and color photo stills, which the artists assembled into a wall installation at Esther Schipper. The desire to imitate and transform (and its necessity) describes a long history from childhood to adult carnival.

Pruitt / Early's videos and photos are based on the desire to show oneself like a city show. 'I myself am the work of art, or at least I would like to be', Pruitt / Early demonstrate it, anyone can appear in a video, the main thing being that the colors and rhythm and the staging are right.

In Galerie Buchholz the objects of the two artists are of a different kind, but the principle remains the same: colorful and cheap (at expensive prices). The attempt to continue Andy Warhol's artistic trivialization and to fall back on the symbolic pool of trade fair culture taps into a frenzy of decals from the contemporary advertising world. Cola cans decorated with counterfeit pop stars form colorful square 'teenage' towers. Picture frames show nothing more than a batik ground with the patch of a skull or an American flag. 'No brain, no pain' is written on a sticker. 

– Kölner Stadt Anzeiger, 26 January 1991