Disco Beast, by American animation artist Jonathan Monaghan, is a sound and color video piece, played on an 18 minute loop.  Currently being shown at Palais de Tokyo’s Another Banana Day for the Dream Fish exhibition, the animation follows a unicorn from its birth out of a Starbucks Coffee shop to its rebirth in a psychedelic bubble after a showdown with a Samsung Charger.  The work serves as a commentary on corporatization  and mass consumerism.  While the unicorn is this unobtainable, utopian symbol of diversity and all that is good, it struggles against the banal, somewhat somber backgrounds of a chain coffee shop, an empty mall lot, and so on.   Monaghan alludes to corporate brands, such as Alitalia, Starbucks, and Samsung to reference this theme.  

One of the current exhibitions at the Guggenheim this summer focuses around the conflicts which come with living in a truly globalized world.  The exhibition’s title “One Hand Clapping” derives from a koan, a riddle used to elevate above rational sense in Zen Buddhist practice.  The koan asks, “We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?”  The phrase, “one hand clapping”, comes from 618-907 in the time of Chinese Tang dynasty, but it has now become a globally appropriated phrase.  This exhibition gathers the work of multiple Chinese artists in various mediums, who each visually demonstrate the controversy of living in a globalized world. 

Among the artworks, Wong Ping, animation artist from Hong Kong, displays a color video installation, consisting of his animation Dear Can I Give You a Hand? displayed on LED monitors which form one large wall, a sculptured head on the backside of the animation, and various wind up toys on the floor space below the head.  The video Dear Can I Give You a Hand? rendered with Wong Ping’s signature overly saturated and simplistic form style, tells the sattirical story of an elderly man, his fascination with VHS pornographic tapes, his daughter in law’s underwear, and his struggle of aging and becoming less relevant.  In the end of the plot line the protagonist loses all his gold teeth and as such his last bit of material prosperity.  These gold teeth can be recovered behind the video in small 1″ x 1″ wind up toys behind the screens, as a floating, turning head looks on above their pile.