On Friday, Brooklyn-based art duo Patrick McNeil and Patrick Miller, better known as FAILE, opened a comprehensive exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Entitled “Savage/Sacred Young Minds,” the showcase includes new art alongside nods to the past such as the Temple and The FAILE & BÄST Deluxx Fluxx Arcade. These prominent installations, which the press release aptly describes as “two immersive environments,” allows attendees to interact with the work in the hopes that it will prompt “viewers to ask questions about their relationship to consumer culture, religious traditions, and the urban environment.”
Both the arcade and the Temple were debuted in 2010. The latter was first installed at the Praça dos Restauradores Square in Lisbon for the Portugal Arte 10 Festival. As the release notes, the Temple is “reminiscent of religious architecture that has fallen into ruin,” and features a Scuba Horse deity surrounded by FAILE’s iconic “prayer wheels,” several of which were also erected on the streets of NYC, albeit temporary, as virtually all of the sculptures were stolen.
The sprawling arcade is comprised of video games, pinball machines, and foosball tables that are set against a backdrop of the pair’s iconic collage-like art and requires no tokens or case quarters to play. The “retrofitted games” are described as variations on “wrestling matches, road races, water-based challenges, tile-matching puzzles, and audio-visual manipulations,” that double as functional sculptures of sorts.
The exhibition runs until October 4, 2015 inside on the 5th Floor of the museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery.
(Photos: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)
