Artist Lecture #1

Artist Lecture- Pete Froslie 

        Pete Froslie is a man with a very unique approach to modern art. For one thing, many of his pieces blur the line between artwork and toy. An piece shown early in the lecture was a hollowed-out book with mechanized insides, which in its normal state would prop the book open slightly, but when a sensor detected a person moving close by, the book would snap shut. Appropriately enough, the title of the book was “Experiences of Anxiety”. Other pieces in this vein used actual toys in their construction; Froslie had created two different installations featuring automated Etch-a-Sketches, one with a (relatively) simple mass of the devices all having their knobs turned by a machine, and another that featured an Etch-a-Sketch hooked up to an Atari 2600, which would trace the direction that the player moved the character in a game of PacMan. Another striking piece was constructed out of cow toys, which were suspended by cables and would move when given energy from a rotting cow heart contained in a jar beneath them. This piece illustrates one of several themes or ideas that Froslie is interested in, this one being the concept of something having a cute and inviting exterior but a disgusting and grotesque interior. This concept is brought out in a different way with another piece, Soldier City. The piece deals with themes and imagery of oil, sand, blood, and war, featuring such scenes as a host of cute bunnies watching soldiers drown in lakes of blood, all watched over by an enshrined Elmo doll. The entire piece takes inspiration from video games and tabletop war games.

One of Froslie’s artistic obsessions (and something he spent half of his lecture talking about) was John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. This historical figure is featured in a great number of Froslie’s works, which run the gamut of mediums and media, from sculpture (both traditional and kinetic) to collage to comics to video games to pressed pennies, quite an impressive collection. All of these pieces are part of the same narrative, called the Battle Prosthetic, a fictional story about Booth and a journey he takes into the center of the Earth and back out again. The entire narrative is completely ridiculous, but as a work of art it’s strangely compelling. Froslie stated that by giving him a new story and new body (the physical art through which he has been represented), Booth can be “resurrected” in a sense. Exactly how serious Froslie was being about this is unclear. 

After listening to his lecture, one could easily come to the conclusion that Pete Froslie is totally nuts, but this view hardly does him or his work justice. Personally I think of Froslie as possessing a form of hyper-sanity or hyper-self awareness; he knows exactly what interests him and incorporates those interests into his work on many different levels. An artist’s creations alway provide some insight into his or her psyche, but the art of Pete Froslie seems to give a much deeper look into who he is than one normally finds.