The Fashionable Weapons of Peter Gronquist



We've previously featured artist Peter Gronquist's work, namely a pimped-out wheelchair and a Pac-Man grenade. Among his other products are rifles altered to reflect various fashion labels. These have been interpreted by art critics in sophisticated, intellectual ways. But in an interview, Gronquist dismissed these explanations:
I actually came up with a ton over the years that I’ve been developing, the original being: “Wouldn’t it be funny if…?” The short list includes: our culture’s glamorization of violence, rampant consumerism, war profiteering and how people will put designer brands on literally anything and think that they are automatically awesome. I really just wanted to make something completely ridiculous. Then people gave me money for them. So I made a ton of them because I’m a whore. I find that it’s a parody of myself because I also like ridiculous things sometimes for no logical reason. I’m a victim of the rampant consumerism that I parody. It’s all very confusing.


Link via Secret Threads | Interview

While I'm happy to admire the intentional irony of this, I wonder whether it might go over the heads of some of his intended audience.
Warren Mitchell, who played Alf Garnet in Till Death Do Us Part said that when walking around in public he often got congratulated by people who seemed to think that not only was Alf Garnet real but someone to be admired. He said it was sad that people completely failed to grasp the underlying message of the character; I wonder whether the same might not happen with these guns.
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