LARRY KRONE: ARTIST/ENTERTAINER
September 15 – December 31, 2006

Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer is an exhibition of work by New York-based artist Larry Krone that reflects the zeal and pathos of a passionate maker of objects, songs, and performances. Krone's practice weaves an expansive discourse out of everyday, personal experiences and a fascination with marginal aspects of American popular and material culture. His distinctive language involves a significant level of self-disclosure and elicits his audience's trust and identification. By performing and communicating intimate and even embarrassing moments through his objects, Krone offers up art that is at once starkly vulnerable, delightfully accessible, but most importantly, sincere.

Krone is well-known for his eclectic interests in music, performance, collecting, and American vernacular culture, and this exhibition represents a compelling and entertaining survey of the love, loss, obsession, and family fun that drives the artist's work. Culled from his East Village studio and from various private collections, Artist/Entertainer presents a decade of Krone's work hung salon-style in non-chronological order, inviting visitors to move at will through the works and through the years, much like one randomly revisits a family photo album.
Krone is very much concerned with the connections viewers will make with his art, and he offers plenty for us to identify with. A compulsive scavenger of everyday objects (tin foil, quilts, handkerchiefs, toys, clothing, even Jack Daniel's bottles) and bodily castoffs (hair, teeth, nail clippings), Krone revives domestic throwaways with labor intensive adornment (stitch work, glitter, beading). These objects retain the materiality and associative qualities of their original overlooked, marginalized status, but they gain a shiny new identity. Other objects meant to soften life's sadness and difficulty (pillows, love songs, alcohol, the hankie) are personalized with graphics, text, and signifying titles that address the joy and cruelty that can exist simultaneously within individuals and that demand heartfelt, emotional expression. With simple clarity, romance, and a sense of humor, Krone's works represent his fascination with love, intimacy, and memory, along with their ultimate disillusionment and failure.

Key to the presentation of his two- and three-dimensional works are Krone's keenly crafted performances, in which improvisation, country music, costume, and family meet amid lowbrow stage sets and themed environments, most of which incorporate his signature Mylar curtain backdrops. The idiosyncratic creative musings that inform his songs, objects, and texts are all best revealed in his performances. They are funny, thoughtful, even abject at times, expressing longing and loss, but without the irony and hard-edged cynicism so prevalent in contemporary culture. The exhibition Artist/Entertainer explores the multiple layers and transformative aspects of Krone's often confessional creative process—a process that lends cultural agency to the terrain of desire.

Krone's muse is country music. By adopting the persona of the country music star, he is able to address the autobiographical with humor and irony which distance him from notions of pure authenticity. Krone maintains a genuine fascination with distinctly American phenomena such as the cowboy, a figure that has evolved from western hero, to national icon, to internationally beloved entertainer. And while Krone has never wrangled cows, herded sheep, or ridden in a rodeo, he has adopted the romantic persona of a strong and particularly stylish rambling man, cobbled together from disparate parts of Western mythology. But be advised, his narrative transforms the hard-edged, masculine cowboy of Western novels and country music into sheer spectacle. Krone's on-stage sexual ambiguity and broken-hearted laments playfully undermine the sexual relations depicted in country songs, conflating men's and women's roles until it all becomes a farce. In so doing, Krone is essentially performing aspects of Krone. His work is personal. As an urban, gay cowboy, Krone makes work in which the idea of a fixed masculinity becomes a masquerade, a set of poses that refuse to conform to social expectations of manhood. Krone's feminization or queering of the cowboy myth can be read as a powerful, transgressive act, although it is powerful precisely because it is genuine and so funny. Indeed, Krone often opts for self-deprecation in order to convey both physical and emotional discomfort while reminding us to laugh at his self-scrutiny. He dares to explore matters of the heart with an awkward machismo—underscored by his own formidable, rough-and-tumble, tattoo-covered stature—that is generous and kind.

As an artist and entertainer, Larry Krone gives validity to such aspirations. His sensitive, lonesome, cowboy-esque pathos elicits happiness, sadness, empathy, and laughter. The joy of giving is at the heart of his eccentric practice and it works to keep him real.

Shannon Fitzgerald
Chief Curator

Thursday, October 5, 2006
6:00 - 9:00 pm
Join us for a special new live performance by Larry Krone and Family entitled Something Beautiful. Experience Krone's unique style and witness the first performance of his new song "Getting Rid of Tomorrow," created especially for his exhibition Artist/Entertainer.

Limited Edition Boxset by Larry Krone
Produced by Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer 10 1/2 x 6 3/4 x 3 inches
Signed edition of 490: $100
Deluxe edition of 10: $1,000

This special boxset, a miniature suitcase complete with handle and made to travel, contains a little bit of everything from Larry Krone's oeuvre: a new music CD, a collection of hand-designed performance playbills from 10 years of performances, an artist designed pattern to create your own Underpants of Many Colors, a suitable for framing poster, an etched shot glass, a postcard, and more! Also included is a 98-page, full-color exhibition catalog with new essays by Shannon Fitzgerald and Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, The New School, New York. The edition is signed by the artist and includes a numbered Official Certificate of Authenticity.
The Deluxe edition (10 available at $1,000) includes all of the above plus an original, hand-stitched drawing by Larry Krone.

Available from the Contemporary or Distributed Art Publishers, New York.

Funding for the exhibition has been generously provided by the Arts & Education Council, Missouri Arts Council, a state agency, Regional Arts Commission, William E. Weiss Foundation, Whitaker Foundation, and Friends and Members of the Contemporary, with in-kind support from the Chase Park Plaza Hotel.