A Brief History of the World

A Brief History of the World

Excerpt from Tucker Neel, “Surface Sounding,” Art Lies Quarterly Magazine, Issue 60, Winter:

“Lisa Melandri, a curator always willing to embrace the absurd and irrational, chose to exhibit A Brief History of the World, a creepy and entertaining work by Bill Kleiman. The piece consists of a hand-made white-on-yellow star-burst tessellation embedded with resin and cat hair, ripped open to reveal red-hot neon camouflage that oozes out a sludgy green hand with elongated fingers, that masquerade as paint drips. This hand plops lumpy rubbery blobs into a complementary outstretched appendage atop a pile of tiny black and white felt clippings, arranged on a puddle-shaped mirrored shelf. Like any hyphen and comma-laden description of it, A Brief History of the World, is absolutely ludicrous and over-the-top, a creepy crafty meditation on absurdity. Maybe it’s that the piece is from 2003 when the US began its illegal war in Iraq, but Kleiman’s conglomeration of loaded signifiers: fiery camo print, Islamic tessellations, zombie hands and reflective surfaces, all lean towards a possible critique of current events, war, and what happens when one’s creations get out of control.”