SEE EPISODE 2 & 3 - http://www.vbs.tv/player.php?bctid=13...
Dan Colen first appeared in the pages of Vice magazine in many photos by longtime friend and roommate Ryan McGinley. One notorious photograph is called "Dan, Dusted," which shows a freaked-out, naked, graffiti-covered Dan on a roof at dawn after having smoked angel dust all night. Then we wrote about him again in 2004 in an article about "hamster nests," a fun little thing that he and fellow artist Dash Snow used to do where they'd go to a hotel room, shred up a ton of telephone books, get superwasted, and, you know, act like hamsters. They recently did a hamster nest installation at Deitch Gallery in New York.
Dan is infamous for his "wild lifestyle" or whatever, but fuck that. His art is awesome. He takes abject things and makes them beautiful, like canvases of bird shit and chewed-up gum that look like abstract paintings, and dumb slogans ("Holy Shit," "Rama Lama Ding-Dong") messily spray-painted on wood boards. For the 2006 Whitney Biennial he showed giant sculptures of rocks covered in graffiti and gum and bird shit that look like something you'd see in the woods after a bunch of teenagers had a crazy party there. And for a show at the prestigious Gagosian gallery, he displayed five found thrift-store paintings in the gallery's five bathrooms. The paintings were altered or defaced with funny, dirty-joke additions, like in a painting with a girl swimming in a lake, he added in a guy spying on her from behind a tree and jerking off. He's a clever one, and we're really into his art. He's also reeeeeeally tall.
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