Arts
Disgraced OCAD Student On Life After Fake ROM Bomb
Former OCAD student Thorarinn Jonsson spoke with The National Post in an article today that discusses his life 11 months after the brouhaha he created.
Jonsson was made infamous for his Fake Bomb art project outside the Royal Ontario Museum last fall, for which he was granted a discharge in a Toronto courtroom last month.
In this Q&A, he says he hopes to come back to Toronto. "I'm so in love with Toronto. I wish they were more positive towards me."
Jonsson's now studying at the Icelandic Art Academy, where he's up to more mischief.
He talks of a piece he did in Reykjavik that created a bit of a stir, albeit of Icelandic proportions:
"I rented this massive speaker system and I took it to the top floor of the schools' office building, in downtown Reykjavik, and five times a day I played the Muslim call to prayer.
"There was one Saturday morning, when it went off at dawn, and you're not supposed to make noise before 8 so a lot of people woke up. So the police were called, and the school had me shut down the piece."
This piece of "art" supposedly "reflected the way the idea of Muslims has entered popular consciousness. Kinda like changing your middle name to Hussein, but with his own perverted artistic vision I guess.
Still, he considers his fake bomb art piece his finest work to date.
Are you glad Jonsson has left the Toronto art scene? Or do you wish his return, bringing along his take on recontextualized art to the our city once again?
Photo by Roger Cullman.
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All I have to say is that if being a public nuisance is creating art then it's time to seriously revise my CV.
Sorry but he's using art as an excuse to be a brat.
So, basically his idea of art is to annoy people?
hah, finally a good reason to break out the anti-terrorism act. keep that poser out of our public spaces.
this guy is a douche bag who lacks common sense
So I take it he's not being welcomed back to Toronto, by the sounds of it. :)
Maybe he could come back to Toronto and on a snowy Friday at rush hour, throw a dummy on the subway track at Yonge Station, some sort of "commentary on the hopelessness of urban life". Throw the whole downtown into a mess and ruin thousands of people's weekend.
Yah, that would be pretty artistic.
Asshole.
So his latest art project in Iceland is a rip off of a Michael Rakowitz piece done in 2001? What a tool.
http://rakowitz.reticular.info/?p=8
this guy annoys the hell out of me. what a pretentious moron.
No wonder Toronto is an artistic slum/ghetto with comments such as these. As far as I'm concerned, we lost a credible and relevant artist. His "bomb" was just as effective mentally as a real bomb would have been effective physically, and exposed just how delusional this city really is believing that it's world class enough to even be targetted by terrorists. If anything, he tapped into our society's paranoid fantasies and his bomb had some very real mental casualties.
His "bomb" was just as effective mentally as a real bomb would have been effective physically, and exposed just how delusional this city really is believing that it's world class enough to even be targetted by terrorists. If anything, he tapped into our society's paranoid fantasies and his bomb had some very real mental casualties.
Yes, Toronto can only dream of the day when it can be as world class as, say, Oklahoma City.
@Reality...are you being serious? as in for real, not joking, serious?
and are you from new york?
If his clueless stunt is art, then Toronto seriously needs to raise the bar.
WTF. rich suburban white kids need to stop making art that involves other races. do they feel like they understand what's going on? fuck that.
He's a jerk. Ok, so art is subjective. I don't think what he does is art, but I get that he does. Regardless of whether it's art or not, what he does is jerkish. The guy's a jerk.
As pretentious, annoying or however you want to describe his piece in Toronto, I think it opened up a different side of us Torontonians. That side is the Americanized side of us. So many of us are anti-American, while all of us - live, eat, work, play, just the same as Americans too. Whether or not we witness this poor hypocritical side of us or not, is another story.
Typical American arrogance in Torontonians. sad.