Giant Dog Defaces Bad Architecture, Locals Love It

Architizer News

Giant Dog Defaces Bad Architecture, Locals Love It

February 20, 2013

“Bad Dog” leaves his mark on OCMA; Photo: Ken Steinhardt/Orange County Register

This is what happens to bad buildings. ”Bad Dog” is a 24-foot sculpture in the likeness of a black Labrador who’s in the process of relieving himself, both of bodily chemicals and of the poor architecture he finds before him. The work by Richard Jackson adorns one facade of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach, California, and heralds visitors to the museum’s current exhibition retrospective of the artist’s career, “Richard Jackson: Ain’t Painting a Pain.” The brobdingnagian pup can be spotted from the nearby roadway and surrounding office blocks that populate the area, whose residents have taken an immense liking to the micturating canine and his vandalizing ways. (Big words equals funny, right?) Continue.

Photo: Ken Steinhardt/Orange County Register

Jackson made his dog using 52 CNC-cut fiberglass panels that were fitted together on site. He then installed a vat of yellow paint inside the pup’s abdomen that was connected to its nether regions via a hose and pump; the latter is programmed to continuously shoot paint onto the side of the building, thereby constituting what Jackson terms a “painting machine,” one of many on display in the exhibition inside the museum. The installation is much more, of course, as the attendant gallery plaque is eager to explain: “[T]he guileless dog unwittingly points to the sometimes rigid institutional constraints that can frustrate artists and audiences alike.” Sometimes, it just takes a (shameless) dog.

“Bad Dog” and ”Richard Jackson: Ain’t Painting a Pain” will remain on display at OCMA through May 5, 2013.