David Datuna (b. 1974, Georgia)
Hungry Artist, 2019

So, Datuna eats Cattelan’s banana. A reverse transubstantiation of sorts.

I like the immediacy of Datuna’s response, his willingness to enter into a dialogue with the piece, also his ability to identify an unexpected possibility for interaction (its affordance, if you wish). His response is witty and extends the original discourse generated by Catalan.

While on the higher abstraction level of re-interpretation and entering into unexpected dialogues with other artists’ works I may trace parallels to quite a few works of my own (that have also been mentioned in this blog before), an even stronger connection can be made to some of my jewellery pieces. In “Re-made by gravity” I let a ceramic jewellery piece fall onto stone floor and then wearing the broken piece as a response to a particular situation of its acquisition; in “Double upgrade” I first remake mass-produced bowl (“industrial design”) into a necklace (“craft”) and then the latter into a mobile spatial installation (“fine art”) – playing with hierarchical categories of the art world.