The recently opened CO Exhibitions returned last night with another unorthodox art show, “Smell The Glove”, a tribute to the mockumentary Spinal Tap, curated by local illustrator and musician Michael Gaughan. If you haven’t seen the classic film about the ficticious 80’s hair metal band Spinal Tap’s fall from grace, one of the classic scenes involves the band’s label censoring the controversial cover for the upcoming release “Smell The Glove”. Originally intended to depict a woman on all fours wearing a dog collar and smelling a glove, the new cover is simply an all black LP. (“How much more black could this be? The answer is none. None more black”) The original cover is never actually seen in the movie, so Michael Gaughan decided he’d like to see what the cover would/should have looked like and offered an open call to artists to do their version of the cover in any media.
The show is a scattershot collection of everything from drawings, paintings, screenprints, and photgraphs, to crochet, video pieces, and soiled socks (um…) Fans of metal art will be pleased by the artists who played it straight, fans of script-flipping will be happy to see the men in the band on their knees in some depictions, and and fans of quirky visual collections will be pleased by basically everything. There’s a great range of pieces, from professional to less-studied, plain-faced to ironic, and many just plain weird. The show is labeled PG-13, and there are some naughty bits as one would expect.
As with last month’s Doomtree art show, the night culminated with live music. The live Spinal Tap karaoke encouraged audience members to belt out their favorite Tap tunes, and some of these amateur performances were truly inspired. The whole event was a lot of fun and a great place to catch art, people-watch, and revel in 80’s inspired schlock.
If you missed the opening, the show will be up for a few weeks. CO Exhibitions can be found at 1101 Stinson Blvd in NE Minneapolis.