The Hoff Drunk on the Floor is High Art

August 07, 2009

The Hoff Drunk on the Floor is High Art

When The Hoff hit rockbottom and was filmed drunk and shirtless on the floor shoving a hamburger in his face by his teenage daughter to teach him a lesson, the footage hit YouTube and joined the crap collective of pop culture video phenomena.

Swiss art duo Comenius Roethlisberger and Admir Jahic, aka 'Invisible Heroes' have been observing the world's fascination with these easily digestible clips of inadvertent social narrative and began drawing frames from selected videos with coloured pencils. Their Star Wars Kid installation was a hit at Scope Basel 2009. It consists of 605 drawn frames of guess who? That poor kid in his garage trying out his moves with an imaginary light saber. (Would you believe I just watched that for the first time? I've seen countless references to it over the years but had never seen the original. I figured the kid was a lot younger. And smaller. He really gets worked up at the end, I thought he'd go right through the wall or at least split his pants or slap himself in the junk.)

Roethlisberger and Jahic's Without You Baby, There Ain't No Us project focusses further on the entity that is YouTube with their latest drawings, described as "an attempt to disrupt the haphazard collection of archived videos that YouTube has become" and that by transforming the visual back into the physical they "are doing what they do best - adding to the confusion." The resulting collection is both distressing and humorous in its ability to highlight our often vulgar predilections.”

You can buy the drawings in Colette's e-shop. Or get out your pencil crayons and draw your own.