Kacey Musgraves's Tour Features Disco Balls Resembling Artist's Sculpture

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Country music star Kacey Musgraves is currently performing on a large, testicle-shaped disco ball during her 36-date Middle of Nowhere Tour, prompting Brooklyn artist Alexandra Rubinstein to note an uncanny resemblance to her own 2020 sculpture.

Musgraves's tour began on August 20 in Chicago. On August 22, nearly two weeks after the tour launch, Musgraves sat on the slowly spinning sculpture for two nights at Madison Square Garden. She performed her song“Rhinestoned” from her sixth studio album to a sold-out crowd of 20,000 at the New York City venue. Videos of the mobile sculpture quickly gained traction across social media platforms.

Rubinstein posted photos of her own work, titled“Disco Balls,” on Instagram on August 22, captioned,“It's true I made them first (maybe, who knows it's all been done).” Users responded with comments like“Who said disco was dead?” and“Testicle spectacle.” Artist Mike Glier remarked that Rubinstein's piece echoed Louise Bourgeois's testicular sculpture series Janus, albeit without the disco mirrors. Rubinstein learned of Musgraves's use of remarkably similar, though much larger, disco balls on her tour when“people often send [her] all these balls,” she told Hyperallergic.

Rubinstein created“Disco Balls” in 2020 using a mold previously utilized for a testicle-shaped piñata. This piñata was filled with“plastic babies, blue and pink candles, and condoms” for her 2020 solo exhibition, Dick Diaries, at Established Gallery. Rubinstein explained that the piñata aimed to highlight the role of cis men in pregnancy and reproduction during a period when Donald Trump appointed conservative judges to the Supreme Court, while also engaging with the archetype of a“ball-busting feminist.”

Like Dick Diaries and her signature paintings of oversized phalluses, which she considers“as stand-in symbols for traditional masculinity,” Rubinstein's“Disco Balls” serve as a satirical commentary on patriarchal structures.

Source: Hyperallergic

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