Yoshitomo Nara, Jeff Koons and Yoko Ono Become 'Party Animals' at Royal/T. Woof!

Keith Plocek

Yoshitomo Nara's Your Dog

​Pulling works from an art collector's private cache and organizing them around a theme is often a tricky affair, where capitalized nouns such as Transgression or Race or Patriarchy wind up applying to just about anything a curator hangs on the wall. Maybe video artist Lindsay Scoggins was trying to avoid such conceptual wish-wash when she grabbed pieces from Royal/T owner Susan Hancock's private collection and clumped them together under the rubric of "Party Animals," although it's probably more likely she just wanted to have a lot of fun.

Plenty of big-name works were on display last night at the media preview for the show, including a large fiberglass dog from Yoshitomo Nara and a pair of Jeff Koons' porcelain balloon pups. There was even what can only be called Butt Corner, where a still from Yoko Ono's No. 4 (a 1966 film consisting entirely of famous bottoms) hung near Mark Grotjahn's playful drawing of an ostrich with its head up its ass.

Was it a party? Yes. Were there animals? That too. Fun? Definitely.

Royal/T is a maid cafe by day, and Scoggins took the whole "cute woman in a French maid outfit serving tea" motif (and what a motif it is) and created a video especially for the show. In the vid a Rotoscoped French maid named Chiyo emerges from a painting and dances around the gallery, sprinkling magic tea on the works and bringing them to life. As we watched the video, a fellow onlooker wondered how the other artists would feel about Scoggins re-appropriating their work.

Let's hope Jeff Koons doesn't sue. Although it'd be great for her career.

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