Unfiltered #LARD
Did y’all hear? Lard’s pulling a Manzoni—#ArtistShit—repackaging the Lardverse, the only volcano in EAV—as a series of Brotein canisters strategically placed in the lobby of his home gym, Village Fitness EAV.
Catch the absurdity Saturday, September 27th during STRUT, when Lard commandeers the only gym that matters, transforming his sweat sanctuary into his personal museum—turning an everyday environment into an art installation.
Part art-world troll, part venture-capitalist strategy, Unfiltered #LARD bypasses traditional art institutions to gift high art to low-hanging fruit—accessible to anyone willing to enter a gym.
The stunt is marketing gold for memberships while making a larger point:
Why buy art, when mirrors exist?
Lifting is life.
Galleries are for the birds.
At LardLabs, every lift, every squat, every drop of sweat becomes part of the exhibition.
#InvestLARD
And bro—it will be on view for an undisclosed amount of time.
Which means it could vanish tomorrow… or never.
So don’t miss out. Join Village Fitness EAV today and selfie your way into history.
Let’s make art weigh in again.
Comparables — The Art Stars
Jeff Koons — Consumer Icon
Relevant Work: Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985
Jeff Koons elevates everyday objects—basketballs, vacuum cleaners—into polished monuments of consumer desire and cultural absurdity.
In Unfiltered #LARD, Lard echoes this gesture, reimagining fitness ephemera as art, but flips Koons’ reverence inside out. Koons entombs his objects in pristine vitrines, isolated within the sterile shrine of the white cube. Lard uses the same vitrine logic, but drops it into a functioning gym—transforming a lobby kiosk into an absurdist stage, alive with sweat, motion, and community.
Both artists reveal how capitalist icons are fetishized. But where Koons embalms them as luxury relics, Lard collapses art and life, embedding high art into the messy pulse of everyday gym culture.
Piero Manzoni —
OG Absurdist
Relevant Work: Artist’s Shit (Merda d’artista), 1961
Piero Manzoni collapsed the distance between art, commodity, and absurdity with his infamous Artist’s Shit—90 tins of his own feces, sold by weight at the price of gold. He weaponized the art market’s fetishization of the artist’s body and output, turning waste into a luxury collectible.
Unfiltered #LARD echoes Manzoni’s provocation but re-routes it through gym culture. Instead of human waste sealed in tins, Lard repurposes Brotein canisters and fills them with Lardverse shit—lava and banaynays. Myth commodity, transformed into art. Where Manzoni mocked the collector’s desire to own a fragment of the artist, Lard trolls both the art market and the art world alike, embedding absurdist relics directly into a working gym lobby.
Both artists satirize consumption, value, and the art world’s obsession with objects—but while Manzoni courted collectors with a price tag, Lard redistributes his artifacts back into a living, sweating community.
Cady Noland —
Dark Mirror
Relevant Work: The American Trip, 1988
Cady Noland uses found objects—fences, beer cans, American flags—to expose violence, paranoia, and societal collapse. Lard inverts this method: in Unfiltered #LARD, everyday fitness culture is repurposed to attack the elitism of the art world itself.
Where Noland turns public symbols into dark mirrors of collective decay, Lard installs museum-quality work directly into a community gym—bypassing institutions and redistributing high art back to the public.
Both artists reveal systems of control and consumption; but Lard flips the critique from low brow society to the art market, from street-level collapse to cultural gatekeeping.
Each of these artists expose systems of desire, power, and collapse.
But here’s the difference: they still orbit the art world, submitting to the market and its white-walled cage. Whereas Lard dared to do something different…
In différance, he walked off set—
Lard chose to orbit the sun.
Lard’s PSA — The Black Hole
I am a self-funded and self-represented jester performing capitalism.
I don’t play by anyone’s rules—let alone the art world’s.
I’m a gym rat—living in a volcano.
And yet, I am fully aware that the things I do,
the stuff I make, reeks of art.
It’s k[n]ot art.
It’s LARD!
This is why, when Blake—owner of Village Fitness—first approached me about using the kiosk in his lobby as a mini gallery, I chose to tap into absurdism and conjure Manzoni instead.
’Cause why sell art when I can witness my myth grow?
I’m the guy who transitioned into a banana, after all.
Galleries are graveyards.
Gyms are for people who thrive.
I wanted to honor the source of aesthetics—
not suck the tit of consumerism.
And fact:
No one wakes up at 3:30am to hit the gym by 4 just to fit in.
They do it because they’re dedicated to self-love.
And it’s that kind of passion that makes my heart smile.
Thus, to honor the athlete in all, Unfiltered #Lard was born: Brotein canisters filled with lava and banaynays to troll Jeff Koons. Because who cares that dog is God spelled backwards?
Balloons are for children.
Art stars come and go.
But black holes are forever.
And lifting is life.
💛 LoveME? I Love Lard.
