Buddha Gone Bananas consists of a cheap Buddha garden-ornament statue (made in China) placed inside of a bulk banana box gotten from a grocery store, initially for moving in 2017 and held on to.

Is this art? Yes. It is art because, despite involving everyday objects, the work was deliberately put together as something to be seen and appreciated for what it is.

One of the points in the Avant-guard movement in art in the early part of the 20th century was to try to break the isolation of art (and its message) from the rest of society; and tried to integrate art back into society, where art is a part of everyday life. One of the strategies was to use everyday objects in art works and force people to reflect on the matter.

One example of this is Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain – a signed urinal presented as art. From around this time, a new genre of art called ‘ready-mades’ and (later called) conceptual art came into being. One of Duchamp’s points of this movement and its reverse logic is that: if art can become a consumerist commodity in a bourgeois society, then an everyday object can become art. Duchamp also said that he wanted to put art back into service of the mind. These trends can still be found in contemporary art.

Regarding Buddha Gone Bananas, people use this type of cheap Buddha statue as a garden ornament - to fill up an empty spot on one’s yard. But the idea for the work was to do something creative and interesting with the cheap Buddha statue by putting it in an unusual place. A few previous works of similar approach that can be mentioned are Venus of the Rags (by Michelangelo Pistoletto) and Piss Christ (by Andres Serrano). 

After some searching, the inside of a banana box seemed to a good spot and could also provide a cool-sounding title – ‘Buddha Gone Bananas.’  Moreover, the stacked banana boxes also resemble Andy Warhol’s stacked Brillo boxes.

Given all this, it can be argued that the points made with the work are as follows: (i) Art need not be a commodified fetishized object of reverence produced by an artist genius. (ii) Art can be made with everyday objects using one’s own imagination and by exercising creativity. The point of the work is to (iii) display a critical and antithetical attitude toward the mindless consumerism; (iv) recycle and reuse the old banana boxes in an imaginative creative way; and (v) fuse those critical messages with its physical appearance in a one-of-a-kind way.

It is true that the Buddha statue was bought as a kind of an aesthetic object but was used very differently than what people usually do with it. Perhaps that is the beauty of it: a critical reflection on life via sensuous means; a societal and (secular) spiritual concerns made to manifest in a unique combination of everyday objects. It can be argued that the work rebels against the buy-your-way-to-happiness society by creating something unique as a way out of that “norm.”  

Despite all the serious philosophical talk about the work, the work has a frivolous side also. As for ‘Gone Bananas,’ the title may refer (i) to the simple fact that the Buddha statue is located inside a Banana box, or that (ii) Buddha has gone bananas (crazy).

‘Go Bananas’ can mean ‘become crazy.’ And in Buddhism, they say, “We are all One.’’ Given those two, would ‘Buddha gone bananas (crazy)’ entail ‘all has gone bananas (crazy)?’