Patrick art of weird4/18/2023 The story of how Kroc took control of McDonald’s, pushed the brothers aside and made his fortune is told in The Founder, a film directed by John Lee Hancock, starring Michael Keaton and due for release later this year. Disingenuously, Dick and Mac had also failed to retain rights to the McDonald’s name. The fast-talking Chicagoan had promised them a royalty on every new restaurant, but the agreement had been a handshake and never written down. The brothers lost out big time as Kroc transformed McDonald’s into a global corporation. Appointed franchise manager in 1955, six years later the energetic Kroc bought the company from Dick and Mac for $2.7m. ![]() While selling milkshake machines in the early ‘50s, Kroc saw the potential of a hamburger chain with a distinctive design and fast, cheap food. The McDonald brothers themselves were content to let the franchise expand slowly and steadily, but not so Ray Kroc, one time jazz musician, radio DJ and paper cup salesman. At this building you can see how, from certain angles, the twin golden arches intersect, and how the McDonald’s logo emerged. ![]() Threatened with demolition, this remarkably original building was listed in 1994 and restored by the McDonald’s Corporation. Fox’s brothers-in-law and business partners, Roger Williams and Bud Landon, took a franchise on the third new-look McDonald’s in Downey, California. The franchisee was Occidental Petroleum executive Neil Fox. Meston’s arches, crafted by sign-maker George Dexter, made their debut in 1953 with the first franchised McDonald’s at Phoenix, Arizona. A new roof sign boasted “McDonald’s Famous Hamburgers”. Eight years later the brothers re-launched it with their new assembly line fast-food concept, meaning they could sell burgers at 15 cents, half the price of their competitors. He ran it with sons Richard (‘Dick’) and Maurice (‘Mac’) who, in 1940, moved the stand to San Bernardino. In 1937, Patrick McDonald, who had come to California from New Hampshire the previous decade, opened The Airdrome, an octagonal drive-up hot dog stand outside Monrovia airport, northeast of Los Angeles. But this famous M logo formed of two intersecting golden arches and developed over a number of years came about more by accident than design. Under the sign of these arches, currently on display at more than 30,000 restaurants in 119 countries, 68 million customers a day are served variations on a theme of burgers and fries washed down with Coke and shakes. In addition to his work as an artist, Patrick currently acts as the artistic director to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, a freelance creative director, and is an intermittent guest curator of the nomadic Jan Weenix Gallery.And yet the world’s most famous arches may well be those – with no claim to high culture, innovative engineering or grand historical narrative – of McDonald’s. Patrick received a BFA in Sculpture from CSU Long Beach in 2011, and an MFA in Art from California Institue of the Arts in 2014. Throughout his works, Patrick experiments with themes of immersion, the ethics of materiality in fantasy, how the interface shapes our mythosphere, psychosphere, and cognisphere, and the role of the individual in collective storytelling. These orchestrated events have taken the form of an interactive, immersive theatrical escape room ( Return to FOREVERHOUSE), a set of experimental stand-up comedy ( I SO SORE FOR EVER THING), a 2-minute micro-opera performed every-hour-on-the-hour inside of a public sculpture mounted to the front of the historic Gamble House in Pasadena ( The Swirling Mess Below the Sleeping Porch…), a set of unsual pedagogical gifts as an invitation to participate in a life-long collaboration ( Weird Alms) and most recently, an ongoing, collaborative paratheatrical ritual-game that revolves around an ever growing pantheon of props 12 years in the making (Fool’s Window). Participants are invited to wander into the Interworveled, past the edges of orientation, through the active transmutation and shifting scale of the “event”. His works are conceived as enactments of Azguyenquynan!-phantasmagorical LARPing events where suddenly immersive over-states fade at the edges of the forming worlds abound as tiny anthropomorphic ducks transform from hand puppets to miniature timegods, T-shirts become spirits that graft the taste of the audience into wakes for dead drawings, historic monuments become cukoo-clocks that birth giant, beaked chorales, and a crack in the wall speaks green light to quell the violence implicit in the misplacement of puzzle pieces. His most recent works incite opportunities for autopoetic game-setting and rule-making around absurdist narrativized rituals where objects can be explored and haunted by different communities and creative practitioners. Patrick Michael Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist and fool-magician that primarily orchestrates secrets and surprises in immersive theater and interactive sculpture games.
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