The Critical Flaneuse

Goings on, a little more autobiographical

2007-05-18T10:59:00.000-07:00

I am super excited about the collaborative projects being planned by Arnold Kemp for next years Time-Based Arts festival. He held a screening of Dario Argento's masterpiece Suspiria, and then invited artists in attendance to submit art inspired by their viewing. I have loved this movie ever since being introduced to it, though to this day I have yet to give it a proper viewing. It is absolutely lovely and terrifying, gorgeous visuals and masterful cinematography, suspense and abject gore. Shot with Anamorphic lenses, and using imbibition technicolor prints, the entire film is cast in a vivid, saturated palette. This creates a visual atmosphere of super-realness-come-fantasy, like an adolescent memory or a life-changing rock show. Not unlike the early video art of Sue De Beer. Actually, De Beer is a great bridge to this project. Her work, which reaches for The Teenage in a way that is both incredibly complex and heartwrenchingly earnest and beautiful, wears it's inflences on it's sleeves. Kristeva and Dennis Cooper, for instance, form the secret bones and guts, as well as the glittering froth of her work. High-concept meets fandom. Casting inspiration-via-fandom in lush, seductive rock-show colors, with all the requisite gothic tropes, has been huge lately. Whitney Biennial-2004 stuff, derided as hyped "glamed-up grungy teenage angst goth/disco aesthetic and faux shamanism, clumsily and cloyingly epitomized by so many Nth generation artists" in some blogs, of course. Actually I LOVE that description, and I LOVE the work of de beer, banks violette, terrence koh, christian holstad, david almejd, dario robleto, marc swanson, scott treleaven, anthony goicolea, and anyone else who that might be reaching at (is naming names breaking some sort of unspoken rule???). Besides being so much more than that, these artists all capture something so incredibly vital about the sociopolitical-social climate of the first few years of this century in New York City. These were really the first works of contemporary art to speak to me, the artistic practices of world-making that have never let go of my imagination. Pieces of art that took up familiar mythologies, but opened out into the strange and beautiful. Not escapism, though it might fool the casual observer, but rather fantasy so fabulous that they perform the same Butlerian function as drag: drawing attention to the utter lack of reality that they contest, reframing our desires to escape, forgrounding the mechanisms of nostalgia and utopian daydreams, and offering blueprints for world-building. Using strategies and tropes and imagery that are immediate and not buried in arcane art historical in-fighting, filled with enough references and jumping off points for the viewer to enter into a conversation-via-interpretation with the art, life, literature, music, and so on.

Anyway, obviously this is a snapshot of a partifular zeitgeist, and we have moved on in that avant-garde way of destructive progress (really?), but it is a point that won't be lost on me. The open call for "SuperNatural" sums it up well, quoting William Burroughs (gag): "America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers." Mr. Burroughs risks overstating it and missing the crux; fantasy, desire- in a word, dream-is indeed at the heart of lifestyle advertising, mass media distractions, and perhaps even ruling political frameworks. However, it is not by appealing to some gritty, restrained, authentic whatever that danger can be evoked, but by retracing those very mechanisms of the operation of power. Not to rehash that whole masters/tools/house stuff, of course.

I meant to post some reviews of the shows up at Tilt, Motel, PDX, Elizabeth Leach, and Quality Pictures, but I think it is time to get back in the studio and run with it.

Although the Glenn Ligon piece up at PNCA's "Habit Forming" is quite amazing and worth the trip alone. Ligon got a BA from my alma mater, and I was first introduced to his work by a curator ther who I worked with there. The piece at PNCA is huge canvas covered with coal dust, which obscures the newsprint image ostensibly underneath, and occasionally resolves into illegible text. The use of material, with its metaphorical and formal registers, is incredibly successful and I actually don't have much more to say about it right now. It is one of those pieces that grabs you, sticks with you, and continuously reveals itself to you. And for better or worse (better I think), it probably looks absolutely smashing on someones wall.

Storm Tharp "We Appeal to Heaven" at PDX Contemporary Art

2007-01-11T16:31:00.000-08:00

There is something terribly unnerving about Storm Tharp's latest batch of drawings. A kind of double-edged unnerving; grotesque in it's own right, and also unsettling because of your own reaction too it. These figures which bring to mind equal parts Francis Bacon and Modigliani, J. K. Huysmans and Dennis Cooper, are bleeding, dissolving, mutating. And yet each grotesquerie is executed so beautifully, and contributes so seemlessly to the work's atmosphere, that they inspire awe rather than horror. But what exactly are the terms of these figurative ruptures and excesses? Skin: traditionally painting is the perfect medium to capture the fleshy essence, and naked skin the proof of an artist's technical chops, hence the classical nudes. Fast forward to Kiki Smith's sculptural rhyming of handmade paper and the frail boundary of skin that marks the distinction between inside and outside. One might imagine, in Tharp's compositions, that this fragile layer has been ripped away, and we are left with a volatile interaction between what was formerly internal and external. The glue that holds figuration together has dissolved, and we are left with something much more interesting. Each work has multiple registers: passages rendered in painstaking detail (that doesn't FEEL painstaking), seemingly spontaneous artmarks, rigid abstractions, confident gestural contours, and richly modulated planes of color. The artist slips in and out of each method as easily as he switches mediums, using watercolor, pencil, ink, and paint with confidence and purpose. And yet there is a palpable tension to each work: the passages rendered the most exactly draw in your gaze, threatening both spatially and temporally to exceed their bounds. The most spontaneous-seeming marks are employed so specifically that one marvels at the artist's foresight and control. It as if Tharp has harnessed the forces of entropy inherent to artmaking, but the outcome of this mastery is recalcitrant and threatening. Because each portrait is not merely a passive subject, the armature upon which the artist might exhibit his craft; rather each creature seems to demand a specific handling, to pose different problems, to smugly challenge the artist, to tease the viewer. In "Einstein," pretty colors and soft renderings of cloth and hair frames the mushroom-cloud bacteria of the inky flesh, producing a tension which presents a stable whole that is constantly at war with itself. In "The Ex-King," the fine details of the figure's dress shirt and bloom wrapped about it's neck overwhelm the attention of the viewer, as the splotchy blooms of the face and hand are inexplicably contained by the invisible bounds of the background. Recalling Tharp's sculpture at the recent biennial, a tumerous growth blossoms from the head of the figure, though he seems nonplussed. "Rare Bird" seems to be slipping farther and father into abstraction, as her torso becomes a biomorphic blob, and her necklace seems to want to be geometry more than jewelry. So why the appeal to heaven? Tharp inhabits the paradigm of artist-as-creator uneasily; equal parts hostile and utterly enamoured with his creations, who in turn are perfectly capable of formulating their own existential stances from their chaotic armature of paint, pencil, ink, of figuration and abstraction, of realism and expressionism. They are untouched by the mortal questions of skin and blood, unconcerned that they have been wiped away and smudged, made host to any number of unnatural growths; instead they each add a voice to the chorus: "we die conceptually."

POW! Pictures of Women- at Quality Pictures

2007-01-11T11:19:00.000-08:00

I caught the tail end of the opening of this exhibit on First Thursday, but had to go back and revisit. Something about it really grabbed me, and left me wondering why. What should have been predictable, obvious, and more or less successful on kind of boring terms- wasn't. I am terribly interested in curatorial projects with a feminist or queer sensibility, but am also prepared to be disappointed when they inevitably fall flat. But this show at the brand new Quality Pictures WORKS, and I want to figure out how and why.

The title of this exhibition, via clever acronym, packs a ontomonamiac punch, so to speak. Within "Pictures Of Women" is a metaphorical kick. Of course, punning is usually not an indication of greatness, but this show manages to pull it off. Because the punch is no comic book warrior princess hyper sensitive stereotyping. In fact the whole issue of stereotypes, positive/negative imagery and relentlessly, and all that GLAD shit, is totally bypassed in favor of something much more wonderful. The show treats its subject so deftly that we forget the heaviness of thematic that tends to haunt and overwhelm typical "woman and art" exhibitions. In fact, it is hard to remember that the works are tied together by being, each and everyone, pictures of woman. They are, of course, and a large portion are by women as well- but in almost every instance the work is so well selected and strong that it demands to be viewed on its own terms. This dynamic is extremely fruitful- each work is engaging, and the whole becomes richer than the sum of its parts. There is no laundry list of diversity, for better or worse. Conventional and somewhat normative beauty is on display here, but as a vehicle for something much more interesting than either the mythologized female form or a trite attempt at substitution, revaluation, or contestation of said form. Often this means attention is being drawn to process and posing, yearning and fabrication- of pictures, of women. Photography looms large here, but not exclusively, collage, painting, and drawing are all present. In fact it is encouraging that a show so heavy in photography bypasses the dangers of the form to fall into over simplification and sensationalism. Instead, the diversity of media pulls in an extra dimension to the show- what is the relationship of pictures of women to the type of picture in question? Does the camera lie? What about the painter? The Sue De Beer stills look fabulous, managing to be inexplicably haunting despite the fact that her work is much more powerful in it's originally moving format. The somewhat candid feeling to these stills (but candid only in that highly constructed sense- what did Wynne Greenwood say once about the difference between a video still and a paused video?), contrasts nicely with the meticulous and joyful staging of Chris Verne and Holly Andres (who reminds me, in some sense, of new German cinema-ist Fassbinder). The mad-woman-in-the-attic thematic is employed to some interest in Elizabeth Huey's swirling acrylics- where hysteria becomes a highly choreographed dance- and her collages. In "Broken Leg" the addition of silhouettes, hand-shadows, and porno imagery brings in questions of projection in an especially interesting way. And her disembodied heads floating on the abstract planes of several collages, is equal parts Hannah Hoch and Marie Antoinette. Bigshots like Nikki S. Lee, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville, and Kara Walker are all here, and look great, but rather than overshadowing local and emerging talents, just serve to show how strong the rest of the works are. And so I will pause here, unable to pull out some master narrative about the show or what pictures of women- in 2006, in portland, in photography- entail. Instead, the show leaves me with the feeling of being led through a post-feminist haunted house...with the shock and satisfaction of a close encounter with the productive uncanny. Being led through some very challenging and beautiful rabbit holes, emerging in the sinister daylight without a firm conclusion, but with exquisitely posed questions.

Jarrett Mitchell: The Dawn Of The Birth Of Right To Life vs. The Law Of Death at Art Organism

2006-12-08T11:12:00.000-08:00

I caught the opening of Organism's first show (barring that Rist video I am abso. devastated to have missed- oh pippi pippi pippilotti!...I've heard rumors that there will be more off you in the states soon though) the Wednesday before the hustle/haze of first Thurs. Glad to have the chance to contemplate, because this was the first really thought provoking show I've seen here so far (though I loved that fairy tale business as Liz Leach last month, and had I not been super busy moving I'm sure there is more to say about the PAM biennial). Mr. Jarrett Mitchell, it seems, is interested in deer- Deer. Now, I will be the first to say I have seen enough antler chandeliers and general pseudo-ironic-urban-woodsey-ness in the past two years in Chelsea and Williamsburg to last a life time (which isn't to say I don't think Marc Swanson's work, for instance, is hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly poignant...but as I was discussing with my favorite renegade curator this summer, a group show poking at this trend was sorely due). So I entered with both trepidation of more of the same, and anticipation of potentially timely commentary. Background information would suggest that Mitchell is familiar with this aesthetic, having shown at Deitch Projects, but also could inject it with a bit of reality, hailing as he does from Louisville, Ky.

A charmingly taxidermied doe, bursting through the walls of the temporary white cube framed by a laurel of ripped sheetrock, inaugurate Mitchell's "The Dawn of The Birth of Right To Life vs. The Law of Death." This titled phrase is repeated on several of the obsessively, but awkwardly, worked faux-naive drawings and paintings following that stuffed and mounted (really? I didn't check the medium on the checklist) creature. These strictly visual works nicely complement the fake scientific method of the maps, documentary close-ups of road kill, and interviews with Portlanders about their encounters with deer that make up the rest of the exhibition. The artist's hand is heavy here, seen in the smartly selective clumsiness of the map multiples, the degrees of google-image-search bad resolution in the c-prints of road kill, and the bitingly humorous timing of cuts in the video footage. Mitchell here is both the objective observer of this apparently epic battle, man vs. nature, life vs. death, and the delightfully self-deprecating explorer of well trod territory. The question- is this serious or trivial, universal or particular?- flickers throughout the exhibition reconfiguring its terms and repositioning its stance as each work plays off the others, and internal tensions mount. The v. detailed pencil drawings and multi colored pointelism are all surface, but superficial in a way which asserts the crucial importance of that layer. The bollywood music and kaleidoscope-computer-manipulated abstractions that punctuate each interview in the video work simultaneously assert a perversely carnivalesque spectacle and- perhaps because of the vague shadenfreude that emerges from this very decoupage- a sense of shared tragedy in the absurdity of, well, you know. It is at the same time very funny, and when you pause and listen to the stories, shockingly serious. The grandiose title and disco abstractions shift from Good Fun to a quirky and poignant take on the unimaginable. Behind the luscious surfaces, the glass eyes, the witty editing, the crafty draftsmanship, is mortality- figured in a gunshot wound, in a rotting carcass, in a late night collision...or perhaps in lethal injection, assisted suicide, electric chair, or back alley abortion. And this ambivalence between the deadly serious and the ironic kitsch is the perfect articulation of the anxiety in the face of morbid inevitability. Through Mitchell's deft and subtle handling the triteness of death and the shallowness of "deer shows" gives way to a hauntingly nuanced and refreshing statement.

Wild Girls

2006-09-17T12:25:00.000-07:00

Exit Art, June 24- August 26, 2006

The premise of the unfortunately titled Wild Girls exhibition is that this group of women is boldly addressing gender issues, jumping off fro the work of their feminist precursors in transformative ways. Their work is touted by the press release as groundbreaking, and as promising a “collective look at the 21^st century woman artist.” The themes proposed are: identity, eroticism, vanity, and mythology—alternately a banal and mystifying interpretative framework. Certainly identity and eroticism are well-worn feminist territory, but I fail to see the exhaustiveness or importance of the categories of vanity and mythology. Or really, the prominence of these themes in the more successful and interesting pieces included in the show. Instead of the “challenging questions” about “everything from gender issues to the mundane aspects of daily life,” the real interest lies in the negotiations of these artists with the past and the changing present.

Certainly the touchstones of the 1970s Women’s Art Movement—craftiness, bodily imagery, etc—are present in the sculptural installations. Emily Keown’s “Eleven Ladies,” consisting of pairs of crochet nipples in red, pink, and purple hues artfully arranged on a glass shelf, takes up from where the “Dinner Party” left off. While the material and imagery is continuous, gone is the explicit sexuality and sense of community and history of Judy Chicago. Instead the installation evokes the commodification of sex, and issues of performance and masquerade replace more essentialist assertions. The “ladies” seem like pasties for sale at an upscale boutique, and in the context of 21^st century hip, young feminism, they recall the “Stitch N’ Bitch” reclamation of knitting, and the d.i.y. sex-positive burlesque movement. They also speak to the current spate of crafty sculptural installation art that defined PS1’s “Greater New York” show. This transmutation of the traditional feminist take on “the body” into a performative problem is echoed in the gilded and bejeweled dildos, “latex pussies”, and leather whips that Jaishri Abichandani arranges into a series of strange snake-ridden alters. This sense of fetish rather than flesh is taken more colloquially in the terracotta assemblages of Simone Leigh, which tread similar ground to a dissimilar effect. Also picking up these threads are Maria Pineres cross-stitched mug shots, and Jennifer Levonian’s delightful stop-action video, “The Figure in the Carpet,” which uses drawings and collage to create a strange retro piece featuring bank robbery and forest escapades. More than anything, these works taken together, seem to reflect this PS1 sensibility, while asserting its ignored feminist provenance.

Dialogues with non-feminist artistic traditions also figure prominently in the show. Alia Farid Abdal creates a series of photographs that twist the iconography of menstrual blood to more minimalist ends. A woman wearing blue underwear stained red is photographed from the waist to the knee against a blue-green tiled wall. Each photograph frames its subject slightly differently in scale and angle, as the tiled grid of the bathroom echoes the gridded arrangement of the photographs themselves. The photographs are crisp, intimate and careful, bringing the sexualized subject into conversation with the minimalist grid, as the very profusion of blood stains recall Rothko more than Schneeman. This embodied, specific route to formal abstraction is picked up by Francisca Benitez’s video of the street shot from the perspective of a skateboarder. The tip of the board against the rectangle of the screen forms the constant abstracted image, but the surfaces traversed change—each creating a specific texture and coinciding sound. This abstract sound-image sync-up is arresting, as are the point of view provided for the spectator, and the redefinition of the modernist flaneur. The field of abstraction is not neutral, it is a shifting, and imagined as a rocky terrain to be traversed. Kate Gilmore’s comments on this issue of movement and process in her sarcastically-titled video “Cakewalk,” which depicts a woman struggling to climb up an incline in roller-skates.

This show is most successful in this question of the relationship of subversion and tradition, rather than the tricky business of identity thematics. The work is characterized most strongly in the prominence of photographs and video, and the relative absence of traditional media (excepting some lovely, though very out of place, paintings by Jenny Dubnau). The resounding statement seems to be that the innovation and inquiry allegedly characterizing the works featured are linked to an embrace of new media. An interesting proposition to be sure. But hardly that wild.

AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

2006-09-17T12:18:00.000-07:00

Supernaturally transported into the future, Queen Elizabeth and her court magician stumble through a dystopian punk vision of England in Jubilee (1977), New Queer Cinema darling Derek Jarman’s early masterpiece. Meanwhile, a troupe of punks lead by nihilistic historian Amyl Nitrate, who paints a pink lightening bolt over the right side of her face, battle fascistic governmental forces and evil record companies. In their decadent teenage lair, a den of sex, violence and philosophy, she reads: “In those days, desires weren't allowed to become reality. So fantasy was substituted for them - films, books, pictures. They called it 'art'. But when your desires become reality, you don't need fantasy any longer, or art.” This anti/pseudo-situationist slogan suggests a progress narrative for any number of outlaw desires, while at the same time cynically imagining the terms of their fulfillment (A proto-argument, perhaps, against the undermining of queer cultural forms by assimilationist politics). Meanwhile, the supernaturally-imported relics of the past wander, lusciously clad, among the rocky cliffs on the outskirts of town, bemused and horrified. But distinctions between the past and the present, tradition and transgression, collapse: the pyromaniac leader of the punk girls is a ringer for the queen, evoking a strange double-ness of the past, a dark unconscious underlying historical memory.

This uncanny clash/coming-together of the past and present emerges in the ghostly chaos of AngloMania, an exhibition that transcends its foundational definitions, operating in a space akin to installation art. Mannequins, decked out in elaborate costumes representing tradition and transgression in British sartorial history, emerge from the wind tunnel of history blank-faced, their multihued hair matted and frozen like styled lumps of sticky frosting. The exhibition forgoes the typical chronological narratives, as well as clear labeling devices unfortunately, in favor of a fragmented approach. Historical costumes are juxtaposed with fashions from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in nine elaborate thematic tableaux installed into the Met’s period rooms. The idea of Englishness put forward by the curators, as articulated in the accompanying brochure, is “poetic, nostalgic, satirical, and above all, theatrical.” Indeed, the vignettes are gorgeous feats of mise-en-scene, which inspire an awe of sartorial achievement while inserting a playful irony into the viewer’s potential stance. The performance of history and historical memory underlies the strength of the exhibition—and, indeed, of the garments themselves—inviting the viewer to actively negotiate their relationship to the objects, and that of the objects to each other.

Anachronism, for Jarman, is not a simple plot device or the object of an easy laugh, but the very syntax of his vision. In Jubilee the dystopian and nostalgic interpenetrate, infecting each other in an orgy of lavish fantasy. The strange disjuncture of time and space effects a queering of narrative and mis-en-scene. The past, and its tragedies and triumphs, is contaminated with the ever-presence of the present, an impulse historical in its very ahistoricity. AngloMania’s trope of lavish, yet somehow grotesque, mannequins evoke an air of anti-history as style. The exhibition, at its most compelling, tells you less about the history of British fashion, and more about the complicated stances we continuously adopt towards history- and the fabulous garments we pose in. And as it turns out, the subject harmonizes wonderfully with this postmodern perspective. Like the Hussein Chalayan’s deconstructed dresses, worn by the servants in the “Upstairs/Downstairs” scene, AngloMania reaches for the flowers in the dustbin of history, and through an endless process of “tradition and transgression” stitches together a suggestive account. In the aforementioned scene, the present cleans up after the past, but also fragments and consumes it.

This care-taking/rag-picking consciousness emerges again in a subsequent tableau, entitled “The Deathbed.” Depicting the ramifications and reverbations of Queen Victoria’s cults of death, an ostentations state bed is attended by a coterie of modern mannequins, bedecked in the designs of Alexander McQueen. These memento mori ensembles seem to relish in morbid excess, when compared to the respectfully plain cut of the costume worn by Queen Victoria also on display. “God save the queen!” cry the Sex Pistols in the last quarter of the 20^th century, “we mean it, man!” (helpfully recited by Johnny Rotten in the accompanying audio guide, which is hilariously bizarre).

In the “English Garden,” eighteenth century floral dresses are paired with Philip Treacy’s orchid hats. The curators stress the contradictory philosophical belief in a natural order and the artifice involved in these “natural” performances. The artificiality undermines any claims to naturalness, as that very naturalness itself decadently overcomes the precarious machinations and treacherous structures of society. One imagines, in the translation of the botanical to the sartorial, a counter narrative of inevitable decay of the cultivated blooms, and the emergence of wildflowers and weeds in the graveyard of history. A vision of decadence that presages the anarchic vision of punk. Indeed, Sid Vicious’s cry of “There is No Future…In England’s dreaming!” echoes throughout the rooms, bouncing off the busy wallpaper, shattering the crystal vases, blowing up the layers of petticoats, and whipping through the top-heavy hairstyles. But this transgressive cry, ultimately, is realized and recognized as tradition.

Clayton Brothers: Wishy Washy

2006-09-17T12:11:00.000-07:00

Bellwether, May 18- June 24 3006

Animated by the pulsating and polychromatic canvases of the Clayton Brother’s show is a battle of sartorial (perhaps, social?) sanitation. The figures populating each image are embodied through an elaborate stylized visual vocabulary. This style veers close to the sort of cartoon-y illustration that could easily sell tee-shirts or shoes, but luckily through this paradigm the brothers manage to produce a carnivalesque, rather than commercial, commentary. The exaggerated figurations shift attention from issues of verisimilitude to the complex negotiation between form and content, between narrative and technique. And there is something immensely satisfying when form and content coalesce so tightly and cleverly, and even more so when they push against each other. This tension is produced expertly in this series, as the form given to content—and the content imbued in formalistic devices—highlight their radical distinction as well as their Mobius Strip-like interdependence.

The paintings of Wishy Washy are populated by an array of characters, some strangely colored and others experiencing hirsute transformations. They exist in a strangely abstract space, nominally a Laundromat: messy and expressive artist’s marks such as smears and drips of paint ooze off the figures, as slick geometric abstractions—rays, diamonds, circles, paisley globules, floral loops, linear 3-d constructions—intersect the picture plane. The relationship between the abstract and figurative elements is complex; alternately existing in radical separation, and implicated in an intimate co-production. This correspondence/contradistinction is pushed further by the ever-changing variety of marks and textures employed. A spray paint can in one of the fantastic humanoid’s hands radiates a fine mist of airbrushed paint, while oversized ink droppers corresponds with a different class of mark-making. The interest is created by this variety of marks—impasto, slick, modeled, drippy, and sprayed. This diversity of surface is matched by an equally overwhelming range of palettes, from glaring neons and supersaturated brights, to realistic neutrals and grungy fatigues. These tonal groups are employed sensitively to the canvas; slick neon rays contrast with rough complexly modulated skin tones.

The characters endlessly produce and are produced by the conventions of abstraction figured in each image. The relationship between the abstract elements and the figurative/narrative ones shifts between overlay, penetration, interaction, and production. Geometric diamonds, which exist in purely abstract space, lacking any intelligible interaction with the figurative elements of one canvas reappear in another canvas being physically carted about by another figure. Non-objective configuration of circles that float over groups of people become, elsewhere, tactile objects held in grotesque humanoid hands.

Cleverly modified and faithfully reproduced vintage signs and texts emerge periodically, vaguely referring race relations, social commentary, and artistic programs through the language of Laundromats. An entreaty to “Lysol Yourself” is reinforced by the ever-present figure of bleach. Meanwhile, the cry of “Color for the people” doubles with repeated eyedroppers and spray paint cans manipulated by, and perhaps creating, the figures. An narrative emerges, playfully suggesting a war between the sanitizing effects of banality and the messiness of bohemianism, between conservative cleanliness and artistic production, or on another register, between racial whitewashing and affirmation of diversity, between so-called purity and dynamic exchange. But the model of identity is linked inextricably to the methods and modes of representation; identity is not fixed, static, inherent, but endlessly produced, modified, and transformed. This production is brought to the fore by the aforementioned attention on the tools, acts, and traces of artistic production: the prominence of a variety of marks, the shifting registers of abstraction and figuration, the symbols of paint and product actively engaged by the narrative elements of each image.

In this battle between colors and bleach, dust bunnies and disinfectant, the stakes are surprisingly high. The style and content bring in an element of kitsch and graffiti to “high art”—in fact, they infect it. Corporeal mutations abound, as figures flicker in and out of grotesqueries, hovering in the space between affirmation and disintegration. The promise of the “white cube,” not to mention the godliness of cleanliness, is refigured as a threat, and is under attack by a polymorphous force of playful creation. The colorful cast of characters poses serious questions of social relations and artistic relations, simultaneously and fantastically.

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2006-06-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

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