Black Acid Co-op at Deitch Projects

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe’s new installation “Black Acid Co-op” is unrelentingly dark, sardonic, and bleak: several reproduced “meth labs” appear here, some of them burned out (as meth labs are prone to exploding), along with a few gratuitously filthy bathrooms, a reproduction of a China-town type boutique, and one room that resembles a twisted satirical version of an art gallery itself. “Black Acid Co-op” is the third version of an installation that has had two previous incarnations: “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun” (in Marfa, Texax), and “Hello Meth Lab with a View” (Miami, Fl.) which were both realized with the help of the artist Alexandre Singh whose touch is also evident here. This version, anyway, is a compelling vision of a world that is falling apart, burned out, stained, rotting, moldy, and over-run with mass-produced crap – one that’s either over- or under-lit (mostly with fluorescent lights) and found in derelict basements, abandoned store-fronts, and burned out shacks in the middle of nowhere.



As with many other young artists including Justin Lieberman, Nate Lowman, and Dan Colen, among others, there’s an over-riding obsession with both abjection and kitschiness of the lowest possible order - this time manifest in what would seem to be their essential subject: meth labs, a subject that seems, all too conveniently, to tie together most of their primary obsessions: kitschy detritus (the boxes of sudafed and bottles of drano that meth is made from, for example), an aura of abjection, hopelessness, impending doom, as well as the seedy, dark American underbelly manifest here as a semi-ironic embrace of criminal activity. It’s also a short-hand for the rural America which artists in this vein (those heavily influenced by Richard Prince) exploit in a way that often seems primarily condescending.

Another problem here is a lack of touch. The artists are too ironically distanced from their materials to engage with them as specific abstract forms – or as materials rather than cultural signifiers - and the overall effect is a flurry of ready-made content swarming together without an entirely cohesive purpose. The oddities found here, a random binder of old Polaroids found on the floor or a poster for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, for example, are compelling as sad relics, but no more so than if we found them ourselves, say, in a junk-yard somewhere.

Something about scale, as well, gets lost. In an installation this big, too much of it feels like dead-space or a theatre set. I found myself wandering around inside it, from place to place, startled or entertained by the sudden transitions and sense of verisimilitude but dissatisfied with most of the individual parts. In the end, it’s like a stream of unceasing commentary comprised of vaguely related ideas rather than a coherent thought articulated over time. But maybe that’s the point: a meth addict prattling on about nothing, seething with sarcasm, paranoia, and random cultural obsessions. Nevertheless, attitudinal posturing, no matter how well executed, isn’t the same thing as unflinching realism.

Justin Lieberman's "The Corrector in the High Caslet" at Zach Feuer Gallery

Justin Lieberman's work is a sardonic kitsch sucker-punch. A potent combination of ironic nostalgia and abject materials, his execution is always impressively thorough - like a three-dimensional Mad Magazine installation on a bad acid. Here he displays phalanxes of familiar collectibles and familiar Pop icons – comic books, baseball cards, beanie babies, VHS cassette tapes, For Dummies books, etc…. – all coated in goopy translucent plastic resin.

As always, Lieberman’s work elicits a reaction but one wonders if this isn’t a product of its almost ready-made content. After all, this sort of darkly ironic excavation of pop cultural detritus is such a familiar genre within popular culture that it's really a matter of wondering whether or not Lieberman isn't merely another art-world certified entry into that crowded field. His work does evoke the feeling of queasy dread that we feel, living in world permeated and over-run with all sorts of hollow, debased crap, as it were - from Beanie Babies to Baseball Cards - although the impulse to wallow in it strikes me as perverse or self-limiting. Likewise, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Jim Shaw et al, have mined similar territories pretty thoroughly.


In effect, Lieberman’s work epitomizes the us-versus-them approach to pop-culture appropriation: High-art being “ours” and the pop detritus being the crap that we’re either critiquing or ostensibly redeeming. Lieberman makes this overt by titling his exhibition “The Corrector in the High Castle.” By making reference to Philip K. Dick’s novel (“The Man in the High Castle”) about a world in which the Nazi’s won WWII and therefore ruled America, he seems to be suggesting that American’s most reactionary right-wing political tendencies may be part and parcel of our penchant for cheap mass-produced detritus. After all, it’s easy enough to suppose that people that collect Beanie Babies are generally Republican.

What is interesting about Lieberman’s work is that it not only epitomizes a generational tendency towards sarcasm (one that’s all negation and no commitment) but it also embodies it physically. Psychologically, coating objects is a way of taking ownership of them but it’s also a way of distancing ourselves from them, by effacing them. By coating these objects with clear plastic Lieberman emphasizes this psychological paradox and redefines a very familiar critique by essentially literalizing it – thus highlighting how all acts of appropriation are framed by underlying forces of attraction and repulsion – a desire to reveal as well as to efface - as well as assumptions about class.

Nevertheless, the ostensibly dichotomous nature of American politics and culture would seem fairly obvious at this point. It only reveals a lack of willingness on our part to either implicate ourselves or to reevaluate the categories of “us” or “them” in the first place. That is, if collecting Beanie Babies, for example, is so creepy and fetishistic, then why has Lieberman bothered to assemble these materials himself (thus re-enacting behavior that he implicates as pathological), and why are we the ones standing here, looking at them.

Wade Guyton

Review of Wade Guyton at Fredrich Petzel as published in Artillery

There was something grim and stultifying about Wade Guyton’s installation at Fredrich Petzel. The floor was laid with black painted plywood and the paintings on the wall are all nearly all-black monochromes, made by repeatedly feeding the canvases through an inkjet printer. As the card for the show, depicting 6 inkjet printer cartridges, also seemed to indicate, this was obviously some sort of a heavy-handed statement (about mechanical reproduction, the monochrome, or the gallery context, perhaps) but it hardly seemed worth trying to parse out.

Mostly though, it just reminded me of all the “boys in black” type of art from recent years and how dated those stylistic quirks already seem. The surfaces of Guyton’s printer paintings are so flat and dull as to be effectively dead (presumably on purpose though, I suppose). As I stood in the gallery I soon found myself staring at the walls and ceiling of the gallery, admiring an unusually elegant sprinkler system. If the purpose of this art is to make us aware of the physical circumstances of the gallery context, it certainly worked. After that, there’s nothing left to do but leave the room.

Joyce Pensato

Review of Joyce Pensato at Fredrich Petzel Gallery in Flash Art on-line.

Mike Williams

Review of Mike Williams “Cancuned and other Paintings from 2007” at Canada Gallery as published in Artillery

In Mike Williams’ painting Tom, a bearded man holds a stick of Tom’s of Maine deodorant which, strangely, appears to be dispensing a bearded face that resembles the man’s own. The bearded man seems curious but ambivalent while the deodorant-face is appears to be quite jovial. Normally this type of surrealistic scene – one concerned with the body and its funkier processes – would evince some trace, at least, of anxiety– but not here. The message is simply the reminder we all have bodies and that its messy processes are just a part of life.

Williams, anyway, does seem to sincerely love these types of surrealistic devices and employs all sorts of similar tricks to good effect. In one painting, a dog in a small room reaches almost to the ceiling. In another, an anthropomorphic frog-like Heineken bottle writhes on the floor in front of mysterious silhouetted figures. What separates this from art-historical Surrealism, is that Williams knows that it’s not possible to see these formal devices as a way of channeling subconscious imagery – at least, not anymore - since, at this point, they’re more likely to just channel art-historical Surrealist gimmickry. At any rate, sometimes a painting of a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages is just a frog-like Heineken bottle with green anthropomorphic appendages. –Likewise, sometimes a cigar really is a phallus.

What makes Williams paintings so affable and entertaining is that he seems to be comfortable with either inversion of this syllogism. Like any art, it might very well be about his subconscious, but he also knows that these Surrealist tricks are just conventions to play with for effect. In a way, these paintings are about this process of self-consciousness itself. They seem to say, regardless of what we do and our intellectual justification or rationalization for doing so, it’s still, nevertheless impossible to know that “subconsciously” we don’t have other (even, possibly, contrary – motivations for doing so) - and then acknowledges with a wink and a nod that, well then, yes, obviously there’s nothing that we can do about that then, now is there?

Surrealism aside, what really seems to carry his paintings is their detail obsessive quasi-pointillist mark-making. The aforementioned dog-in-a-room, for example, is less compelling for the goofy surrealism and amusing scale-shifts involved than it is for its lustrous painting and the specificity of his visual language. The dog’s coat, is comprised of deep brown’s, burnt sienna, and yellow ochre, all modulated with an array of subtle, rich hues that nearly glimmer in the dog’s fur (or on the surface of the canvas). Here, as in the unctuous crystal ball in “The Duchess of Tareyton”, I think that I can best see what Williams is going for: a type of furtively obsessive mark-making that’s neither “filling in”, nor modeling, exactly (nor “Obsessive Compulsive); but rather, a complex exploration of the line between representation and abstraction; and a search for the hidden place where material transforms, mysteriously, into a new type of sign.

Review of Mike Nelson's "A Psychic Vacuum."

Mike Nelson’s: A Psychic Vacuum, sponsored by Creative Time is the latest addition to a genre of installation art that attempts to create either replicas of “real” spaces (or fabricates fictional though hyper-realistic spaces out of “real” stuff), while usually adding a clever surreal or conceptual twist. This territory has included Christoph Buchel, Justin Lowe, Gregor Schneider, and Christian Tomaszewski. Schneider, for example, once turned part of Barbara Gladstone’s Gallery into a sepulchral parking garage while Lowe recently created a replica of a typical New York City bodega within Oliver Kamm’s 5BE Gallery.

With the Lower East Side’s derelict Old Market, Nelson’s been supplied with a massive ready-made, a picturesquely decaying building which he’s transformed into a sprawling, quasi-Lynchian labyrinthine installation filled with decrepit musty rooms, salvaged junk, and bits of Americana. Entering, initially, into a filthy derelict Chinese food restaurant and passing through its back kitchen, visitors subsequently encountered, among other things, a long bar with a few scattered stools, mausoleum-like walk-in freezers, and a cavernous room filled with drifts of sand piled up almost to the ceiling. One little room appeared twice, almost duplicated although one could notice odd subtle differences in some of the details.

Nelson’s particular flair, actually, is for these little dramatic moments. By controlling pacing (almost like a film editor) through the size, scale, and arrangement of these spaces and selecting the odd details that create mood (like a great set designer) he creates a lot of momentum and drama out of our own movements and turns particular discoveries into “moments”. My favorite part was trying to learn my way around, to mentally map, the densest part of the installation - a convoluted tangle of small rooms near the middle of the installation. Still, without a commitment to sculptural form or a discernible narrative, the whole project falls back on a type of realism which becomes, in essence, tautological. Things here are representations of themselves (not unlike film-sets, actually, which are similarly partial). The room of sand at the end invokes the grandeur of the desert and initially feels fraught with archetypal symbolism or otherwise psychologically loaded (and maybe it is), but these implied meanings are never fully consummated in any specific, meaningful way. Sometimes a room full of sand is just a room full of sand.

But the larger problem with A Psychic Vacuum was that it was so intent on creating a sense of dislocation and realism that, paradoxically, it seemed to constantly assert its status as art - like how bad Photo-Realist painting is constantly reminding you of just how impressively well it was painted. Inside, I wandered around, nearly lost, and yet, still found myself visualizing my location in terms of the intersection outside the building; as if the whole installation (regardless of all of its little shocks and amusingly disorienting features) was – far from being a vacuum – rather, a black box: a discrete location within a categorically definable “art” experience or place, (literally speaking, on the corner of Essex and Delancey) – and more defined by its context than defining it.

Judi Wherthein's Corporate Logo Review

My review of Judi Wherthein's show "Corporate Logo" at Art in General is up on Frieze on-line.