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.