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.