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.
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