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Two openings yesterday—Robert Gober at two Matthew Marks locations plus Doug Aitken at 303 Gallery—transfigure this current crop of shows in Chelsea. With uniquely American aspects that make extensive use of ephemera, the works under consideration all have rather playful characteristics that slyly explicate far more grave and subversive subject matter. While a major retrospective of Gober's work at Basel's Schaulager opens in May, fans of Gober's major shows at Dia: Chelsea and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles will recognize the hallmarks and context of his work currently of on display. On 22nd Street, a plastic milk crate filled with wax Granny Smith apples featuring Gober-made stickers sits atop a crudely-painted white stool with green trim. The object of note, a Winchester rifle that appears rather melted into the crate, evokes our gunfighter nation, the myth and reality of the Wild West and Westerns. When viewing the 21st Street piece—again a beat-up seat, here covered with a scraggly blanket with paint splotches on it—Gober's inventive and perceptive insights into crafting these inelegant hand-made objects seem all the more fascinating. On both side walls, two nearly identical framed receipts for a five-dollar entrance fee to Monument Valley can be found. But these mass-produced receipts here are actually hand-crafted wood engravings made on Legion interleaving paper, both with rips and tears that further elevate and enhance their status as objects of the American west. Produced in a series of 15, Gober typically tinkers with mundane items and recreates them with such subtle characteristics that their qualities are easily overlooked. Recall, for example, the hand-crafted rat poison boxes and the stacks of reprinted and transmogrified issues of the New York Post at Dia. Or at MoMA, the black-and-white self-portrait of Gober as a bride; the wax human-like leg emerging from a wall; and the Prison Wall on display on the second floor. Or the oversized coins, flowing water, and life-size Virgin Mary with bronze pipe through her midsection at MoCA. In each, the high caliber of his craftsmanship appears subordinate to the mundaneness and deceptive crudeness of the objects in the tableau vivant he creates. While Gober's work here perhaps evokes the infamous brutality of John Ford movies and Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the American West" shot in Monument Valley, so too do a printed wood engraving of an impermanent receipt, a hand-made cast-off blanket, and a wooden stool symbolize the permanent and lasting scars on this landscape. Seven drawings in space, all untitled, surround the 22nd Street sculpture, and a curious Gober-esque piece of filthy quilt has been charmingly mounted on the back wall. What of the transformation of nature (apples replicated in wax), the harshness of life and landscape (rifle, blanket, etc.), and artifice and genuineness? As always, Gober's work raises innumerable challenging questions and issues.
I noticed Bob Gober was the first to sign Doug Aitken's guest book at the 303 Gallery, a show in which Aitken also brilliantly plays with all-American motifs. The neon sculpture "99¢ Dreams" (2007) in the window on 22nd Street functions both as signpost and chaperone, guiding the visitor inside to this dreamy and visually compelling show. A light sculpture of nine letters forming the word disappear (2006) features blurry photographs of airplanes—mostly US Airways—parked in the barren desert of the Southwest, where old airplanes go for extended or eternal rest. Two sculptures—"Wilderness" (2006) and "beautiful and damned" (2006) underscore the kinetic virtuosity of this exhibit, as do two objects in the rear gallery, "K-N-O-C-K-O-U-T" (2005), a sonic table crafted by Michael Thiele as well as "don't think twice II" (2006), a hyperactive neon sculpture. Try to view this show in tandem with Aitken's sleepwalkers, which remains on display outside MoMA for another week and online as well. The experience of optical sculptures in a gallery as contrasted with video projected on a sterile museum wall—outdoors, in the winter—make for stimulating and visually striking pageantry on topical themes. Though not reviewed here, Robert Wilson's just-closed VOOM Portraits at the Paula Cooper gallery featured a likewise breathtaking and enchanting high-tech tableaux.
As to fractured 99¢ dreams seen on a larger scale, Brian Ulrich's photographs on display through Saturday at the Julie Saul gallery offer a more deliberate and forceful depiction of the seamy side of American commerce and the ephemeral nature of our newest national religion, shopping. The images from "Copia" are stunning, harsh and recall Andreas Gursky's seminal 99 Cent, the ultimate consumer paradise bathed in garish fluorescent light, gleaming floor tile, and endless rows of CPS (cheap plastic stuff). Yet Ulrich's photographs of CPS consumers have a fascinating angle, whether the cashier amidst a length hub of checkout stands at Target in "Granger, IN" (2003), the fishing-pole shopper in "Gurnee, IL" (2003) or those haunting "patriotic chairs" with "U.S.A." on back and sold in American flag sacks for $9.99. Other images reinforce the mutability of our 99¢ utopia, such as garish "final sale!" and "store closing total liquidation!" signs hanging in a barren shopping-mall landscape, or "Kenosha, WI" (2003), featuring the pallets of Faygo soda next to a dairy case, with spilled milk in the foreground. The ennui, boredom and humdrum qualities of consumer paradise could not be more evident here.
Gober's response to issues of gender and sexuality in America—such as in his reworked Saks Fifth Avenue advertisement, an exceptionally clever photolithograph in which he appears as the bride underneath an article "Vatican Condones Discrimination Against Homosexuals"—could not be more different than James Bidgood's outlandish and lush 1960s photographs on display at Clamp Art. Bidgood has spent formidable amounts of time in recent years scanning and color correcting these opulent images, and his digital C-prints deserve further attention, in particular, those of Bobby Kendall. Bidgood's luxuriant obsession—a film titled "Pink Narcissus" (1965-1971)—languished in relative obscurity until shown in 1999 by Frameline in San Francisco to a highly enthusiastic audience. Its protagonist, the hypersexual Kendall, was at the forefront of the radical alteration of erotic imagery in the 1960s. As with Cindy Workman's recent inkjet prints les demoiselles at Lennon, Weinberg, themes of multiple identities are explored in these extensive fetishizations of the (fe)male form. Whereas Bidgood created lavishly stylized studio portraits in his Hell's Kitchen tenement with brash colors and his male models' wild outfits along with partial or full nudity, here Workman uses newer technologies to explore and deconstruct gender identities with images of women found from various sources.
photo credit: Doug Aitken "99¢ Dreams"; courtesy of 303 Gallery
Tags:
303 gallery, andreas gursky, basel, Brian Ulrich, Cindy Workman, clamp art, Doug Aitken, frameline, James Bidgood, lennon weinberg, los angeles, matthew marks, met, michael thiele, moca, moma, Robert Gober, robert wilson, schaulager, voom portraits
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Posted on 2/4/2007
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