If the traditional understanding of the artist’s work is the creation of precious objects, what happens to the artist in a commodity society – like the one we’ve got – that’s devoted to nothing so much as the making of objects, precious or otherwise? What’s an artist to do?
Nearly a hundred years ago, Duchamp pointed to a solution to the artist’s dilemma when he unveiled his Readymades. Most of the time, when we talk about his legacy, we speak almost entirely in art-historical terms. We talk about anti-art, Fluxus, and Conceptualism.
All well and good, but maybe we should also talk about the stuff itself – all that stuff we live with, all those mass-produced things, the bottle racks and bicycle wheels, the plastic Jesus and the porcelain Mickey Mouse, the milk cartons and paper cups.
By turning the stuff of everyday life into art, Duchamp revealed to us an entirely new medium for art – the medium of stuff.
Sarah Sze: Milk cartons, water-cooler bottles, soda bottles, paper cups, architect lamps, tools, pills, feathers, teeth, pebbles – all are meticulously laid out on industrial shelving, the gallery floor, a board cantilevered from a stepladder, what looks like a conveyor belt frozen in time. Sze repurposes all the stuff of daily life, the stuff we drown in, into a tipsy construction that veers between obsessive order (carefully laid out grids of objects) and domestic chaos. Home Depot meets Dr. Seuss?
(
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21)
Tchotchke Stacks:
Patrick Jackson uses yard sale stuff (bric-a-brac angels, ceramic cats and dogs, Jesus and the Virgin Mary, etc., etc.) to create stacked pieces that resemble 3D chessboards. Jackson’s description of these pieces as “a stand-in for American desires” didn’t persuade me, but these thrift shop constructions are a hoot. (
Nicole Klagsbrun, 526 West 26)
Mayumi Terada: The ringer here, Terada doesn’t scavenge. Rather, in a seeming throwback to traditional art-making, she hand-crafts. Like Thomas Demand, she sculpts miniature scenes – sparsely furnished domestic interiors and unpeopled landscapes – and then photographs them. In a sense, though, she’s as much of a scavenger as Jackson, except that she recreates stuff rather than picking it up at the thrift shop. The result? Where Jackson’s work winks at us knowingly, Terada’s draws us into mystery: the scene is abandoned, the inhabitants long-gone, the tone melancholy. In her case, the things that surround us stand in mute witness to our solitary condition. (
Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26)
After All: At the other end of the "stuff" spectrum is
Laura Letinsky, whose aesthetic and intellectual concerns are more 17th-century Dutch
vanitas than 20th-century Dada. Her spare, elegant compositions. all angles and weird perspectives, contain little disturbances of the domestic variety. One series features classic
nature morte objects - wilted flowers, an orange peel, an octopus - shot in the falling light of dusk. In counterpoint, images from the "Fall" series are blindingly bright, verging on minimalist abstraction with white walls and tabletops occupied (only barely) by a white paper cup, a couple of cherries, a plastic McDonald's sundae cup. (
Yancey Richardson, 535 West 22)
