William Finley Green
November 16
In the 1970s Alison Knowles worked and reworked a series of performances and documents, collectively known as Identical Lunch, that grew out of her habit of eating a tuna sandwich and drinking a glass of buttermilk every day and inviting friends to do the same. Photographs of the proceedings included the Star-Kist logo, and somehow Knowles was invited by the company to visit the factory where the fish was canned. She accepted, but then Star-Kist abruptly rescinded the invitation, evidently because of the risk of corporate espionage. They thought Knowles would turn around and sell their secret canning methods to Bumble Bee.
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Knowles is the godmother of a category of art I would call “metacommercial” art that exhibits a purposely ambivalent and sometimes perverse attitude toward commercial products. Metacommercial art is somewhere to the left of the blatant endorsement–shocking when Andy Warhol did it for Campbell’s Soup 35 years ago, but merely dispiriting this past summer when Mr. Imagination agreed to make a giant Coke bottle for the Coca-Cola Olympic Salute to Folk Art. And it’s somewhere to the right of stridently anticorporate art, an approach closely identified with the volleys aimed at Phillip Morris by the German artist Hans Haacke, who once created a giant carton of cigarettes labeled “Helmsboros.” Metacommercial artists adopt a poker-faced attitude to the brand names they fool around with.
At Automatic, Green gave me a quarter so I could play one of the altered machines, though the fun lasted only a short time since I couldn’t see the ball. The experience lifted my spirits after a long afternoon of merely looking at art, and it got me thinking about all the ways tinted glass could be used to subvert the straightforward functions of clear glass–as watch crystals, incubators for preemies, aquariums, those crystal balls with scenes inside and snow falling. But I wasn’t left with any definite feeling toward Bally. Is it an empire of greed or an empire of fun? Green did nothing to help me decide.
