RADICAL SCAVENGER(S):
These works are often based on mass-manufactured objects and frequently use photographs and video–all media that reveal little sign of the artist’s hand. A few elements are juxtaposed to make an immediate impression whose instantaneity is in some ways similar to the glimpse of a billboard from a moving car or a fragment of a TV program caught while switching channels. Art is no longer seen as offering transcendence, lifting the viewer out of the present, but rather as refocusing her attention on our mass-manufactured world. Organic signs of the vagaries of individual consciousness–the myriad tiny lines of a Rembrandt–are expunged in favor of machine-produced objects, or of objects and images that mimic their qualities.
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In seven paintings made between 1987 and 1993, Ruscha juxtaposes a few printed words over images of the sky or of Los Angeles seen from above at night. In some, the text seems to act as an ironic advertising slogan for the image behind. In Irresistible Singles, “Irresistible Singles Win Incredible Dates” is printed in large white letters over an out-of-focus (smog-blurred?) grid of LA lights. In Cellular Void, the words “Cellular Void” printed over an even fuzzier grid offer an obliquely poetic commentary on automobile space, linked by cellular phones but devoid of real human contact. But in Hot Rip Stop, those words printed over a blue sky make little logical sense. Yet each word is itself charged with a certain force, even a hint of violence; they strike the viewer like pieces of disembodied words from road signs, glanced at too quickly from the freeway for more than a single word to register.
In the film L.A. Suggested by the Art of Edward Ruscha (1981), by Gary Conklin, on view in the museum’s orientation space, Ruscha talks about how words intrigue him “like objects” and describes how when driving, things “go by you so fast that they seem to have more power to them.” His signlike paintings convey this odd presence that words, used logically or illogically, can have, while at the same time expressing a somewhat alienated relationship between words and landscape. These works evoke the near-chaotic disconnectedness of a modern city.
On the walls are photographs of the dolls, each set against a ruler, thus establishing its length. This seems as arbitrary and meaningless a method of classifying them as any of the others proposed; one is left with the breakdown of all classification systems. The unpleasantness of seeing icons of childhood laid out like corpses is magnified when one realizes that for all the work that went into this mortuary, nothing “coherent” has emerged. I found myself shutting out Kelley’s nonschemes and looking at the individual dolls, with their sensuous, playful attitude toward color and form. The artisan who placed two black eyes peering improbably out of the surface of a shellfish, or the one who constructed a cat by attaching a pillow shaped like a head to a stack of differently patterned and colored cloth arranged like pancakes to form the cat’s torso, betrays a loving attachment to specific forms that Kelley’s arrangement, and the whole postmodern enterprise, seeks to undermine or deny.
Another Noland work, Nuts ‘n’ Shit (1990), is more problematic. Red ink is silk-screened on a metal rectangle to form what could be a poster for a circus–a round tent bearing the work’s title at the center, framed by a curtainlike pattern at the top and bottom border. The four-letter word and a certain steely elegance notwithstanding, this work produced an experience very much like that of looking at an advertising poster.
In a letter, Mike Kelley describes “an ex-neighbor of mine whose apartment was crowded with frog knicknacks. I, of course, assumed that he had some special interest in frogs. But when I asked him about it he replied that he had no interest in frogs, that he had once been given a ceramic frog and others, seeing it in his house, believing him to like frogs, continued to give him such things until he had a large collection of them.” Each of these artists behaves in a way like Kelley’s neighbor. The world thrusts itself, including its most mindless artifacts, on them, and they accept this deluge as a mantle that becomes their “constructed” identity. In this they create an art whose relation to the world is that of the television viewer.
