|
The Chicago Reader - Friday, February, 12 1999
"Spring Fever" By Fred Camper
Perhaps it's the long winter or the anticipation of spring, but it appears to be silly season in several Chicago galleries this month. There are funny animals at Bodybuilder and Sportsman, and Margin is showing works made of or inspired by butter, including a butter bust of Richard Nixon. Helen Mirra's thoughtful exhibit at the Chicago Project Room is mostly not silly, but in one piece she's tied together all her clothes except one outfit - which means she'll be wearing the same clothes for the show's duration, "unless I buy some more."
Spring is definitely in the air at Bodybuilder and Sportsman: Katherine Shaughnessy's show, occupying two storefront windows on either side of the gallery entrance, plunges the viewer into a fantasy world redolent of flowers and woodland. In the window to the right is the life-size "Princess Isabella, the Doegirl From Pleasant Forest," whose head and torso come from a female mannequin while the rest of the body is a hunter's decoy deer covered with fake fur. Many small animals with human hands grafted to them face her worshipfully, offering flowers. The other window reveals strange tiny creatures, most combining human and animal features, in cages with a mirror on one side. Inside the gallery a "Princess Isabella coloring and Activity Book" tells us that the doegirl's father "was shot and mounted on a board by a man with a gun" (we see a deer head on the wall behind her), that the "handimals" - animals with human hands - are her admirers, and that the caged creatures are "mutants."
The excess of Shaughnessy's exhibit - the multiple animals and flowers and the painted forest backdrops - gives it an immediate visual appeal. And the combination of Disney-esque images with the caged mutants suggests a world that maintains perfection by imprisoning every being that's different, even those as innocuous as her charming mutants - a fawn with two heads, a squirrel with a baby-boy head. Even the lamb with baby legs for horns reads more like a collage of toys than a real creature. There's also something appealing about the contrast between the show's bucolic fantasy and the gritty setting.
Shaughnessy - a Chicago born in Ohio in 1970_ writes in her statement about the dangers of cloning, mentioning its possible use as an instrument of fascism and the way that "Hollywood and Disney" insist on perfect bodies, whether for actors or animated characters. Remaking that "every kid in America who can afford to get their very won, pocket-size. Plastic here," she's also selling tiny mutants in tiny cages and plastic wrapped miniature replicas of Princess Isabella and two other doegirls - "her friendsfrom a nearby forest," the coloring books tells us. But the question remains, as it does with much postmodern art purportedly offering cultural commentary, how far this work actually departs from mainstream values. Princess Isabella is blond, light skinned, and of normal weight, the two other doegirls are dark-skinned sidekicks, available only in miniature. Shaughnessy may oppose the perfection of Disney figures, but her creatures are arguably no weirder and almost as charming. What aren't her mutants more threatening? And how is buying one of here miniature figure different from buying a toy based on a movie? Even the painted forest backdrops - the part of the exhibit in which Shaughnessy's hand is most visible - reveal little or no commentary, being perfectly matched to the show's coloring-book aesthetic. If "Doegirl" offers a hint of spring, "Butter is possibly only in winter. These 35 works about or made of butter are being shown in a new gallery, managed by artist Nathan Mason, in a underrated basement apartment - fortunately, because on a warm day many of these pieces would melt. "Everybody knows I'm cheap and don't like paying heating bills," Mason told me, and this show gives him an excuse to keep the heat turned down.
Mason's solicitation letter invited artists "to think about butter and do apiece about it (either ephemeral and made of butter or engaging the concept of butter in their more typical medium)." Thus Adelheid Mers, who's best known for her light projections, gives us a wonderful faintly yellow square of light like a pat of butter on the floor outside the gallery door. Joe Ziolkowski, whose photographs are usually homoerotic, shows an image of a well-muscled man holding an unusually long stick of butter; the title, "Twelve Inches," makes more explicit a reference that's already pretty clear. The apartment's back bedroom, which is farthest from the heater, contains a number of pieces of actual butter. Don Stahlke-who's previously created assemblages of real fruit-presents a small staircase of butter sticks, the faux-grand "Tower of Babel/Stairway to Heaven."
If there's an idea here its that butter can be or suggest anything, from insubstantial yellow light to ideas of ascent to an oversize unit. Butter has no essential nature, its just what artists make of it-a promo idea at odds with concepts like "truth" but perfectly suited to something as neutral as butter. Indeed, the artist' playfulness, producing an improbably diversity of works, is what makes this exhibit a delight. In Carla Preiss's gouache "I can't Believe" the words are dimly visible as white letters on a yellow field; Aimee Beaubein and Art Jones in "everything's Better" show a book whose pages are covered with butter, oozing thick gobs as the book is slowly closed in an accompanying video. Barbara Koenen in "(Parkay)" has put tiny daubs of butter and imitation butter on the wall over the kitchen sink. And Andrew Rubinstein in "Power Figures" embeds porcelain shards and corncob holders in butter sticks in the manner of African fetish sculptures, which have foreign objects driven in to them to give them power.
The purest conceptual work here is Michael Piazza's "M=Butter Rate," a shelf of books in which references to butter have been highlighted (in yellow, of course) and bookmarked with cards reporting prices for butter futures. Piazza makes the point that butter can "mean" anything by contrasting, for example, an offhanded mention of it in Saul Bellow's "Herzog" ("I used to rub my patent-leather shoes in butter") with Joseph Goebbels's reference in his diaries to Nazi official Rudolf Hess advocating "guns instead of butter."
The ease with which these artists can acquire and lavishly goop on butter in this show reflects the material excess of America at the end of the millenium. In the famous cream-separation scene of the 1929 Soviet film "The General Line" Eisenstein valorizes the mechanization of butter making, celebrating a process that made food production and distribution more efficient. But for us, butter is there for the taking.
|