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Vol 14 No. 28, Mar 24 - Mar 30 2005 |
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-ART-
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CONFLICTED BODIES ConWorks' Environmental Studies by Nate Lippens
Ergonomicon Consolidated Works
We are all in a kind of combat with our bodies and our environments, an unending tug of war between nature and culture, according to the philosophical through-line of Ergonomicon. As the visual-art portion of the Vs. Consolidation Series at ConWorks, this group show takes the theme of the body in conflict with the built environment to its aesthetic heart. The exhibition, deftly curated by Casey Keeler, is both playful and austere in its probing of the discomfort we feel in our manufactured worlds--whether they be physical, imaginary, or emotional. The 10 artists in the show use vastly different mediums, including sculpture, video, photography, and interactive environments, but the works are unified by a bristling elegance and an undertow of dark humor. The surface cleverness of the work by Bruce Conkle and Paul Davies mirrors the glossy world of gaming that they both explore, but there is also something grotesque in the stunted emotional spaces they present. Conkle's slick, airless photos are of doctored video-game environments from which all the players and carnage have been removed; only the surreally perfect yet totally artificial landscapes remain. It's a seemingly silly yet disturbing reminder of the power of eradicating images--from something as harmless as a game to something as sinister as sanitized and censored news footage. The only photograph with human life in it is just as fake. It's a cyber-makeover, in which Conkle represents himself as his gaming persona: an absurd satyr holding a tinfoil alpenhorn. Davies skews design to his own purposes. He created the ultimate slacker/stoner/gamer homage with custom-built furniture for the American sloth. A drinking fountain from Davies' series, The Curious Furniture of Ned Troide, is on view here. It's a cabinet with a steady stream of whiskey designed for Ned Troide, who made video-game history when he played 62-and-a-half consecutive hours of Defender, racking up the highest score ever (72,999,975 points). Davies' work is the perfect corollary to Michael O'Malley's sprawling wooden sculpture, which is based on proliferating suburban sprawl. It shrinks public domain down to private escapism and the often-creepy recesses of leisure time. Both O'Malley and Davies understand the obsessiveness involved in maintaining lifestyles, whether communal or individual. The best and most resonant works are by Alex Schweder and Sofia Hulten. Schweder's brilliant and sly piece Fountain is a porcelain sculptural diptych--two fully installed urinals (one for men and one for women), which he completed as part of the Kohler Arts/Industry artist-residency program. They are presented here fully operational with a sign encouraging viewers to use them. Fountain is a Duchampian homage, but for Schweder the object is less important than the implied body and its functions. It's as if Rrose Selavy ("Eros, c'est la vie" was the artist's punning pronunciation), the female identity Duchamp periodically assumed, had taken his iconic urinal for a mischievous romp. The female urinal has a phallic trough for women to straddle and the male urinal has a vaginal-shaped drain. Schweder's excellent Jealous Poché, a projected video in a custom-built room, is also on display. The projected image is complex: a clear glass structure filled with Jell-O was filmed through a colonoscopy camera. The room's walls are angled so that the viewer is incorporated into the image. It's impossible to move out of the projection, so one's shadow ends up on the screen. The viewer/voyeur is placed in the frame as an intrusive presence in an exploratory journey. Physical and psychic unease creep into every frame of Sofia Hulten's video work. Her Grey Room is Office Space for the conceptual-art crowd--hilarious, weird, and a little melancholy. The video shows a series of compulsive, failed attempts by the artist to hide in an office: in a storage cupboard, behind blinds, climbing the walls of a bathroom stall, and in a pile of crumpled, wadded-up paper like Winnie's sand pile from Beckett's Happy Days. It's full of an internalized paranoia that turns the concept of "office culture" into an oxymoron. The ultimate built environment is fear, an endlessly generating sprawl that takes over the mind. |
  
  
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SOFIA HULTEN Office culture.
Strange Currency
For the Time Being
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