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Livin' It Up When You're Going Down
Damon Rich would like you to remember that in Old French, "mortgage" means "death vow." This truism rings sadly ironic in the United States where financial crisis has put many people out of their homes and the implosion of the subprime mortgage market has had deeper effects upon the national economy and our international relations. In a show at the MIT Museum, commissioned by the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, called "Red Lines, Death Vows, Foreclosures, Risk Structures," Rich explores the architectural history and financial terrain of the American housing market and the continued impetus toward residential development and unsound design practices. The artist is the founder of the venerable Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) collective who work with youth and local community members to address street-level issues through research and remarkable art projects. Rich's penchant for excavating facts, figures, and ideological trends is manifest in the exhibition, which includes new video work, photos, drawings, models, and historical artifacts. Open through December 21st, the show promises to draw a big red line around "the furious circulation of finance capital." - Marisa Olson
Image credit: Video stills from Predatory Tales, produced by Damon Rich in cooperation with Lawrence Community Works in Lawrence, Massachusetts
Assassination Adventure (1988)<br> - Mark Allen
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Giving 'Em the Old Razzle Dazzle
There is an approach, within military strategy, known as "Razzle Dazzle." The idea is to stand out with such visual intensity so as to perplex your target. This might be a good point of comparison with the work of Meredyth Sparks, which addresses political issues by dialetically fusing stills from the halls of rock music history, a constructivist visual vocabulary, and bling...lots of bling! Her current show at New York's Elizabeth Dee gallery, entitled "We were strangers for too long," employs images and sculpture heavy on silver foil, vinyl, and glitter, as ammo in launching an argument about intersections of "radical chic" and the culture wars. Her digitally-processed collages layer not only images from the mid-1970s that she argues chart a rise in rebellion against conservative culture, but also splice together art historical references to perspectivalism, the history of photographic media, and modernism's love affair with the grid. Her work both pushes and critiques the ideology of loud, glam, in your face activism, looking particularly at how strains of punk rock became (either through their own design or by a process of co-opting) part of the capitalist system they sought to tear down, thus raising the question of how we might come to fight fire with fire by once again making protest hot. - Marisa Olson
Image credit: Meredyth Sparks, Kraftwerk III, 2008
A Question of Form
Conceptual formalism receives a contemporary appraisal in "The Form Itself," a group show currently on display at New York's Priska C. Jushka Fine Art. Curated by artist Michael Bühler-Rose, the exhibition finds nine predominantly emerging artists conducting "a self-reflective dialogue on the potential and purity" of their mediums, be they painting, photography, video or sculpture. This broad and somewhat undercooked curatorial conceit results in an elegant but uneven show, where self-reflectivity is often manifest in a tautological affirmation of an object or discipline's constituent parts, as with Talia Chetrit's Grotjahn-esque color investigations or the Lewitt-meets-readymade sculpture Possible Form (from "100 Variations") (2008) by Roula Partheniou, made from one-hundred monochrome Rubik's Cubes. The strongest works end up being the least discursively entrenched, mining the formal qualities and social and economic connotations of contemporary objects. Joy Drury Cox's spare, precise graphite drawings of employment applications of chains like Starbucks and Wendy's, stripped of all textual content, expose the common structural parameters within which applicants render their professional self-portraits. Another standout is Adrian Crabbs' Shipping Pallet 2 (2008), one in a larger series of paintings the artist made by pressing one side of a paint-covered pallet onto linen. Given the pallet's paradoxical role in contemporary trade -- a sub-structure so ubiquitous as to be practically invisible to consumers -- Crabbs' concrete utilization of the object to generate its own trace-like representation is appropriate and evocative. - Tyler Coburn
Image: Roula Partheniou, "Possible Form" (from "100 Variations"), 2008
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