These are perilous times. And as usual, not in
the way we're being told.
As I first said to Ingrid, I was thinking that these pieces might feel
like JFK’s head being blown off; an event signaling as it did
the loss of our innocence. This hardening of our collective spirit might
be called “Pop.”
Pop is fun. And deadly. Like the inevitability of Warhol’s slaying.
For isn’t that the kind of love that accrues to objects? Like
O.J. Simpson, and the telling detail of the slashing of his ex wife’s
breast implants, as if it were the impassioned yet calculated end of
all illusion; all possessions.
The end as latent. Violence as the popular medium.
In this show, the video screen image of a frosted white cake is framed
by white monochromes that “float” before gallery-white walls,
like painting’s restless spirit seeking its corporeality; its
age old reason for being. The form this takes is tacitly acknowledged
by the cake’s white frosting, which has the feel of smooth, dense
paint carefully applied with an artist’s palette knife. Of course,
the sedate white cake’s subsequent “dispersal” also
conjures the memory of action painting, albeit the method here employed
admittedly involves a different form of “mastery.”
But even before all that, I would offer that my nostalgia for celluloid
(these works were shot on 16mm) is commensurate with my nostalgia for
“home” (the greatest wounds lying beneath what we romanticize
most.)
Repeat the trauma.
With Peckinpah slow-motion timing, the perfectly white cake with its
ephemeral white (classic ad) backdrop becomes the object of the occurrence
and recurrence of violence. Our watching completes its subject.
Joan Wallace, 2005
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