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A feast for the eyes
The good doctor contemplates a hot dog in Andre von Morisse's
painting "Pink Freud."
Sunday, December 17, 2006
BY DAN BISCHOFF
Star-Ledger Staff
Chelsea, at least temporarily, is the seat of desire.
The Chelsea Art Museum, on the edge of the art district in Manhattan,
is hosting two exhibitions all about desire: "The Food Show:
The Hungry Eye" and "Shu Lea Cheang: Babylove Drive Me
Drive Me Crazy," and it's up to you to decide which one is
funnier, depending on your desire of choice. "
Babylove," designed by the Taiwanese-gone-global digital artist
Shu Lea Cheang, is the simpler to describe.
On the concrete ground floor of the museum Cheang has set up six
autonomously mobile plastic teacups, each big enough to accommodate
two full-grown adults plus the 28-inch-tall eyeless, handless, but
permanently diapered babies that sit at each small driver's wheel
inside. The teacups are like very slow bumper cars. Each baby has
a pacifier-shaped speaker where its mouth ought to be, and it merrily
spouts global Pop as it whirs through the room. Songs like "I
Care for You," "I'll Never Have," "If I Should
Die," the sort of tunes that are peppered with first-person
pronouns and lots of breathy "baby's" (as well as "I'll
Whip Your Head Boy" by 50 Cent). Each saucer has a soft rubber
bumper, and when the cars touch one another, the music files in
each are exchanged, remixed, and played back into the Web stream
(you can get a technical explanation of how this all works at http://babylove.biz).
The teacups suggest a nostalgia for a simpler time of carnival rides
and, well, baby-love, but the ever-churning soundtrack that seems
to smash hip-hop, R&B, Chinese glitter rock and universal bubble
gum into a cultural paste threatens some kind of worldwide freak
out of dehumanization.
Cheang's installation is part of a three-part series called the
"Locker Baby Project" (the first part, "Baby Play,"
opened in Tokyo in 2001). She's also known as a filmmaker, having
directed "I.K.U.," a kind of sci-fi porn cult picture
that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and was produced by
Japan's Uplink. Cheang gets around -- "Babylove" was produced
by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, she has a new media
society called TAKE2030 based in London, she does shows in Amsterdam
and Norway, and her work sort of lives on the worldwide Web, anyway.
Desire free-floats through globalization like a mist, or a mirage
-- or a distraction. If Cheang's "Babylove" suggests the
slightly spooky consequences of desire, "The Food Show,"
being rooted entirely in art history, seems by comparison to be
about the fleetingness of desire -- always a comic subplot in farce,
but a tragedy in life.
The show begins with prints by now old-Modern masters like Philip
Guston, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud and Tom Wesselmann, Pop
guys whose images of food suggest affluence and a certain queasy
overstuffed-ness -- not unlike the Warhol Campbell's Soup Can that
greets visitors as they enter the show.
The deeper into the exhibit we go the more the odd meanings of still-life
come to the fore. If we begin with an early Janet Fish ("Mustard
Pickles," 1970), we quickly find ourselves among works that
use food as a medium, like a painting of artist Frank Stella painting
one of his large chevron abstractions done in chocolate syrup by
Vik Muniz, or Rutgers professor Sandy Skoglund's "Raining Popcorn,"
in which three human figures huddle in a landscape made of popped
kernels.
Even more meta are pieces like Nina Katchedourian's "The Genealogy
of the Supermarket," a kind of a genealogical chart that combines
real folks, like P.C. Larkin, the manufacturer of Salada tea, an
early mass-produced sifted tea, and salad dressing magnate/movie
star/philanthropist Paul Newman, with brand name mascots like the
Morton Salt girl or the Sun-Maid raisin girl. Renee Cox takes the
idea that corporate mascots are as real as flesh-and-blood people
a step farther in her collage "The Liberation of Lady J &
U.B.," in which the supermarket figures of Aunt Jemima and
Uncle Ben are reimagined as young action stars posed in skimpy leather
outfits striking matinee poses.
Established, blue-chip art brands can be counterfeited, "The
Food Show" points out. Sharon Core's "Salads, Sandwiches,
and Desserts" is a contemporary C-Chrome photo of these foods
arranged on plates in rows, exactly like one of Wayne Thiebaud's
early Pop paintings. The fact that the former art director's 1960s
paintings were themselves based on ad layout photos lends a barbershop-mirrors
sense of the infinitude of food -- something row after row of slices
of pumpkin pie on thick deli plates probably suggests anyhow.
Food in America is too much of a muchness anyway. And a kind of
a cheat, too, since so much of it is designed to give us a fleeting
sensation rather than real enjoyment. Desire is a measure of contemporary
society because so much of the day-to-day drudgery of consumerism
is tarted up with it, commodified by allusion to illusions. Mere
economic transactions are but dull mechanics compared to choosing
razor blades wielded by a Coldstream Guard or buying canned vegetables
from a near-naked green giant with an asparagus cap for hair. And
yet, underneath it all, we suspect, as we see in Andre von Morisse's
oil-on-canvas "Pink Freud," that too much can be made
of desire yet.
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