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"HEYDAY"
Lee Henderson on Heyday
Postscript 20, 20-05-2006
Sarah Massecar,
Remade: Book, 2006
Peter Freitag,
"example for communication # 62" (detail), 2000
Sarah Massecar,
Remade: Wallet, 2006
Kristi Malakoff,
Ornithological Series-$20 (detail), 2004
Photos: Peter Freitag and Aina Rognstad
The urge to destroy money can be stronger than the urge to make it. The
artist is susceptible to either urge and its taboos. It's the egotism
that's alienating: tyrannical greed or anarchistic profligacy, both are
antisocial, even misanthropic. Hording it and blowing it show an unhealthy
contempt for others. But there is always, at every level, the underlying
desire for money. And whether the desire for money is poorly repressed
in the destruction of its object or more convincingly repressed in the
equal dispersal of fortunes among puritanical communities, it remains
as constant an agony for the middle class as it is for the rich or destitute.
The closer we get to a cashless society, the more we understand and appreciate
the fetishization of money as an object, an unhealthy habit: we've long
forgotten the reason for these shackles. We manifest a fascination with
death in a quaint fascination with objects from the past.
Kristi Malakoff's dioramas are meticulously scalpelled from local and
global currency. Her global tableau, a utopia under the bell jar of the
gallery vitrine, encompasses airplanes and satellites, tribal dancers
and heroes, and numerous indigenous structures. But we are inoculated
against this mosaic of optimism by the ever present knowledge that these
iterations of human achievement have been lifted from cash money, the
greatest human inequity ever invented. The old saying money to burn
reinforces the taboo Malakoff is breaking by implying that only the super-rich
have the right to do what she's doing – destroy cash – only
the decadently prosperous are allowed their heyday. Malakoff
turns ruined money into a semiprecious mise-en-scene. She has made an
ahistoric Eden etched by timeless greed, corruption, vanity, and base
price. Here, even talent is at the mercy of money's needs. Never mind
Malakoff's utter precision with a knife, the more detailed and unique
the design is for each dollar bill, the harder it is to forge. And the
longer it takes to do something – like meticulous scalpelling –
the greater value we place on the final product. Without their original
value attached, Malakoff present the figures, edifices, and inventions
shown on money as beautiful, fragile, and utopic, and all equally honorable
examples of artistic technique and human accomplishment. Each of her Canadian
birds – one per vitrine, in palettes which are no doubt labour intensive
to replicate – are small masterpieces of approval. Now, the iconography
on the world's money begins to speak of each nations' honest collective
longing, at times for the sanctities of the past, and at other times for
the latest landmark of human accomplishment, as if we can take credit
for our time in history.
There's a certain amount of redundancy in the act of taking apart a
perfectly good leather wallet and then carefully putting it back together
again by hand. It is redundancy as a form of innovation. The styrofoamed
paper coffee cup that Sarah Massecar peeled apart and reconnected as if
no intervention, excorcism,and resurrection had even occurred was finished
without any waste or much distortion of the original; but a first edition
of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet was given the same treatment
and the reconstruction is displayed alongside a pile of cakey paper flakes
and amber glue drops to reinforce the difference/mess the artist accomplished/made
in her repetition/room. There is also a tangle of unneeded thread and
fabric placed on a plinth beside the wallet so that nothing of the original
was left out of the exhibit. It is a process of removing only the factory
from the wallet and reapplying the actions of the leather worker, the
man machine. The remade wallet suggests similar artistic contradictions
as Malakoff's money works, that the value of labour is massively unstable.
It is a form of penitence for art's bullishness that the artist offers
to mimic the assembly line, to denude commercialism in art by repeating
by hand the actions of a machine. But the redundancy of her remades isn't
that they already existed, it's that they would have been accepted, however
listlessly, as legitimate art objects had she left them entirely untouched.
In a sense, this is not a remade wallet so much as it is a handmade representation
of a readymade. A fot of sculpture today has this fear of ontology. The
strategy of imitation conceals the artist's innately obsessive craftsmanship.
It's green art: what was once called a talent is now sublimated
by an act of self-conscious recycling. The covertness of the technique
is like that rhyme hidden in the middle of the poem's stanza, surprising
on its second time around. And there's no lack of awareness on the artist's
part that to create a sculpture using the subject as the material is a
deeply self-conscious activity. Flaubert is often described today as the
most self-conscious prose stylist in modern literature, and the first.
His appearance in Massecar's series of remades as the author of a book
that has been replaced with its hand-made identical suggests the impact
his ideas had on close to a hundred and fifty years of subsequent thinking.
Taking images from hotel brochures in his native Germany and digitally
erasing the props that set the scene, Peter Freitag produces large scale
images that appear untouched but are more disarming and traumatic than
any hotel advertisement. They are immediately attractive, to the credit
of the original compositions, but without props to guide our reading of
the scene, the relationships between the actors turns ambiguous, complex,
even savage. One of these tourism brochures once featured a family seated
around a full meal; now the meal's gone. The consumptive sacrifice that
revives the soul has been eliminated so that Freitag's family is now seated
before an empty cloth, with only mother looking up cheerfully, as if expecting
nothing besides judgment to ascend her at any second. Evidence that a
magazine was spread open on a hotel bed has been extracted from one image
so that a middle-aged woman now sits with her legs off the matress, gazing
down with great concentration at the plain blue linens. Her happiness
is now strained to anxiety. The sheets are fitted so tautly as to give
the bed the cubic immaculateness of something unreal. Behind her, a man
wearing convenience store sunglasses, a moustache, and receding hairline
is seated cross-legged in khaki shorts in front of a white light blazing
through the deck curtains as if the sun is screaming next door. His eyes
are fixed, staring at the side of her face. There's no People magazine
or fresh pack of cigarettes to distract these old lovers from the fact
they're the only two people in the room now. Without the dressings, most
of the situations in Freitag's pictures begin to spell out tragedies.
The hotel room is at its essence a generic habitat no more sympathetic
to our needs than life itself, seeing bodies come in and seeing bodies
leave just the same. The hotel room is the most indifferent living space
we pay for. And without their leisurely domestic props, the pleasure purpose
completely vanishes, and what appears in its place (in the expressions
and actions of the actors) are the same sordid myths of dysfunction that
artists have represented forever.
Heyday is comprised of works with theoretical price tags and
spatial dimensions that are readily importable to the collector's home.
This strangely domestic commercialism is tempered heavily by the fact
that all the work speaks candidly about their passive-aggressive acceptance
of money and commodification. Perhaps the artists themselves see no distinction
between art and commodity, and what could be construed as antipathy is
humour. Even as the works speak to the fact that the human race has ceded
a large part of our retinal privacy to commercialism in everyday reality,
these are all still smart, eloquent objects hardly beyond the market.
There is even a cautiously sardonic fascination with the impact the originals
have on the conceptual experience. The artists have gone so far as to
sublimate their own talents to present only slightly tampered visions
of this supra-regular. The coffee cup, the national currency,
the advertisement, the first edition... these are nondescript on a scale
of global massproduction surely unparalleled in history, and the current
result of thousands of permutations over thousands of years. These might
all be considered object-extensions of our bodies. The wallet is never
far from the hip. The cup, never far from the grip. The cash is in the
wallet or the palm of your hand. The book is in your hands, beside your
bed, always nearby. In the case of Freitag's images, which might not at
first glance suggest an organ or extremity, the subtext to any vacation
is work, and labour is our survival. The family vacation is an essential
valve in the organic system of an economy without slaves, allowing for
the occasion, if not the direction, towards feeling truly human. We earmark
a time and a place for aimlessness, where the purpose is not to escape
but to arrive, but we usually squander the opportunity because our minds
aren't prepared to drift like that.
Lee Henderson is the author of The Broken Record
Technique, a collection of stories, and a new novel forthcoming in
Spring 2007. He is a contributing editor for Border Crossings
and Contemporary Magazine.
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