"Artists embrace, deconstruct capitalism"
by Robin Laurence
Georgia Straight;
Vancouver; April 13-20, 2006, page 60
on the show "Heyday"
of Peter Freitag, Kristi Malakoff and Sarah Massecar
April 1 through May 6, 2006
at ARTSPEAK
233 Carrall Street
Vancouver, BC Canada V6B 2J2
Phone: 604.688 0051
www.artspeak.ca
Perhaps there should be a sign on the front door of the gallery: "Deconstruction
Zone". Of course, deconstruction is a tidy word to deploy in a place
called Artspeak. So is Heyday, the title of the show on view. The latter
term denotes the height of power and popularity. The former evokes a literary
exercise in which texts are (figuratively) dismantled to reveal their
contradictions. For the last few decades, visual artists have been busily
deconstructing everything from the high works of art history to the low
products of popular culture.
Represented in Heyday are Torontonian Sarah Massecar, Vancouverite Kristi
Malakoff, and Berliner Peter Freitag, each taking deconstruction literally.
Freitag uses a computer to edit particular items out of found images;
Malakoff cuts up paper money with the precision of a neurosurgeon; and
Massecar nimbly pulls apart objects of manufacture and puts them back
together again. Together they articulate a relationship to capitalism
– a system, the show suggests, that may have had its heyday and
be headed for decline.
Massecar’s disassembled and restitched leather wallet sits on
a plinth along with a little heap of frayed threads and shredded lining
material. An old copy of Gustave Flaubert’s farcical novel of bourgeois
life, Bouvard et Pécuchet, stands on a shelf beside the petite
rubble of its binding materials. Less obviously, a takeout coffee cup
reveals the split seams of its recent autopsy. While dissecting and rebuilding
these culturally charged objects, Massecar performs a postmortem on larger
systems of production and consumption, especially highlighting hand labour
versus mechanized manufacture.
Malakoff creates miniature scenes or dioramas out of pictures printed
on, then excised from, paper money, both Canadian and foreign. Most of
the tiny images are cut in triplicate, connected with teensy tabs, then
lined up in receding planes. Like the painted flats of ballet and theatre,
they flip two-dimensional representations back into the three-dimensional
world.
The painstaking research behind these micro-miniature works and the extreme
delicacy, dexterity, and labour intensity of their creation cannot be
overemphasized. These very qualities draw our attention to the ways different
countries depict themselves on their currencies – whether with tractors,
palaces, loons, or hockey players. Because of the ubiquitousness and ordinariness
of paper money, most of this highly considered nationalistic expression
goes unobserved and unquestioned.
Freitag appropriates a less common yet more banal species of representation:
brochures from European hotels and resorts. He edits out as many domestic
and recreational objects as possible from the scenes depicted in the brochure
photos, then blows them up to poster size. The beings who people these
advertisements are thus left stranded in a dot-matrix limbo of generic
furniture, architecture, and landscape views.
What Freitag demonstrates is that when the props of advertising –
the objects of daily consumption and communication – are removed
from the staged photos of vacationing families, no one is actually looking
at or interacting with anyone else. Without magazines, books, toys, games,
telephones, food, drinks, or cigarettes, the adults come across as bored
and estranged, and the children as lonely, lost, and profoundly unhappy.
Social structures malfunction without the lubricant of overconsumption.
At worst, deconstruction is a wank fest of blame and self-righteousness.
At best, it has the power to shake us out of our complacencies, to demand
that we reexamine what we do and why. The Artspeak show does not shake
so much as give a subtle sideways nudge. It provides understated insights
into this heyday of capitalism.
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