How Ironic
Humor, 'bad art' blur all lines in 'B-List' show
By RICHARD HUNTINGTON, News Critic
5/2/2003

REVIEW

The subtitle of Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center's exhibition "B-List" is "Brooklyn, Angst and, Desire." But the angst here isn't of the pitiful-cipher-falls-into-abyss sort, and the desire all comes filtered through the coarse mesh of consumerism.

There isn't a work in this show that doesn't either brim with irony or pay homage to the great cackling God of Parody. Some pieces blur life and art so thoroughly that it's hard to tell where autobiography leaves off and fiction begins. All 14 of these artists slip around any direct expression of subjective feelings, as though embracing what Sartre used to call "the authentic" was like singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" in karaoke.

In other words, this show is a fairly accurate reflection of the state of much of contemporary art. It deflects meaning through various tactics - humor, mockery, "bad art," TV and movie references and art crit lingo (as in Joe Amrhein's dazzling "Winking Anachronisms," layered in art jargon).

Many of the works come across - intentionally - as peripheral commentaries on a culture that barely deserves anyone's attention. "Say it like it isn't," could be the shared banner.

What might distinguish these Brooklyn-based artists from their Manhattan counterparts is their sometimes gleeful self-deprecation. It's more than a coincidence that one of funnyman Michael Smith's videos is about his flagging art career ("How to Curate Your Own Group Exhibition") and that the smart little watercolors of Guy Richard Smit include an amateurish landscape topped with the words, "IDEAS RUN OUT."

Charley Friedman's video "One Hour Smile" is a painful demonstration that happiness is a feigned condition - at least for the artist trying to sustain the expression. Michael Buckland appears in a photo in the pose of ultimate avoidance: head in the sand. Jennifer Dalton, evidently a good painter, chooses to show her canvases in a wall of Polaroids that documents the entire contents of her apartment for insurance purposes ("The Appraisal").

Some self-deprecation would, I suppose, be a given in a show whose title consigns - if even in fun - its artists to a "B-list." John Massier, Hallwalls' visual arts curator and co-curator of the show with David Kramer, writes in the catalog that it was easy to find this "self-deprecating doubt in Brooklyn." Kramer sees these artists as "outsiders, looking in," but many seem to have their eyes fixed on what's happening in some of the more savvy Chelsea galleries.

Fritz Chesnut, for example, uses a familiar New York City-born ploy: a "dead-hand" painting style to communicate false ecstasy - in this case people caught in goony rapture waiting hopefully outside MTV's "Total Request Live."

Similarly, Christopher Johnson enlists mediocre painting to depict low-brow subjects, like Hugh Hefner surrounded by his bunnies. Both artists - I hope knowingly - drag down the painting level to match the cultural pit represented by their subjects. It is a double hit of dumbness - dumb subject, dumb painting style.

Joshua Stern and Mike Ballou use another familiar setup: puppet "emotion." In Stern's nicely composed photographs, crowds of dowel people carry torches as they go after (absent) movie monsters including Frankenstein and King Kong. Nearby, in an excellent installation touch, is one of Ballou's giant hand puppets spread inert on the floor waiting for a monstrous 4-foot-long hand to bring it to life.

The others in the show are the duo Standard and Poor, Meredith Allen and Beth Campbell. Campbell's "flow charts" are particularly interesting. At the bottom of a big sheet of drawing paper she writes down a description of an event - the growing of a rooftop herb garden, for example - and branches out from there to various outcomes, both happy and dire (one ends with her tomato plant taking over all of Brooklyn).

Campbell presents a bizarre, regimented kind of stream of consciousness. What makes it fascinating - and funny - is that the drawing keeps shifting off track to reveal a mind in wild turmoil that flits from potential to potential. She is the one artist to give at least a sly glance toward subjectivity.