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Art
Issues March/April 2001 Deborah Oropallo at
STEPHEN WIRTZ, 2January-24February Thanks be given to Caroline Jones, who christened the category, "The Industrial Sublime" in her prescient 1997 book Machine in the Studio. No longer do we have to wonder to what degree Donald Judd might have been arguing with Barnett Newman when he wrote "Specific Objects" in 1961, nor need we ponder how Robert Smithson’s "Passaic Monuments" might be read as similar rebuke or satire of Judd. Now all of these polemics can be read as parts of a larger and more coherent history that hysterically sought to reconcretize art as idealized nostalgia for the aestetic brutalism of early twentieth-century heavy industry. As is the case with other forms of anziety-driven postmodern nostalgia, both the art and the shrill manifestos of the industrial sublime shout loudly, even as they contain little thought about the larger implications of what they are shouting about. At the onset of a new year in a still new century, northern California has been treated to three provocative exhibitions that seek to intelligently redress this particular dirth of thought. Deborah Oropallo’s new series of digitally-based works asks the question, "How much paint does an image need before it can be called a painting? Here, Iris digital outputs affixed to large canvases form composite images of such things as stacks of oil drums, paint cans, or lengths of stout pipe. These are accented by the addition of design fragments-a floral motif, a torqued grid-applied as silkscreened oil paint atop the casually composed digital works. Most of Oropollo’s images show little indication of the digital retouching that too many artists use to pointless excess;rather, they come off as being very much of the scan-and-print school of thought. On the other hand, there is the lingering possibility that Oroplollo’s retouch is so good that it merely looks nonexistant, this by way of emphasizing cruddy resolution and harsh shadows while minimizing the midtones that are the traditional retoucher’s bete noire and beau ideal. Even though this is a very vexing possibility, its point remains moot. What is salient is the tone and temperature of Oropallo’s deadpan representations of what we might think of as"immense arrays of construction supplies," to play on Marx’s famous phrase. Indeed, Oropallo’s intent may be to visually recast the most frightening implications of Marx’s now hackneyed notion of commodity fetishism: Even though the strong sense of omnipresent toxicity, they serve to recast vaguely sinister objects in a warm and fuzzy "tubby-bye-bye" light- sggesting that hypersubtle digital retouch has conquered the brutality of fact by dint of its almost invisable subtlety. Such insidious sugarcoating successfully masks its obvious poison while refraining from tasting sweet. Kenji Yanobe’s sculpture and photographs also try to come to terms with the toxic underbelly of the industrial sublime, but the spirit of these works is openly sardonic and overtly topical. Yanobe designs absurd postapocalyptic survival gear that appears to be as functional as it is aesthetically alarming, in a classically surrealist way. For example, Survival Racing Car (1997) is a hybrid of a vehicle and a diving bell, sporting Geiger counters and emergency lights on a one-seat chassis crowned with a deep-sea diver’s helmet, all decked out in bright caution-tape yellow. Likewise, Survival Gacha-Pon(1998) closely resembles a giant gum-ball machine, only it dispenses plastic canisters of silly survival gear(mine was a tea-bag and sugar cube.) These works are augmented by a series of lightbox photographs showing the artist using some of the equipment that he has fashioned, including several images from a pilgrimage he made to Chernobyl in 1997. Yanobe’s photographs sound a note of wistful lament in a show that might otherwise seem like an elaborately supercilious examination of the Japanese relationship with weapons of mass destruction–– a relationship that dramatically resurfaced with the 1995 Sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway by the apocalyptic Aum Shinrikyo cult. Nonetheless, Yanobe’s art suggests that we might be able to survive the most insane and inhospitable circumstance if we just adopt the Boy Scout motto of eternal preparation. Of course, at this point we realize that there may be no way that we can seriously prepare for the unimaginable toxic and viral overload that the future will bring, but a small degree of hope springs eternal in Yanobe’s mordant wit. When one thinks of the cloistered bedroom of an 18-year old suburban girl, the idea of the industrial sublime is not likely to come to mind, but it makes an oblique appearance in Alison Shield’s collection of multimedia works. Although Shields previous installations focused on compulsive systems of object organization and suborganization, this particular show is a departure, in the direction of an idealized memory of her own life from a decade ago. The low point is a trio of duplicate graphite drawings that she did in 1990(when she was 18)for an "advanced placement" art course, in an attempy to "conceptually suggest that the pairing of two bad drawings––one old and one new––might add up to one good one:NOT! Other works are more interesting, starting with a locked diary set atop a pedestal titled All the Lies I Have Ever Told(2000), a suspiciously small book for such a grand theme. Two framed clusters of snapshot-sized C-prints from 2000 give more away: Don’t let Mrs. Collins Catch Us (The Day Camp Behind My House) and Almost Perfect(The Bedroom That I Grew Up In) convey a great sense of that moment when one finally leaves behind the fond memory of a happy childhood. Moreover,they convey how the very idea of a happy childhood is a fictive artifact of industrial construction, be it via the hypercoded articles of bedroom furniture that look like so many life-sized dilapitated Barbie Accessories or an uninhabited day camp, whose haunting appeal is more along the lines of an abandoned construction site than a place of managed child care. The exhibition’s piéce de résistance is a large, two-part multimedia construction featuring a small tent containing projected images and a giant plaster incarnation of a bedside lamp, minus bulb and lampshade. One can imagine the perspective: Laying on one’s pillow, looking up at the night table, a lamp looms large in the memorable moment of delicious vertigo just before sleep––prior to the subsequent sleepwalk of a life of adult responsibility. |