A Sorry Kind of Wisdom
Perry Rubenstein
- Marie-Adele Moniot -
Katrina Moorehead, Draumalandid, RedGreenBluePeony, 2007; archival blue board, archival blue paper, wheat starch paste, graphite, gouache; 5 x 5 x 2 ½ feet; courtesy the artist and Inman Gallery, Houston
Daniel Rich, Kurdish Democratic Party HQ, 2005; enamel on wood; 60 x 48 inches
The summer group show at Perry Rubenstein, A Sorry Kind of Wisdom, is not a meditation on the politics of hope or cynicism, as the gallery suggests, but on the politics of anxiety, which defines our current political climate of suspension. As the country waits for the November elections, nervously looking backward and forward, it neglects the present, in which we still see the world through our lens, making it in our own image. No work in the exhibition typifies this problem more than French artist Jules de Balincourt’s primitive oil and spray-paint map of the United States with European and Asian countries wedged between the two coasts—crammed into the heartland. With childlike execution, de Balincourt suggests our provincialism is a condition that has been legitimized by miseducation: if we see the world only in terms of how it relates to us, don’t we necessarily restrain and submerge its vast differences?
We’re a bunch of control freaks, in other words, and Daniel Rich’s hyperreal and pristine painting of the Kurdish headquarters in Iraq—one of the many buildings damaged in the war—is a sunny ode to our need to “make things right.” Nearby, Michael Brown’s sculpture of stainless-steel lawn chairs and beer cans is a shiny shrine to the American dream of leisure. Both works point to our country’s unflappable optimism, alive and well in spite of its political body, which thrives on fear. But what both also share—the dreamer and the cynic—is an anxiety about ugly truths, such as the pointless destruction of the headquarters of persecuted peoples and the deterioration of the American dream.
Some of the work in the show is less successful in exposing this dilemma. For example, Natalie Czech’s series of six lambda prints, Across the Universe, lays multiple slogans (“Support Our Troops,” “Stop War,” etc.) end to end until they are meaningless bits of paper read and said ad nauseam. It’s not clear if Czech is attempting an aesthetic of protest or suggesting the futility of the whole enterprise. But if Czech’s prints are distant and ambiguous, Sam Durant’s work is a kick in the craw. In Emory Douglas Suite (On Landscape Art), he creates a graphite drawing of four pigs hanging from nooses and bearing labels, such as “Avaricious Businessmen” and “Pig Cops.” It includes a quote by former Black Panther Emory Douglas, a graphic artist and no-bullshit defender of the disenfranchised.
Like Durant’s, Houston-based artist Katrina Moorhead’s work, Draumalandid, RedGreenBluePeony, is one of the strongest and most emotive pieces in the show. Constructed of archival paper and blue board, the sculpture is remnants of fireworks shells and their cases, marked with the names of their countries of origin (China and Iceland). The viewer gets the before and after, but misses the big show. Almost mournful, Moorhead’s sculpture—and the exhibition in general—is not a light summer salad. A Sorry Kind of Wisdom is apparently gained through broken narratives in which the players mine and deride history, fret the future and ignore the present.
Marie-Adele Moniot is a freelance critic based in New York.