Continuing Education Blog

Sign the waiver, then step through crumbled, Chinese text newspapers covering the floor like dry leaves in late autumn.  Nestled within is an album of aging photos.  Handwritten titles on the reverse side meant something to someone: “Joe Wishey dressing room” and “Carla’s last night.”  They are dated 1979-1988, summertime, and record a group of people involved in a theatrical production, perhaps everyday life, All the World’s a Stage?  We also see dull photos of the family dog: as puppy and then mature. Not catching Frisbees; he’s just sitting there, looking on as time passes.

Like a moth to a flame, we follow the fluorescent glow into a barren shop with slatted walls resembling those used by Canal Street hucksters. Garish lighting, nappy wigs on headforms, colored pebbles: all symbols for Sisyphian, futile beautification.  Superficial self-transformation is cheap and easy; hence, this is the first room we enter on our journey.  A sledgehammered passage leads to a small room with a door.  The door is locked. Dead end. It is also papered with catalog pages displaying not couture, but banal apparel and mom jeans, more plain than the most generic store-brand.  Mirrored mylar drapes the walls like sagging mirrors – hapless, sagging mirrors. Vanity gets you nowhere.

 

Hurry out.  Where to now?  Door number one, two, or three?  Choose your own adventure. But first, pause and contemplate the naïvely rendered painting on canvas of a molecule that might be a drug, but is not LSD, psylocibin, THC, cocaine, amphetamine, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, nor heroin.  I checked.

Saving the staircases for later, enter the twine-lined dojo, where bulletin boards bear snapshots mingled with photocopied astrological readings.  Letterhead identifies astrologists in Maine and one from Manhattan.  Details reveal that the photos are decades old: we see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle costumes; an office calendar from 1996; a Bobby Brown clone, an acid washed denim jacket, and even a teen reenacting Nirvana’s swimming baby.

Up the steps into a disheveled mobile home that defines abandoned squalor.  Nobody would endure the stale odor, let alone rest on the hideous brown couch with cigarette burns on the armrests.  Fireproofed windows keep things dark.  Next to the couch are a sewing table and machine.  White powder is scattered (drugs? fire extinguisher?) and there’s a wanted poster for a male, African-American arson suspect; the text absurdly mutates into a textbook lesson for police faced with domestic disturbances.  The rotting kitchen is cluttered with meth lab accoutrement and a grocery list of pseudoephedrine, matches, Drano, Winstons, Mountain Dew, coffee filters, funnels, bleach, beer, aluminum foil.  Some of these items are scattered about, all with contemporary packaging.  There’s also a Richard Simmons Disco Sweat Farewell to Fat VHS.  Chalky ash and cinder cover everything.

Interior details and surfaces suggest that the mobile home connects to an R.V., but it’s hard to make sense of this labyrinth.  For example, why does a timber post support the rear ceiling, more typical of a cabin?  Cupboards along the walls are empty, except for two ironing boards.  Aluminum ventilation ducts intrude from overhead.  The bathroom floor is carpeted, dark muck fills the toilet bowl, and the cabinet is tied shut with a wire hangar.  A rotting corpse will howl from the bathtub any minute now.

Turning around, we see knitted fabric hanging above a homemade frame containing a NY Times page from 1980 reporting the surrender of Weather Underground leaders, along with a button for The Pretenders, and a mysterious concert photo.  And the Richard Simmons fan has left a weigh scale in the middle of the floor.

The R.V. reveals the source of the ash and cinder.  Its kitchen is ruined after an explosion.  The oven is missing and a recliner sits atop a table, whose formica surface has peeled away from the MDF underneath.  Expanding outward, blisters and shadowy scorch marks record the trajectory and reach of the ghostly blast.

Climb through the wall to an intact meth lab majestically positioned like an amphetamine altar.  A can of Ice CRYSTALS.  The floor is carpeted with torn clippings from a Dr. Leonard’s Discount Health Store catalog.  A sci-fi fan must have brought out the Terminator 3 and Mars Attacks trappings.  Terminator 3 ends at the fictitious CRYSTAL Peak.  We also see clippings of sports cars and lingerie catalogs.  A man worked here.  But what about the pair of posters depicting one white horse and one black horse?

Comb through the Sudafed boxes to a refrigerator portal leading us to a creepy chamber where a musty boxspring leans against the wall.

In the study next door, we can view footage from surveillance cameras monitoring the compoud.  This shelving unit looks a lot like the refrigerator Justin Lowe used in Helter Swelter, his earlier summer blockbuster. Smart to recycle things like that.  Printed matter is stacked, filed, and bound among a wall of office shelves.  The books are missing their covers, and someone has handwritten custom titles. Many of them, such as The Ardor of Plunderers and Undoing of Foolish Virgins, come from Rimbaud’s Season in Hell.  Facing this library are more bulletin boards with astrological diagrams, now joined by photocopied text on palmistry and parapsychology, and a seemingly random production image from Black Shampoo.

The high ceilings and open space in following room offer relief from the musty claustrophobia everywhere else.  This parlour/ gallery rolls out the red carpet for the tuxedoed elite depicted in framed, b&w photos of gatherings involving CACTUS and CRYSTALS.  Also exhibited here are collages of appropriated media photos layered beneath fragmented CACTUS images.

Next door is its bizarro counterpart.  A single light bulb illuminates the circular mystical symbol on the wall, which has survived the peeling paint; but the decaying red carpet and drop ceiling panels are beyond repair.  (My friend, Dennis Hoekstra, executed this marvelous space, what a wiz!)  I don’t know what the symbol symbolizes, but maybe it’s just a super-symbol, standing in for myriad subcultures and countercultures, none of which really exist without suffering commodification first.  Look at the 3GS punks on St. Mark’s Place.  It’s over, man!  By the time the world discovers something, it’s already over.  Hence, this vacant new age temple/parlour is empty and decrepit.  And next door in the upper-crust gallery, visitors fetishize pictures of people fetishizing objects.  The cactuses and crystals thumbed by the clad-in-black elitists meant something to someone, like the notes in the photo album, but now they are just abused signifiers.

Yet, I couldn’t help walking through the show wondering, “How would they sell this? Do they sell the couch?  Or the room?”  The vitrines in the red-carpeted gallery contain apparent fragments from the Tweeker pad, as if snidely, literally answering our query about a saleable art object.  They’ll chop a piece out of the installation, a bite-sized morsel, and you can buy it and show it off to your friends.

Now we can return to the crossroads at the beginning of the show.  Downstairs, the Chinatown head shop offers glass wands, bundles of herbal remedies and Sudafed, CRYSTALS, minerals, roots, and bark. Terrariums incubate gnarled plant life, like CACTUS, possibly the ephedra Ma Huang: the Mandarin meth.  Candy-colored airbrushed T-shirts on hangars portray hard core sex between buxom women, fruit, a dog, and much more.  A lone television conveys a montage of what appear to be Eastern and Western T.V. commercials, a telenovela, and a glimpse of Syd Barrett’s acid trip.

Upstairs is a mysterious dwelling.  Fur boots outside the door suggest a cold climate.  Colorado?  That was the site of Drop City, which surely inspired the fabric, geodesic panels overhead. Transparent, dust-covered glass jars fill the room, containing pickled memories, many echoing objects unearthed elsewhere in the show: tobacco packaging, Chinatown shopping bags, a 21st birthday foil balloon, Christmas ornaments, Elmer’s school glue for elementary huffing, spray paint with a tube for teenage huffing, beer cans, burned books, rotting fruit, an ad for Similac, coffee cups, machine parts, packing bubbles, a Tony Little workout video, wig price tags, a book called Rebels bundled with a photo of Chinese students, chicken wire fence reminiscent of the molecule painting downstairs, and a murder mystery by Lucha Corpi, CACTUS Blood.

The bedroom is a haphazard nest amidst collages made from books about science, communes, and Heloise All Around the House.  We find CRYSTALS, and illustrations of people with CRYSTALS substituted for heads.

Coyotes in sweaters (also recycled from Helter Swelter) snuggle in the back corner.  Above them is a sequence of cinematic photos of a man carrying woman’s body up a hill, and said woman bleeding from the mouth, unconscious.

Is Black Acid Co-op – the extraordinary undertaking by Justin Lowe and Jonah Freeman, at Deitch Projects in its third generation after protean transformations in Marfa and Miami, a culmination for Justin Lowe and a leap for Jonah Freeman, overwhelmingly maximalist and immeasurably significant – the tale of a square-peg, desperate housewife? Here’s the story that I detected, at least in my imagination. Said desperate housewife sought spiritual fulfillment to ameliorate the drudgery of dog days, rode Women’s Rights out of suburbia, briefly indulged in cosmopolitanism but didn’t fit, opened the gateway to substances, got deeper, got hooked, took jobs only an addict would take, found a partner, stayed on in an interracial relationship with a meth chef, sleeping with the source, who died in an explosion, leaving her a drug-addled widow with paranoid delusions and separatist leanings, who dabbled or even employed herself in astrology, then tried to find solitude by building an individual commune, the definition of which precludes solitude, and fell victim to foul play or other ill fate?  Printed matter downstairs includes a Black male arsonist, a Blaxploitation poster, and the racially suggestive pair of b&w horses: clues about her mate? The book about housewives and the family photo album indicate family life conflicts, as do the gendered clothing catalogs, which would appeal to an isolated meth maker, as well.  And the stray weigh scale, fitness videos, and sewing machine for tailoring all intimate a woman’s burdensome body consciousness, inextricably connected one way or the other to meth abuse.

IMAGES: Michael Bilsborough, Gagosian Gallery

Tags: acid trip, astrology, Ballroom Marfa, Black Acid Co-op, Black Shampoo, Cactus, Cactus Blood, Chinatown, Crystals, Deitch Projects, Drop City, Emerson, ephedra, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, Hello Meth Lab with a View, Heloise, Helter Swelter, Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, ma huang, meth lab, methamphetamine, Season in Hell, Sudafed, Syd Barrett, Weather Underground, weight loss

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 7:44 am and is filed under Art Criticism, Events, Exhibitions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. trackback from your own site.