Painful Pop
by Benjamin Sutton
One of the most enjoyable throwaway moments in Fox’s latest merchandising adventure in mediocrity, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, comes as our heroes Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) and Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) run through a modern art wing of the D.C. museum complex and directly past a shiny, squeaky, delightfully bouncy Jeff Koons balloon animal sculpture. The blissfully upbeat, flashy, empty movie and sculpture go so well together that the seconds-long appearance is enough to help viewers make sense of each work and their relationship. It’s a great (if unintended) moment of high-low cultural commentary, the kind of synergy that four exhibitions in Chelsea seem to be after.
One of the most accessible involves another parodic homage to Jeff Koons, Jonathan Monk’s The Inflated Deflated at Casey Kaplan. As the title suggests, the show revolves around a series of revisions of Koons’ iconic stainless steel balloon rabbit in various stages of deflation, along with a series of paintings depicting the process of creating the flaccid bunnies. Monk has made a career of parody art – taking John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, among others, to task – and with each new exercise his criticisms seem to become more nuanced and incisive. Here, Monk not only undermines the idea of the reified pop object by offering visitors five collapsing steel rabbits, but also by highlighting the process of making them in documentary paintings of assembling, welding and polishing the otherwise timeless and slightly sci-fi objects.
Another poppy and pulpy satirist shines in the paintings, sculptures and installations that make up Gosha Ostretsov’s Coolville exhibition at Claire Oliver. Here a cacophony of comic book imagery is piled up into a distopian vision that’s more surrealist than Superman. Part apocalypse, part subconscious nightmare and hyper-sexualized fantasy, Ostretsov forgoes the linear narratives of comic book panels for an architectural environment where superheroes, billowing smoke, life-sized nudes and monstrous villains spill across the walls and ceiling. Throughout, sculptures of alien G-men give the installation an air of Area 51 secrecy and spectacle. Borne of the skewed power-relations in his native Russia, Ostretsov’s comic book structure also offers a surprisingly lucid allegory for media saturation and the kind of Twitter-fueled narratives that turn a walk to the bodega into an overblown epic.
Meanwhile, another familiar pop culture format with dedicated, cultish followers gets a sly yet loving reinterpretation in Phil Collins’ exhibition when slaves love each other, it’s not love at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In addition to a selection of images from his free fotolab – where he sets up a photo developing service in a city and processes locals’ undeveloped film on the understanding that they thereby transfer the rights to the images to him – Collins has created a phenomenal telenovela pastiche starring some of the biggest stars of Mexican daytime soap operas. Melding the overwrought drama of that popular genre with exquisite design and beautiful 16mm film, Soy mi madre (“I Am My Mother”) is both parody and homage, not unlike Monk’s Koonsian post-pop sculptures. Underneath predictable and ludicrous plot twists, Collins weaves a fascinating 28-minute narrative of class conflict, sexist double-standards, racism and generational angst.
More successfully than the two artists above, Collins not only imparts gallery prestige upon this low form of entertainment, but also helps to make us fluent in its codes and strategies. Think of it as a crash course in soap opera viewership and you’ll be copiously rewarded. Unlike Monk and Ostretsov, who deploy pop trappings as allegorical vehicles for their ongoing investigations, Collins’ ideas seem inseparable from the soap opera format. Whether they’re trying on aesthetics or pushing them further, these artists’ latest exhibitions are more interesting than Night at the Museum.
Phil Collins: when slaves love each other, it’s not love at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, through June 20.
Gosha Ostretsov: Coolville at Claire Oliver, through July 4.
Jonathan Monk: The Inflated Deflated at Casey Kaplan, through June 20.
One of the most accessible involves another parodic homage to Jeff Koons, Jonathan Monk’s The Inflated Deflated at Casey Kaplan. As the title suggests, the show revolves around a series of revisions of Koons’ iconic stainless steel balloon rabbit in various stages of deflation, along with a series of paintings depicting the process of creating the flaccid bunnies. Monk has made a career of parody art – taking John Baldessari, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, among others, to task – and with each new exercise his criticisms seem to become more nuanced and incisive. Here, Monk not only undermines the idea of the reified pop object by offering visitors five collapsing steel rabbits, but also by highlighting the process of making them in documentary paintings of assembling, welding and polishing the otherwise timeless and slightly sci-fi objects.
Another poppy and pulpy satirist shines in the paintings, sculptures and installations that make up Gosha Ostretsov’s Coolville exhibition at Claire Oliver. Here a cacophony of comic book imagery is piled up into a distopian vision that’s more surrealist than Superman. Part apocalypse, part subconscious nightmare and hyper-sexualized fantasy, Ostretsov forgoes the linear narratives of comic book panels for an architectural environment where superheroes, billowing smoke, life-sized nudes and monstrous villains spill across the walls and ceiling. Throughout, sculptures of alien G-men give the installation an air of Area 51 secrecy and spectacle. Borne of the skewed power-relations in his native Russia, Ostretsov’s comic book structure also offers a surprisingly lucid allegory for media saturation and the kind of Twitter-fueled narratives that turn a walk to the bodega into an overblown epic.
Meanwhile, another familiar pop culture format with dedicated, cultish followers gets a sly yet loving reinterpretation in Phil Collins’ exhibition when slaves love each other, it’s not love at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In addition to a selection of images from his free fotolab – where he sets up a photo developing service in a city and processes locals’ undeveloped film on the understanding that they thereby transfer the rights to the images to him – Collins has created a phenomenal telenovela pastiche starring some of the biggest stars of Mexican daytime soap operas. Melding the overwrought drama of that popular genre with exquisite design and beautiful 16mm film, Soy mi madre (“I Am My Mother”) is both parody and homage, not unlike Monk’s Koonsian post-pop sculptures. Underneath predictable and ludicrous plot twists, Collins weaves a fascinating 28-minute narrative of class conflict, sexist double-standards, racism and generational angst.
More successfully than the two artists above, Collins not only imparts gallery prestige upon this low form of entertainment, but also helps to make us fluent in its codes and strategies. Think of it as a crash course in soap opera viewership and you’ll be copiously rewarded. Unlike Monk and Ostretsov, who deploy pop trappings as allegorical vehicles for their ongoing investigations, Collins’ ideas seem inseparable from the soap opera format. Whether they’re trying on aesthetics or pushing them further, these artists’ latest exhibitions are more interesting than Night at the Museum.
Phil Collins: when slaves love each other, it’s not love at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, through June 20.
Gosha Ostretsov: Coolville at Claire Oliver, through July 4.
Jonathan Monk: The Inflated Deflated at Casey Kaplan, through June 20.
