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REPORT FROM RIDGEFIELD Outlaws in Art Land
Bad was good in a recent show at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporar y Art in Connecticut, where a score of feisty artists tested the limits of the legally permissible.
BY SARAH VALDEZ
L ike a clubhouse for miscreant youth, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art-a white-paneled colonial house with rolling green lawns in Ridgefield, Conn.-was recently overrun by 22 contemporary artists who transgress rules and push boundaries with their work. “Art at the Edge of the Law,” curated by the museum’s assistant director, Richard Klein, featured mind-altering drugs, marketplace pranks and strategic appropriation among its many quasi- illicit treats. Local Ridgefield police and a lawyer were con- sulted to protect the museum from potential litigation. Cautionary security procedures were advised and undertaken. Signs warning parents to preview the exhibition before bringing in children were set out in the admissions area. The show was, in fact, a bit of a three-ring circus. But even so, superficial shock value was (mostly) avoided, while heavy-hitting issues like freedom of expression, individual autonomy and the relationship between imagination and reality were raised.
“If I were to curate a show, it would look a lot like this one,” artist Tom Sachs told A.i.A. He contributed assemblage works incorporating homemade, functioning pistols and shotguns to “Art at the Edge.” Sachs’s dealer, Mary Boone, was arrested in 1999 on charges stemming from a show of similar work (which included two such guns, eventually confiscated by police) and a publicity stunt that allowed gallery-goers to help them- selves to 9mm cartridges set out like after-dinner mints in a bowl on the gallery’s front desk [see A.i.A., Nov. ‘99]. According to Klein, the presence of such firearms in the Aldrich exhibition was legally permissible because “there’s a gray area in Connecticut law. Guns that are historical, or being exhibited, are pretty much overlooked so long as the public can’t get access to them. If you go to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, you’ll see they have a big collection of Colt firearms. The Colt Company is there, you know.”
Gregory Green contributed a two-part installation. In the attic, he set up a low-powered pirate television station (replete with dirty laundry and coffee cups littering the floor) to broadcast news coverage, on a 13-minute loop, of the fracas caused by his 1995 installation, 10,000 Doses, at Feigen Gallery in Chicago. When first shown, the work comprised 12 antique apothecary bottles filled with yellow liquid and a recipe for LSD. Provoked, Chicago police seized Green’s bottles and tested the substance; when results came back identifying the liquid as acid, they arrested gallery director Lance Kinz. With mounting pressure due to media attention, a second test was performed. The liquid turned out to be distilled morning glory seeds, which contain traces of lysergic acid. The police said they’d made a mistake and Kinz was released.
The second component of Green’s Aldrich piece was a re-creation of the installation (with two of the bottles “damaged,” i.e., opened by authorities), accompanied by documents pertaining to the seizure and arrest. A television was added to the installation to receive the programming from upstairs. As a way of transmitting information, Green’s illegal broadcast (unsanctioned by the FCC) was a bit more complicat- ed than, say, just using a VCR. But exerting effort impractically was one of this show’s most prevalent art-making practices. Intentionally unproductive labor can come off as meditative, anti-capitalist or anti-elitist. In this instance, however, it mostly has to do with invading “private” public space (the air- waves) and daring the authorities to do something about it. To date, however, the range of Green’s sever- al pirate broadcast setups has been too limited to attract regulatory ire.
British artist Janice Kerbel showed Bank Job, a project a bit more likely to make law enforcement itch. For two years, she carefully researched every- thing required to rob a private investment institution in London’s financial district, photographing the bank and its environs, taking notes, studying floor plans and otherwise casing the place. She stopped just short of the actual heist. Kerbel’s documents have serious criminal potential, but in and of themselves are “just” art.
Jeffrey Hatfield, presently enrolled in Hunter College’s MFA program, heightened the exhibition’s unruly vibe by presenting a large, functioning moonshine still. Its network of copper pipes connected to heating and cooling tanks; water trickled down a trio of brightly colored baby pools on shelves, suggesting a crude yet gleeful fountain. The contraption yielded actual white lightning of around 100 proof, which Hatfield packaged in antique glass bottles and sold-embedded in law books-as limited-edition, souvenir art works.
“In Connecticut, it’s legal to make beer and wine,” Klein explained, “but you’re not really supposed to make distilled spirits. And technically, you need a liquor permit to sell liquor to the public. But if you wanted to go and get drunk, you probably wouldn’t buy Hatfield’s sauce. It’s $400 for one bottle.” As if winking approval for Hatfield’s delightful machine, a few of Fred Tomaselli’s pill “paintings” hung near- by-happy, hippie-style designs made out of an assortment of multicolored pharmaceuticals set in shiny black polyester resin.
Elaborating on his curatorial strategy for the show, Klein commented, “The public seems primarily concerned with nudity.” Richard Prince furnished the only example of such. His Untitled (Publicity), 2000, features appropriated, autographed photographs of a demure, blonde, bare-breasted Playboy playmate from 1969. As nakedness goes, the piece is a fairly tame, unobjectionable example.
“Art is business, business is war, war is advertising and advertising is art,” begins San Francisco-based punk band Negativland’s 270-page tome, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. They wrote the book following an intellec- tual property battle with Island Records over their single “U2/Negativland,” which samples music from and appropriates the name of the megaband U2. In an unpublished interview for the cyberpunk magazine Mondo2000 arranged by editor. R.U. Sirius, Negativland band member Don Joyce explained to U2 band member The Edge, “The idea that [someone else’s work] could become part of your own work is perfectly appropriate, and is, in fact, necessary self- defense against the coercion that media has become.” [1]
The Edge agreed, responding “yeah? But Island sued anyway, and in an out-of- court settlement eventually recouped the legal costs incurred attacking the small-fry West Coast musicians. At the Aldrich, a Negativland album cover with “U2” writ large across its pale pink front was shown. Wall text told the tale.
The art collective known as the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) enacted Operation Newspeak in 1993-94, invading toy stores across the nation to sub- vert gender stereotypes. The group bought hundreds of Teen Talk Barbies (who are wont to make such observations as “Math is hard!“) and GI Joes (programmed to utter “Dead men tell no lies.“), took them to their headquarters, switched their voiceboxes and “shopgifted” them back into stores to be repurchased by unsuspecting consumers. BLO Nightly News, a fuzzy video of the covert transplanting project, was screened in the museum.
J.S.G. Boggs’s art also makes its presence felt in the consumer realm [see A.i.A., Jan. ‘88]. Today, the artist’s intricate drawings of currency are less faithful than his earlier works and may include such alterations as a portrait of Harriet Tubman, the denomination of “FUN” instead of “ONE,” or having the note signed by the “Secretary of the Measury.” Rather than selling his work, the artist spends his “Boggs Bills” on real-world items and services. Sometimes art collectors follow in Boggs’s footsteps, purchasing the “cash” from those who accepted it from the artist as legiti- mate tender. The ongoing art project has gotten Boggs arrested in Australia and England; his studio has also been raided by the U.S. Secret Service, which confis- cated some of his work. On a more macro scale, Mark Lombardi’s flowchart-style diagrams of various, nefari- ous associations and occurrences-such as Bill Clinton, The Lippo Group and Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, Arkansas (5th Version)- span the globe with alarmingly few degrees of separation.
Chicago-based artists Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson design faux postage stamps with a range of illustrations too nervy and stylish- cockroaches, condoms and pinup girls-to have been commissioned by the U.S. government. One Thompson-designed example, bearing the image of a pistol, reads “Kill All Artists,” referring to a 1994 manifesto written by a cultural organization known as “The New York City Militia”:
If art were illegal and punishable by death, only those willing to risk their lives for their work would prevail. . . . The spirit of originality or the right to dream have [sic] been quashed and replaced by the remixing and rehashing of the styles of yesterday in a failing attempt to recreate an originality that was never there to begin with. In the midst of it all, there lie We. Our role, friends, in order to create once again is to: KILL ALL ARTISTS! [2]
Hernandez de Luna and Thompson mailed letters to themselves, to friends and to their gallery with their stamps-sometimes successfully, so that postal workers’ complicity in the prank can be inferred. An ill-gotten postmark is a trophy, a sign of life garnered from the systematized void of the postal system. At the Aldrich, sheets of stamps (minus the ones used) were displayed in frames, next to envelopes that suc- cessfully made their way back home.
An Austrian “art company” called Ubermorgen gave people the “chance to take part in the U.S. election industry” during the last U.S. presidential election. Their [V]ote-auction.com was a Web site that hypothetically facilitated the purchase and sale of votes. The domain was shut down by InterNIC, the main American compa- ny that stores service records for .com/.net/.org names. In the museum, the project took the form of a bunch of legal papers and a video of CNN’s Burden of Proof on which the Web site was discussed. Esthetically speaking, there wasn’t much to look at here. But that the artists took a democratic election as a potential medium to manipulate overtly is, one must admit, intriguing. It’s a little more high-concept than, say, oil on canvas.
Michael Oatman’s entire existence appears to be but the sum of senseless transgressions as he serially confesses his paltry, generally unre- markable sins in a nearly two-hour-long video. The piece is surprisingly stirring, given the low-energy, self-centered nature of his idea. His sequence of drol- ly admitted violations, interspersed with flickering mug shots of various 19th-century criminals, has the capacity to plunge a viewer into a certain existential angst.
Steven Tourlentes has traveled the country and often trespassed to make his black-and-white night- time photographs of prisons that carry out the death penalty. As an art project, the series is admittedly a one-liner, but chilling nonetheless. The documentary photographs are technically very good but mostly function as the optical equivalent of a high-pitched drone: overwhelming yet oddly silent, the irreversible starkness of death drowning out the relative insignificance of everything else.
A lock of Charles Manson’s hair, toilet paper from Gianni Versace’s bathroom and a piece of a restraint strap from “Old Sparky,” a Tennessee electric chair used in 125 executions, are among the talismanic objects amassed by Barton Lidice Benes for his miniature curio cabinet called FOUl Play (2000). One wonders whether these objects are what Benes labeled them as, and even if one is bored by supposedly shocking items like a kit for shooting up heroin and a facecloth taken from Robert Downey, Jr’s Palm Springs hotel room the night before he was arrested for drug possession, the matter of collecting things based on aura as a way to express meaning (or lack thereof) is fascinating. Benes also showed a piece incorporating a syringe full of his own HIV-positive blood, At the Aldrich, visitors tended to fall silent, standing before the object in a swirl of horror, grief, embarassment and veneration.
In 1982, Benes and his partner, Howard Meyer, obtained a bunch of finely shredded money from the Federal Reserve Board. The couple searched through the heap of scraps to reassemble three whole one-dol- lar bills, which are shown pressed in Plexiglas, atop a couple of large, hay-bale-sized blocks of shredded cash. It’s a soulful thing, evidencing the duo’s stubborn, patient, life-affirming act of uselessness. Particularly given the couple’s affliction with a deadly virus, their gesture points to the crassness of any moment in which money is prioritized over life.
“Art at the Edge of the Law” is of the variety of cultural undertaking that may seem inappropriate in the post-September 11 cultural climate. It might not, for instance, seem particularly interesting at present to have a gun in a museum, or to taunt law enforcement with conceptual high jinks. Irony has been pro- claimed “over,” patriotism is back, and many people appear willing to trade in civil liberties for an illusion of security. But before resigning ourselves to this new, depressed, frightened point of view, it’s worth pausing to recognize the hope inherent in playful, spirited rebellion. The idealistic message underlying most of the work in “Art at the Edge” couldn’t be more serious or poignant right now: life isn’t worth much without liberty.
1. Interview mediated by R.U. Sirius, September 1992, published at http://www.12g.to/negativland/u2/the-edge- interview.html. 2. http://207.69.247.167/letters/manifesto.html.
“Art at the Edge of the Law” appeared at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporar y Art in Hartford, Conn. [June 3- Sept. 9].