Shelve it

It wasn’t until after I wrote about Dave McKenzie’s (B)lack that I realized how much work in Just Kick It Till It Breaks presents shelves or tables as a primary element. (B)lack is not a literal shelf, of course, but Carol Bove and Josephine Meckseper use real shelves in their work in the exhibition. Bozidar Brazda and Fia Backström use tables as a key part of their installations. (Tables are to sculpture as shelves are to reliefs.) Uses of flags and banners have been common in contemporary art—witness Michael Phelan’s and Garder Eide Einarsson’s work in the exhibition—but I haven’t yet noticed shelves. Haim Steinbach (above) is an obvious precedent, but I am sure there are others.

Back in (B)LACK

I am interested in Dave McKenzie’s (B)LACK (2006), a work of colored pencil on paper in the collection of Anthony Elms and Jacqueline Terrassa of Chicago. McKenzie draws on an instruction manual for an Ikea shelf, coloring in a warm, medium-brown skin tone onto the man sizing up the shelf on the wall. There are also coffee-cup stains, folds, and other signs of distress on the paper. I think some holes have been cut out too.

In a handout/checklist now available for the exhibition, the author writes, “This collage transforms generic directions … into a document more specific to [the artist’s] needs and identity, underscoring how one’s concept of self in contemporary society is often produced by consumer culture and the media rather than the other way around.” Sure. But I wonder if an artist would need to alter such instructions in order to make such a critique. Or even if such a critique is necessary.

One only has to look at advertising circulars from stores such as Macy’s or Kmart, the kind you find in the Sunday newspaper. Since the 1990s, or maybe even the 1980s, department stores and discount retail chains have increasing included nonwhites as models. Seeing a black man modeling an expensive suit in mainstream advertising might have been rare twenty, thirty, forty years ago. Now it’s commonplace—though of course, like in prime-time television, parity may not yet be reached.

Back to McKenzie’s work. Is the creative, artistic act of drawing or defacing the Ikea shelf instructions an act of rebellion? If, as I posit, representations of nonwhite people have become common in this type of consumer publication, what is the meaning of McKenzie’s gesture? The “lack” that McKenzie points to isn’t as big an issue as the artwork (and the accompanying text from the Kitchen) indicates. The interpretation offered by the exhibition handout doesn’t go far enough—it’s too obvious. And boring. A careful analysis—visual or textual—of this kind of imagery or these type of publications might uncover something else, something more crucial, about representation. Including more blacks and Latinos, for example, in the JC Penney catalogue is a calculated move on that company’s part: it wants to depict a more culturally diverse society while at the same time bring in more African American and Latino consumers by portraying these groups wearing JC Penney clothes and sleeping on JC Penney bedspreads. Progressive politics becomes a capitalist tool. Companies make previously undersought consumers welcome, make them feel good, in order to sell them stuff. Let’s talk about political candidates pandering to the “black vote.” This larger, more important idea relates to the theme of Just Kick It Till It Breaks, but I don’t quite see it addressed in McKenzie’s work.

While on the subject of advertising circulars, I remember that in the mid-1990s, Wal-Mart began using store managers and employees and their children as models in their product photography. It was certainly a populist move, a novelty pleasing both workers and shoppers, but I assume it also saved the company a lot of money. I imagine Wal-Mart didn’t pay these people the same rate as they would for professional models—if they were paid at all. It reminds me of what some art magazines and related publications do for art critics: give them the pleasure of seeing their names in print while not having to actually pay for the writing. Few art critics make money writing about art, and few Wal-Mart employees earn a living wage working for that company.

Back to (B)lack. Or rather those Ikea shelves. Full disclosure: I bought two of them maybe six years ago and installed them in my living room. I’ve stacked several hundred CDs on them, and the sturdy shelves have held up just fine.

Who wants Yesterday’s Newspaper?

One of Dave McKenzie’s two contributions to Just Kick It Till It Breaks is called Yesterday’s Newspaper. The set-up is simple: a gallery assistant places a folded copy of the New York Times—straight from the newsstand—on a low wooden base every day the gallery is open. As the work’s title indicates, the issue is not that particular day’s edition but the one before.

The press release for McKenzie’s last solo exhibition, held January 5–February 10, 2007, at Small A Projects in Portland, Oregon, says that Yesterday’s Newspaper “is an object that is at once useless and historical, disposable and archived. It is also a sculpture that amplifies the disappointments of the present while anticipating the brighter possibilities of the future. Yesterday’s Newspaper relies on a caretaker (in this case, the gallery) for its maintenance.” The press release’s author compares this activity to the replenishing of ephemeral work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; Robert Gober also worked with newspapers in the early 1990s with a different purpose. But I digress.

As the major theme of the Kitchen exhibition is reappropriation using a wide nexus of quotes and source material—more on that later—Yesterday’s Newspaper references an earlier moment and another artist, Dan Graham. McKenzie’s work is a literal manifestation of Graham’s idea of the “just-past,” which in turn was borrowed from Walter Benjamin (who cribs from Marx and the Surrealists). Graham articulated this theory in a short talk that was published in the first Discussions in Contemporary Culture (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1987). He writes:

I believe now that the task of the artist is in part to resuscitate the just-past—that period in time made amnesiac by commodity culture—and apply it as “anti-aphrodisiac” (Walter Benjamin’s phrase). The Rolling Stones’s song “Yesterday’s Papers”—“Who wants yesterday’s papers? Who wants yesterday’s girl? No one in the world”—make this anti-aphrodisiac aspect of the just-past clear.

According to Benjamin, “progress,” the 19th-century scientific and ultimately capitalistic myth, is expressed in commodities, fashion goods which “produce a sense of eternal newness.” This makes progress a mythical goal, never to be reached, for there is always the new and it is always superceded by the next new. For Benjamin, then, progress is actually a state of stasis. And yet it is this very stasis that makes the recovery of the just-past potentially subversive.

It’s amusing to see an artist make a work of art based directly on Graham’s theory, whether intentional or not. The Graham essay is scanned and posted below—it’s only three pages long, four with the footnotes and well worth the read. Everything in the text illuminates a lot of what’s going on in Just Kick It Till It Breaks. The essay could also potentially work against the exhibition, much of which focuses on the revolutionary sixties, and make McKenzie’s Yesterday’s Newspaper surprisingly stronger than the other works because it focuses on the importance of what’s happening now without a whiff of nostalgia. Consider Graham again, this time in conversation with the video artist Michael Smith in the May 2004 Artforum:

DG: I thought Outstanding Young Men was hilarious. You were reviving ‘80s disco culture, but it was a ridiculous revival. I think it’s very important to look at how ridiculous the “just past” is.

MS: The what?

DG: The just past: Walter Benjamin said the just past is very important—it’s a little like “Yesterday’s Papers” by the Rolling Stones. They ask, “Who wants yesterday’s papers?” Nobody. Nobody wants to look at the just past. People almost always look to a few decades before instead. And every time you have a neo-’60s or a neo-’70s, like we’re seeing now among artists, you’re canceling out the just past. I was trying to get at the just past in the Dia Art Foundation roof piece, for example, combining the corporate atrium of the ‘80s and the alternative space of the ‘70s.

MS: I’m thinking that the “just past” is always Mike’s present. It’s fresh for him, since he’s always behind the times. Everything has been absorbed and digested before Mike even considers a taste.