MetaArt: Constructing Self-Criticism

“Overstocked: under.consumption,” a student photography and sculpture exhibit at Mather House’s Three Columns Gallery, engages an interesting discussion about food, culture and beauty.

At first blush, the pieces included in the exhibit—by photographers Carlin E. Wing ’02, Jean J. Ryoo ’02 and Arwen K. O’Reilly ’02, as well as sculptor Kurt D. Mueller ’02—seem to further a well-worn thesis: commercialism is both cause and symptom of a deep-seated sickness of American—or Western?—culture, one that champions quantity at the cost of quality, efficiency at the cost of beauty.

Carlin Wing’s pieces, like “Sun-sun Co.: Hanging Meat,” present familiar marketplace images in a way that makes their familiarity painfully evident. Wing is hyper-self-conscious about symmetry and repetition, about pattern and economy of perspective. He uses ambient light to affect a sort of cheapness of color and thus draws attention to aesthetic costs of a buyer-friendly market place—lifeless blues and greens and oranges. The photographs themselves are mechanically arranged on the wall, with the same precision of placement and over-attention to balance and equilibrium. They pit—or at least seem to pit—art and commercial culture at vicious odds.

This, though, is a mistaken, or at least incomplete, first impression. A closer look at the show as a whole—not as a complex of the work of four distinct artists—reveals telling philosophical nuance. Taken as gestalt, the show is not a social critique at all: it is an indictment of art itself, as a symptom of industry, as fundamentally hypocritical in its dialogue with commercial culture.

Ryoo’s presentations, for instance, seem intentionally baroque and self-indulgent. They cleverly re-imagine older staples of the western art canon as food, a mere commodity. “Portrait (W. Pooh),” for instance—a bust of a chocolate bear—is absurd and self-effacing. Art, then, for Ryoo is its own subject—her photographs are a kind of meta-art. They suggest that artistic creation is subject to the same commodification as the boxes of Tide and cereal in Wing’s photographs.

Mueller, too, damningly equates—or conflates—art and food. He glosses his own work: “19 fluff bunnies. Nineteen cast plaster rabbits covered with Marshmallow Fluff™. Cast-cover-drip-display-shine-sniff-distaste-desire-ad nauseum.” And true to this description, he offers a bevy of 19 frighteningly exaggerated marshmallow bunnies, perched atop cans of paint on a transparent tarpaulin. They are, to be sure, shiny and distasteful, but again this seems to be Mueller’s intent. The bunnies aren’t themselves sculptures—they are caricatures of sculptures, caricatures of art writ large.

To resolve this exigency, O’Reilly proposes a move beyond theory and philosophy—beyond art as a lens for social scrutiny. He proposes a return to a simpler aesthetic that values beauty above all and doesn’t concern itself with deeper remarks about the world. “I’ve chosen,” O’Reilly says, “to move beyond the cerebral and look at the beautiful.” He cites as his artistic influences Vermeer, de Hooch, Clasez and Monet. And indeed, his photographs recall both the poignant and dignified simplicity of Flemish still lives and the French Impressionists’ emphasis on the qualitative and sensory experience of objects.

Importantly, the pieces in “Over–stocked” are crucially interdependent—none make full sense apart from the context of the others. Wing begins the discussion deceitfully, suggesting that the show will be a trite critique of consumer culture. Quickly, though, Mueller and Ryoo dissolve this notion and turn the critical microscope onto art itself. And finally, gracefully, O’Reilly gestures at a resolution. Together, the artists’ work comprises an organism, and any attempt to understand it atomically or deconstructively will be misinformed.

visual arts

Overstocked: under.consumption

Mather House Three Columns Gallery

Through Feb. 24