Goldmine Shithouse
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Pretty, and pretty orderly. Sure, there’s some necessary roughness. Each of the 40 pieces is backed by a square or rectangular plywood board screwed onto a crude wood frame, both wood and screws often left visible through the paint and other materials. There are lots of dribbles, unmotivated swatches of color, messages (handwritten as well as stenciled), and self-consciously naive drawings scratched into surfaces like so many doodles on a high school student’s desk. And yet the overall effect is of cool, highly orchestrated attractiveness.
No doubt a big part of that effect has to do with the clean geometry of the pieces’ positioning on the gallery’s exceedingly white walls. A group of 24 one-foot-square paintings, for example, is hung in a lattice formation as regular as the windows on a Mies van der Rohe building–an arrangement that goes a long way toward defeating any incipient chaos lurking within the frames. Or would, if there were any incipient chaos to defeat. The works are as smoothly arranged as the walls. The artists’ palette of ochers, blues, and mostly dark reds–with occasional festive splashes of gold or silver foil–is knowing and tasteful in the manner of a truly hip hotel. The repeated use of appropriated images–medieval peasants, gothic lettering, Renaissance saints, masted ships, winged lions, rendered for the most part in a woodcut style–makes some pieces look like decoupaged serving trays from a truly hip crafts store. I saw the show with my wife, who’s a graphic designer, and she thought the aesthetic would translate nicely into her professional vernacular. Should they want it, Burns, Hochbaum, and Lindquist have a future in design.
