I know you’re not supposed to touch the art in galleries, but during the opening at Wendy Cooper last Friday night I couldn’t help myself. Standing in front of an electric high chair that was, believe it or not, plugged into the wall, I just had to see if it worked. I touched a metal ring inside the headpiece with one hand and a U-shaped contact at the left ankle with the other and winced, waiting for the zap. Thankfully nothing happened.
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Noelle Mason built the child-size model of Old Sparky, Florida’s retired electric chair, which was notorious for botching executions. (In two cases there were reports of flames shooting out of convicts’ heads.) She told me it was a comment on the Puritan idea that anyone, even a child, can be irredeemably evil, literally possessed by the devil. Behind the chair were two gigantic black-and-white paintings of the mug shots of Betty Lou Beets and Karla Faye Tucker, the last two women executed in Texas. “They’re the archetypes of feared women,” Mason told me. Beets was a “black widow” who killed her fourth and fifth husbands; Tucker used a pickax to kill a woman her best friend’s husband was sleeping with (meanwhile Tucker’s boyfriend killed the cheater). Mason painted them in an almost dreamy manner, which didn’t romanticize them so much as show their softness, a reminder that they were human beings.
looking black woman on Lake Street. I guess this is what the gallery meant when it said in the PR materials that the show would include “sophisticated artworks that examine contemporary issues including: race, class environmental issues, consumption, the violence of environmental waste, depression, mortality, institutional control, gender roles, death, ritual, loss, grief, denial, mathematics nuclear technology and the cannon [sic] of art history.” Ho hum: that’s what the 90s were for.
Then I wondered if I was the cynical one. What if the poor guy was just being sentimental? Thinking too much leads to the disintegration of faith.
Halfway through the book I was convinced of Miller’s genius. He points out the nihilism and passive-aggressive self-pity in human emotions and gets you to wallow in the worst aspects of being privileged but still having feelings too. And then you get to pop that bubble in the most detached, I-don’t-fucking-care manner: eventually you turn the page.
