Mona Hatoum
By Fred Camper
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Much has been made of Hatoum’s double displacement–displaced by her Lebanese birth, she found herself in London in 1975 at the start of Lebanon’s long civil war, unable to return. And indeed her work has an odd rootlessness; when it refers to place at all, something still seems out of place. The 36 pieces in the MCA exhibition are mostly sculptures and installations, though Hatoum began by doing performances and making videos; the photograph Performance Still in this show documents a 1985 event in which she walked barefoot through the streets of Brixton, a West Indian neighborhood of London. Tied to her ankles are a pair of Doc Martens; since these are the boots the British police wear, we see the feet of the victim and of the attacker at once. One element that separates Hatoum’s works from one-dimensional political art, as Dan Cameron points out in his insightful catalog essay, is the way they vibrate between “the source of oppression and our subjective experience of it.”
Many of Hatoum’s pieces seem to be saying that our culture threatens the individual. Even her rugs can seem malevolent. The black Pin Carpet at first looks inviting, a thick, cushy surface to sink into. Then one realizes it’s made entirely of upright pins. The surface of Entrails Carpet is filled with rubber intestinelike shapes curling about. A carpet–meant to shield the eyes and feet from the rough surface of a floor–here becomes something much rougher, suggesting the insides not of one but of many bodies.
Jason Zadak’s 12 pieces at Better Weimaraner reveal a similar recursive quality. We know painting is the principal target for his jokes because of The Board, a canvas spray painted black on which the artist has written 57 times in chalk “I will not paint on canvas.” His Title shows solid black letters, on an ironically thick, painterly white surface, that seem to magnify the typewritten text one would find in a museum wall label: “Jason Zadak, American, 1972-…” If these works resemble the one-liners that infest so much art today, most of his other pieces are richer: his playful digs at art take painting so literally it’s made to seem absurd.
This clever joke works because the paintings themselves are so sterile–colors devoid of life, water devoid of movement. My mind turned to another seascape, Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee. Delacroix’s brush expresses both his own vision and the emotions inherent in the scene; his painting reveals its own artifice yet creates a roiled sea whose motion is far more complex and far-reaching than Zadak’s picture-in-picture cakewalk.
