Dysfunctional Home
Robert Wilson: The Theater of Drawing
Messiness is at play in Jane Benson’s three witty dust pieces (one titled Under the Chair Dust). She’s painted dust bunnies with white enamel in some 50 layers, which partly preserves and partly obliterates the texture of the dust: the glossy, reflective enamel recalls those perfect TV-kitchen surfaces, but makes a witty joke on the impossibility of perfect cleanliness.
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Another group of works comments with equal wit on the idea of display, of the home not as a refuge but as an object to show off. Frances Myers in Best China mounts two porcelain plates side by side on a wall, one printed with the word “Best,” the other with “China,” effectively ridiculing those people interested in objects not because they’re beautiful or useful but because they announce the owner’s wealth. Paul Sacaridiz’s Ornament is a huge triptych, three white plaster blocks showing fruit in relief: in the manner of a trompe l’oeil painting come to life, grapes, bananas, and pineapples stick out of these large white slabs. Of course, in interior decorating schemes bowls of actual fruit are meant to convey bounty, but Sacaridiz undercuts that effect by leaving his surfaces white. Tonya Hart’s Vanity offers a witty comment on another kind of excess: her oversize shelf in front of a huge mirror is cluttered with containers of colored liquid, apparently perfume and cosmetics but, as I learned from the gallery director, actually different types of liquor.
I asked Molloy, who lives in Atlanta but was born in Vermont in 1970 and raised there, about my perception, and she confirmed that this body of work does have trauma as a subject–not from her childhood, which she describes as “idyllic,” but rather from a fatal car crash a few years ago. She wouldn’t tell me anything except that she wasn’t involved in the crash, saying she wanted to “leave the work more open so that people can project their own experiences” onto it. But one smaller piece here, Raw Gasoline and Other Memories, includes part of what appears to be a newspaper report on a rollover crash that killed two in Vermont.
A similar mix of emotional suggestiveness and cool formal control marks two sets of chairs designed by director Robert Wilson for his productions, part of a small exhibition of Wilson’s notebooks, drawings, and other objects at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Stalin Chairs are based on chairs Wilson designed for his 1973 The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin. These, however, are covered with lead: their surfaces look like slipcovers, complete with fabriclike creases and folds, but assert the heavy physicality of metal. “Dysfunctional” in the sense that lead is toxic, these two rounded shapes nonetheless suggest real chairs. I’ve rarely seen a sculptural object express contradictions so well: they’re both human and antihuman, squat and vertical (because of the drapery folds), heavy and light. Weaving together such contradictions, these objects unite rather than separate emotional expression and formal elegance.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Best China” by Frances Myers; “queen Victoria Chairs” by Robert Wilson; “The Chinse Fire Drill” by Traci Molloy.
