Fake Stamps and Other Mischievous Behaviors: Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson
at Morlen Sinoway, through April 2
For several years now Chicago artists Michael Thompson and Michael Hernandez de Luna have been making fake stamps with a computer and laser printer or color copier. Like my rendering of Ho Chi Minh, their subjects often offer mischievous alternatives to typical commemorative stamps: a sheet of bare-breasts stamps, for instance, and another showing a postal worker with a rifle captioned “Disgruntled Postal Employee/Handle With Care.” They aren’t the first artists to make their own stamps–20 or 30 years ago Donald Evans drew fantasy stamps, and Fluxus artist Robert Watts actually printed fake stamps suggesting that Fluxus was a country. Doubtless Thompson and Hernandez de Luna aren’t even the first people to do it as a joke; if I thought of it on my own in the 60s, surely others preceded me.
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I can’t say I’m completely sorry about this: their attempts to use the stamps as postage are rather troubling, garnering press but at the risk of making the duo seem mostly provocateurs. Seeing sheets of stamps displayed together with a successfully canceled envelope gives the work a sensational bad-boy quality that’s less sophisticated than the art itself. At first glance Thompson seems to choose subjects that are merely as irritating as possible to the country whose stamps he’s imitating, while Hernandez de Luna uses erotic and excretory imagery seemingly designed to tweak conservative sensibilities rather than actually say something.
What makes these stamps work as parody is that they’re so simple and factual. Thompson’s characterization of Rostenkowski doesn’t exaggerate at all. And he relies on simple facts to spoof stamps that celebrate food products (one actual U.S. commemorative celebrated sheep): he designed a British stamp with a profile of a headless cow captioned “Mad Cow,” and a Japanese stamp with a whale and the caption “Eat Whale,” referring to Japanese insistence on “harvesting” whales despite an international ban.
Mower’s Coconut Wall consists of alternating vertical stripes of coconut flakes and marshmallow flattened on a wall and even spreading out on the floor below. This is doubly transgressive–a giant Barnett Newman or Gene Davis “stripe” painting made of kitschy foodstuffs that seem to have been gooped on the wall so thickly they’re dripping off. Mower also gives us the sculptural equivalent of Hernandez de Luna’s urination stamp: in Fountain, a supine boy appears to urinate into his own mouth. The bright colors and the boy’s blank expression evoke the cartoon world of Hernandez de Luna’s Mickey and Minnie stamp; though hand modeled in different colors of Sculpey, a medium that hardens on baking, the piece has the look of a mass-manufactured object. In this clever, kinky twist on Duchamp’s most famous readymade, a urinal of the same title, Mower reminds us of the everyday things usually left unrendered.
