Barbara Koenen: Buddha at the Hot Dog Stand
Some observers, myself included, routinely complain about the one-liner form of current art–jokes you get in an instant but that are presented with little craft. Barbara Koenen’s elegantly made works on paper, “Buddha at the Hot Dog Stand,” at first seem part of this vein. But ultimately her show goes beyond, and even inverts, the one-liner on which it’s based.
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Each of Koenen’s 36 works, mounted in a six-by-six grid in Ten in One’s back room, is decorated–and that is the right word–with dots, most often in irregular grids but sometimes in clusters resembling nebulae and galaxies. The materials vary from one picture to the next, often wildly so. Dots made of sand lead to clusters of poppy seeds, which lead to a grid of grommets. Circles drawn with pencil are adjacent to a grid of differently colored sesame seeds (raw or roasted in different ways, Koenen told me), which leads to a grid of small burn holes called Fire. Just below this is a grid of rainbow-colored candies, which Koenen removed from their original strip of paper and remounted on a wider one.
But nothing Koenen told me predicted what I liked most about her installation: the way it reverses the meaning of its eponymous joke. Part of its humor, of course, is that the Buddhist practices involved in becoming “one with everything” are typically vegetarian, monastic, and self-abnegating–the very opposite of the lifestyle implied by a dog with everything, pickles, ketchup, mustard, onions, relish, and whatever goes into the sausage. Yet the latter approach is what seems to inform Koenen’s combination of pictures and objects, galaxies and grommets, candies and holes.
