Attributed to: Anomalous
By Fred Camper
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The rather unpleasant meaning is obvious, though gallery director Jason Zadak assured me the smears are only paint. (“I was worried about taking it in my car,” he said.) This extreme example of the “look at me” trend, like most of the best work in this mode, soon suggests its opposite. The heavy diet carefully recorded almost shouts its defiance of the prevailing dietary puritanism; the smears exaggerate that defiance to the point of absurdity. Though the artist remains anonymous, this seems the work of the kid who fears he or she will always be unpopular, puts his or her nose in the air, and shuns everyone. The artist had to know that some people would be put off by this work but made it anyway.
Five works by the same artist–Zadak confirms this much–are the only pieces here to emotionally evoke anonymity and loss. Four of them are paintings hung side by side, with slightly varying titles: one is Now for Something Completely Different, while the others replace the word “completely” with “entirely,” “totally,” or “wholly.” But the works themselves are almost identical: all are cool, detached, mostly blue abstractions with messy brushwork. The small differences between them seem random and unimportant in this mildly humorous attack on the idea of originality in art, especially art in abstraction’s “heroic” branch. A thin slice of apple in the lower right corner of each painting functions as the artist’s signature–an approach not unlike the stamps that Chinese artists once used to sign their work. But by using apple slices, this artist subjects his or her own signature to decay.
Welsh’s video, Expecting to Fly, combines a sound track of the old Neil Young song of the same title with footage from a Bruce Lee movie and abstract footage from a New Age hypnosis tape. It’s hard to imagine a combination less promising, but after I watched it a few times the elements began to fit together and to seem emotionally resonant. Abstract moving circles turn into Bruce Lee leaping through space and turn back again; the song opens optimistically with “There you stood on the edge of your feather / Expecting to fly.” Lee’s free movements through space seem to parallel the tape’s weightless, hypnotic abstractions–some sort of ascent seems the goal. But soon Bruce looks pained and begins to break glass in a rapid montage, and Young sings, “I tried so hard to stand / As I stumbled and fell to the ground.” Meanwhile the circles turn into rotating ovals, whose goofy patterns of movement look ridiculous. These cultural artifacts may suggest that you can be anything you want to be, but they come together finally in a depiction of failure. The advertised freedoms don’t materialize, and the individual who wants to become something else winds up with nothing: the tape ends with an empty circle frozen against darkness.
