Reviews

Untitled (Gollum), performance, plastic boulder, coffee-dyed loin cloth, mask, Hue LED light, rocks, running water, dead fish, 2014

It’s cold, but I’m not surprised to see Dolly Parton, a young and rebellious Sinead O’Connor, a resurrected Freddie Mercury, and even Cicciolina hanging out in the menacingly bright, ultra­high definition gallery where I was painfully, anxiously aware of Gollum’s presence beneath me. We were just learning to be worried about Ebola. ISIS had just killed 150 people in Iraq. Kurdish forces arrived in Kobani, and the FBI was seeking, is still seeking, broad expansion of its hacking powers. And none of us could have imagined what, in a few weeks, would expose the murderous racism of which our criminal justice system is capable. It’s Halloween and the abstract machine is whirring away around us.  Because all of these things are happening, Puppies Puppies is somewhere in a dark basement, in this art desert we call Chicago, pretending to be Gollum.

I walk in to the gallery I have seen a thousand times to see it’s been more terrorized than deconstructed. The bathroom has been gutted and its insides lay splattered about the gallery. But it’s less like Silent Hill than it is like Patrick Bateman’s morning routine in American Psycho; hauntingly sterile, precise, obsessive. It had to have been Gollum that tore down these walls, displaced the bathroom fixtures, and pounded a hole in the floor.  In the basement the lighting, the rocky ground cover, the ambient humidity are all controlled. No attention to detail has been spared upstairs or down.  Is this precision a pathos of things, or could it be that all seeing gaze of The Great Eye/Big Brother?

Untitled (Skeleton), bathroom drywall removal, 2014

Untitled (Skeleton), bathroom drywall removal, 2014

In a world of growing identitarian radicalism, violent and stateless casino capitalism, and piercing global panopticism the bathroom may be privacy’s last imaginary sanctuary. This bathroom is a giant perverse skeleton memorializing the loss of privacy.  Me, wine in hand, hanging off it like a drunk monkey.  Are we profane monkeys who turn memorials into playgrounds, split between our desire to be Galadriel and our desire to play with our own feces? Instead of bugs we eat each others neuroses and anxieties because it’s hard to stay clean in the wild, especially when everyone is watching.  In this case it could also be Gollum who is watching me through the peephole on the bathrooms floor, right next to the toilet.  Or am I Gollum watching myself deciding whether or not to urinate in the middle of a gallery?  If that’s true then my split personality has a split personality, an idea I find compelling and maybe apt to describe the cultural situation at large.

puppiespuppies_install_019

In a world of growing identitarian radicalism, violent and stateless casino capitalism, and piercing global panopticism the bathroom may be privacy’s last imaginary sanctuary. This bathroom is a giant perverse skeleton memorializing the loss of privacy.  Me, wine in hand, hanging off it like a drunk monkey.  Are we profane monkeys who turn memorials into playgrounds, split between our desire to be Galadriel and our desire to play with our own feces? Instead of bugs we eat each others neuroses and anxieties because it’s hard to stay clean in the wild, especially when everyone is watching.  In this case it could also be Gollum who is watching me through the peephole on the bathrooms floor, right next to the toilet.  Or am I Gollum watching myself deciding whether or not to urinate in the middle of a gallery?  If that’s true then my split personality has a split personality, an idea I find compelling and maybe apt to describe the cultural situation at large.

Puppies Puppies Bathroom and Gollum, October 31st – December 14, 2014 at Courtney Blades, 1324 W Grand Ave.  http://courtneyblades.com