Catherine Osborne just posted a nice piece on Eddo Stern's show at AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario). She's into the work, but not so keen on the sculptures, and I agree that of his ouevre to date, they are also my least favourite pieces. However they functioned quite differently in the context of this exhibition than when I saw them at Postmasters. At AGO, Stern's art is all together in one room. This is a bit distracting, but in other ways cramming the sculptures up against the videos is good for both bodies of work. The didacticism of the videos plays off against the nerdy medieval festish humour of the sculptures, connecting one kind of harmless recreation (ie: dressing up like knights and elves and throwing tinfoil balls around in the woods) with another (playing video games in which you re-live the brotherhood-and-lightning-reflexes-and-suchlike-juicey-tropes of Vietnam and other fun wars). Both together make a tidy picture of a violent culture that just so happens to be killing and torturing a lot of people in the middle east. There are sublteties to this work that are a bit obscured in this noisey installation, but I don't think contemporary events are really calling for nuance right now.
There is a new sculpture, two Hulk-like fists of beige, pseudo-stone pounding a keyboard, shooting off red, white and blue stars on a monitor, and playing bellicose favourites such as Queen's "We are the Champions." I'm guessing it reads as subversive in the states, whereas here it falls a little flat as over-obvious humour. It's silly but kind of satisfying nonetheless. The new video is more troublesome and more interesting. It's a montage of internet Flash games in which you kill (mutilate, humiliate, and sexually violate) Osama Bin Laden; cropped so the gory pixelated details are blown up huge. This all to tunes from big Jesus movies like Last Temptation of Christ and Passion. Normally I think I'd find this all a bit heavy-handed. Right now, however, when war fetish and violence are anything but abstract, driving home the political points in a major art museum feels appropriate to me (as the Whitney Biennial, with its pretty pastels and tender touches did not). I've heard Eddo talk in public
twice, and he's ambitious, earnest and smart about the implications and narratives of technology. "Vietnam Romance" is still one of my favourite artworks, and I'm very curious about the ongoing game development and community hub activities of C-Level in LA. For more writing on C-Level, see Tom Moody's review of the Waco game .
Note: Mark Allen of C-Level is no longer working on the Waco game, but he's started a gallery called machine project. The current show is Jessica Z Hutchins, also a C-Level member, artist and writer. She came to Toronto for Eddo Stern's AGO opening, and meeting her was, for me, a high point of the evening. Her new book, Pastoral, is available online here.
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