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I created a slide show called the "New Jersey Wasteland Tour" that I hope you'll check out here. I took the pics with a digital camera (and later wrote accompanying blurbs) in a panic that the little "zone of rot" I frequently walk through was about to be fixed up by the city and/or state. The emphasis here is on Decrepitude and Folly, but I also find this area (between Jersey City and Liberty State Park) to be sort of beautiful. I've got shots of the Morris Canal at its toxic/fecal best, the Statue of Liberty from the viewpoint of a "Hazardous Materials Area," and some belated documentation of the parking lot that was hastily put in and removed in the patronage free-for-all that followed 9/11.
For my New Year's resolution, I promise this year to be nicer and more temperate politically in my posts.
NOT.
I mean, how about that twisted, Nixon-era relic Donald Rumsfeld, boasting that the U.S. can fight two wars simultaneously, neither of which has anything to do with bagging the Twin Towers murderers? We wouldn't be talking about any wars if the administration was halfway competent. The "axis of evil" rhetoric is what got us to this point with Korea, and Iraq is another fight we're picking.
One of the secretaries where I work said that when Rumsfeld was on TV during the Afghanistan bombing, a lot of women thought he was "hot." Sorry to be patronizing here, but c'mon, ladies! Is it that he's a confident Daddy figure, or is it the edge of violence that makes him so attractive? I mean, grow up.
Eric Heist has street cred to spare as a guiding force (with Laura Parnes) behind the Brooklyn nonprofit Momenta Art, consistently one of the best and smartest of the Williamsburg spaces. That rep climbed a few more notches last year when he collaborated with musician/poet/shaman/malevolent pixie Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV fame (as a TG fan from way back, I admit I was jealous). The pair did a 2-person show at Team Gallery in Manhattan, a kind of punk/psychedelic boutique entered through a womblike tunnel. It was a bit too DIY for my taste--more like a Happening set than a stand-alone exhibit, but then I missed the packed opening, so I really didn't get the full flavor of the event.
The new work in Heist's studio continues some of the themes of the Team show (and an earlier solo at Feed): an interest in crawlspaces and secret chambers, the street agitprop of band posters and handbills, and a Heist specialty, an obsession with the trimmings of multinational capitalism. When I visited, we looked at three installations, all incorporating fixtures from the modern office suite, heavy on the black formica. The first is a reception desk, of the type used by art galleries (including Momenta) to keep employees discreetly hidden from view. On the wall behind this structure framed prints depict business suited executives shaking hands and giving meetings--real annual report stuff, only done in garish black light colors with cheesy flocked surfaces. What's most noteworthy about the piece, though, is that down where the receptionist's legs would be, the formica has been replaced by a large cardboard box, with ratty blankets lining the bottom. Maybe you have a co-worker that likes to curl up under a desk and nap during "down time" ( I know I do), and this would be the perfect place, except it looks vaguely unsanitary.
The piece (and another one like it, resembling a corporate boardroom table, which may or may not end up including some porno in the box) is an oxymoron, a big exquisite corpse, grafting together sleek office fixtures with the repressed Other of makeshift homeless shelters. Somehow all this avoids being didactic, though. Perhaps because it appeals to the child in all of us who remembers playing in cardboard tunnels. William Gibson also exploits this nostalgic feeling in his last novel All Tomorrow's Parties, which has several characters living in boxes in a Japanese train station. There is a tension in both cases between bourgeois fantasies of escape into a "romantic" lower class world and the very real fear of it happening involuntarily in the Bush Economy.
Continuing the "invisible office" theme were some really nice muted pencil drawings depicting janitorial cleaning equipment in lonely corporate hallways, and a sculpture of a custodian's door, which opens incongruously onto a disco diorama. The latter piece also holds out some suggestion of escape, this time into a world of coked-up sensuality, but it's really only exchanging one kind of regulated, commodified activity for another. (But what lies beyond the disco?) Through his use of the boxes-within-boxes motif, Heist's work is ultimately about the impossibility of escape: even we gallerygoers, hoping to use art as a refuge from the micromanaged environments where most of us spend our time, aren't going anywhere--until we wake up one morning in that cardboard box.