Along the Blurry Line Between Blotto and Buzzed
An installation view of "Drunk vs. Stoned 2," the sequel to a spring show.
"Drunk vs. Stoned 2," an ambitious if understandably discombobulated group show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, cuts to the chase in terms of artistic dualities. Expressionist versus realist? Neo-figurative versus abstract? They're so 20th century.
Fittingly perhaps, the opposition that counts here is less about style than about lifestyle, based on an artist's preferred shortcut to artistic transcendence. And what could be handier? Drunk versus stoned is a distinction familiar to many people, often from direct experience.
Perhaps most important, the appearances and visual effects of artworks themselves can be loosely categorized as either drunk (delirious, openly emotional, robustly physical) or stoned (mesmerizing, becalmed, obsessively repetitious). Abstract Expressionism is drunk art; Pop Art and Minimalism are stoned.
Like the original "Drunk vs. Stoned," staged by this gallery last spring, the sequel has been instigated by the founders of General Store, a freewheeling art gallery in Milwaukee: the artist-brothers Scott Reeder and Tyson Reeder, and Elysia Borowy-Reeder, Scott Reeder's wife, who is now a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. They collaborated with Gavin Brown and his gallery director, Corinna Durland. As before, there is an intermittently operative bar, this one ensconced in a marvelous replica of a rustic Western saloon, courtesy of the Reeder brothers.
The show's 39 works, which include film and video, interact in different ways with the framing duality. Some conform neatly to one side or the other, often by concentrating on the different physical effects of indulgence. "Stoned Robot" and "Drunk Robot," light-blue, nearly life-size sculptures by Scott Reeder and Donald Morgan, capture the body language of zoned out and falling-down drunk with boxy accuracy.
The noted drinker Martin Kippenberger, no longer with us, is represented by photographs of himself seemingly under the influence. Rebecca Warren's ceramic sculpture suggests a large, wobbly martini glass and even has a red nose; a photograph by Sarah Lucas shows an empty wine bottle sprouting the letters of her name like a bouquet.
Edgar Bryan's "Touched" depicts a pale Chaplinesque young man staring fixedly at some flowers. "Bong Island Butterfly Lamp," by Abel McHone, incorporates, in miniature, the ideal apparatus and locale for getting stoned and even a suitable object of the ultra-focused (stoned) gaze: a spiraling flock of fake butterflies. The personal wear and tear of alcohol is alluded to in Anne Collier's "Spill," a photograph of a neat row of LP's, the first one titled the Pet Shop Boys' "You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You're Drunk." Next to it, Robert Crumb counters with a drawing of a belligerent woman titled "I Suppose You Think I've Had Too Much to Drink."
Other works pull back even further to take in contrasting subcultures and, by extension, social classes. Chris Johanson's "Contemporary Cosmopolitan Painting" is a two-dimensional assemblage in which two disheveled young men partake of cocaine in a fancy apartment, or perhaps the back room of an art gallery. The preoccupations of a seemingly Southern, white-trash milieu are conjured up by one of the pyramids of lewdly customized beer cans that brought the 1980's art team Pruitt & Early their moment of notoriety. (Today, it's unrepentant machismo relates to the politically incorrect work of the 1990's by artists like Kara Walker and Sue Williams.)
The cultures clash symbolically in Richard Prince's photomontage of images of a love-in and a biker rally, and abstractly in Mary Heilmann's brightly colored "Seeing Things," which is half orderly grid, half phantasmagoric splat. They clash literally on a T-shirt hanging in the saloon that spells out "Brüskie Killed Stoney" in homey cutout letters commemorating an actual event.
The duality becomes symbolic again in Mike Kelley's "Better Than Nauman," a 2004 video installation in the gallery's old space, Passerby; it constitutes drunken subject matter in stoner form, although seating would help the latter. It consists of "Stepfather 3: Father's Day," an execrable horror film, projected simultaneously on four walls.
Peaceful coexistence prevails in "Pull," an enigmatic, slightly kinetic sculpture by Evan Holloway involving a rolled dollar bill, a stone, a flushed human face and a pig's foot (traditionally consumed with a bottle of beer). The piece exemplifies Mr. Holloway's customary sparseness; it might have been extracted from Giacometti's "Palace at 4 A.M." and resonates here with Franz West's "High," a shard of pink papier-mâché held aloft by a single wire.
The show acknowledges some of the history of substance use or abuse in art, with one of Henri Michaux's mescaline-engendered drawings from the 1960's and a 1960 red-on-black web painting by Yayoi Kusama, which could have been made while on acid. Bruce Conner, whose obsessive noodling drawings from the 1960's are among the fountainheads of stoned art, is represented by a collage of photographs of punk musicians, blurred by a sheet of plastic: drunken behavior viewed through stoned eyes. The tradition of noodling drawing is continued in the collective Dearraindrop's large black-and-white drawing, which suggests a full-disclosure exquisite corpse drawing.
The show introduces the stridently sexy faux album covers from 1987 by Pedro Bell, a designer of real album covers, and includes Monique Prieto's uncharacteristically dense non-abstract little painting of Stonehenge-like (get it?) letters that spell the phrase "Myself Humming to Myself." It also highlights the libidinal garrulousness shared by Mr. Crumb's and Paul Noble's obsessive, exacting cartoon styles, which may or may not hail from opposite sides of the drunk-stoned divide.
And certain works are simply pressed into service. Charles Ray's brilliant 1996 film, "Fashions," is recast in the light of stoned concentration. It consists of a fixed-camera view of the artist Frances Stark standing on a low, cunningly contrived revolving pedestal, changing from one precariously handmade garment to another, seemingly without moving. It can make you dizzy.
Occasionally a piece seems to combine the effects of being both drunk and stoned. One of the show's most intriguing works is Thomas Bayrle's "Autobahn Kopf" ("Autobahn Head"), a short animated film centering on a violently jerking, bodiless head that seems wrapped in spliced-together shots of cars speeding along a German superhighway. Mr. Bayrle might have done more with this motif, but the suggestion of a test-crash dummy that has consciousness, and possibly a brain crawling with ants, is memorable.
August 26, 2005