Darkness Ascends
"Darkness Ascends" by Ashley Johnson, Winter 2006, pp. 83-84
Evil is a very culture-specific term, and this exhibition ripped into it with canine glee. David Liss, its curator, assembled a veritable phalanx of cultural producers that included Henry B. Benvenuti, Peter Beste, Paul Booth, Robert Boyd, Shary Boyle, Mat Brown, Joe Coleman, Andrea Cooper, François Escalmel, André Ethier, Janieta Eyre, FameFame, Neil Farber, Anthony Goicolea, Sherri Hay, Jay Isaac, Brad Phillips, Ixone Sádaba, Carlos and Jason Sanchez, John Scott, Seth Scriver and Chris Martin, Fiona Smyth, Richard Stipl, sunn o))) and Scott Treleaven. As if this was not enough, the main event was supported by “Sideshow,” a display revolving around a trio of street and tattoo artists.
The sheer weight of numbers combined with an even weightier agenda of exploring “the internal and exterior conditions, the tensions and anxieties particular to our current era” created a sinkhole of booming comical hilarity.
There are really two discordant agendas at play in the exhibition, which succeeds in being egalitarian, welcoming youth culture’s comic arts, music and activities like tattooing. However, this process also accepts a fashionable juvenile state of mind; so the exhibition’s vision of evil is only skin deep.
Murder and mayhem abound as the blood oozes. Several works venerate Satan or warlocks like Aleister Crowley, yet none of the artists really address evil: it’s all in the horror-movie section at Blockbuster. The binary Christian God/Satan experience marks the show’s imaginative border, with no pioneers even exploring this limited frontier. In my homeland, South Africa, infants are raped or have their genitals ripped off for muti (potions) and it has nothing to do with Satan.
Janieta Eyre’s beautiful photograph After He Left, which features a pregnant woman sitting on the edge of a bed and gazing down at a piglet that presumably has just been birthed (by her?), brings to mind a societal attitude towards animals that is abysmal, to say the least. At present, transgenic pig organs are being grafted onto host baboons in a vain attempt to remedy the organ-donor shortage. Baboons are classified as vermin in some countries, so laboratories can use them at will. Is this evil?
Richard Stipl’s Block Sabbath is comical. The orgiastic enthusiasm with which his figurines engage in their fetid butcher-block fantasies is tempered by the number of flaccid fellows standing around. Surely somebody should have an erection! Perhaps this reticence reflects an underlying concern not to offend.
Despite an overwhelming deluge of trivia, there were some powerful and interesting works. If one ignored the rhetoric and often indifferent installation and just enjoyed the show, it was a rollicking good Halloween party. Anthony Goicolea’s video Nail Biter was the most gripping psychologically, but there were many other great works. Peter Beste’s images of a Norwegian black-metal group dedicated to eradicating Christianity in Norway were intriguing. Sherri Hay’s crystal balls containing disaster scenes added a neat twist to the hurricane experience while the Sanchez brothers make beautifully melodramatic images of concocted scenarios. Seth Scriver and Chris Martin’s Wrong Side of the Skull Cave was a psychedelic delight.
One should laud David Liss and MOCCA for attempting to take on a social theme like this; the exhibition remained entertaining, if not entirely successful. Very few galleries are brave enough to take the risk.
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