Overwhelmed

In an exhibition at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, “Speed & Chaos: Into the Future of Asian Art,” which closed in mid-February, Junebum Park showed a video titled Hypermarket 4 (2008). It opens with a plain, static mid-distance shot of the facade of a large, restored, but still relatively dull and conventionally historicist building in Berlin—the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art—with a curving driveway circumscribing a grassy circle and curb. Then the artist’s hands and forearms appear, as big as the building, at either side. Ah! We’re looking—probably down—at a photograph or a digital grab. The hands go to work in speeded-up motion, applying photo-collage elements of commercial signage and other geegaws, and then they disappear for a moment, so that we can gauge the morphing. First, the building becomes a Lindner-chain hotel, the Hotel Berlin. Stores (Jopp, Kamps, Bauhaus, even a little porno parlor) open up, awnings appear, commercial vans pull in and park, and the H&M and Mercedes-Benz logos rise atop the museum-cum-hotel’s two towers. In 6 minutes and 20 seconds, this austere public museum of modern art is transformed into a retail free-for-all. 

At first, Hypermarket 4 seems a little didactic, obvious, and it’s not unlike those precisely illustrated children’s books in which a street corner or a small town is altered over the years. But what makes the video so ultimately disturbing is its visual reasonableness: everything the artist slaps onto the building seems to fit so nicely that we shrug and think, “Why not?” Junebum Park isn’t overwhelmed by the hypothetical commercial defacing of a venerable public building, but in being able to distill the horror of it, he beautifully conveys the idea that we should be.

William Daniels, who used to paint trompe-l’oeil oils of cardboard collages that imperfectly replicate old master paintings (he made the collages himself, then threw them away), now paints small, equally “realistic” pictures of silver foil maquettes that are so elaborately lighted and tightly cropped that they’re functionally abstract. At first glance, the off-square paintings—not much over a foot on a side and rather over-preciously distributed, one or two to a big white wall, in his most recent show at Luhring Augustine—look like Richard Pettibone miniatures of mid-1970s de Koonings. Upon further review, however, Daniels’s paintings reveal what they really are: receptacles of myriad visual signals from the always inchoate, frequently maddening, world around us. Daniels plays an intriguing double game, though: his wrinkled silver foil thingies are obvious metaphors for us—receiving the signals but not able to make anything coherent out of them. Only when the painter paints “illusions” of the silver foil does the world make any sense. At that, it’s only a provisional sense, which toggles between figuration and abstraction and back again, depending on how far away we are and how attentively we look.

Daniels makes us work harder to “get it” than does Junebum Park, but that difference may lie in the difference between painting and video. The former is inherently untrustworthy, and the latter retains the residue of a presupposition of documentary authority. But both artists manage to absorb the jumbled excess of postmodern life and channel it into rigorously intelligible art. Encountering a work or two such as theirs during a round of the galleries is what prevents a critic from feeling, if you will, overwhelmed.

Photo: William Daniels: Untitled, 2009, oil on board, 113⁄8 by 105⁄8 inches. Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York; Vilma Gold, London; and Marc Foxx, Los Angeles.