Art Issues, Summer 2000
San Francisco e-mail/Monday April 3, 00
01:15:33
Lauren Davies at Gallery 16, 9 March – 4 April
From Mark Van Proyen
Now that springtime is bringing us some much-needed pleasant weather, we can take note of a romance in the air – the romance of the hardware store. Early tax refunds combined with spring cleaning make hardware stores pretty busy places these days, and this is borne out by the burgeoning array of new and bizarre products appearing chockablock on display shelves. A cursory glance would suggest that the American cult of pragmatic self-improvement is alive and well, but this is belied by closer inspection. Hardware stores are no longer content simply to sell widgets, fasteners, and wall paint; instead, they are veritable cornucopias offering the tools and materials for a strange new activity that I term “parafabrication” – an improbable postmodern hybrid of the act of acquiring something that is pre-constructed, conjoined with the ancient task of actually building something from what was once called “scratch."
Lauren Davies’ new sculpture draws upon the will to formal hyper-elaboration that we associate with the work of Funk sculptors like Jeremy Anderson and Robert Hudson, but it also reaches a coherence that is more explicitly related to the self-consciousness associated with performance art. A description of her project sounds almost as amusing as it actually looks; to mimic, in step-by-step fashion, the procedures detailed in an old taxidermist’s handbook, substituting common craft materials for the deceased animals that constitute the taxidermist’s morbid stock-in-trade.
Each of Davies’ finished works look decidedly unfinished, as if the implied artist/taxidermist were suddenly called away from his or her creation of a Frankenstein equivalent of display wildlife (wildlife morte, no less!), abandoning the project midstream because of the repeated failures to reanimate dead matter into a sufficiently persuasive illusion to real life. In this, one may detect a kind of implied allegory for the triumphs and disappointments of the artistic aspiration to create eventful objects (or objectifiable events), even as the art reveals a remarkable material and formal inventiveness.
If Davies’ poorly simulated illusion of the “real” life of squirrels and rattlesnakes is hopelessly skewed via its recasting with “funky” materials (pace Joan Brown’s legendary Fur Rat of 1962), her work’s ability to create a compelling allusion to various animal forms reveals a remarkable sleight-of-hand, as it deploys unpredictable material equivalencies for recognizable points of anatomy. This interpretation is encouraged by the accompanying inclusion of photographs and diagrams from the taxidermist’s handbook, which illustrates the specific animal that a given set of sculptural procedures seeks to mimic.
Mark Van Proyen is an artist and art critic who is Associate Professor of Art History, Painting and Digital Imagining at the San Francisco Art Institute. His San Francisco e-mail appears regularly in Art Issues