'Public Selves Gone Stealth':
"Nirvana: Capitalism and the Consumed Image" at CoCA

by Laura Lee Bennett
Free Press Contributor


October 11 - December 7, 1996

Center on Contemporary Art,
65 Cedar Street, Seattle

11-6:00 PM Tues-Sat, 10-4 PM Sun
$2; CoCA members free
For More Information: 728-1980


Consider laying a tape measure across a table's smooth hard surface. As soon as you attempt to measure a thing, you change it-you scatter and alter its molecular mass. This is a law of physics. Similarly, once an event takes place, any record, reference, or memory of that event takes on a life of its own. It is nearly impossible to preserve events or images in memory without "mediating" them; it is a natural (human) phenomenon.

Add to this natural human tendency the media's manipulation of images- television, music videos, advertising, the internet-and you have what '60s Situationist and avant-garde filmmaker Guy Debord called the "society of the spectacle," where "everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation." What is real has been irrevocably changed, altered, by "an immense accumulation of spectacles." We have become passive consumers of images, memories, and experiences. Once we lived life; now we watch it. We are the cult of personality, but "personality" is not earned. We are in love with the mediated image; we are William Burrough's "nation of junkies," addicted not to product, but to byproduct (the image of the product). The irony is that we are not islands, either; MTV and the internet have guaranteed our shared (if unilateral) isolation.
These are some of the ideas put forth in CoCA's Fall show, "Nirvana: Capitalism and the Consumed Image." Co-curated by CoCA director Susie Purves and acting director Brad Thompson, "Nirvana" began with a conversation on memory back in the Spring of '95. Thompson remarks that the show is something of a parable on the history of modern Seattle and this city's hyped "livability": Over 100,000 people have moved here drawn by images in a magazine. (The word "Nirvana" refers to both its original meaning-a place or state of oblivion to care, pain, desire, or external reality-and the name of the band that made Seattle grunge rock's musical mecca.)
Thirteen artists from around the country and from Washington state participate in this "conversation," in works ranging from video to installation to the more traditional, "static" wall art. They take elements of our culture - the Joe Camel character, a presidential debate, a racecar, a porntalk commercial, or a chunk of freeway-and "subvert" these images to illustrate our (obvious) plight.
In 1996, '50s and '60s sitcoms like I Love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, and The Beverly Hillbillies-even the ubiquitous Perry Mason-drench the TV viewer with nostalgia. Tennessee-born LA artist Mark Bennett's lithographed blueprints of the homes of Ricky and Lucy, Mary Richards, Ralph and Alice Kramden, and Jed Clampett are charming, wacky, and precise renderings of an imagined, utopic life. These lithographs are contrasted with Alan Lande's series of Stranger-like personals ads plastered along the opposite wall, featuring standard and hilariously rude phrases like, "Dude seeking same... who's into burying noses and taking big whiffs of funky butt."
Other two-dimensional works in the show include Catherine Opie's eerie, elegant freeway images; Karen Kilimnik's demonized beauties (the painting "Tabitha"); Richard Hawkins' snapshot montage of rock stars cutting up (Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, Ozzy Osborne's Zakk Wylde). Isabel Samaras' erotic acrylic and enamel paintings on tin trays of TV celebrities-in classic art-historial tableaux-are witty, macabre, and gorgeous. In a twist, paid advertising becomes artist installation: Two giant posters for Market Optical show a naked woman in glasses; in one she swells up from her last trimester, in the other she's holding a baby.
Olympia resident Steve Davis' series of chromogenic prints, from the "American Album" portfolio, is the most ambitious and telling two-dimensional work in the show. Phrases like "Cold-hearted bitch" and "Wants a virgin" are typed across the images-portraits of men, women, and children, all willing participants in the very public (and therefore private) "American social landscape," where, "What was once private, secrets, vulnerabilities, and anger, are now catalogued and pronounced from the highest mountain, while our public selves have gone stealth."
NYC "art-school gull" Alex Bag's seminal videos feature an army of characters, from a blonde sexpot to an inarticulate art student to the incredibly banal sister in "Bunnies/Monsters Part 1 (Annie)," ostensibly a public service announcement, in which rubber monsters try to convince the camera that cute toy bunnies are "machines of destruction" ("It was a setup!"). In another room, two videos by Pullman, WA's Paul Pak-hing Lee reveal a monotonous onslaught of pixilated, pea-green talking heads (presidential candidates Dole, Nixon, Ross Perot). Stay tuned for election night.
Marshall Weber's interactive installation, "The Candy Store," is part educational display, part time capsule, and on the opening night of the show, caught the most attention: One reveler boldly lifted the Plexiglas cover off the tobacco display and smoked a Chesterfield King, thereby demonstrating the very idea the artist wished to convey-that by socially (via marketing) condoning or demonizing drugs like nicotine, we prepare our children to be the ultimate consumers and addicts.
But where does the propaganda end? Monitors placed throughout the exhibition space display static quotes from Debord's manifesto, "Society of the Spectacle," making the rather insidious suggestion that we can't avoid being manipulated by the message. Even rebels and artists, if they are to thrive, must live in the uncomfortable realm of the consumer.

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Contents on this page were published in the November/December, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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