Anthony Burdin Takes Us Backstage
Elwyn Palmerton
Spread through all four floors of Maccarone Gallery, Anthony Burdin’s work runs the gamut of mediums: paintings, drawings, installations, sculptures, found-objects and photos. There’s a punk rock edge to the whole thing, a visceral intensity that–even in some small drawings–betrays a trace of onstage rock ‘n’ roll energy.
An installation, Backstage, for example, is made up of a few amplifiers and a guitar smashed through and wedged into the wall, hanging upside down and revealing a storage space behind the wall. A video plays in the storage space and the windows are covered over with garbage bags. A microphone stand lies on the floor. It’s sparse but psychologically loaded. It’s like a crime scene; one’s left with the sense of how a violent, destructive, or shamanic act can leave a residue that is underwhelming physically while providing evidence of a traumatic or transformative moment.
There’s a downside to this physical directness, though. When his work falls flat (a small percentage), we’re merely left with the object, the product of his efforts, stubbornly untransformed, almost banal. His tie-dyed sheets, for example, look like they could have been made by almost anyone; they’re simply tie-dyed sheets. These rely on their ironic titles–all of which feature the words "Brainwashed Dopehead"–to prop them up.
Still, these are minor quibbles in a show this sprawling. Filling a whole three-story building, there’s a ton of great drawings as well as phenomenal videos, which contain his best work. All of these record Burdin in his car from an apparently first-person perspective; we only see his hands and a hint of his blue jeans. He loads a tape of a Satanic sounding troll into his tape player, accompanies it on snare drum and cracked cymbals in Nipomo Session, and then makes drawings in Factory. These two are projected, alternately, on the wall in a trapezoid. The shots are so tight that the space fractures and fragments. The color is mostly bluish, violet shades. The video oscillates between abstract chaos and noise, revealing the recognizable car interior. It’s a raw homemade post-apocalyptic cyborg space–somewhere between Bruce Nauman and Bladerunner or a more abrasive "boy-art," sci-fi Jack Smith.
The show’s best piece is a two-monitor video installation in the basement titled Dual Vision Dope Mix/Restoration Editing Project (his titles are all pretty good). It contains many similar elements to Nipomo Session and Factory although its color is less monochromatic, more realistic. The action’s denser and even more chaotic. Burdin plays his snare drum over a recording of the James Bond theme music. At one point he hits something that looks like a piece of fried chicken or a muffin on his dashboard. He splashes water from a bottle onto his drum and gets some on the camera lens. The density of visual information is almost painterly. There’s a digital glitch (or glitch-type effect) where the image breaks into pixilated blocky forms–as if the videos were breaking up in transmission. Burdin accompanies it with an electronic malfunction type of noise. It helps give an almost Gursky-esque impression of witnessing the proceedings from an alien or omnipotent vantage point, but inverted, more cybernetic "fly-on-the-wall" than expansive "God’s-eye-view."
At the end of the video the chaos recedes and there’s a sparse period of relative tranquility, silence, then Burdin jangles the keys hanging in the ignition with his drumstick and drives out of what is revealed to be a Whole Foods parking lot. We see, out of the window along the curb, the well-maintained flowers and shrubbery of the parking lot medians; the glitch effect, here again, asserts their status as simulacrum. This nearly plaintive imagery is a fitting epilogue to the preceding post-apocalyptic hysteria. It is, after all, the nostalgia for nature that perpetuates the suburban/automobile culture which is, ironically, a major cause of environmental degradation. (The "well-manicured" lawn is the completely artificial and generally creepy formal expression of this nostalgia.) Here, Burdin ties together the aesthetics of new digital media, the proliferation of digital images and video into our lives, the pathological toxic nostalgia for nature, the anarchic revolutionary attitude of punk rock, and the central role of the automobile in our culture. Forget about Gursky; this is what Globalism looks like.
