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Established in August of 2001, Cuchifritos, a reference to Latin and Caribbean cuisine, is also the name of a Lower East Side art gallery situated inside the Essex Street Market. Surrounded by various businesses including a botanica, barbershop and cheese stores, the gallery represents a wonderful position as an interlocutor in the debates between capitalism, or as Adorno and Horkmeier have phrased it, the “culture industry.” Shinique Smith’s mixed-media installation, “No Dust, No Stain,” curated by Sara Reisman, further suggests a complicated relationship between global cultural practices, such as spirituality and cleanliness in a localized setting (a broom and dustpan are part of the installation). |
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Global Rifting – Cecilia Muhlstein
Established in August of 2001, Cuchifritos, a reference to Latin and Caribbean cuisine, is also the name of a Lower East Side art gallery situated inside the Essex Street Market. Surrounded by various businesses including a botanica, barbershop and cheese stores, the gallery represents a wonderful position as an interlocutor in the debates between capitalism, or as Adorno and Horkmeier have phrased it, the “culture industry.”
Shinique Smith’s mixed-media installation, “No Dust, No Stain,” curated by Sara Reisman, further suggests a complicated relationship between global cultural practices, such as spirituality and cleanliness in a localized setting (a broom and dustpan are part of the installation). Since the gallery co-exists within a retail market, it also questions how the sacred becomes morphed into the blending of everyday objects like the dustpan, which involves the artist’s interaction with her own work. The removal of the patron’s residual returns to the economic purity of capital, which marks the revenues of the consumer as expendable. Smith brilliantly connects capital and waste to a bale of clothing tied up in twine. The bales are a reference to the bales sent to third-world countries where they are sold. A piece that suggests that these clothes are surreal and, even scarier, by-products of global excess, waste and capital. For questioning the role of the consumer’s presence, the bale was a tremendously effective presence in one corner of the gallery space.
This excess is punctuated by the small cushions on crates and different patterned pieces of carpet, juxtaposed with walls covered in drawings, textiles, as well as found photos and letters that the artist collected in the neighborhood. In one letter, the anonymous writer philosophically asks for someone’s “understanding,” while the relationship, and its miscues, reflect the “sacred” space of bargaining and exchange in a consumerist context; it’s a reminder of mortality in an increasingly chaotic space. This mortality is evident in a photo of a woman sitting on a bed, gazing into the camera. It’s as if there is an implicit secret in her gaze, and the sparseness of her room offers a minimalist effect. The subjects become part of the intimacy of the piece and, like the figure contemplating, we, the consumer/spectator who shops for groceries, are also in the most literal of terms—the consumer/spectator who pauses.
This moment of contemplation is also reflected in the plates placed around the room, which are indicative of both places of worship and of outdoor fountains where one places his/her luck in a coin.
Shinique Smith’s work is important in that it challenges the very simple acts of urban movement. Provoking in its ability to look at the most visible objects we encounter in the city, like lost letters and pieces of textiles, and to engage with the spiritual elements of the present, Smith’s work is something that cannot be forgotten.
