Julie Fishkin, The Politics of Surfeit
Andrea Liu
"The secret organ was playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Capriccio–rippling arpeggios of thyme, lavender, of rosemary, basil, myrtle, tarragon; a series of modulations through the spice keys into ambergris; and a slow return through sandalwood, camphor, cedar and new-mown hay (with occasional subtle touches of discord–a whiff of kidney pudding, the faintest suspicion of pig’s dung)…
Sunk in their pneumatic stalls, Lenina and the Savage sniffed and listened. It was now the turn also for eyes and skin."
-Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Such is the description of the Savage’s first encounter with "the feelies" in Huxley’s Brave New World, the multi-sensory extravaganza of cynically manufactured mindless sensation. Inundated with sensory stimuli, these mass entertainment movies of relentless smells, touch, sounds and sights titillate and arouse the senses to the point of such satiety that they dull them.
This seems akin to the dynamic that curator Julie Fishkin synthesizes in her exhibition "Bubble Tea," at Williamsburg gallery NUTUREart–albeit on a note of greater frivolity. Bubble Tea, a drink with tapioca balls sucked through a straw, is construed as a metaphor for pleasurable sensual and tactile experience that one overdoses on to the point of feeling empty and stupefied. Fishkin includes a letter to Bubble Tea in the exhibition notes: "I really loved you during the summer when your sweet green tea tasted like mango with creamy, sugary froth that melted in my mouth…/Now I’m cold. You are now warm. Your frothy milk is like a spoiled by-product of the most wretched animal." Perhaps that coldness is the metaphysical coldness of a society that titillates our senses enough so that we become acquiescent consumers, but never allows us to feel. The effect of tactility upon our senses and its intersection with desire, gender, consumption and the ontology of perception is explored to provocative effect by the nine artists exhibiting in the "Bubble Tea" exhibition.
Vadis Turner, Sweet Tooth
Buttons, marbles, doilies, pantyhose, aluminum foil, fuzzy yarn, thin yarn, string, sponges, net, twisty ties, thumbtacks, sewing thread, pony tail holders, sugar packets, a loofah, sprinkles, toy jewelry parts. The grinding day in, day out, "the-mass-of-(wo)men-lead-lives-of-quiet-desperation" banality of these items are the target of an ingenious transformation into sweets: two unapologetic shelves of cookies, ice cream, cupcakes and candies. Yarn spools become popsicles and vanilla icing on a cupcake, yellow buttons become lemon drops, pantyhose mimic the color of nougat and chocolate, colored thumbtacks become cookie decor. Beatific hues of melon, sky blue, peach and a rainbow of primary-colored explosion are splashed. The objects almost seem drunk, falling and piling over each other in hyperbolic excess, melting indulgently, exuding a party-like communal exuberance. A delirious paean at the pumped up sugar-high adrenaline rush of seeing sweets and anticipating eating them, her highly contrasted colors, almost bordering on the psychedelic, juxtaposed with the homey safe feel of yarn and cookies, make for a curious Electric-Kool-Aid-acid-test-meets-Grandma’s-knitting hybrid effect. Her transformation of the pedestrian to the euphoric is woven in gendered terms, as these are the scoured paraphernalia of clean-your-cabinets-last-Friday-of-the-month women’s labor and are the objects of jubilation and self-reward. Woman, for centuries quarantined in the home and locked out of the sphere of male-produced art, were relegated to the culture and labor economy of domesticity. Now there is irony, if not self-asserting pride, in these Common Woman products being the vehicle of expression in high art. Sweet Tooth is a jubilant intervention in the historical narrative of production of art, gender, and public/private labor dichotomies.
Julie Peppito, Bling, Bling
On a more strident and disconcerting note is Julie Peppitio’s Bling Bling. Here junk abounds again, but to a different effect. Perhaps a scathingly ironic inversion of the hanging ball of toys in Toys R’ Us, this was instead an 11-foot wide hanging ball of the forgotten detritus of unabashed white trash strip mall suburban consumerism. Plastic juice and Poland Spring bottles, Clorox bleach, milk bottles, bubble gum machine fake jewelry, spongy balls, stuffed teddy bears and turtles, plastic robots, brochures, pillow parts and other paraphernalia are bound together in grating cacophony. Unlike the cookies, ice cream and candies that coalesced in harmonious synergy in Turner’s piece, these items seemed caged up against their will in a disjointed, chaotic, absurd and grotesque dystopia. This is a world with no moral core–just garish rhapsodies of animal miniatures, turtle stuffed animals, juice bottles and Barbie hair juxtaposed nonsensically with photos of American Iraq War soldiers without limbs, wailing Iraqi children, and minute cutouts of President Bush’s face. Bling Bling is a stinging indictment of America turned inside out, literally a "snowballing" of untenable contradictions and insatiable consumer needs, tornado-ing into an oblivious waltz of consumerism, militarism and death. The pounding recurrence of chartreuse, hot pink and florescent orange in trimmings and wire ornamentation around the ball lend it an almost grotesquely incandescent gloating commodity fetish glow.
Athena Waligore, Red Bites
Another highlight of the show was Athena Waligore’s Pears–large, close-up, almost human portraits of pears whose "organic"-ness is the source of their decay. These pears are damaged, about to rot, and are being dressed up with bright candy-red and glistening gold nail polish; reminiscent of the feminine urge to paste over and hide the signs of age and the deterioration of their once juicy looked-at-ness. There is a humanity and vulnerability to these pears–their roundness, their humbleness, even their charisma. Once succulent, they have lesions now, are over-the-hill, and need stitches. One feels embarrassed that these once regal and majestic pears are now being photographed on the brink of dilapidation.
Matt Lucas, Permanent Foliage
Matt Lucas’ seven photo collages of plant life are a cool and subtly ironic commentary on the ontology of perception and the fabrication of the "natural." Impossibly verdant, lusciously green, the contours and the lighting of each leaf and stem give one the sensation that they are not encased photos but three dimensional plants that can be touched in all their plush, leafy glory. What great feelies these would make, for their fabricated tactility is insuperably real. They are not even photos of actual plants, but computer-generated photo collages of plant parts, with no space between plant and camera lens lending to an immediacy that makes them seem touchable. The reversal of the poles of real/organic and the artificial/fabricated in the expectations of the viewer elicit an interrogation of the integrity and accuracy of our senses in an age of advanced technological manipulation of external stimuli.
Bubble Tea takes the effect of tactility on our senses and explores it through different sociopolitical and gendered contexts. Our relation to, awareness of, and interpretation of our senses are mediated in the context of a society replete with consumerism, sensory assault, technological "innovation" and rampant commercialism. Our senses–that is our ability to touch, smell, taste, feel–are no longer a sovereign private space of interiority, but yet another domain to be socially re-engineered, titillated and manipulated in the service of conformity to a pattern of commodity consumption and political acquiescence. The paradox is that our senses (eyes, ears, tongue, nose) are in our bodies, and yet they no longer belong to us, so ruthlessly have they been conditioned to ingest and reiterate the pathways of the mass-manufactured stimuli that we swim in. And so, we are left with the Bubble Tea ennui of a sated capacity for sensation that, paradoxically, has not yet learned how to feel.
