MADness

I'll keep this short so you won't lose interest reading it. I LOVED the MAD museum as a whole, not just the 'Second Lives' show. It was very refreshing to see examples of art and design removed from the kind of formalist history espoused by a museum like the MoMA - things that were just aesthetic objects, taking pleasure in an exploration of form. That sort of thing has become taboo in fine art today, where concepts are everything; even craftsmanship is scrutinized as 'too bourgeois'. I could go on and on, but I digress. I loved seeing things that were purely aesthetic at the MAD museum, many of which were lovely and plenty which were ugly to me.

Probably my favorite piece was Hew Locke's "Horde" (I believe that was what it was called). I actually had seen his work before at the Brooklyn Art Museum - his El Dorado (above) was in an exhibit there last year. It's a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II made completely out of kitsch objects - silk flowers, plastic toy knives and guns, mardi gras beads, etc. These objects carry through to "Horde", which is similarly playful and subtly violent. Two of the floor pieces were described as oversize soup tureens as I recall, though my first impression was of a soldier's camouflaged foxhole. Toy guns pointed out menacingly under the thick foliage of gold plastic jewelry. On the wall, heraldic symbols were constructed out of the same dollar store fare. What I love so much about his work is his playful and rather funny approach to an essentially crass critique of consumerism and empire. Its meaning is extremely accessible; yet Locke does not need to sink to the level of anti-craft or anti-aesthetic to drive his point home, as many artists of the last decade have. I also love the way he appropriates the very lowest of mass-produced low-culture objects and elevates them to high art - it's like rethinking the products of the industrialized age as a new 'natural resource,' an idea I like to play with in my own work and very much admire.