Cold Comfort
“Comfort Accomplished” it certainly couldn’t have been called. Unfortunately, the group show Comfort Potential, currently exhibiting at Transformer, fails to live up to any such standard. Sara Dierck, Vincent Lamouroux, and Gabriel Martinez fill the tiny gallery with two to three works a piece, displaying their attempts to interact with society and, one assumes, contribute some comfort to the world at large. Instead, a couple of these artists don’t seem to live very comfortably in the society with which they seek to interact. The work comes off as immature in its simplification of complex problems and proffered solutions, and even borderline condescending as we – as the society in question - are alternatively ridiculed and rewarded according to the artists’ apparently far superior opinions.
Sara Dierck is a photographer who “intervenes” with the world around her and documents it with her camera. Her Safety Catalogue Series is a collection of four 20” x 24” photographs, each one a glossy advertisement that mocks our society’s obsession with safety and cleanliness. In Air in a can, Dierck laughs at our germ-phobias by “selling” us a compressed air can (the type you’d use to clean your keyboard) to use to blow out candles on a cake. Even the frosting gets its dig with “Happy Birthday and Good Luck,” a moment before the entire thing is destroyed by the force of the “clean” air. The heavy-handed irony continues in Chemical resistant gloves and standard business envelope, as two latex covered hands fill the envelope with anthrax-looking confectioner's sugar.
In a certain sense, Dierck might have a point: it's true we might be obsessed with our health and safety, occasionally to the point of absurdity. But it’s a problem without a solution, and to think we all should simply calm down, in the face of preventing illness and needless death, is naïve and even destructive, when it’s those people she seems to view as “hysterical” who also end up giving us the seat-belt and the smallpox vaccine.
Dierck’s major piece in the show is her pay-phone cozy "sculpture." She recycled sweaters to make piles of knitted covers for public receivers, in a display of embarrassing upper-class condescension that is truly hard to stomach. Her passion for these sad, neglected pay phones reeks of false sympathy for those that are “forced” to use them – those poor, poor folks without cell phones. How terrible it must be to touch that cold, bare plastic. Surely there must be something I can do? And after I’ve helped all the people who still need such quaint devices, I'll take a picture of my work and display it so everyone can see what I’ve done. She's a lightweight Sean Penn wading through the Katrina waters with his cameraman in tow. At least now Ms. Dierck won't have to look at these eyesores while she's walking down the street, since she's duly covered up the problem. In case this "sculpture" hadn't completely embraced the caustic stigma that practical bleeding-heart liberals have been trying to shed since the term was created, just think how that knitted fabric, nestled up against strangers mouths day after day, will be the perfect breeding ground for next year’s vicious flu season, backfiring on any intent to help that might have existed in the first place. At least Dierck’s not a hypocrite when it comes to her views on safety and cleanliness.
Vincent Lamouroux contributes a video, Pentacycle, to the exhibit. He recorded himself maneuvering a one-person transportation device he created that fits on an unusually shaped abandoned track, initially built in the 1960’s for the futuristic Aérotrain, before the project was canceled when the inventor died. Though, like Dierck, Lamouroux tries to shine a spotlight on neglected objects, he has a tighter focus and a practical investment in his artwork. The pentacycle itself may be somewhat silly and unrealistic, but it shows us that we get nowhere by simply throwing away ideas that don’t work, since nearly every great invention was built on the back of something that failed. Even if the Aérotrain itself is never resurrected, surely the original inventor’s efforts can be expanded and built upon, rather than letting his vision wither and die along the fields where the track lies.
Finally, Gabriel Martinez, another photographer, focuses on the give and take in society that happens between strangers, whittling it down to almost purely economic terms. Two of his photographs turn everyday interactions into formal social contracts. In Untitled (Double Bummer), the camera focuses on two hands, one taking a cigarette from the pack in the other, with the caption, “Cigarettes are borrowed for the express purpose of redistribution,” while in Untitled (Siesta), a photo of a napping barrista is followed by a notarized contract between her and her employer, giving up one hour’s pay. I suppose these are the kind of things one thinks of in a comfy college dorm room after hitting the bong too many times and having that flash of epiphany about the way the world “really works, man.” Except, of course, that it comes out sounding blatantly obvious to the rest of us who actually live in it everyday.
Transformer is located at 1404 P Street, NW, and is open Wednesday through Saturday, 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. Comfort Potential runs through June 17.
Picture from transformergallery.org.