-- A Cyberspace Review Of The Arts
Volume 20.01
March 25, 2013
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Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt at MoMA/PS1
Entering this exhibition, which occupies one of the larger spaces at MoMA/PS1, was overwhelming. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it. The entire space is filled with numerous, mostly shiny artifacts, made of the most diverse materials, mostly things one might obtain from a 99-cent store or a trash pile. Several themes and concerns come together: formal pictorial and plastic values; religious sensibility and aesthetics; Gay and general sexuality; class politics; diverse cultures; the conflicts and cross-pollination between these elements.
Artists have been using junk, detritus, trash, for a long time. Usually, however, a particular point is made of the junkiness of the junk. It is not supposed to rise above its origins; in fact, the main point of most of that kind of art has been specifically that quality, used perhaps to criticize or deride 'society' or 'modern life', to point out their brutality or wastefulness, for example. Just the other day I was looking at the work of an artist who does sensitive portraits of broken television sets in what appear to be the sort of damp suburban wooded areas where people like to deposit such things along with other household trash.
This is not that kind of junk; this is junk which has been made to transcend junk, which has been rescued and lifted up to a higher level, both as to its formal properties and its meaning, its signification. In that regard, maybe its closest famous relatives are the shadow boxes of Joseph Cornell, another collector and combiner of odds and ends. Like Cornell, and unlike your average everyday trash-employing artist, then, Lanigan-Schmidt appears to find real, not ironic, value in the materials he works with. When he employs irony, it is at a different level. (I think this somewhat refutes a widespread take on L-H's work: commenters have found it to be a crossing of kitsch, pop (in the 'pop art' sense), punk, and folk. Except in hard-core Outsider Art, these styles, when used by present-day artists, is almost always substantially if not entirely ironic.)
One of the obvious influences on Lanigan-Schmidt a sort of combined influence of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the latter being perhaps predominant in the Linden, New Jersey, of his childhood. (When I first encountered this aspect of his work I was sure it was specifically Eastern Rite Catholicism, which combines both traditions in a number of different ways.) We are not talking about only iconography and decor here, although there is plenty of that, but their practices and the social meaning as well. It is evident that the artist experienced a great deal of tension, internal and external, around the antisexual (especially antihomosexual) attitudes taken by the churches of his youth and his own sexuality, which he understood to be Gay from an early age. Many people have gone from one side to the other, and vehemently rejected the side they came from. Evidently Lanigan-Schmidt didn't do this. While he makes some fun of strict nuns and depicts brutal street gangs doubtless cheered on by parental and religious authority, he does not reject the churches' humane and positive social values. And so we have images of priests baptizing infants, or of neighborhood churches in the evening twilight, as well as depictions of violence and oppression.
While the religiously themed material is overt and given on its own terms, the sexual content seems rather restrained (in spite of a sign warning us at the front door that some of it is 'graphic'). However, it is certainly not hidden. Outside of some humor, it is usually integrated into other work. Some of it is selected from the rather Arcadian soft-core pornography of yesteryear, but it has undergone a kind of sublimation through the same processes as the other material. Lanigan-Schmidt, unlike many, appears to disdain the now ancient clichéed demand to épater les bourgeois however much they may desire to be épatéed -- a demand which often had invited the use of pornography. Instead, the erotic material is pretty seamlessly involved in the other material, especially the religious. After all, it is the erotic which first takes us out of ourselves. However despised and humiliated, it, too, can be lifted up.
The large room of the exhibition -- I should say installation, for the entirety is well-designed and coherent, for which the curator and assistant curator, Peter Eleey and Jocelyn Miller, must be honored -- was divided into bays, each one differing from the next thematically. On the immediate right going in were numerous drawings on ordinary paper pasted into the bottoms of aluminum baking pans; these turn out to be images from a semi-autobiographical story. Some of these are modest, fairly representational line drawings; others are more surreal. Some seem to be versions of others, either copied by hand or with an office copier. At the center of each group is a handwritten page containing the narrative which the surrounding pictures illustrate or comment on. The story seems to be semi-autobiographical.
In the next bay we meet some larger works including glittering devils and skeletons, reminiscent of Mexican calavera art, plus a great profusion of what can only be called hypervermin -- lurid, shiny creatures which seem to be part rat, part insect, part lizard, transformed from their lowly estate into jewels without in any way losing their proper creepiness (especially given their numbers and the fact that a good many of them are overhead.)
In the next bay after that, the imagery turns more religious; at the same time, often woven into the religious imagery, some sexual themes emerge. Some of these pictures are organized like comics in panels, and textual material is interspersed with them. 'The prayer of sexuality / the sexuality of prayer' one legend reads.
In the back, on both sides, the works are more abstract. There is a table with posters announcing some exhibitions of installations the artist put together in the 1960s.
On the opposite wall, further toward the front, is a subinstallation consisting of streamers, banners, various objects such as chalices (a favorite theme) and one as-yet untranscendent rat.
This particular subinstallation is about the size of an apartment room and may, in fact, be a recollection of the artist's first shows, which were given in his own apartment to his friends and acquaintances. Finally, on the same side, there is a sort of parody of high-school art involving the strict nuns of the artist's parochial school experiences, or at least their mythic equivalents. In the center of the room, towards the back, is an ikonostasis (which Lanigan-Schmidt had to construct in pieces, since his work space could not contain it in final form) and behind that a similar assemblage of religious works. Between the ikonostasis and the front door are a number of free-standing three-dimensional works, often lit from within. These usually are highly baroque representations of objects of various kinds like chalices and high-heeled women's shoes, although some are more abstract. The exhibition cannot be easily summed up; it is a considerable experience, and I have only scratched the surface here. It does leave one wondering why Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt is not better known and more widely exhibited and appreciated. Links |
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all images on this page by and copyright © Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt
text by Gordon Fitch, 2013 |
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