implicit art

As I slowly walked towards the Green Gallery via Farwell Avenue on a snowing and icy Wednesday night, two 60-inch (or so) glowing LCD screens grew larger and larger in my vision, each presenting me with videos of how we consume… well, consumption.

On the left, a delicate yet confident pair of hands mechanically browses a Sears catalog from the late 1800s – scouring over a landscape of hand-drawn horses, which market saddles and harnesses for us to purchase. On the right, we see a different kind of browsing and browser, our all too common doubled metaphorical “window” into Amazon.com: a scrolling grid of colorful and mostly useless objects, devoid of context, background, or sizing information (a bicycle appears smaller than a keychain).

It’s mundane. Funny. Sad. It’s hard to look at. Hard to look away. Who buys this shit? Oh, wait, I think my daughter has that patch… Oh, that ghost pin is kind of cute. Is there a list of prices somewhere? No, not for the art… for the objects in the video…

Wait. What the fuck is wrong with me?

These videos present a very concrete frame for thinking about some of the (first print and now) digital realities around us, for reflecting on how we engage with distance shopping and online culture, visual literacy and the consumer society it encourages. That complexity can’t really be described concisely – at least not very well. But we can feel it in, and want to talk about via, the strange comparative gestures McLean dishes out. There’s just so much she implicates (positive and negative, frustrating and gleeful, embarrassing and desirous) in the continuous and varying relationships we have with money and objects, matter and concepts, looking, seeing, and being seen; buying and selling, being and becoming, hating and loving, and more.

The show is, on the one hand, a wink and a nod to those critically-minded folks that are self-reflexive enough to recognize our participation in that culture, how contemporary society (and all of its predecessors) consume, and are often consumed by, things and spectacles, trends and treats. And on the other hand… It reminds us that we (“critically-minded and self-reflexive folks”), too, are no better; or at least that we can always do better. The feeling that rose in me reminded me a bit of this Jon Rafman quote, from his bizarre interview with Bad at Sports in 2010 (I’m paraphrasing here): sometimes, in Postinternet culture, we never know if we’re celebrating or ironizing what we make art about.

I hate to love to shop for the stuff I hate to love.

To the right of these videos is a beautiful framed print of some Life books on various subjects: Primates and Ecology, Mathematics and The Mind, Evolution and Ships, to name a few (see above). Again, I struggle. I’d be interested to know what the books contain: both for knowledge, and to guess when they are from, as represented by the language and beliefs they present (we know so much more now, both scientifically, and about our own judgments… right?) . But then… I could as easily see this stack of books in Goodwill as I could in the Anthro or Geology department at UWM, or – oh, the irony – on a hipster’s mantelpiece.

On the other side of the video pieces discussed above, there are several framed prints of strange and funny objects; they are visually contextualized as if on instagram, with potential “like” hearts in the upper left corner (and numbers – mostly zeroes, and one 57K – that tell us their ratings); and I don’t know if that’s real (were they actually on Insta?), or even if the objects are real.  Are they from Amazon, or 3D printed, or just rendered / virtual?… It’s amusing. And weird. And uncomfortable. I look around at other people looking, wondering what they are thinking. And I question it. And I question myself, again.

It’s so easy to get lost here, cycling around, cynical with the world and myself, and everyone around me… But then, here we are, in a crowded room despite the weather, talking and chatting and laughing and recognizing ourselves and our issues, for better or worse: making and looking at art, trying to be and do better than what came before.

Is that so wrong? In the world of alternative facts and fake news, where a reality star is president and an ex-president war criminal has become a painter, can we trust images or computers? Dogs or books? Anyone – even ourselves? And to do what, exactly? And with what power?… So, then I forgive myself… After the Greatest Generation made America Great and the Baby Boomers built on that, only so the latter could dismantle the safety nets they both created once they were through to the other side… our responses have to first be criticism with cynicism, if only to make room for the productive discussion and activism I have come to see Gen Xers and – yes – Millenials, are truly capable of. We need to look closely, then walk away – if only temporarily, to regroup – to find meaning, and purpose, and to make change.

The center room, then, has three looping videos from 12-20 minutes each, which I admittedly came back to several times, not realizing they were separate – yet still having a hard time tearing myself away from them each time. Thankfully, McLean sent me links later, to rewatch and ponder. Let me first say that McLean’s juxtaposition of sound (or the lack thereof) – music, text, reading, effects, jarring silence – with image – realistic video, abstract digital drawings, and more – is masterful. With See a Dog, Hear a Dog, (17:40), she somehow creates a strange but familiar, almost nostalgic, empathy with and sympathy for, computers, dogs, humans, and shapes. We hear a computer telling us her feelings and reading from the bible. Dogs whimpering and wailing. A piano playing a sad melody. The affect/effect is a combination of watching CNET, Mr Rogers, and Arrival. The stories and texts are strange and implicitly political, the crying dogs terrifying and sad, the music eerily teacherly, and the “conversations” difficult to follow – despite our knowing how hard all of the subjects are trying to communicate (though what, exactly, is not always clear).

The Invisible World, then, is 20 minutes of Sci-Fi snippets, scientific how-to’s, unboxing and shopping spree youtube clips, home videos, stills of “warm” and “homely” objects (think a yellow butter dish from the 70s) paired with texts about capitalism and meaning, audio narratives about vaccines (among other things)… and more, all juxtaposed in McLean’s signature style outlined above, with sound bridges and silence, embedded empathy and oddities. This was the video I couldn’t tear myself away from, watched waiting to see and hear what would happen next, trying to make sense not of the film (it’s impossible), but rather of my feelings about it, about the tactics deployed and how and why. In the end, I think I encountered precisely my feelings around trying to communicate and relate: to information and consumption overload, to others and things, to our pasts, presents, and futures (and future pasts). Communication, like consumption – I can’t help but think – always fails. But… perhaps it’s still worth trying?

And Wherever You Go, There We Are has audio of spam emails, read by an automated correspondent, juxtaposed with hand-colored historical postcards (with some hand-written and some typed texts on the underside) to create a 12-minute artificial travelogue. There are occasional videos of fingers clacking an invisible keyboard, upright; videos of natural landscapes or highways; and a feminine hand on a computer trackpad. Taken together, it wanders and has us wonder around real and virtual, affect and effect, perception and performance. Where do we go when in front of our screens? Where don’t we? Where does the value or lack thereof lie in each?

In the last room is Rains, a 7-minute video of digital rain, pouring quickly, but more slowly changing direction, ignoring gravity: up, down, left, right, in arcs and planes and more. A reference to the title of the exhibit, it does kind of sum it all up. A torrent of things and feelings and people and animals, stories and not-yets, all push and pull, potentially drowning us. We can try to bring an umbrella. Or stay inside… And sometimes we might. But sometimes, we could try asking someone else for shelter, or building some of our own – perhaps big enough for friends and family, with a fireplace, and a couch, and some whiskey. Sometimes, we might contemplate why it comes down so hard, what conditions lead to this, and if and how we might change them. And sometimes, we might run outside and play in that rain, allowing ourselves to revel in the water – and invite others to join – consequences be damned. After all, we are the ones who will be left to clean up any given mess, whether our own, or from the others who came before us.

A Nohl Fellow last year, and an Assistant Professor in the department of Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres at UWM, Jesse McLean is a talented artist, generous teacher, and interested/interesting person to chat with. When It Rains it Pours is not an easy show. But it’s a necessary one. It doesn’t provide answers, or even direct questions. Rather, it asks us to question ourselves and our relationships to contemporary digital and consumer culture; and more importantly, it then has us ask, What’s next?

When It Rains it Pours is on show at Green Gallery East at 1500 N Farwell Ave through May 12. The gallery is open Wednesday – Saturday 2-6pm or by appointment.