On View
Bridget Donahue
July 15 – September 25, 2021
New York
Loot Sweets, on view at Bridget Donahue in New York till September 25, is a heady collage of discovered objects, paper scraps, and nostalgia that transforms into an uneasy meditation on consumption as a efficiency—on the issues we purchase, make, and throw away as an extension of self and tradition.
As illustrated in an accompanying essay by Alissa Bennett, the origin of the present was an public sale of Janet Jackson’s costumes, memorabilia, and private belongings that Syms attended with Bennett as a witness by way of a telephone display screen. On the sale, Syms acquired one among Jackson’s jackets by the designer Alexander McQueen, which got here to represent an embodiment of Jackson and her aura and what Bennett describes as “a psychic shortcut that circumvents the barricades erected between fan and idol.”
The artist’s recording of her purchases on the public sale are immortalized within the exhibition’s eponymous piece Loot Sweets (2021), a sculpture wherein a small display screen is implanted within the right-hand breast of a garment bag. The display screen performs a looped video of Syms surveying the public sale’s gadgets on loop and her pleasure in buying the McQueen jacket, an act that symbolizes each her admiration of the pop icon and the ways in which our materials belongings have a method of shaping our exterior and inside selves.
The items in Loot Sweets are virtually solely crafted from ephemera, each the artist’s and others’. This contains every part from Kewpie mayonnaise wrappers to the coveted tote baggage of artwork galleries, an object that exists as each an indication of allegiance and a standing image in New York’s artwork world. Syms turns these in any other case unextraordinary objects right into a treatise on materials tradition, Black tradition, and efficiency, centered round a number of two- and three-dimensional assemblages that each critique and exalt consumption, understanding that consumerism has a method of constructing an individual or a tradition immortal by way of its remnants.
The primary piece one sees once they enter Bridget Donahue’s two-story walk-up in Chinatown is Martine Syms Merch desk (2021), a desk filled with small, boxy sculptures, nearly all of that are constructed with cardboard and coated within the flotsam and jetsam of the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles. The packing containers are coated in enterprise playing cards, receipts, and tape, and their M.C. Escher-esque cutouts and different beautiful particulars present the extent of care Syms took in fabricating these objects. Collages equivalent to Do you’ve gotten any movie posters of… BLACK MOVIES? He understands. and Luxurious is private (each 2021) are composed of paper and plastic scraps collected from Syms’s (doubtless pandemic period) life: there are baggage from Los Angeles take-out joints, receipts from purchasing, and airplane tickets. A personalised notice from a Comme des Garçons shopper tells her to “please keep secure and wholesome.” One other one among these assemblages, entitled Dominica Publishing Paris (2021), after Syms’s publishing imprint, is mounted within the heart of the room in a fashion harking back to Robert Rauschenberg’s Trivia combines (1954) that served as a backdrop of Merce Cunningham’s performances. Punctuated by a yellow Le Chiquito clutch from French style model Jacquemus, the piece is a patchwork quilt of clothes labels—a callback to the significance of Jackson’s McQueen jacket.
These assemblages are paired with 4 video works that strategically play in sequence on separate screens, creating a way of narrative amongst the abstraction of the sculptural work. The exhibition’s centerpiece video DED (2021) incorporates a girl merely rendered in three-dimensional animation killing herself in a wide range of grotesque methods. Over the course of the video, she decapitates, stabs, and dismembers herself, however the violence is so austere in its presentation that as an alternative of repulsing the viewer, there’s a solemn understanding and sympathy that emanates from this work. Probably the most defining element of this character is a t-shirt that reads “TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING.”
There’s an irreverent disappointment to those movies—not shocking contemplating the ways in which on this second, loss of life appears to hover over our collective psyche with a suffocating menace. But, Loot Sweets isn’t a wholly morbid affair. Simply as DED indicators an finish, the remainder of the exhibition suggests a vibrant reminiscence, just like the ticket stub out of your first live performance or a notice from a long-gone liked one. Simply as we use mementos to recollect a previous time, we additionally use them to craft a persona and aesthetic in a method that feels immortal in a world pushed by consumption. But it surely isn’t the thing itself that holds the facility, it’s the feelings we forged upon it. It’s not Janet Jackson’s jacket essentially, however the energy that object holds to move you to a time or place or individual that feels too slippery to maintain alive with reminiscence alone.
