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Dying in All Directions by Nancy Lupo

by Nancy Lupo

Thomas Hirschhorn and Roxy Paine: Selections from the Permanent Collection

MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art)

250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90012

July 26, 2007 - October 29, 2007

In an aptly sized room, in between MOCA Focus: Matthew Monohan and The Poetics of the Handmade, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Non-Lieux and Roxy Paine’s Weed Choked Garden, are out of the collection’s archives for a face off.

If you are standing on the western side of the gallery looking east, beyond Paine’s dying garden, you will see Hirschhorn’s Non-Lieux. Two big candy colored peaks, the effect of melted down candles that were once stuck in glass Coke-Cola bottles, protrude perkily. Topping off each peak is a fan cum flagpole flying two twin flags of democracy. The electricity powering the fans is also powering florescent lights that are affixed to two scale billboards displaying tantalizing Photoshop flesh. In the shadow of both the billboards and the peaks, Afghan fighters with their requisite guns are hiding out. An army of cleaning products and purifying agents are encroaching upon the Afghans. Some of them have religious inspired names (St. Marc, Super Croix). The entire scene is sitting on a large table with a blue skirt that is decorated with texts from Gilles Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze).

If you are standing on the eastern side of the gallery looking west, you can see that just beyond the candy mountain there is a vegetable garden in a dire but fixed state of decay. Paine’s Weed ChokedGarden is rendered in lacquer, epoxy, oil paint and pigment. An aluminum table that raises the entire garden off the floor four feet demystifies only slightly its stunning realism. Contrary to the overall state of decay, the dirt seems fertile and moist with little epoxy puddles in between the asparagus, tomatoes and lettuce, which are brown, sun burnt and dying. Even the sinister dandelions are browning and starved. Although the title informs you that the garden is in such a state because it is ‘weed choked,’ it seems that it is something else that is killing the garden.

It is reasonable to ask if what is killing the garden isn’t the same thing that is causing the mountains to become waxy and rainbow colored. Paine is sometimes reluctant to discuss his work in insofar as it might be read as a kind of morality tale but if we think back to Peter Rabbit’s squirmishes in Mr. McGregor’s garden, we might wonder if that army of cleaning products in Non-Lieux, is looking for more that it can handle when there are dying gardens that resemble the ones in out heartland’s own backyard.

(*Images from top to bottom: Installation view of Thomas Hirschhorn and Roxy Paine: Selections from the Collection at MOCA Grand Avenue, 2007, photo by Brian Forrest.)

Posted by Nancy Lupo on 8/19/07