Sam Durant at LA MOCA - through 02.09.02

(A version of this review appeared in Kelly & Charley's Art Recs, January 2003.)

Sam Durant practices an ingenious brand of cultural chemistry. Each of his installations is a mix of sonic, sculptural and pictorial elements carefully calculated to reveal unexpected relationships between a wide variety of cultural and historical phenomena. Unlike artists like Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, with whom he shares an aesthetic and methodology, Durant tackles large social/political issues: the legacies of modernism, race, class, and activism in America. However, lest you feel your eyelids beginning to droop, Durant brings a fresh, entirely non-didactic perspective to this subject matter. His quixotic wit and refreshing irreverence present new and surprising takes on some of the key moments of 20th century American history.

For example, in Upside Down and Backwards, Completely Unburied (1999), Robert Smithson meets rock ‘n’ roll in an astute comparison of the pop mythologies of ill-fated rock stars with the young lives lost in the activist struggles of the 60s and early 70s. At the center of the piece is a resurrected (unburied) model of the structure from Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed. Encircling the model, which houses 3 CD players, are 6 audio speakers playing The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)” in continuously overlapping lyrical combinations. In the original Smithson piece, located on the Kent State University campus, earth was piled atop a woodshed until the central supporting beam cracked. This exemplar of minimalist process art soon became a memorial for a human burial ­ National Guardsmen murdered 4 Kent State students participating in an anti-war protest only months after the piece’s completion. In resurrecting the woodshed, Durant invokes not only a more idealistic era, but also the insistent human desire to un-do past tragedy, to turn back time. By juxtaposing songs by Nirvana (evoking Kurt Cobain’s much lamented suicide), Neil Young (whose line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" is quoted in Cobain's suicide note), and The Rolling Stones (whose 1969 show at Altamont Raceway marked the end of 60’s idealism begun at Woodstock), Durant muses on the simultaneous mourning and fetishization surrounding the conjunction of youth and death. Rock stars like Cobain, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix as well as the figures of the 4 slain Kent State students, are resurrected in memory, mythologized all the more because their untimely deaths symbolize the unfulfilled promise of what could have been.

This first survey exhibition of Durant’s work is full of similarly unexpected comparisons that reward an attentive viewer with both poignant and humorous commentary on the intersections of high modernism and pop culture. In the Chair series of 1995 Durant pokes fun at the conceits of high modernist design by photographing upended designer chairs (by Eames and the like) in a harsh, pornographic light. Legs splayed in the air, these “fuck me” chairs take on a startling, yet hilarious humanity, debunking the ideal of the graceful, carefully ordered modern interior with a reference to the physical awkwardness of everyday life.

One potential criticism of the exhibition has less to do with the work itself than with the gallery space. Upon entering the galleries, one is immediately confronted by a mélange of musical sounds from a variety of cultural moments and genres. Juxtapositions, both intentional and incidental abound: Billie Holiday rubs elbows with Lynyrd Skynyrd, Neil Young mixes it up with Bad Brains. At moments, the overwhelming effect is sonic chaos, as the musical tracks from one installation float across the communicating gallery spaces into the next. Because musical elements contribute heavily to a full comprehension of each piece, it’s difficult to appreciate each installation on its own terms. However, what is at first listen a poorly planned exhibition design, upon further reflection begins to take on conceptual significance. This indiscriminate sonic mixing echoes the fluidity with which Durant collects the elements of his cultural concoctions. By combining normally segregated threads of American culture (high, pop, black, white, etc.) and letting them interact, Durant reveals often pointed, often serendipitous, but always thought-provoking patterns.

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