BUY AMERICAN is a show about what it means to be an American. Not the kind of American we have come to loathe over the last few years, but the thoughtful, doubtful, introspective kind of American that has been muscled from public view. BUY AMERICAN is about artists who, however small or isolated their gestures, still believe their art is effective.
Intellectuals are lately fond of saying that America has become a Hobbesian state, referring to the proposition that war is the natural condition of mankind that British philosopher Thomas Hobbes put forth in his signature treatise, Leviathan. In some respects this is true: two decades of corporate and governmental animosity has created an atmosphere of perpetual contestation among United States citizens: against the world, against the driver in the next lane, against each other. In such a state, being aggressive at all times toward every person you encounter seems the only way to survive the competition. If you are not preemptively screwing others, then you yourself are probably getting screwed.
In such a desperate state of mind, knowledge becomes a hindrance. No person can claim to be knowledgeable without admitting that their knowledge has limits and is subject to doubt, and is therefore vulnerable to attack. The more sophisticated the knowledge, the more vulnerable it is. On the other hand, any person who claims to be faithful suffers neither limits nor doubts, and their willful ignorance toward public opinion or scientific fact only serves to strengthen their faith. The more blind the faith, the more powerful it is. Faith is power.
Under the current American president, whose name I cannot even bear to write, traits that should be the basis of human knowledge--curiosity, playfulness, reason, skepticism--are portrayed as signs of weakness because they demonstrate a lack of faith. To be reasonable or skeptical is to be an unbeliever, and not believing is the work of traitors and evildoers.
BUY AMERICAN seeks to transform the current hatred for the United States into love for its homegrown dissenters. BUY AMERICAN features art that is worse off than you are. It is full of pointless systems, trivial obsessions and petty scams. It is underwhelming and nonthreatening and laughable and poetic. But it cannot be ignored or dismissed, because it is everything that America is not. In that sense, BUY AMERICAN is an act of appropriation, an attempt to turn the emotions riled by ignorance to its own advantage.
Yes! It’s reassuring to know there are still people in America who refuse to cooperate. Yes! It’s comforting to know there are people who refuse to be bellicose and profitable and dull. Yes! It’s encouraging to know there there are artists whose works are resourceful and beautiful and subtle. Yes! It’s consoling to know they are there and they need your support. Yes! BUY AMERICAN. Yes.
Joe Scanlan, January 2004
WALEAD BESHTY is a young photographer living in Los Angeles. His photographic series is a pathetic attempt to “fit in” in an abandoned shopping mall. The small (28 x 35 cm) pictures document him sticking his head into whatever products it will fit.
LOUIS CAMERON is a young painter living in Brooklyn, New York. His puzzle paintings continue the Dadaist and Conceptualist tradition of inventing a system of “controlled chance” and then using that system to compose paintings. The works share conceptual similarities with collages by Arp, musical compositions by John Cage, and wall drawings by Sol Lewitt.
JAY CHUNG is a young artist living in Berlin. His works often take the form of singular, enigmatic photographs that document an event that may or may not have taken place. There is no way to be sure, and the photograph offers little help. Chung’s work is extraordinarily dependent on the willingness of viewers to trust him, even though he offers little in return.
MARTHA FRIEDMAN is a young sculptor living in Brooklyn, New York. Her sculptures are tromp l’oiel renderings of cucumbers, melons, lemons and bread in slightly gymnastic, slightly sexual compositions. In the sculptures, the repressed sexuality, consumption and illusionism of Minimalist sculpture are made more playful and explicit.
JAMES HYDE is a mid-career painter living in Brooklyn, New York. Although Hyde stubbornly sees his work as part of the long tradition of painting, few of his artworks bear resemblance to oil paint on canvas. Rather, Hyde dispenses with the pictorial limitations of the rectangle to emphasize the painting’s more abstract, physical potential. Works often take the form of stuffed pillows, sewn networks, and flexible vinyl forms.
HIRSCH PERLMAN is a mid-career artist living in Los Angeles who has been widely exhibited. For three years, he collected and transformed derelict shipping material in a spare room of his Silverlake apartment. The beautiful pinhole photographs that resulted are eerie proof of the strange workings of the artist’s mind.
JOE SCANLAN is a mid-career artist living in New Haven, Connecticut. For the past five years he has investigated two parallel metaphors of death. One is the making of a coffin, the other is the opening of a store. Both present paradoxical motives and consequences: self-effacement and self-actualization, confinement and freedom, loss and reward. In fact, it is American slang when someone dies to say that they have “bought the store.”
DONELLE WOOLFORD is a young painter living in New Haven, Connecticut. Her “cubist paintings” made from recycled wood scraps are elegant tromp l’oeils of the originals. Rather than being reproductions of actual cubist paintings, though, Woolford’s cubism represents a compromise between three givens: her memory of cubism on the one hand; the wooden scraps she can collect on the other; and the fact that, as an African-American, her cultural heritage predates the forms on which the “invention” of cubism was based.