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Art Papers Magazine (Vol.
26.2), March/April 2002
REVIEWS: Southeast
Nashville
Had Lenny Bruce remained sober, kept his intellectual rigor intact, masterfully
versed himself in carpentry and conceptualism, and then entered the upper
echelons of art world academia, poised for subversion and critique thereinÉ.
then perhaps MICHAEL AURBACH's "The Administrator" (C.A.P. Gallery,
Frist Center For The Visual Arts, Nashville, April 8 -- August 19, 2001)
would suffer the rejections of nostalgia. Fortunately, this is not an
alternate universe, and there are real people still saying the right things.
Michael Aurbach is one of them.
In the seventh and most recent work in his "Secrecy Series," Aurbach
plays hero to the over-bureaucratized underdog, and further secures his
place in a unique personal-political niche vested with empathy towards
the subjugated. An actual-sized room within a room, The Administrator
is a burlesque tableau of an office space. It is made entirely of reflective,
galvanized steel (or wood painted to mimic metal), theatrically lit from
above with a series of sparse but intense spotlights, and seemingly encased
by the deep grey-black walls of the surrounding gallery space itself.
It has the immediate look and feel of a shiny, jewel-like prison cell,
overly riveted together, blocked off and expanded in four corners by railings
through which the audience may peer inside. It is a stage for a play that
has already happened, and Aurbach's protagonist, the absent administrator,
has left behind a rebus of contextual clues for us to piece together and
contemplate.
Step stools, waist-level peepholes, and a significant scaling down of
furniture within the room paint an initial picture of a very short, Napoleonic
man. Fleur-de-lis adorning the wall tops surrounding the space provide
a subtle historical nod to the moral failure of the French Monarchy, whose
leaders believed themselves divine. A toy-like motor and air compressor
flank a lone desk, frontally adorned with a pair of Roman fasces_symbols
of ancient strength and control_here sabotaged by their absurd pairing
with obviously functionless and artificial sources of power. You get the
idea. Marionette strings dangle overhead, underlining the artist's intention
to portray the administrator as a puppet of bureaucracy. A genuine "hot
seat"_a chair fused with a stove eye_sits atop a trap door, wired back
to a huge desk-side lever_an image of interrogation straight out of a
wartime cartoon made hilariously real. Siegfried and Roy-style animal
training hoops, the only objects of normal height and scale within the
room, stand perched on stilts, waiting to be leapt through by subordinates
of normal stature. Inside the edge of the entrance door, a red and white
"height stick" (like those in convenience stores to assist clerks in identifying
the height of criminals running out of an exit) is carefully demarcated
from three to five feet. Here, one can almost image the artist thinking
of ways to translate "new heights of paranoia" into a sculptural guffaw.
The translation is easy, hilarious, and biting. Almost needless to say,
this corrupted tyrannical midget can't practice what he preaches, give
what he demands, or ask without a threat. A towel bar, water bowl and
pitcher seem to await a Pontius Pilate-inspired guilt-washing exercise.
The ease of such deconstructions notwithstanding, the work does feel genuinely
cathartic and knowing; especially in the places where Aurbach references
himself, the elements read no longer as satire, but as pointed autobiography.
Two shelves are symmetrically positioned on the wall behind the desk,
one supporting a box of shoe lifts and the other an array of metallic
notebooks meticulously labeled "Aurbach Incident 1 through 8." Such details
bring new depth to the work and invite many intriguing questions. Is this
"administrator" a real person; and if so, just how much is the artist
risking in being so candid? If this work steps on real toes, could its
public display be a kind of Pandora's Box for Aurbach? Could this work
bring about a real change in the artist's life or within the bureaucracies
that he lives and moves within? There is real risk here, of a much heavier
kind than the artist references through his sharp-edged building materials.
The visual puns in Aurbach's work are stacked and unapologetically literal
but so numerous and involved that the elements read interconnectively,
like parts from the 1960s board game Mousetrap, except taken to a dizzyingly
involved extreme. What starts out as an exercise in "figuring out" a comic
scheme quickly becomes something quite alive and inclusive of real-world
politics and lives. Meanings remain slippery, not because of symbols being
difficult to interpret, but because the interpretive boundaries between
each "joke" (for lack of a better word) are ultimately ambiguous. Also,
the artist's jabs become so personalized, seedy and specific upon closer
examination that the viewer is left with a mood of unexpected seriousness.
Even the convoluted manner in which the audience gleans information about
the life of the administrator is itself indicative of the common experience
of "wading through red tape," and discovering that a corruption of power
is taking place.
One of the most inviting aspects of the work lies in Aurbach's refreshing
choice to suppress a kind of cynicism and misanthropy (certainly the kind
that he is critiquing) that would wince at such wisecracks. His satire
is informed by a fresh improvisational sensibility, mixing a knack for
plundering art history's "greatest hits" with the need for a populist
punch line. "The Administrator" succeeds in much the same way as a rim
shot would if played by an orchestra.
Joseph Whitt
Murfreesboro
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Link to Secrecy Series
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