To skip to the end of the book, I'll tell you that Daphne Fitzpatrick was one of the original founders of Bellwether back when it was a down-homey space in Greenpoint. She also is one handshake away from the Yale grad school connection that Bellwether's owner seems to love. But in the imaginary book we just skipped through, chapter after chapter was full of people saying "Oh, I didn't know that Daphne Fitzpatrick made art". Confidentially, I'm not so certain she does do so. Not well, at least.
The second question that I posed to myself was about the ramp. I went up it, looked around, laughed a little, and went down it. I thought about all the other ramps I've traversed while in art exhibits, a few moments of reflection and I decided that my favorite was at PS1 several years ago. Mostly because that one had a point, Fitzpatrick's ramp seemed to be entirely disconnected from the rest of the show, and being that the show is pretty ramshackle to begin with... But it's a ramp and you can hardly go wrong with one of those.
The show has its good points. Links of different types of sausages pass through a hole in glass jar and then droop down towards the floor. It takes guts to make a ham-handed joke like that (a little sausage humor there). The variety of sausages was what made the piece for me, though. It's the little things that get you.
Three wax candlesticks of increasing, or decreasing if you like, size rest on a shelf. Again, this is a visual gag of the get-it-or-you-don't variety. I laughed out loud.
Turning about, I cringed at the shiny silver flag arrangement. I suspect that Daphne borrows style by the bucketful and deploys it to create interesting thoughts. It can be assumed that she borrowed this flag arrangement from "Sculpture 201", as it does all sorts of ground breaking things. Namely it knocks a hole in the drywall of the gallery, exposing the naked brickwork underneath. Take that for-profit gallery system! And I'll lay down a piece of flooring under my piece, because it helps tie it together visually! There's a reason none of the press this show has gotten mentions this piece, it's awful.
The back wall has what the press release calls "construction fencing". Imagine a plywood box covered in tattered prints of what I think are Warhol drawings. There was a peephole in the side of the fence, but the inside was as black as night - maybe inside was the secret key to whole show. According to the press release it was. Technical problems seemed to have kept the lights out off and on, as the peep holes were dark both times I looked.
A proper door lets one into a musty sitting area, where a video monitor shows us the artists attention to detail. Watch the bug crawl across the board. Watch the blurry reflection in the window. I can practically feel the whir of the autofocus lens on the camera, in-out in-out. Videos like this have been ruined for me by television, and not in the way you might expect. A long while ago a commercial ran in which they talked about cell phone designers paying attention to 'the details', viewers were shown designers studying things closely and randomly pressing buttons on an elevator. At the end of the commercial a comical intern is chastised for imitating the designers (he aped them by pressing random elevator buttons, just as they had). Fitzpatrick's video feels like its aping the long tradition of 'attention to detail' films that have bored us since the 60s. I hope that this is another example of her cleverly borrowing conventions from previous style, because if this video is intended to be a true chart of the artists interests then she's a pretentious fool.
More, it seems, it's about style. About creating a place from which to make art and allow others access to that position as an interpretive tool. Fitzpatrick identifies herself with the video monitor work, it helps position everything around it as 'smart' because only a smart person would show something so dumb. Any moment, though, I expect the artist to leap forward and strike a dramatic pose, shouting "It's ACTING!" ala Saturday Night Live.
Run through the show with the price list in your hand, or else you'll be missing the titles. With names like "Tie a Pabst Blue Ribbon around my prize pony Bud" and "A roll of saran wrap and a bottle of beer", you can't tell the horses without the racing program. The titles help, they help set the mood for the show, they remind us that it's funny. "A roll of saran wrap and a bottle of beer" seems unnecessary, though, as the piece is pretty sexual and funny as is.
Walking up the ramp and out the door, I give Bellwether props for what might be their least sellable show ever, and I mean that in the nicest way.
This is all made from scratch. I hope the artist uses a knife to cut up the plastic rings of the can holder, otherwise a baby seal might choke on it.
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