I saw Caroline Wells Chandler’s cookies in passing at Spring
Break, and they seemed a little crafty and jokey for my liking. I walked into
Field Project and immediately assumed that the giant cookies on the wall were
made with actual edible toppings. For a second, I contemplated whether I could
get away with eating a marshmallow peep off of one of the cookies. Might be my
inner fat kid, but I had to weigh my desire to eat part of the sculpture
against the shame of being caught by the person sitting the gallery. Seems to
speak to a certain success in the work. Oh, even better, the toppings are cast
and aren’t edible at all.
The oversized cookies are both a little gross and clearly
desirable. They provided a wonderful backdrop for the life-size knit version of
Muppet characters with enlarged limp penises. It is the physical embodiment of
the terror I felt as a child for the off-kilter, trippy narratives of the Muppet
show. Remember when Alice took the pill that made her huge and was accidentally
crushing the Muppets? In the Muppets Take Manhattan, I got hysterical at the
prospect of the villains chopping Kermit up and eating his legs, and I had to
leave the movie. My own childhood and food issues might have blinded me to some
of the gender issues in the work, and I guess they do have penises. Somehow I
took the show more as the absurdity of dragging these beloved childhood
characters into the reality of gender and scale, and how it transforms them
into bizarre monsters. I took seeing Gonzo’s penis more as a joke about his nose
than anything about sexual politics. Of course, one person’s life-size gender-specific
Muppet is another’s reminder of mild childhood trauma or yet another’s “anthropomorphic
guides from yesteryear” who “sprawl on the floor and slump in corners under
paralytic self-reflexivity.” Either way, I found the show impressive, and it
certainly stuck with me in an unsettling kind of way
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