I hate to admit that the Internet has changed the way images
are thought of. It is such a hackneyed line of thinking now, that to even find
myself doing it makes me a little embarrassed. I hasten to call the resulting
style of work the Tumblr esthetic, because it now seems Tumblr is dying a quick
death; people are already onto Instagram, and I am just exhausted trying to
keep up.
But if the abundance of images democratically popping up
next to each other in people’s various social media feeds have led to questioning
the importance of a traditional visual coherence in a body of work, then Alex
da Corte seems to be taking it up a notch. Having gone through his rather ambitious
show at MASS MoCA, I am not sure I like it, but it has stuck with me. What I
remember is a lot of stuff that looked very cool, and I immediately imagined da
Corte as someone much hipper than myself who has no qualms going all in on some
garish bright colors, fluorescent lights and carpeting, lots and lots of
carpeting.
I am not sure what the work means exactly. The carpet, a
giant Kleenex box and erector set sculpture along with a giant cover of REM’s Green
album with letters missing and a banana on it: the work all scream a vague free
association of my own childhood, so I am guessing da Corte is of a similar age
or at least young enough to glorify the period when I was a teen. But with the
over-the-top colors and everything being so dark, it seems that his connection
to suburbia of a certain period isn’t a happy one.
With this kind of random work, I can never quite tell whether
the resistance to overt meaning is a punk rock confrontation of the viewer or
just a cloying way of for the artist to avoid coming to hard artistic conclusions
about the meaning and aspirations of the work. As a viewer, I am not sure if I
am being swayed by vacuous work that feels cool or work that is aimed at an
audience younger than myself. Either way, it has stuck with me, which is a lot
more than I can say about most art.
Through Jan. 15th
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