Quote:
Originally Posted by sierraAZ
|
A REVIEW OF "MUAH"
by Phillipe Argyle-Wentsworth III
City-Data Art Critic
SierraAZ, long-crowned the
enfant terrible of the art world, has, through her latest ontological
oeuvre, transformed our so-called familiar urban landscape of City-Data into something self-referential, stochastic, and yet at the same time mundane. One recalls the Dadaists and the soup cans of Andy Warhol, and one reflects on the normative paradigmatic shift of our hermeneutical age. There are those who will view "Muah" as a didactic polemic, little more than a
bete noire; still others who will see it as replete with a fertile esthetic, and others will want to burn themselves into a fiery crisp on national television, imitating (perhaps) the Buddhist monks of yesteryear, whose saffron-colored robes "Muah" echos, in all their evanescent autocracy.
The question remains:
Muah: a simple
recherche into the lost
carts de jeunesse, a Dumbo’s feather that lets the viewer soar back to the lost folly of youth? Or a
sine qua non of postmodern folly?
The meaning of this "Muah" might have been comprehensible had we discovered it rising against the warm backdrop of “avant-garde” Seattle, but arising as it has, here, in the gritty cold heart of Relationships, and funded by so-called ‘artists’ whose “creative” progeny are all indubitably strange, we find nonsense in the idea that meaning means anything ‘sensible’ and one rather suspects a joke being played and we, the viewers, don’t yet quite “get” it.
I would equate the experience of seeing this exhibit with passing through the birth canal and suggest that those who hate "Muah" do so because they despise their own existence. Sierra’s "Muah" is a physical representation of the artist’s inner dialectic, juxtaposing saffron spirituality and utilitarian steel in a compromised landscape, and brings up the penultimate question:
Ou les neiges de temps jadis sont?
If we know anything, we know this: Art is neither object nor subject, but the phenomenological intertwining of both so that ‘appreciation’ (in all its varied and multiple meanings) is born from the simple realization of perception. This recognition allows for art that is neither here nor there, but everywhere. And nowhere.
Sierra’s animism is at the heart of her challenge to the verity of truth, insofar as it rectifies the humanism of our spatial modality. "Muah" purports to effect a
nouveau realisme in which the actual is unrealized into a cathartic emission of the whole.
The dialectic of Sierra’s “Muah” is a reflection of the post-9/11
zeitgeist, absent the
schadenfreude qua nervousness that has gripped the American populace in this world of “now-more-than-ever.” The semiotics of the lowly chimpanzee serves an ontological function in re-animating and re-introducing the humanity of New Relationships to their perceptions of the apish joy of being – the being you felt as a child, vis a vis a
pinata. The Gestalt bespeaks a Foucaultian
Weltschmerz, a sumptuous feast of post-Derridian brio-***-angst. It’s in this context that “Muah” covers, even metastasizes, over City-Data like a vast dollop of neo-maternalistic, neo-Marxian mayonnaise.
The painted lips, a touchstone of familiarity to the bourgeoisie (nursing at the paps of
American Idol), emanate as immense labia beckoning, even taunting the onlooker to become, to
be the phallus penetrating into Mother Nature – the maternal
yin imprisoned in the mechanistic
yang of the thread and yet floating above the concept of restraint – the “Muah” welcomes yet repels; it silently ululates like a
shtetl of
schmatte-clad
yentas and yet remains silent with the deafening-yet-voiceless torment of the
ur-mensch; metaphysical yet material (or rather neo-material), smug in its tangibility yet internally, silently, futilely screaming in horror at its immateriality. The “Muah” is, in short, of a piece with and yet utterly discontinuous from the fundamental leitmotifs of our age.
As for the sexualized nature-of-being within the context of the exposure: the Muah cannot be phallic; by its very nature it must be Sapphic and labile, thus rendering the observer as a sort of unintended symbol of penetration
qua probing. It mitigates the very phallocentric nature of our neo-culture where every wardrobe malfunction becomes a gesture of the feminine violent against a landscape of testicular domination. The flowing lips of the Muah are by necessity, feminine; they recall the flowing garments of kindergarten teachers, of wash on the line, and the color – an ochre, rather than a true red – dimly recalls menstruation. What Sierra has done here is nothing short of genius; the observer-as-penis concept writ large.
As rendered in "Muah", the effect is homiletic rather than narrative–especially the cheap eyeglasses, which provide a whimsical counterpoint as well as a sobering reminder of our paternalistic dichotomy, where all true art is of necessity samizdat, and thus destined to languish in obscurity, ignored by the nekulturny hordes of bourgeois apparatchiks.
I gladly viewed Muah, feeling in it a life-affirming force, but couldn’t help looking away with existential angst on my face, remembering Auschwitz.
In SiearraAZ’s America, we are all diaspora.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
