"Disorderly Conduct".

Markle, Leslie

Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach CA February 3 * May 25, 2008

"Disorderly Conduct: Recent Art In Tumultuous Times," featuring painting, video, and installation by nine local and international artists, addresses, according to curator Karen Moss, nothing less than "the political turbulence, cultural malaise and general instability of our tumultuous times." Selecting artists whose work is "imbued with surrealist absurdity and irony," the idea is to get at the roots of this country's current psychological breakdown through the mirror or therapy echo of art. Pilar Albarracin, Karen Finley, Pearl C. Hsiung, Glenn Kaino, Mike Kelley, Martin Kersels, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Rodney McMillian, and Robin Rhode were all brought together with this clever agenda in mind.

These artists routinely transgress the expected limits of art to construct otherworldly allegories, mirroring the pressure points and insecurities of real world counterparts. Typically, these impulses find no simple resolution, but rather tend toward open-ended narratives. Karen Finley presents a series of childlike works on paper depicting the Iraq War, culminating in My Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Eyes of Condoleezza Rice (2007), which commemorates not only the song but the final words of Martin Luther King's last speech. Daniel Joseph Martinez's The House That America Built (2004) makes a sly architectural reference to the cabin of Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski. The fact that Kaczynski's cabin was modeled after transcendental American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau's house at Walden Pond, which in turn encouraged Martinez to paint it in the Martha Stewart signature line of house colors, is the measure of the type of spiraling absurdity characteristic of "Disorderly Conduct."

Representing video and photography is the old bad boy himself, Mike Kelley, whose Gospel Rocket (2005) installation juxtaposes a phallic projectile with an illuminated marquee displaying the title words and animated photographs. This mise-en-scene is set to gospel music and, in its entirety, seems to evoke an evangelical telethon. In Rodney McMillian's video Untitled (The Michael Jackson Project) (2004), the artist creates a disturbing sense of self-parody while lip-synching the Streisand song The Way We Were in a T-shirt and whiteface.

The standout piece, however, is definitely Martin Kersels's paired installation of Tumble Room--a slowly spinning, near-life-size recreation of a teenage girl's bedroom--and Pink Constellation (both 2001)--a documentary video heavily influenced by Fred Astaire and Buster Keaton. The narrative arch of Tumble Room, which kinetically embodies a loss of innocence in its sense of play, begins with the room revolving incessantly and only concludes after all the furniture in the girl's room has been pulverized to dust. Both the high point and summation of "Disorderly Conduct," Tumble Room has us share the fantasy that Kersels, just like a revolving room, can see a world turned upside-down through the eyes of a teenage girl. The ease with which the girl's ego view is appropriated within the art of male mid-lifers is a signature moment in what's new today in L.A.: the historicization of its art scene.

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