My Own Private Public
February 6th, 2009When life gives you lemons, make lemonade (with vodka). When life gives you trauma, turn it into brilliant art.I’ve never psychoanalyzed Robert Melee (“Damn it, Jim! I’m an artist, not a doctor!”). Still, his early “Mommy” videos suggest that he grew up in a minefield of traumatic experiences. In those episodic videos, Madame Melee staggers and moans in front of the camera, heavily made-up, drunk, often naked, and ranting. The “crazy mother” thing is indispensable for camp (“No…wire…hangers…EVER!”), but Robert Melee harnesses it as multi-layered, subversive material.
Generally, trauma is repressed. Too painful to handle, the sufferer buries it deep down inside. But Robert Melee televises it, paints it, and allows it to ooze and drip, encroaching through the walls, like the invading hands in Polanski’s Repulsion.
This is speculative: but in a parallel universe, Robert might make work like Richard Artschwager, or paintings that fit somewhere between Kenneth Noland and Robert Mangold. He is rooted in the minimal cube: geometric, stable, clean, and self-sufficient. And look at all the grids, which appear throughout his interiors as modular drop ceilings, paneled floors, and square-sheathed walls – and in his bottlecap paintings, photo albums, platforms and entertainment units. Rhythmic arrangements and periodic motifs are systematic; the randomness of his marbleizing “gestures” is carefully ordained by framing structure. Even his collaboration with Merce Cunningham dancers, This is for You (2003), proceeded by rules and a grid floorplan.
(Really quick: here is some background on Robert Melee. -Grew up in New Jersey, was an undergrad at SVA, did his homework at the Pyramid Club, assisted Marilyn Minter, exhibited at PS1, White Columns, and Artists Space, and then had a studio visit with Andrew Kreps, which led to five solo shows at that gallery.)
Robert’s work expanded from his Mommy videos to room-filling installations that looked and functioned like mausoleums for families of his photos. Robert has adopted domestic dissonance as his subject matter. And the aforementioned minimalist tendencies either cause or are caused by a structural, pragmatic sensibility. That may be why Melee ends his excavation of suburban home artifacts at its furniture. He doesn’t seem to dig through ornamentation and kitsch knick-knacks (not counting the photo albums that bear photos of Mommy, himself, or both). Instead, many of Robert’s sculptures enjoy day jobs as cabinets, curtains, and appropriated appliances – the stuff that would be hard and heavy to load into a moving van. Even the paintings, fragmented and diffuse, lean toward the “specific object,” by defying categories. One might think “op” before thinking “painting” or “sculpture” when squinting at a blazing bottlecap construction or mesmerizing curtain sculpture.
And although some pieces are irrefutably “period,” such as the oven in Anti-Inter Shamelessness Substitution (2008), there is still more interest in functional objects qua objects than in historically significant details. Compare to Keith Edmier, Robert’s contemporary – and fellow survivor and archaeologist of 1970s suburbia – who painstaking recreates, either personally or through artisans and fabricators, every subtle detail around the home. For his Bremen Towne (2007-8), Edmier obsessively reconstructed rooms from his childhood home, leaving no pet rock unturned:
“Every other detail of his parent’s kitchen and their furnishings had to be researched reconstructed, and recreated. The backsplash tiles for the kitchen wall were custom made in Las Vegas on the basis of vintage samples. Edmier found the two-door Amana 25 refrigerator in a film prop store in Burbank, Los Angeles, and had it painstakingly restored…the door handles had to be rechromed using an electroplating technique, while the harvest gold finish was reapplied in a professional paint workshop. (Scheidemann, Parkett #81)
So what happens when Robert Melee unveils his objects in exterior settings? We get to see at City Hall Park, in a project presented by the Public Art Fund. Four large-scale, polychrome, bronze sculptures doused in paint seem to roam amongst the trees. Their surfaces are as chunky and craggy as an old tree. The colored streams running from top to bottom are enamel paint, a material as industrial as Judd’s aluminum or plywood, and especially suited for municipal applications, like fire hydrants or the poles in parking lots. From the craggy, eroded surface of each sculpture, stringy rivulets of paint dangle, frozen mid-drip.
The sculptures are hulking figures with postures fully human, but they are unsexed and faceless. The titles confirm: It Sitting, It Standing, and It Up; though Her Leaving seemingly indicates a woman (Mommy?). Then again, gay patois sometimes defaults to female pronouns. The depersonalizing “It” strips the objects of character, so only the form remains. It’s also creepy. It reminds me of Buffalo Bill’s directive “It puts the lotion in the basket.”
These bronze sculptures are cast from molds made of plaster, armature, and mannequins, begun while Robert worked temporarily in Lisbon. Mannequins? Yes. So think about how a mannequin is an idealized figure, yet Robert covers it with countless layers of amorphous goo! The pretty, well-adjusted mannequin is demoted to a mere ghost in the shell of a grotesque giant that makes Rodin’s Balzac look like a young nun.
Which takes us back to the trauma stuff. For most people, inner beasts, the personal demons, misshapen, savagely unfit, and ugly are more commonly buried under layers of repression. But in Robert’s work, it all has emerged to the surface, and buried the consumable ideal deep within. He uncovers the ID and inverts the persona. And then he places it in a public setting with an especially authoritarian context. The (very) private goes (very) public.