House Synch Crisis
March 21st, 2009Looking to get away this summer? Recession cut into your travel budget? Too old for STA discounts? Too restless for a staycation? Then Lisa Kirk has a deal for you.
Open for one more week, her project at Invisible-Exports, House of Cards, is a shanty assembled entirely from found materials. You can enter the enclosure and tread across the cardboard floors, pausing to examine its improvised amenities: dining room, bar, sleeping quarters. When you reach the exit of this shotgun space, you’ll find yourself in a sales office, carpeted and painted an innocuous beige, where one of the sales specialists – not gallerists – will pitch the selling points of the shanty and offer you the opportunity to purchase a share in the shanty timeshare.
That share, only $199.99, consists of a week-long occupancy in the shanty during the period in which it will be installed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. For a little extra money, $599.99, you can add to your week-long getaway one of the 52 component pieces of the shanty. And for much more still, $8999.99, you can have that piece cast in bronze. I tried to purchase the week of July 4, but that was “on hold.” A friend bragged that he had scored Fleet Week; wish I had thought of it. Act now: after the show closes next weekend, share prices will go up.
A satirical show about timeshare shanties – luxury slumming – is perfect for this year, rued for the recession caused at least partly by foolhardy home loan deals. The devastating tsunami of foreclosures and stalled construction sites tragically has deposited many of the victims into tent cities, ghettos of lean-tos for the down-and-out. -Maybe her next project could be an orchard of guillotines for AIG executives.
For those in the know, a “sub-exhibition” is installed downstairs in the basement, featuring Molotov cocktails, gunpowder, pipe bombs, and a projected video, which is the commercial for “Revolution.” It’s sexy and dramatic, with mercenaries dashing through the city amidst snipers, sirens, and chaos, ultimately demasking and handing off “the package,” a bottle of the subversive scent.
I don’t really need to mention the haunted houses, meth labs, bodegas and mini cities by Mike Nelson, Jonah Freeman, Justin Lowe, and Christoph Büchel. Nor Carsten Höller’s Revolving Hotel Room in last year’s theanyspacewhatever at the Gugg. Actually, I really named those artists simply to show off how I learned to type the umlaut. I always thought you needed a special keyboard. Anyway, the mimetic environment installation genre is HOT: Envision a subculturally loaded space, often abject, recreate it in another designated space, then add water. I guess I could point to Claes Oldenberg’s Store(1961) as a precedent, though its items were handmade.
House of Cards unfolds in the wake of her institutional debut at PS1 in 2007, where Lisa, an SVA alumna, installed Time Suspended, a kitchen laboratory where hypothetical separatists brewed their subversive perfume, “Revolution.” Both shows used scavenged materials, exemplifying a resourceful “something from nothing” aesthetic. The post-apocalyptic House of Cards is a freegan gesamtkunstwerke. Again, the shanty is built from found objects, including the wheatpasted poster of “Sgt. Guy Debord,” a serendipitous match of guerilla and gallery. Moreover, the stock-styled photographs displayed as sales aids have as their models friends and family members of Lisa and the gallery staff. Her real-life infant son stars as the progeny of the archetypical, focus-grouped young family, who are otherwise pushing strollers around Williamsburg. House of Cards is built from components at Lisa’s fingertips, imbued with overlapping personal connections.
One additional layer of coincidental co-identity: if you’re lucky, the sales specialist twisting your arm will be the charming and effective actor, Susan London. She’s a natural, answering any question without pause. The twist is that outside business hours, she actually owns an impressive art collection, with top-tier names to raise your eyebrows.
