^{Chris Lipomi's photograph of his installation YSKKI WAKIPI (2008), artworks, twine, and Ralph Lauren wall paint (color: Village)}

At Open Satellite. (Gallery site here.)

This installation is a takeoff on the famous 1942 Mile of String installation by Marcel Duchamp, in which the artist hung a web of string inside a surrealist exhibition, thereby making the sculptures and paintings even stranger (making-strange was a chief priority of the surrealists, after all). Here the Los Angeles artist Chris Lipomi uses three miles of twine to close off an exhibition of his own earlier photographs and sculptures. Unlike Duchamp's setup, which you could walk inside of, Lipomi's gallery is entirely blocked off by the string.

Lipomi gets the atmosphere of the Madison Avenue mansion right, but beyond the most basic theatricality this installation has nothing going for it. It's appropriation of the laziest kind. Many artists (all the way back to 1943 and as recently as 2007) have made works that reference and expand upon the possibilities of Duchamp's Mile of String. It's hard to see what Lipomi's contribution adds.