Look Both Ways
Fuzzy Engine, 720-1767.
Through Jan 8.
THEY’VE REPAINTED the floor at Fuzzy Engine, with yellow and white block shapes arranged so that they recall a hazmat warning logo. In the vast annals of contemporary art, I don’t know if gallery floors have ever been used to put you on alert to the kind of work you’re going to see–I imagine they have–but these colors, brightly and unsteadily underfoot, signal danger.
The show is Look Both Ways, an inquiry into safety and danger, their interdependence, the consequences. The most obvious consequence is how fear drives us into a bland landscape of isolation, cutting us off from real experience, and this is the main ore mined by the Fuzzy Engine artists. Look Both Ways leans heavily on this irony–perhaps too hard. The idea could have been pushed further, I think, into the realms of the necessity of danger and uncertainty, especially to undertakings such as art, but also to growth. Nonetheless, there is interesting work here.
The show’s set piece is Steve Veach’s Loaded. It holds the gallery in its menacing and magnetic aura, and well it should: It’s a loaded gun, partially encased in cement. The safety here is provisional, since the gun is embedded in such a way that it’s not safe after all, and could still go off. The presence of a loaded gun radically changes the gallery’s very air; it reminded me of riding the subways in New York, and how when policemen would board for a few stops, everyone would suddenly get very still. You would be sitting there eye-level with a weapon; you could, if you were very brave and stupid, reach out and touch it.
The work is accompanied by a paragraph of text by the artist, which describes the gun’s owner in language right out of Flannery O’Connor: “Sometimes I happened upon him drinking, dry firing the gun in his kitchen, glowering, sullen, deliberate.” Veach is evasive about who this person is, and one senses that the relationship is closer than the distancing text implies. Suddenly the gun gains a depth beyond the obvious, standing in for all the unresolved relationships in our pasts, the unexploded events of the past. (Above the loaded gun there’s an x-ray of it, as if we could get to the heart of the matter by seeing through it, which of course we can’t, since the x-ray reveals nothing.) A few feet away, a painting by Veach, a thickly impastoed hand holding a gun, is called It’s Only a Painting, speaking further to the limits of art, or its possibilities, depending on how much you want to learn from its process.
Susan Robb mines a different territory in a work called At Home Safe in Bed. It consists simply of a telephone on a table, which also holds pens, pastels, spray paint, and a number of safety-guaranteeing products–Lysol, latex gloves, anti-static bags. There is also a phone number that you are directed to call, and when you do, a voice instructs you to write the following words on the wall above the table: I am not here, this is not happening. This is the incantation of the frightened, a rather touching and naive belief that we can make something disappear through the power of words. But the installation’s effect is quite different. The phrases, written and rewritten, gain a psychotic weight, like the pages of “all work, no play” repeatedly typed in The Shining. Here the parameters of safety are set and violated by our own minds, not by the products that remove germs, static, or undesirable people.
Fuzzy Engine is emerging–on the strength of its first two shows–as Seattle’s most conceptual gallery, displaying a kind of work largely missing from our landscape cluttered with glass. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t beauty here, and humor and politics. Blair Wilson gives us a jointed policeman with a loony leer of an expression and big round testicles that make his arms and legs move when pulled. Randy McCoy’s Ride Free tests the beauty and use of a simple object–a motorcycle helmet–by casting it in glass, and finds it quite beautiful, but ultimately useless. Much of the work in the show comes to a similar conclusion, which might signal a theme too narrow for these artists. Or it might signal a blind spot we all share in how we look at what is really–I mean really–good for us.