Jon Haddock
Howard House, 256-6399.
Through April 5.
Jon Haddock’s previous shows have established him as a kind of digital-age provocateur. In Internet Sex Photographs, he edited the bodies out of porn stills, leaving those forlorn, underdecorated rooms still slightly charged by significant absence–dented cushions, weird stains; he has also removed the figures from famous photographs, leaving us to wonder how well we actually remember them. In Screenshots, he rendered famous real and fictional scenes (the death of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Hotel, the death of Fredo in The Godfather: Part II) in the style of the video game the Sims, giving, in a neat flip-flop, video-game authority to fiction, and digital distance to reality.
The tide of critical opinion generally agrees that Haddock points toward the truth by draining the emotion out of fraught moments, largely because the quality of fraught tends to congregate in bodies rather than environments, and also because digital has come to mean we don’t feel a warm, living hand behind the work. These are easy claims to make, and not terribly interesting. But Haddock’s new work, in a show called The Death of Reason, suggests something more emotional at work.
For one thing, it’s a show of painting and sculpture, so evidence of this warm, living hand is everywhere. The paintings feature comic-book-style characters (mostly superheroes) against abstract painterly backgrounds, but they are not as accessible and friendly as the style suggests; in fact, aside from a series of political moments (the disembodied heads of Bush, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft gazing malignantly at a naked, bound John Walker Lindh) they are relentlessly personal. Each painting illustrates a moment out of Haddock’s life, and the usefulness of this trope began to penetrate while I looked at Clea Puts a Dying Cat out of Its Misery, in which Clea–engaged in a thankless, agonizing task–wears an elaborate spacesuit. If you’re going to have to do something as awful as kill a cat, you might as well imagine yourself a superhero. You might as well make it part of a heroic narrative.
The superhero template is a useful one for all sorts of uncomfortable situations, kind of like imagining the soundtrack to your own life. (The midnight trip to the grocery store for kitty litter is much more plangent if you imagine a Nick Drake song playing over it.) It’s a way of making sense of history, like telling a story over and over again until you find the version you like–and then you own it.
One of Haddock’s older works is a tiny double diorama of Susan Smith killing her children: In one of them, a woman walks away from a submerged car, and in the other, the car is stopped at a light by a black man. The power of these scenes lies in the fact that no one ever saw them–one, obviously, because it never happened–but the artist’s re-creation gives him a kind of sculptural power over the crime’s senselessness. Re-imagining the World Trade Center attacks as a Marvel comics emergency (green Gotham-style buildings, with cigar-shaped missiles swooping in theatrically) gives it an overlay of wishful thinking (that it never happened, that it’s just a story in a comic book imagined by someone else), but also a moment–however short–in which unwilling suspension of disbelief relaxes into the willing variety.
Haddock’s installation, called 98/107, works in the opposite direction. It consists of 98 foot-high sculptures of the United States senators voting for the PATRIOT Act, each arm shot führer-style into the air, each face frozen in a rictus of self-righteousness. You get the feeling that Haddock created each one to understand, right down in his hands, the difference between symbol and reality. Each one has its individuality (it’s not too hard to pick out Maria Cantwell and Hillary Rodham Clinton) but not in a very flattering manner (the women all have the kind of ankles the British call “beef to the heels”).
On the exhibition’s opening night, someone whispered to me, “You just want to kick them.” Somehow you feel you wouldn’t be kicking a symbol; they’re quite real enough.