Liz Magor’s coolly painted cast-polymer sculptures of empty trays,
dead animals, folded coats, and rotting timbers, adorned with
cigarettes, candy wrappers, and assorted bottles of booze, inhabit a
lonely and barren space that exists between our urges and their
fulfillment. Her empty, exhausted, and expendable objects have not, of
course, extinguished our needs, but represent nonessential, easily
procured, and quickly consumed stand-ins. The pleasures they wrought,
if experienced at all, have long since passed and the sober
consequences of their effects can clearly be felt.
Assembled on a series of footed, cast slabs smeared with traces of
color are sculptures of dead rodents, cigarette boxes, decaying food,
and small pieces of candy, all sandwiched between stacks of tarnished
metal trays. There is a pale, severed deer head; a colorless raccoon
carcass on a plate of breath mints; a shriveled mouse in a heavy
ashtray; and half-a-dozen leather and woven jackets folded into
squares. Magor’s “delivery devices”—whiskey bottles, cigarettes,
a Toblerone bar—are frequently inserted into and partially
concealed in the cast forms of the collapsed outerwear garments,
suggesting their injection or infusion into hollow, depleted vessels.
Beneath them on the floor are cast segments of a downed, decomposing
tree oozing static foam from either cut end. All the objects in the
gallery possess the cold dampness of death.
It is not hard to see in these works a critique of society, with its
emphasis on consumption and denial, but Magor’s sculpture is about
something more specific. Her pieces address the commercial and critical
demands of the contemporary art world, as well as our historic and
deep-seated belief in the transformative power of the art object
itself. The public’s insatiable hunger for novelty, excitement, and
content (both within the art world and outside it) is frequently at
odds with the artist’s need to satisfy her own creative urges and to
produce meaningful works of art.
Magor’s series of works at the Henry engages this dilemma
brilliantly by deromanticizing the artistic process. The life force of
her sculptures has been depleted and replaced by an unholy trio of
tobacco, alcohol, and sugar, but the act of making is as painstaking as
in traditional, romanticized castings, in which sculptures are seen to
take on a life of their own. Magor’s practice is more like inverse
taxidermy. 