Here’s a little note about Canada Gallery’s latest. In the past year they’ve had several exhibitions that made a couple of friends and I use the term trash-art with regularity. It seems that we couldn’t really decide whether trash-art was something we wanted to be or was something we wanted to work against.
Ever since one heart-stopper of an exhibition by Gedi Sibony, which I must confess to only having seen as photographs, I’ve been determined to not miss another of their shows. After numerous trips (with only Ronson Crow even beginning to be an exception) I’ve remained mostly underwhelmed.
But the latest, Seven Thousand Years of War with Aidas Bareikis, Phil Grauer, and Sarah Braman really pumps some excitement back into the room. The work represented is a little light on the content end, but what it does have is a kind of angst-fueled formalism. This brand of we-all-drop-dead assemblage takes its art history lessons from the likes of Rauschenberg, Kienholz, and a dash of Anthony Caro, but if you’re willing to follow my trajectory you might find that almost every object in the room betrays a sensibility indebted to late 80’s and early 90’s personal punk, via The Melvins and Dinosaur Jr.
I believe this is how the new trash-art (for lack of a better phrase) plans to operate. You can approach it like you would a 45 year-old high-modern sculpture, and at times it’s a little like the everyday shit you see clogging the garbage bins on Canal Street, but the important key here is feeling the works in the same way you, fifteen years ago, felt an emotive alt rock song. And while this approach comes with some nostalgia in tow, it might help to make sense of the kinds of punchy, ramblings leaking out from under Canada’s door.
One artwork in the show is not trying to do anything that different from any of the other artworks in the show; no artwork in the show is trying to refer to anything specific in the world. If a work by Braman confronts Anthony Caro’s work, I don’t understand it to do so didactically. It only brushes shoulders with the elder and moves quickly back to its native vocabulary of trash structure. If Bareikis winks to Kienholz, it is just a wink, never taking on any of his specific politics as subject matter. This is much how Kurt Cobain may have been dipping into one of his notebooks, cobbling various fragments of songs together – a verse here, a chorus there. Every work is a practice in arranging or cropping, and all with an aesthetic sense focused on the anger and ennui that I associate with a certain era of rock music.
Word of warning: you most certainly should not approach this work with a thesis statement in hand or ear, and maybe this is why I’m most excited about this space. They seem to be throwing a good portion of art world garbage out the window, even if most it does just end up being dragged back in and displayed on their showroom floor.
