I was going to start this
review with a list of some of the recherche items found in Kai Althoff’s first
solo show in
If Althoff’s installation
had actually been the labor of some of the obsessive netting-and-veil queens
from whom he self-consciously borrows-people like Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, and
Stevie Nicks- the gallery doors would have remained locked, with the artist
still futzing with things until maybe a day before the closing. Instead, all the
delicacy, Scheherazade nuttiness, and nightshade queerness of Smith has been
“Extreme Makover”-ed into a stage set for painting, where painting is both
literal prop and metaphorical proscenium. Even without the collages, drawings,
and mixed-media paintings strewn (and hung, leaned, and hidden) among the
tchotchkes like food in a beard, what “supports” this contrived mess is a
rhetoric of (and market for) painting. Regardless of the other media Althoff at
times conjures, his dependence on the pictorial points to the redundancy and
conservatism of his project: There is no rethinking of space beyond merely
filling it up with stuff no
rethinking of temporality beyond old-timey styling.
Among the things hanging on
the wall or hanging around nearby were a lot of stumbled, angsty Egon Schiele
pastiches and a suite of shiny poster-sized images. including liquor ads,
florists’ ads, and a close-up of a face, printed on Mylar for an effect Madonna
put to better use in the packaging of Sex.
In one drawing, a top-hatted gigolo figure with a vest over his pink torso
sticks fingers from each hand up the noses of two naked victims, one male, one
female, their legs bound behind their heads, the antics caught beneath a
scribbled-y chandelier.
This drawing under glass
was propped on an expertly thrifted Lucite chair padded in black vinyl, with a
sheer ivory blouse and pink negligee draped nearby. Was this doodle a key to
the goings-on? I’m not Rain Man enough to care. After seeing the hodgepodge, I
used a gallery washroom in the back of a packed storage area. It was filled
with stacks of shipping crates, paintings, and photographs, and near the toilet
were some old exhibition posters, shelves of cleaning fluids, and a jumbo box
of Extra Strength Tylenol™. The washroom’s random accumulation may not have
been any more meaningful than Althoff’s art-directed mise- en-scène but it
certainly wasn’t any less so. I guess the best spin to put on all of this would
be to see Althoff in the light of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s take on Isa Genzken:
that to have the self succumb to the totalitarian order of objects brings the
sculptor to the brink of psychosis (although, postfeminism, it’s hard to
tolerate terms like psychosis, theoretical or not, in discussions of a woman
mist). Genzken navigates the moment by adhering to some vestige of discrete
sculpture, which, paradoxically if only momentarily, can stymie the optical
glut of capital. Contrarily, what Althoff proffers is hardly a contemporary
take on The Arcades Project. Rather,
he evades decision and responsibility in favor of eBay shopping. Althoff’s
decorator aesthetic (“gay” in its signs, although risking no defective
signification) is Norman Bates without the murder, taxidermied repression, or
dead mother—everything that made that faggot fun.
— Bruce Hainley