Bill Amundson at Plus Gallery
Despite the humor in most of his work, Amundson’s drawings develop integral questions about American commercial lifestyles, and, well, all of America itself. Often when looking at his work I think about what it means to be an American, and I don’t see much glamour or intelligence, just monolithic icons of consumerism. In Amundson’s work, members of the consumer class get burned the hardest, and in his work these folks seem even more mindless than usual. Commercial giants who suffer at the expense of Bill's jokes seem to be deserving subjects: Dollar stores, Wal-Mart, and cookie-cutter houses out of suburbia serve as the locus of a minimal absurdism, where there is nothing in an entire Nebraska-colored landscape but a stylized Starbucks.
You kind of get the idea that even if a meteor hits Earth, the big box store will still be standing.
At Amundson’s new show at Plus Gallery, I was happy to see Sarah Palin built into the Tower of Babel in the "Tower of Sarah." Amundson has made similar pieces before: turning a person, usually a political figure, into a building. Usually an industrial, much-wrought building. Machines and integrity structures seem to fit naturally with the egos of these public, political figures: the person suddenly becomes a place and an industry. Pipes enseam wrinkled faces. Double-enforced buttressing provides the only hope of support.
This form of political artwork works. In both the real world and Amundson's work, political figures produce ideas; they create a product that in turn creates a kind of cultural waste, and massive structures are built to contain them. Perhaps the best easter egg in the Palin drawing is a tiny stick figure, Sarah’s husband Todd, who seems to be dancing about on a snowmobile-topped precipice jutting out of Sarah’s cheek, identifiable only by a label that says Todd. Isn’t that how big he seems? That is how he seems to me. At least compared to the zigguraut-like, much-gustoed Sarah.
It might seem odd to use to word “easter egg” while discussing a drawing, but Amundson’s drawings contain so much to look at, and so many jokes, that eventually a few of them go hidden enough to surface later and become treasured. One could visit this particular show several times and still not see it all.
If I didn’t enjoy laughing at/with the "Tower of Sarah" so much, I would say that my favorite piece of the show is the 2000 drawing, where Amundson has rendered a cell-phone or remote-like device that is built to navigate the art world. The device can tell its user “Where to go” and “Who to blow.” If only such a thing existed for those of us who can't understand art world dynamics for the life of us.
During his talk on November 4th, Amundson mentioned that he had made the ArtSpeak2000 piece with younger artists in mind. The art world can be strange and in-navigable for many people, and for many young artists. Someone who writes iPhone apps, get on an Artspeak App asap! Amundson's drawing looks about 500x more useful than ArtCards or ArtNear.
You can see this show through December 3rd. Go see it soon!
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