“Communications Programming,” Alex DeCarli and Dmitri Hertz on the 6th Floor

In one corner of the sixth floor lobby a very tall, spindly broom, which brought to mind Martin Puryear’s “Ladder for Booker T Washington,” and Dr. Seuss, extends from the ceiling to the floor as though it might clean up the mess at the other end of the lobby. That mess is, we know of course, art. And if art doesn’t get swept up, it does get stored, contained, packed. This highly allegorical exhibition (maybe allegory is my own entry to the work, and imposed) kept bringing me back to the idea of packing, and by extension traveling. In two instances, or three possibly, packing material provides a kind of base or pedestal for the “piece”—packing boxes with the warning, “very fragile” in one instance, a sealed container of packing peanuts in another. One piece is already loaded up onto a dolly cart, or never unloaded.

Following this train of thought, the work seemed to be involved with the problem of its own display, a problem that sculpture more than any other medium seems to take most seriously. And, I guess, it’s a serious problem when you exist in the messy world of three dimensions. The attention to how something is contained allows for some of the nicer parts of the show, like the painted table holding a small video or video game screen, or the container that props up the TV on which a video of a man trying, and failing, to stab himself plays. This container changes the potential moment of viewing radically, so that we are forced to completely “look down” on the video.

This video also captures a recurring tone to the other work in the show and its display. Ironic angst, if that’s the right way to phrase it, present in this piece also plays into the brick (or what I thought might have meant to be a sculpture of a video game representation of brick) that is crushing the middle of a phallus. I honestly don’t know why sculpture shows insist on repeating phalluses. But it’s also possible, in the spirit of irony and fake angst, that this attempts to be a post-phallus phallus piece. Or does every phallus sculpture intend to be that? Certainly that is an easy metaphor to take from it, though I’m not sure how much I can believe that reading.

I failed to watch the performance at 7 and so someone else's reflections on that would be useful here.

Henry