NURSERY ANGST

Tossing aside Freud and Lacan (as many of us would like to do––especially Lacan) it must be conceded that time travel began with Orpheus, whose prolonged and noisy mourning so pestered the Gods that they reversed their decree, allowing him to rescue Eurydice from the underworld. Much of our anguish, and our methods of relieving it, is an attempt to sieve the ocean of memory and experience and segregate the droplets containing shame and sorrow. How many of us would not, given the chance, exchange our lives for one less crowded with incident, one more rewardingly devised? Unfortunately, existence is a game of stud, not draw, so our revisionism remains in the realm of fancy but that does not prevent us from traveling back in time to revenge (or sometimes to simply replay––we take perverse pleasure in unscabbing our old wounds) wrongs done us in a vague and embellished past.

With childhood extending ever longer we find, if not entirely acceptable, at least tolerable, the 40-year-old skateboarder and the mother-daughter tandems in the tattoo parlor. Why should we not invest our juvenilia with curative powers? Psychology (see above) and Romantic poetry (Wordsworth and Blake) have so indoctrinated us that we seek our futures in our past.

The artists assembled in Nursery Angst; Marcel Dzama, Jon Pylypchuk, Adrian Williams, Sierra Mitchell, Datu Galang, and Martine Gilbert, indulge and lampoon this notion. Marcel Dzama shows us, in an ink line drawing accented with saturated color, a horse beheading a weasel. Both are dressed as humans but the horse, in an act of exclusivity, shows the weasel that only certain animals are worthy of anthropomorphism. It is class struggle among the animals. Horseracing is, after all, the sport of kings while weasels are, well, weasels. In a collage/drawing––made of simple notebook paper, cardboard, and correction fluid––of a woman kneeling at a well, Adrian Williams has led her there through partially obscured dance diagrams, covering her graceful footprints, as if she will be forever changed after tasting the new waters; a product of, but no longer bound to, her past. It is unclear whether this is a desire or a fear. The caviling conjoined twins, shown above, in Sierra Mitchell's tiny painting, Union, share an empty thought balloon from which their dream of separation has fallen, disappearing, behind them. The balloon still floats above, a vacant herald, transformed into a darkening cloud. From a recollection of childhood viewing of adult-themed movies Datu Galang has made the crudely painted and poignant The Death of Fredo from a scene in the film, The Godfather Part II. The errant brother sits praying in a small boat while his fishing partner, and murderer, raises a pistol. The moment is silhouetted in the moonlight reflection upon the water. Milwaukee, by Martine Gilbert, depicts a gleaming back brace, named for the city of its invention, designed to correct curvature of the spine. It casts a long, sinister shadow that heightens its resemblance to a device of torture. The strangest and most evocative work is by Jon Pylypchuk; another collage/drawing, it shows a weeping toucan, made of felt, being cast out by a larger, sandpaper-torsoed figure raising a broken arm to point the way to exile. Like a mediaeval painting it has ribbons of text that leaven but do not reveal the scenario. It is both a love story and an expulsion from Eden.

It is understandable that we should retreat from the complexities of adult life in an attempt to unburden ourselves, even briefly, from the obligations and entrapments we have invented, sought, and possessed, and that these strategies should be encoded enough for plausible deniability. Therapists and lovers are allowed only so deep into the root cellar of our vulnerability. We always reserve a distress too grievous to signal, a torment with which we so deeply identify that to master it would make us unrecognizable even to ourselves. We then, as if for sport, offer for display a series of fears, strong enough to wound but too weak too cripple, so that we might scrutinize these proverbial fish swimming lazily in the barrel while we take aim, accounting ourselves great hunters.

Max King Cap