86.625″x43.25″x57.875″; wigs, polka dot top, lace pleated dress, ribbons, found images; 2021. Courtesy of the artist and Downs & Ross, New York. Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle.
COLLAGE ON VIEW
Legally Blonde
at Downs & Ross in New York, New York, USA
13 January-26 February 2022
From our current perspective, Hollywood’s blonde heroines are always coming of age for the wrong reasons. A SoCal sorority sister enrolls in Harvard Law intent on winning back her WASP-y ex-boyfriend; or a showgirl from Little Rock stages a successful revue in Paris while otherwise engaged in a comically pathological pursuit of diamonds; or, maybe, a blindly ambitious news personality attempts to boost her ratings, and, instead, tumbles down the nationally-syndicated rabbit hole. “Wait, am I gonna be the story?,” asks Charlize Theron anxiously, portraying a fellow blonde, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, early in Jay Roach’s 2019 film Bombshell, a political comedy documenting the proto-#MeToo demise of the cable network’s mastermind Roger Ailes. Set against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, the film introduces a Queen of Hearts: then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, who orders Kelly’s decapitation by mean tweet, for Kelly’s crime of confronting Trump with a headline-grabbing account of his own misogyny on live television. Most viewers of Bombshell will arrive to it already knowing what comes next: Fox’s subsequent embrace of Trump and desertion of Kelly, former host Gretchen Carlson’s wrongful termination suit against the network, the seemingly endless, sordid accounts of sexual harassment at Fox that followed, and, in the final act, Kelly’s career-defining patricide of Ailes, her Jabberwock-like mentor. Replacing the real world leads with A-list actors like Theron and Nicole Kidman, the film draws our attention to the uncanny construction of its own image, and, perhaps inadvertently, the plasticity of its main subjects. And, as evinced by the duality of its title, Bombshell shares with Ailes an understanding that his deleterious production of “the story” and his manufacture of the telegenic personality are irretrievably, inextricably connected.
The film is the subject of Jacqueline Fraser’s The Making of Bombshell, 2021, the latest entry in a series of installations, beginning with The Making of La Dolce Vita, 2011, and including recent iterations The Making of Dressed to Kill, 2019, and The Making of Maria by Callas, 2020. Drawing upon the title format of the behind-the-scenes documentary, generally released alongside the film as a sort of fan service or promotional tool, Fraser retains the parallelism of the format, but inversely imagines herself to engage in a process of remaking the source film through a series of collages and assemblages, later installed alongside an unadulterated projection of the film.
48″x36″; archival inkjet print on canvas with gouache butt prints; 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Downs & Ross, New York. Photo: Phoebe d’Heurle.
Elsewhere, Marie Karlberg constructs desecrated copies of works by cool male conceptual painters who came to prominence in the late 1990’s, artists like Merlin Carpenter, Günther Förg, Christopher Wool, and Heimo Zobernig. Transforming the painterly surface of the original into a digital image and then printing it back onto canvas, Karlberg allegorically submits her source material to a sort of blonde-ification, while simultaneously restoring her own authorial signature by repetitiously applying her own ass to canvas, covered in gouache. By employing herself in a performance redolent of Yves Klein, Karlberg humorously suggests a psychosexual relationship to this lineage of intellectual bad boys turned art market mainstays, tempered by a self-reflexive knowingness that resonates not only elsewhere in her oeuvre, but also in the dually defiant and aspirational logic at work in the exhibition.
The exhibition includes work by Vikky Alexander, Darja Bajagić, Jacqueline Fraser, Marie Karlberg, Catherine Mulligan and Kayode Ojo.
(adapted from text written by Jeremy Gloster for Downs & Ross)
INFORMATION
Downs & Ross
2nd Floor
96 Bowery
New York, New York 10013
(646) 741-9138
Hours:
Tuesday-Saturday, 11AM-6PM