You know the drill at modern art museums: Lotsa white. Highbrow taste. Obscure prose. Reverent silence.
Film auteur and art maven John Waters is having none of it. In "Absentee Landlord," a smart, sexy and exceptionally witty exhibition he's curated at Walker Art Center, Waters mischievously breaks all the rules and more. Most of the art comes from the Walker's collection, but it's not all tasteful. Surprisingly, it's not shocking, either, at least not as shocking as you might expect from a guy infamous for a film scene of a drag queen eating dog poop.
Having long ago established his reputation with such low-budget cult classics as "Pink Flamingos" and "Hairspray," Waters has nothing to prove, of course, so he sallied into the Walker with an open mind and the firm backing of chief curator Darsie Alexander, a friend from his hometown of Baltimore. The idea was for Waters to come up with a fresh take on the Walker's collection. Of the 80-plus pieces he included, two dozen are on loan from artists, private collectors or Waters, who inserted some art of his own making. He has previously shown his work at galleries and the New Museum in New York, but this is his first curatorial gig. It's on view through March 4.
Swingers at home
The "Absentee Landlord" theme is a handy big-tent idea that lets Waters house a lot of unlikely, multigenerational art roommates, some of whom squabble while others pal around happily.
The first of three galleries is furnished with art arranged to evoke the apartment of a swinging couple, exemplified by the mismatched daters painted by John Currin in "Park City Grill," a nervous, anorexic blonde and a sleazy playboy with a dyed pompadour. A discarded window blind, flung on the floor courtesy of artist Gedi Sibony, suggests their domestic discord. Nearby hangs Mike Kelley's large slab of carefully groomed gold-shag carpet, opposite four Richard Prince photos of gloomy 1977 living rooms expensively decorated in tacky good taste. The bathroom is tucked around the corner -- a functionless Robert Gober sink and Paul Lee's rock-hard, rolled bath-mat sculpture.
In the cavernous black hole that serves as the couple's media room, the insidiously funny film "Flooded McDonald's," by the Danish group Superflex, plays endlessly. They also have a second, fake, media room designed by Waters, and a TV set showing "Meat Joy," a 1964 underground film from the Walker's collection recording a cheerful bacchanal in which men and women smear each other with raw chicken, fish, sausages, hamburger and wet paint. And of course they have trophy art: the Walker's prized "Sixteen Jackies" by Andy Warhol. Opposite it hangs a Waters photo collage pairing images of the burning World Trade Center with B-movie spaceships crashing into the U.S. Capitol and Washington Monument.
As an observer of the pretensions and degradations of contemporary culture, Waters is a deft manipulator of social signifiers. He obviously doesn't give a fig about the pieties of polite company as he sharply skewers the vulgarities of capitalist excess. Yes, it is startling to see our own 9/11 national tragedy juxtaposed with sci-fi mayhem, and portraits of "the widow" (as Aristotle Onassis referred to his second wife) lollygagging around in the bathroom of rich white trash. But reluctant though we may be to admit it, Waters' tabloid mix of high and low culture is as American as Playboy magazine.
