A Strange Harmony
Still able to attract the foreign and Downtown chic, filmmaker Harmony Korine has teamed up with artist Rita Ackermann to produce a series of large-scale artworks based on his 2009 film Trash Humpers. The movie, like an episode of Jackass written by a 6-year-old on Special K, features three actors in Freddy Krueger-style masks, roaming the suburbs of Nashville and invading homes, fornicating with trash bins and being generally antisocial.
The artists were notably absent from their own recent opening of [Shadow Fux], but as a mob of would-be attendees jostled for entry on the sidewalk, trash-art devotees mingled with the upper echelons of what passes nowadays as Downtown cool. Aurel Schmidt and Terry Richardson posed together for pictures while Andrea Rosen and Piper Marshall made the rounds.
Many guests just walked past the artworks hung in the first two galleries and congregated in the back room, where a VHS video played deleted clips from Korines movie.
A sign outside the gallery warns, The material in this exhibition is intended for persons 21 years of age or older only.
But its mostly a precaution; the worst thing inside is a video of two Trash Humpers beating off a couple of black dildos. There isnt enough depth for anyone to object in a David Wojnarowicz-at-the- Smithsonian sort of way.
In another deleted scene, a corpulent boy in his Sunday best speaks to the camera while addressing Rachel Korine, who sits in the grass behind him wearing a hideous mask and wig. Do you even have a face?! he shouts. The Trash Humpers cackle at this well-dressed little comedian, and we are left feeling vaguely exploitative. Strange lullabies and the occasional make it/ make it/ dont fake it echo around the gallery and provide an eerie soundtrack to the rest of the show.
Many of the artworks themselves are collaged paintings built from vinyl, canvas and source photos from Trash Humpers. Sending the pieces between New York and Nashville (Ackermann and Korines hometowns, respectively), the collaboration was built on adding and scrubbing away what the other artist had done.
Ackermanns calculated gestures and surrealist figures are a welcome addition to Korines universe, but only a few works manage to transcend the individual to a collaborative middle ground.
A piece called me versus the light evinces the same menacing atmosphere that got Trash Humpers credited as a horror movie in some circles. In it, three figures stand mockingly to one side of a still from Trash Humpers, while a foregrounded figure kneels before an assemblage of cigarette butts, orange peels and burnt match sticks.
The extensive use of red and blue ballpoint pens and even some imagery in high powered tramps is lifted directly from Ackermanns 1997 piece, World War III Around My Skull. Perhaps not the Downtown art darling she was a decade ago, Ackermann tethers herself to Korines star in an attempt to reach the Vice magazine demographic that the Chelsea art scene does not readily appeal to.
Korine is an accomplished visual artist in his own right, having held a number of group shows and published a book of collected zines. But his main contribution has been the strange and occasionally magical films hes made since writing the screenplay for Larry Clarks Kids.
In some ways, Trash Humpers is a distillation of Korines vision in Gummo, his 1997 drama about small-town lives in Ohio, a few years after a tornado destroyed much of the area. Much of the disgust and anxiety is from an inchoate view of American suburbia. His films revive the spirits of Tod Brownings Freaks and Werner Herzogs Even Dwarves Started Small.
Its hard to pin down what exactly is discomforting about Shadow Fux and Trash Humpers. The stripped-down techniques and no-holds-barred attitude blur the line between voyeuristic ethnography and trash art. But its the played-out retro-referential use of VHS and tongue-in-cheek appropriation of Middle America that comes across as pretentious and insincere. They are certainly able to construct a mood, if only after an hour of mindless chatter and cackling.
>> [Shadow Fux] Through Jan. 23, 2011, [Swiss Institute](http://www.swissinstitute.net/), 495 Broadway (betw. Spring & Broome Sts.), 212-925-2035.