“Alright, let’s get all Creme Brulee around the table,” says artist Jonah Freeman, prompting a procession of tux-clad gents and flapperized ladies to crowd a buffet teeming with plastic crustaceans, tropical fruits, and flowers, all of which surround his artistic collaborator, Justin Lowe, who lies recumbent on the table in a navy pin-striped suit, black ascot, and werewolf makeup. Assistants armed with spray adhesive apply tufts of hair to Lowe’s hands and face. Freeman, in his uniform of black skinny jeans, black monk-strap shoes, and a black vintage rock T-shirt, climbs onto the back of a horseshoe-shaped booth, a fully kitted Canon in hand.
“Smoke!” he says.
“Smoke,” shouts photo assistant Steven Perilloux.
“Smoke,” echoes Jhordan Dahl, a curator who serves as the stylist, photo booker, and general fixer for Freeman/Lowe, as they’re known professionally. Within seconds, a dense white fog creeps over the shoulders of this utterly bizarre party at L.A.’s Hemingway’s Lounge. Owned by a collector of their work who also owns Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Hemingway’s is a Tinseltown facsimile of a salon from “A Moveable Feast,” only in this version, the next-door neighbor is the Roxbury, a bottle-service nightclub that seems to trade on the “Saturday Night Live” parody of its namesake. Nothing here is quite what it appears to be—and that is exactly the point.
Welcome to the scene behind the mise-en-scène of the next Freeman/Lowe installation extravaganza, “Stray Light Grey,” opening September 13 at Marlborough Chelsea, in New York. Today’s tableau is meant to evoke a private club in Weimar-era Berlin, where three groups of characters — monocle-wearing, cigarette-holder-puffing aristos known as Crème Brûlée; half-naked femmes fatales clad in wire-and-circuitry bustiers and their androgynous male counterparts, called the Dada Cyborg; and Haitian voodoo street gangsters capped with papier-mâché animal masks, called the Shade — engage in a polyamorous bacchanal before an industrialized war machine snuffs out their pleasure palace. “You can think of the Shade as the Hells Angels at a Leonard Bernstein party,” Freeman says. “It’s this hedonistic, nihilistic scenario.”
As for Weimar Berlin, “that was the beginnings of the Dadaist movement and the concept of the hybridized identity — cross-dressing, androgyny, and really the first inklings of the man and machine merger,” Freeman explains. “One of the main themes of this show is hybridized identities, spaces, environments, cities.” It’s Otto Dix meets cyberpunk, with Carnival-going thugs “reenacting their colonial oppressors at a ritualistic food banquet.”
While the scene is a product of acting, the hedonism is quite real. Almost everyone has been sloshing wine since the morning hours. Some may have physically (and psychically) entered a Temporary Autonomous Zone, those last remaining pockets of pure, unadulterated freedom described in Hakim Bey’s titular text, a copy of which is sitting on a table beside “Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti.” It isn’t quite Burning Man, but for many here it is a welcome reprieve from the strictures of the outside world. One belligerent groper has already been tossed from the set.
“Finally, something to eat,” says a sash-wearing Laurence Olivier look-alike as he takes in the Lowe centerpiece.
“Does he have rigor mortis?” asks a crony, looking for a laugh. Not getting one, he bursts out, “He’s got a crab on his balls.”
Before things get too wild, Freeman, who has been shooting a series of group portraits of the Brûlées idiosyncratically mugging for a page in art history, shouts over the crowd, “No horsing around — this is a very somber moment. No smiles. All eyes on me.” Then, motioning to photographer Donya Fiorentino, who’s playing a Brûlée, he asks, “Can you take your arm off of him?”
She reaches for Lowe again as Freeman snaps pictures. Behind Freeman, Perilloux whisper-shouts, “Donya! Donya!” Looking at me plaintively, he explains, “Donya’s petting the werewolf. She’s a little drunk.”
Dahl and prop stylist Sonja Kroop, the artists’ neighbors in Laurel Canyon, usher in members of the Dada Cyborg and of the Shade for subsequent shots. Lowe shakes off his rigor mortis, and Freeman disbands the group for a series of individual portraits with a stuffed wolf. “The idea is to create a scenario so Jonah can get a reportage type of photography, but to do it in a way so it has a pageantry to it,” says Lowe, who at 36 is a year younger than Freeman. “If enough of a situation is created, documentation is no problem. I think we created quite a situation today.”
Remarkably, this heavily staged scene, complete with hair, makeup, and fashion stylists, a craft services table, and a small army of interns, represents just one facet of “Stray Light Grey,” which refers to the haze one sees right after looking away from a bright light. It’s a hallucinated light. “Stray Light Grey” will be the fifth (and largest) in Freeman/Lowe’s series of ever-expanding multiroom environments, which have incorporated secret societies in Manhattan and Hollywood, meth labs, hippie communes, pirate radio stations, off-track betting sites, pornography (print and video), Mexican swap meets, William Gibson novels, modernist architecture, uptown art galleries, Chinatown pharmacies, Situationist psychogeography, and homeopathic medicine. The duo’s oeuvre constitutes an evolving, seemingly limitless, and unified body of work, beginning with “Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,” their now legendary 2008 debut collaboration (with Alexandre Singh) at Ballroom Marfa, in Texas, and continuing with “Hello Meth Lab with a View,” 2008, at the Station, in Miami; “Black Acid Co-Op,” 2009, at the now defunct Deitch Projects, in New York; and “Bright White Underground,” 2010, at Country Club Projects’ temporary home at Rudolph Schindler’s Buck House, in West Hollywood.
“They’re among a small group of artists who are really inventing something new,” says Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch. “It’s a new form, and it’s extending collage into a realm of performance and experience that I haven’t seen before in the visual arts.”
“Black Acid Co-Op,” which completely transformed Deitch’s former Wooster Street gallery space, was larger and more complicated than their previous installations. “We obliterate spaces, so it doesn’t really matter what was there before we got there,” says Lowe.
People returned to “Black Acid” repeatedly, spending hours there each time, says Deitch, “the way you might go to a theater, then go out for intermission, then go back in. We were able to give them the platform to go all the way.” For that show, Freeman/Lowe firebombed two trailers (outside city limits and with a pyrotechnician, which wasn’t the case in Marfa, where they burned the trailer themselves with a Red Dragon torch kit in the gallery’s backyard), converted the basement office into a Chinatown pharmacy, and enlisted the services of production wizard Meghan Coleman, a former director of Deitch Projects who played a pivotal role installing Michel Gondry’s sets for his movies “Be Kind Rewind” and “The Science of Sleep” in the gallery. Now a freelance production designer, she has rejoined the artists for the Marlborough show. “On 'Black Acid Co-Op' I was daunted and easily overwhelmed, but having gone through that, it’s easier for me to regiment this organism, which can grow like crazy,” says Coleman. She seems to tread the line between construction foreman and movie producer, one now working with a six-figure budget. “My goal in working for them, and what I keep in the back of my mind, is to do as much as possible and think one step ahead so they don’t have to worry about the logistics and can just continue to be artists.”
The Freeman/Lowe experience is performative sculpture on steroids, laced with acid. The trip, as it were, comes courtesy of embedded paintings, photos, postmodernist sculpture, faux commercial items (backpacks, posters, cakes, psychotropic toiletries, books, flyers), custom wallpaper, mildewed ceiling tiles, dumpster-scavenged bathtubs, scrap lumber, WASP-approved wainscoting, wall treatments replicating smoke and fire damage, manufactured astrological charts, light tubes wrapped in sheet aluminum, exposed insulation, slinky air vents, fabric-clad geodesic dome ceilings, crystallized cacti, and taxidermy (wild and domestic). “The sources get so deep I tend to forget them,” says Freeman. It’s exhaustive and exhausting. The audience is meant to be disoriented by the decontextualized white cubes and modernist houses, to feel the dissonance, hear the echo machine, and feel the distortion of the feedback.
While the two artists admit to taking their share of drugs in the past, they insist the installations aren’t so much biographical as historical materialism meets materialist fiction. “It’s a little too complicated a project for us to be all flipped out,” jokes Lowe. “There are too many people involved to take off and come back later.” Still, the work leaves you feeling altered and hungover, as if trapped in the aftereffect of some drug. You may not be high, so to speak, but you are changed. “It sort of embeds this mind state, and people start to see the world in some ways as we’ve been seeing it,” says Lowe. “And they start to communicate back.” At Deitch, some viewers went so far as to bring household items to add to the installation.
Justin Lowe didn’t grow up by the train tracks, but he did spend a lot of time on them, scavenging for his sculptor mother’s assemblages. His half brothers, actors Rob and Chad, were much older and spent most of their time making movies in Hollywood. Lowe remembers them “coming to Dayton [Ohio] in the summers, but mostly we would visit California.” Despite his early introduction to various artistic processes, Lowe didn’t fully comprehend the idea that he too could be a professional artist until he started frequenting Chelsea galleries while attending Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts.
After moving to New York for grad school at Columbia, he worked as an art handler for numerous galleries (Matthew Marks, Lehmann Maupin, David Zwirner) and artists (Jim Shaw, Mike Kelley, Rachel Feinstein) while bartending at dealer Gavin Brown’s now defunct art world watering hole Passerby. At the bar, he was once tasked with running the out-of-sync “Leprechaun 2” video sequences for Kelley’s “Better Than Nauman” show, which he likens to a “quadraphonic head fuck.” While these experiences helped order his own studio practice, it was the late installation artist Jason Rhoades who left the biggest impression on Lowe.
“It was pretty awesome when Jason came to town because everyone made money,” he says, recalling his work on Rhoades’s “PeaRoeFoam” installation, which catalogued Kevin Costner’s film oeuvre in 1,000 glass jars. The experience clearly had an effect, because the Drop City room in “Meth Lab” — inspired by the mid-1960s artist commune in southern Colorado, which also inspired the eponymous T.C. Boyle novel — features a veritable tinker library of jars cataloguing such mundane items as Christmas-tree ornaments, social psych texts, and glue sticks. When Rhoades ducked out of openings, Lowe says, “I just hung out with him in the back and talked about going to grad school and him studying under Paul McCarthy. That seemed totally intriguing to me. I was just trying to navigate a plan that wasn’t duck-duck-goose.” Lowe learned there was “value to hanging out and staying up late,” so he worked the crowd at Passerby and befriended other artists. Freeman met him while scouting locations for a film at the graduate studio at Columbia.
A Santa Fe, New Mexico, native, Freeman was raised in Damariscotta, Maine (pop. 2,218), a tiny crabbing hamlet that was home to the late Hilton Kramer. During that time, Freeman got turned on to the 1980s graffiti, skate, and punk scenes by visiting New York, riding the subway, and trekking to the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art with his design-obsessed father. “My dad brought me an airbrush, so I spray-painted my room,” recalls Freeman, demurring when asked about his tag. “I wasn’t good.”
“That’s why [L.A. artist] Nick [McGee] is airbrushing the cakes,” jokes Lowe, referring to the fake confections that will travel to Marlborough for the show.
After getting kicked out of Vermont’s Putney School, Freeman enrolled in the prestigious Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts, where his classmates included artist Cheyney Thompson and musician Alex Waterman. “There were no sports; it was just art, so you had classical musicians and ballet dancers and studio art and theater,” he says. “When you’re only around that, it becomes your reality.”
He eventually graduated from NYU film school but was more interested in experimental cinema than commercial filmmaking. In 2004, Freeman showed “The Franklin Abraham,” a 56-minute film shot inside Manhattan’s Municipal Building, at Andrew Kreps Gallery. “It was about a building, the Franklin Abraham, that had two million people in it, that was being built for 50 years and just added onto and added onto, this agglomeration of styles,” explains Freeman. “So I made this film, a roving camera moving through the interior of this building, and you got a sense of the scale through this voyeuristic eye.”
Soon thereafter, he and Lowe each began working out of, and living in, a communal loft space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, owned by artist Alexandre Singh. It was there that the three began swapping ideas for what would become “Hello Meth Lab.”
“I was listening to a lot of Neil Young and misinterpreting the lyrics of ‘Cowgirl in the Sand,’ which became ‘Hello Meth Lab in the Sun,’ ” says Lowe. “It’s just a stupid associative thing.” Lowe had also been talking to the artist Andrea Zittel, who’d suggested doing a project on the meth culture down in Joshua Tree, California, where she lives. He and Freeman realized that the notion of cooking applied not only to meth but also to the culinary revolution that sprang from the hippie culture of the ’60s. Within that culture, they traced two strands of drug users: the transcendentally motivated idealists and the apocalyptic nihilists who would give birth to the meth scene. To complement a meth lab (which uses readily available industrial products) and a hippie commune (the rejection of industrial society), the notion of an industrial complex became the third component that created, says Freeman, “a trinity of things in the way they were linked in their historical and cultural context.”
Of the 5,000 photos snapped at Hemingway’s Lounge and Milk Studios the following day, maybe a few dozen will make it into the exhibition. At Milk, Freeman shot a series of Tiger Beat-style portraits featuring two manufactured pop stars, Agnes Nago and Spencer Dean, posing with a bevy of new products such as the DNA Recalibrator (motto: “Change Is Now!”) and Bioluminescence Elixir (“Light Up the Night!”). The models portrayed icons such as Grace Jones in a sequined jumpsuit; funk diva Betty Davis; the bisexual drug addict and German cabaret legend Anita Berber, half naked with a taxidermied monkey; “American Psycho”’s Patrick Bateman; a Lands’ End poster boy; and a magenta-mulleted Ziggy Stardust. These will all become swag (backpacks, posters) and such propaganda items as “news” photos in fictional broadsheets. The Hemingway’s images will end up in the installation’s final room, an Art Deco cabaret/museum called Villa Straylight, named after the Tessier-Ashpool residence in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer.”
“We want the first space you walk into to mimic the environment in the neighborhood. So in Marfa, we did a country-doctor waiting area, and at Deitch we tried to do a Canal Street T-shirt shop with the slat wall and fluorescent lighting,” explains Freeman. “Because this one is in Chelsea, it’s going to look like you’re at an art show.” From there, viewers will flow through a double bathroom (literally two bathrooms right next to each other) emptying onto a dank, condensation-ridden tenement hallway, dumping into a mind-bending OTB site where wagers are placed on novelty pastimes like fast-food pornography (which will be playing on the in-house monitors). Once the bets are on the table, it’s off to another hallway, this one meant to resemble those in Kowloon’s now leveled Walled City. It will be outfitted with pipes ripped from the old Acme Sandblasting Co. on Great Jones Street, which currently doubles as Freeman/Lowe’s Manhattan studio. In that studio they will shoot the fast-food porn video, with interns and friends simulating sex while dressed as parodies of Burger King and Ronald McDonald-type characters.
Amid the maelstrom of Kowloon, visitors will sneak a peek at a self-contained crystallized pirate radio station; then it’s up the stairs to a two-level, slat-walled Chinatown bazaar/Mexican swap meet zone kitted out with caged booths hawking everything from custom rims and fighting fish to strange Asian roots and the Dean/Nago swag. There will also be cakes featuring airbrushed portraits of sci-fi baboons, Charles Manson, a blood diamond, and the cover of late Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard’s book “It Wasn’t Always Easy, But I Sure Had Fun.” From there, it’s down to the library, parts of which made its way into Marlborough’s Armory booth, overflowing with fake books exploring the depths of art (“Modernist Monsters”), drugs (“Black Magic Shabu”), war (“Kandy Korn Parade”), metafiction (“Martin Amis Presents: Honkies on Holiday”), municipalities (“Karmageddon!” ), sex (“Kamikaze Fun Machine”), social psychology (“The Narrow Brain”), religion (“The Religion of New Monsoon”), and personal identity (“Pam.Sam.Glam.Ram”). Things wind down in Villa Straylight before one exits through the modern industrial lobby of the Chelsea Arts Tower, which will undoubtedly take on
a surreal, if anticlimactic, air.
Hopefully it won’t be too anticlimactic, since the Marlborough show marks the first time a New York gallery has represented the duo (Country Club Projects represents them in Los Angeles), as well as the inauguration of Marlborough Chelsea’s programming focused on more experiential multimedia artists like Rashaad Newsome and Valerie Hegarty. In addition to selling individual prints, photos, and sculptures, gallery director Max Levai wants to streamline the artists’ de-installation and cataloguing process, which previously resulted in a lot of work going to the dump.
“I think the idea is to sell the installation as a whole, and it would be great for people to commission rooms, but there’s also a way of bringing contained work into the installations [such as a large crystallized alligator with rock-crystal teeth] and being able to create revenue that way. But it goes beyond just making installations into saleable objects,” says Levai, who anticipates a Deitch-level block party vibe for the opening. “Ideally, we’d like to see the next iteration of this installation in Europe, so it’s really a priority for us that the installation be contained so it can travel to other places in the future.”
In the hills of Laurel Canyon, just up the street from the Chateau Marmont, Freeman and Lowe have been living together for the past year and a half in a house previously occupied by porn star Sasha Grey. Over coffee and cigarettes they expound on the logistics of their collaborative process. “It’s a constant discussion,” says Lowe. “I guess it’s probably like how the creatives in an agency would work.” The division of labor is such that Freeman works the computers (he’s got two, to Lowe’s one) and handles the graphic design and photography. Lowe gets his hands dirty with the physical process of silkscreening, cake painting, and the like. The two make decisions by committee.
“We don’t tend to disagree about what we want in the end,” says Freeman. “There might be some disagreements about how we get there along the way, but we don’t have divergent aesthetics or tastes.”
Only time will tell whether Freeman/Lowe will remain in New York, where they will soon move to work on the show. On a tour of the bougainvillea-ensconced property, Lowe explains they never planned on living in Los Angeles past the “Bright White” show. Peering over Laurel Canyon Boulevard, he points out Jim Morrison’s old “Love Street” chalet, wondering whether they’ll return to this funky live-work scenario. And if their friends will still “love us when we get back.”
“We’re shaking things up, we’re moving,” he says. “These projects have a way of changing your life.”
Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe's exhibition at Marlborough Chelsea, “Stray Light Grey,” runs from September 13-October 27. To see images of Freeman/Lowe's previous installations, click the slide show.
This article appears in the September issue of Modern Painters magazine.