The first thing you have to know about Cory Arcangel is that he’s serious — despite the kittens on pianos, the abstract compositions based on Photoshop gradients, the modified video game bowling. Despite the retail-based solo exhibition he’s hosting tomorrow in a business conference room at a Holiday Inn in Soho. Despite the fact that this show — titled “You Only Live Once,” and characterized by Arcangel as “a pop-up shop or an exhibition, it’s 50/50” — will debut new artworks that include an architectural-style drawing of the exterior of an Applebee’s, America’s “Neighborhood Bar & Grill.” Love it or hate it, there’s heart here, and to discard Arcangel’s experiments with cultural detritus as mere ironic posturing is a mistake, and a sad one at that.
Open May 17 from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m., the artist’s one-day event — which he’s billing, accurately, as his first solo exhibition in New York since a 2011 retrospective at the Whitney Museum— includes a line of sweatshirts, sweatpants, and hoodies, along with iPad covers and bed sheets, created in conjunction with the company Bravado. (Items start at $39.95 and range up to $495.95, for the sheets.) Arcangel says that he found Bravado conceptually interesting because “they do the merchandise for Justin Bieber, Kanye, Lady Gaga, Lil Wayne — I liked the idea that I was going to be working with them in the same way a musician would.” The resulting apparel, explicitly intended to be worn and enjoyed while cruising the Internet, is emblazoned with the logo for the line, which combines the colorful fade of one of Arcangel’s Photoshop gradient photographs with a yin-yang symbol (“hinting at a kind of spirituality to being at your computer”), as well as a winky-face emoticon and an outline of an actual computer (both “self-explanatory,” Arcangel confirmed). The text on the logo is rendered in Comic Sans, which the artist called “the fantastic Microsoft font emblematic of the late ’90s, the golden era of the amateur web.”
The bed sheet set most explicitly muddles the division between consumer product and artwork; as Arcangel explains, it’s simply a version of one of his Photoshop gradient works, printed on a different medium. “Instead of being on the wall, it’s on a bed now,” he said. “As a whole set, Arcangel Surfware was conceptualized to fit together, and to fit with the work I’m making now. There are all these blurred lines.”
As far as the Holiday Inn itself, he is also sincere about it as a venue for his recent art. “It has the right flavor,” he said. “I took a break for a couple years and I’ve been working on stuff quietly. The work has changed quite a bit. [The Holiday Inn] seemed the perfect place to place it all.” Some works recently unveiled at Lisson Gallery’s Frieze New York booth will also resurface in the hotel’s conference room. One involves readymade plush polar bears with televisions embedded in their stomachs; Arcangel has arranged it so that the TVs are playing looped clips from a video of President Clinton, jogging. “I saw [the polar bear TV] on Walmart’s site, I bought two, and then they stopped selling them,” he said. “That’s how that work happened. It’s always hard to say what you’re doing when you do it.”
Which brings us to Applebee’s, which has figured recently in Arcangel’s work — his contribution to Artists Space annual, editioned portfolio was a readymade composed of a $10 gift card for the restaurant — and will be present at Saturday’s pop-up in drawing form. It’s easy enough to assume that Arcangel’s incorporation of such lowbrow highway chains is nothing more than wink-wink hipster affectation (embodied in many ways by an Onion TV spoof in which the chain “urges hipsters to go to Applebee’s ironically”). But this isn’t the angle Arcangel is taking. “You can’t get very far if that’s the spirit of the work you’re making,” he said. “When I started doing Nintendo stuff 10 years ago, people would say, ‘That’s junk, you must be making fun of it.’” Instead, in these loci of what the artist calls “contemporary Americana,” he sees “what it means to be alive now, what it means to be an American, what it means to be human.” Call it an existentialist philosophy of onion rings and Top 40 aural wallpaper.
“I grew up going to places like that,” said Arcangel, who spent his youth in Buffalo, New York. “When my family was going to have a fancy dinner we’d go to T.G.I.F’s. I still remember the first time I went to another T.G.I.F.’s and was devastated — I had no idea it was a chain. I thought it was this special restaurant full of this old stuff. I feel most comfortable in places like that. Do you remember the Virgin Megastore? When that was still open I would go there to calm down. It was the one thing in New York that reminded me of the suburbs.”
