Manfred Pernice’s “Bbreiland,” at Regen Projects in Los Angeles through August 16, is the latest manifestation of something seen before, a restaging of the artist’s 2012 exhibition at Anton Kern in New York titled “Pezzi.” That it has been shown elsewhere is not important: Pernice wants this body of work to be regarded less as a set of unique objects and more as a way of life. As in 2012, a number of similar boxes are filled with material, arrayed on steps of wood that become shelves when the boxes are hung vertically. It doesn’t really matter what material Pernice chooses, for, as his manifesto on the project’s website attests, “every gesture and glaring manifestation is only a bubbling mumble, an overcooked pea.” What the viewer gets is essentially a pizza with multiple toppings: some may satisfy, while others will just be seen as junk.
Pernice collects potential for meaning, rather than directing or arbitrating it. This may seem like an intellectual trick to dodge any systematic form of composition or ideology, and for the most part, it is. Critic Roberta Smith initially read Pernice’s work as a contained form of scatter art in 2001, but as his career has progressed, his lineage becomes clearer: less scatter art and more in line with irreverent hoarders like Dieter Roth and Martin Kippenberger. Pernice picks up right where they left off, tossing packs of cigarettes and half-empty bottles of rum onto middle-class throw rugs.
The result at Regen Projects is a sort of museum of punk entropy. Some boxes lie on the floor, others hang on the wall with their contents sitting on shelves and behind glass. There are no grand theories, but there are shifts in meaning. The objects feel more in the realm of life on the floor, but more in the realm of art on the wall. Assorted papers, for instance, feel discarded and haphazard while horizontal, but when vertical, they take on the quality of collage and seem firmly in the world of the image. This is art as strategy, as posture. Even the sale of the works speak to its slippery punk ethos: 20% of the profits “supports leisure facilities in Spain and southern Sweden, organizes street parties, and helps young painters in the procurement of work material.” In other words, Pernice will have fun in Ibiza and will always have paint. Charity, indeed.
A version of this article appears in the October 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
