Is Jack Strange Trying to Weird Us Out?

Jack Strange, "Metaphorical Vegetables" 2011. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar In his latest show at Tanya Bonakdar, "Deep Down," very young British artist Jack Strange takes us through a journey of weird materials--from fruit pits wearing headphones to his own blood--and perhaps even weirder precepts, meditating on the proclivity of humans to impose their subjectivity onto inanimate things. Check out my review of the show for Rhizome below.

Normally, if one were to ask whether it’s possible to successfully create art by smearing your own blood on a gallery wall, and to evade coming off like a desperate emo teenager, I would respond with an unequivocal “absolutely not.” Blood is one of those materials that you not only want to avoid hanging out with, but also, in an art context, it comes with the most exaggerated eye rolls and “what-the-hell-were-they-thinking”s imaginable. Yet, in his latest exhibition British artist Jack Strange reveals a trick or two to convince us that bloodbathing a white cube, among other head-shakers, may in fact be a right step in considering the art of the present. Jack Strange’s second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar, “Deep Down,” peregrinates through various media. The show coheres by way of an overarching curiosity for the slippery human consciousness, and the all-too-common instances in which we as people project our image onto dumb objects and animals in order to better understand ourselves. Beginning with the aforementioned over-the-top cloudy smear of his own blood (replete with HA HA HA’s inscribed in pencil), the show meanders through overly slick Neo-Dada assemblages of fruit pits suspended in vitrines fitted with earbuds, to cutesy cross-sectioned vegetables seemingly springing off the wall, and perhaps even less predictably, a curiously dry sound installation that may have well as been made in the 60’s. Strange also dabbles with some “new media,” encasing an iPod Touch in a ceiling-hung plastic bag, which houses another plastic bag filled with water. The works, titled “All Fish,” “All Sharks,” etc., play cartoon aquatic animals on the encased iPods, the animations originally created for an e-card. The e-card animation is then programmed to utter its stream of consciousness, “left, right, slow, sinking, drowning, swimming, right…” With weird convoluted pits appearing like brains with invisible heads wearing headphones (titles ranging from “Blues Avocado” to “Pop Plum” and “Electric Olive”) and vegetable tops joyfully frolicking off the wall and into somewhere as sanguine as Dora the Explorer’s kitchen, Strange delights in obliquely articulating the ineffable through images and objects, specifically combining natural flora with manmade elements. Evincing Strange’s tenacity to uncover the inner workings of our minds, his sound installation “Staring into Seeing” directs its listener to sit knees-forward to the wall and fix their eyes upon its whiteness, training them to not waver or blink in the slightest. It is as if Strange has created an oddly fascist manual to train his viewers to view his or other people’s art with a most ideal comportment—their attention fully fixed on the object. Another interpretation would be that Strange desires to illustrate the impossibility of viewing art in the space of the white cube gallery (whose neutrality and sanctity have been long-challenged), calling attention to the myriad distractions preventing the viewer from the simple task of focusing on a plain white wall.

To read the review in entirety, click through to Rhizome here.