Rumination X

Gen Xers offer solutions at the Danforth

By Chris Thompson

"ANXIETY" by Aimée Freas-Corp, ceramic and mixed media, 1999.

In the eight years since author Douglas Coupland coined the term Generation X, attempts to define 19- to 35-year-olds by the label have become ever more suspect. The “slackers” of 1992 are today’s dotcom millionaires, and their anti-establishment ethos is now a marketing sound-bite. And so, when the Danforth Gallery asks in the title of its new show “The Unknown Generation: X? Who Are We?” it is worth being more than a little skeptical. But the show — guest-curated by MECA’s Mark Bessire and featuring the idiosyncratic works of 35 GenX artists from the Northeastern US and Canada — exhibits a surprising continuity.

From Rachel Katz’ Do-It-Yourself lightbox constellation kits to George Arnold’s obsessive cataloguing of (presumably his own) hair and blood in clinical packets, “The Unknown Generation” comes together cartographically, mapping the links between these artists’ responses to a range of ethical and social issues while gently mocking efforts to pinpoint the identity of an entire generation. In response to a time when wearing your heart on your sleeve gets you nothing but smirks, these artists opt for a highly serious playfulness. No subject is too sacred or profane, no medium too hallowed or base to be poked and prodded in a search for meaning.

The show’s power and humor come from the tensions that we all live with: condemning pollution but still driving to work; denouncing the drivel on television but enjoying “Survivor”; hating fur-wearers’ disrespect for life but squashing the spider on your bathtub.

A commentary on this tension is perched atop a standard gallery plinth in Aimée Freas-Corp’s “Anxiety.” Across the yellowed pages of a book on homeopathy, opened to a passage detailing treatments for nausea and vomiting, lies a ceramic stomach hand-painted with dainty blue butterflies. The homeopath’s art, which involves using the “poison” that causes an affliction to cure it — in Freas-Corp’s case, defusing the power of anxiety by making its butterflies-in-the-stomach literal decorations — here becomes a model for the way many of the show’s artists allow a problem to point to its solution.

Painter Jennifer Benn alluded to this flexible sensibility in the conference prior to the show’s opening. She said that despite the way Generation X (both the name itself and the people it stamps) tends to be read as an illness, she liked the way that “X” connotes the ability to be, in the algebraic sense, a variable. This can be interpreted as a lack of commitment or common ground, but it can also be a useful critical tool for the artist to use in commenting on society. Benn’s “Titanium and Silicon Overthruster,” a panel divided vertically into silver and gold halves, invents the innards of a made-up machine, complete with a matrix of real-looking circuits, a few knobs and controls, and some parts that look less than plausible. The piece parodies the near-divine status we grant to the microchip maze around us, and the omnipotence we promise ourselves we’ll soon achieve via lightspeed internetworking. She recognizes technology’s importance, and laughs at our dependence upon it.

Getting at this same idea of turning the tables, French artist Yves Klein suggested in the early 1960s that instead of thinking ourselves the center of the universe, we ought to consider the universe and its processes to be the center of the “human.” This proposal is taken up by Mia Brownell’s painting “Hash,” where a raw red meatball hovers at the center of a neon-pink space, exuding an aura of importance greater than that of the viewer; by Michael Angulo’s “Interdependent,” a tightly drawn M.C. Escher-esque micro-ecosphere where animals fit seamlessly together in a complex repeating pattern; and by Edward Ramsay-Morris’s video animation “Chew,” in which (to the tune of an ambient soundtrack) cross-sectional diagrams of the human digestive system ingest, process, and excrete little primary-colored balls in increasingly interwoven patterns, one organism’s excrement becoming another’s nourishment.

The resonance of a number of artists’ works from the 1960s and ’70s can be felt throughout the show. In her monoprint “Sacrificial Bestiary #1” and its grainy layered images, Amy Ross calls to mind Robert Rauschenberg’s early prints. Additionally, her inclusion of a page from a French dictionary, with the entry “Agnus-Castus,” references the late ’60s performance “Vitex Agnus Castus” by German artist Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ æsthetic, his use of natural and animal elements and his willingness to transform any material into medium, is the most identifiable ghost haunting “The Unknown Generation.” But his blackboard lectures and didactic politics are a world apart from the show’s understated style of social engagement, so different from the political activism of their parents.

Martin Cruck’s photograph “Signs: Viva the Difference” says it all: a sign announces the coming of a planned community called “Vellore Village,” the “Authentic Community” that we are assured will soon be built on what is now an empty wasteland of sun-baked bulldozer tracks. An uneasy belief in some kind of authentic community stirs beneath the surface of all the work in the show. “Who knows, maybe it’s possible,” they seem to be saying, “maybe we’d even work tirelessly for it, but where to start? Sure as hell not in Vellore Village.”

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.