The Good Luck Gallery | Tieken Gallery LA Review
The Good Luck Gallery had an eerie exhibition from the artist Art Moura. The art tilted towards being slightly disheartening but still welcoming to interrogation with the eyes. The Good Luck Gallery normally does an exquisite job with its space, taking advantage of its high ceilings to cover every possible scope of eyesight with an exhibiting artist’s work. And this was no exception, where we were given almost the impression that these sculptures were ghosts evaporating into the night sky.
This sense of motion in the space was particularly keen, as the rest of the pieces felt ritualistic in nature. They were reminiscent in structure and symbolism of crude, cargo-cultish engenderment. The organic materials mixed with undeniable industrial production gives the entire work a feeling of post-apocalyptic curiosity. It takes us into an imagined world where, conceivably, several generations after the annihilation of civilization, the regeneration of the human race begins to take place.
This sense of eternal return by humanity, then, in not so much assembling art in a hypothetical post-civilizational savage world, but in its yearning for the transcendent, takes what would be a bleak and nauseating thought and provides us with optimism on the uncertainties in the future. For while this is imagined, it may remain just that, i.e. a thought experiment, because of this inner sacredness in possession of humanity. This sacred yearning toward the Beyond imbues man incessantly to strive for it, thereby acting as a natural rectifier toward any chance of ruin. Indeed, there were countless instances during the Cold War where Nuclear War had the possibility to initiate, but because of the inner nature of man and his avarice being most fundamentally a thirst for peace, it never was substantiated. Nuclear holocausts remain a chimera to frighten children and the senile of a world which threatens to exist but can’t quite persuade man to turn against his inner drive, however brutish he has been in his history.
Just around the corner was Fred Tieken’s brand new gallery opening. This is an artist which has such crassly humorous absurdity in each of his works, it had gallery attendees (including myself) laughing out loud. What’s astonishing about each work is the moving pieces. They are cartoonish in nature, with their outright symbolism interjected independently of the main focal point in each work. They augment the point, however, but are so independent and therefore non-contingent, each provides a reminder of how the world really is. It is an ensemble of independencies which, when looked at as a whole, provide a meaning greater than the parts by themselves. Of course, this cannot be the primary objective of Mr. Tieken. But it explains why the works are so captivating to gaze upon, and endows us with a wider perception on how to look at the world. To think our social reality can ever be condensed so crudely is a thought of folly, and these pieces subtlety explain why.
And yet all the works focus intensely on the absurdity of our social reality. They are very much in-line with representational observational humor but taken to a visually absurdist degree. You Forgot the Velveeta elegantly expresses the style of the work in a secularized context. With its mockery of Costco and its patrons, it does not do so with a tinge of condescension. It acts cooperatively with the subject, by making a concerted effort to share in the universal truth of the Costco experience. Rare is the person, in other words, who has stepped foot in Costco and not purchased gluttonously. By acting so harmoniously to the big box phenomena, we can glean into our very nature and recognize that the store may make us susceptible to a miserly addiction. Being a miser ought to be irrational, for our foraging of 12 pounds of mixed nuts which cannot be finished before their one-year expiration date yet yields a significant price savings does not justify the purchase. Is this a moral judgment then? Morals ought to be reserved for actions onto each other, but then can a moral judgment be made about suicide? Can we be unrighteous in our consuming behavior?
Yes we surely can, in the case where the consumption presents itself in a manner of exploitation, i.e. of an agreement where one individual is perceptibly weaker than the other and necessarily must make the agreement binding to simply survive, for instance. But we cannot assume that consumption in the general sense possesses this element, for the logic would arrive at the conclusion that we are all shackled by virtue of being in a society. On the other hand, surely the direction of our consumption can be critiqued. Not so much on a moralistic plane, but on a more metaphysical one primarily.
To borrow an old quote: Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. There is then, by our very nature in being, an order. From such a base perspective as consuming, but more so our choices in how we consume, we can indeed evaluate the quality of what we are. Rendering judgment on said quality is a separate, moral query, but we typically associate higher quality with goodness. Henceforth, the examination by Mr. Tieken allows us to gape appallingly at our decisions to act so poorly; under the guise that more is always better, when quantity is an altogether different measure than quality.