Life's flaws inspire Jack Daws' wicked sense of play
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REGINA HACKETT, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER ART CRITIC
What was once a misdemeanor is now a felony, in an edition of 6 at the Greg Kucera Gallery.
I'm talking about Jack Daws' series of small black boxes ("Felony Sculpture") into which he has sealed a variety of hard-core drugs, from crack cocaine and crystal meth to ecstasy, heroin and LSD.
In his exhibit last year at the King County Arts Commission Gallery, he threw the place into a tizzy with his "Misdemeanor Sculpture," a larger black box with pot inside. After much soul searching, the commission declined to exhibit the piece, referring those who were interested to the Kucera Gallery. Getting no public funds, Kucera had much less to lose.
Anyone can be controversial. Daws is aesthetically smart as well as culturally audacious. On one level, his boxes pay tribute to Robert Morris' box sculpture of the 1960s, "Sculpture With the Sound of Its Own Making," as well as Charles Ray's box from the 1980s that wasn't a box but a vat of black ink. Those who touched the surface expecting something smooth and hard came away with a record of their infraction staining their fingers.
Daws' infraction is an inside job. He's making fun of the very idea of drug possession. Who is in possession in this case, and who is the pusher when no one can lay hands on the drug (assuming it's there at all) without destroying the art?
Moving on, Daws examines the idea of sport, focusing on basketball. Jeff Koons in the 1980s floated basketballs in fish tanks, creating a kind of sculpture no one had seen before. Daws trapped his ball in a glass orb, which looks impossible, the glass wrapping around the ball like a glove.
Daws is in David Hammons' territory here, Hammons' meditations on the cult of basketball ("Higher Goals") that narrows the aspirations of young African American males to a virtual impossibility. Daws isn't nearly as serious as Hammons, partly (I think) because Daws is white and Hammons is black. What is tragic for Hammons is just one more piece of absurdity for Daws. On the other hand, I could be reacting to the art based on what I know about the artists, muddying the waters as Daws intended.
Seattle's Daws, 32, was born and raised in rural Kentucky, hence the title of his show, "Kentucky Windage." In his home state, windage refers to the practice of aiming away from the center of a target to compensate for the effect of the wind or an inherent flaw in your weapon.
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For Daws, life itself is inherently flawed, and those flaws inspire his subversively wicked sense of play. Consider "Mamma Tried," a playpen Daws surrounded with electrified wire, making it a high-security prison in miniature. Robert Gober has previously dealt with the warping claustrophobia (and dreamy beauty) of playpens. Daws' harsh light makes Gober's look insubstantial. Daws takes his title from a Merle Haggard song, "I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole. No one could steer me right, but Mamma tried." Haggard's saint is Daws' hag.
I love his "Nike Branding Iron," his "Two Towers" photo of the World Trade Center rebuilt as french fries with ketchup, and his backwoods version of Sisyphus. If a Southern man were condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back again, he'd hitch it to his pickup truck, wasting his time without wasting his energy.
Daws is hard-wired to go over the line. One of the lines he crosses here is racial: the black-faced Mickey Mouse dolls, the photo of the basketball sliced open to reveal a watermelon, and (above all) his Southern black "Still Life" photo, with watermelon, Kools, cognac and a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket on fake leopard-skin.
He's channeling racist jokes that whites commonly enjoyed before the civil rights movement cast those alleged levities in a less benign light. Fred Wilson, Kara Walker and Hammons (all black) have explored this territory. It's theirs to explore. Is it Daws? Don't artists have the freedom to conjure with whatever cultural codes they choose?
In a city as averse to controversy as Seattle, artists who insist on lighting fires on our nerve endings stand out. There are no easy answers to Daws' provocations. He forces you to crawl along the razor's edge of his consciousness, and he rents space in your head long after you've left the building.
REGINA HACKETT