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Jack Strange: Within Seconds

Presented by Arthouse at the Jones Center at Arthouse at the Jones Center

April 9-July 3, 2011

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British artist Jack Strange makes conceptual works in a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video, works on paper, and performance. Characterized by a cheeky wit, his work is visually engaging and frequently causes the viewer to do a double take. Strange finds beauty in the mundane and humorously celebrates the banal by appropriating everyday items and subjecting them to simple manipulation. Part of a lineage of conceptual tricksters that includes Tom Friedman, Maurizio Cattelan, Marcel Duchamp, and Robert Watts, Strange achieves effects that are sometimes confounding but nearly always smile inducing.

The media works in this exhibition are stitched together by futility, redundancy, and the nagging feeling of being stuck. Presented on television monitors set on pedestals stationed throughout the exhibition, the three-channel video, Biff, Griff and Mad Dog (2009), functions as a thread that weaves through the exhibition uniting its disparate parts. In this work, Strange replicates the visual and auditory effects of a DVD getting stuck in the player: the tracks jump, blur, layer on top of each other, and the soundtrack skips and repeats. The work appropriates footage from the enormously popular Back to the Future trilogy, focusing on the antagonist in each film (Biff, Griff and Mad Dog – all played by the same actor). By freezing these troublesome bullies in time, Strange relegates them to a tortuous existence for eternity. Strange’s manipulation of Hollywood films is furthered in Tom (2007), a single-channel video that hilariously follows action star Tom Cruise endlessly running through a marathon loop of spliced film clips. Cruise, like a modern-day Sisyphus, futilely runs and runs but is never able to reach his destination. This video, which references YouTube mash-ups and action film montages, keeps Tom Cruise stuck in its grip, on an endless treadmill to nowhere. In both Tom and Biff, Griff and Mad Dog, Strange submits media archetypes to an inescapable, tortuous cycle leavened by humor.

Hollywood is not the only subject susceptible to Strange’s structure of futility. In the works Fat Laptop (2009) and Lecture on Life Inside a Human Cell (2010), Strange renders laptops incapable of performing their typical duties. Fat Laptop references Joseph Beuys’ fat sculptures, Janine Antoni’s corporeal performances, and Matthew Barney’s gratuitous use of materials that recall the human body. A wedge of fat immobilizes the computer, filling the 90 degree angle made when the laptop is open. The sculptured fat is presented atop a pedestal, thereby recalling a marble sculpture. The fat’s unfinished edges have an unsettling tactility and the memory of the artist’s hand is still visible where he sculpted the shape. This fat wedge could be the next generation couch potato, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a computer user stuck behind the screen all day, looking at the world rather than participating in it.

Lecture on Life Inside a Human Cell also employs a laptop, one of the artist’s hallmark materials, but instead of being rendered wholly inoperable, it is transformed into a miniature lecture hall for a Lilliputian audience of clay balls. The clay audience, each painted with a unique face and perhaps representative of human cells, sits in rapt attention, perpetually watching the lecture. Strange’s attention to faces and especially grins (or grimaces) is underscored in The Epidemic Series. This series features photographs that, like much of Strange’s elusive work, seem rather nondescript at first glance. Pictured are a common tree stump, a plastic bag caught on a barbed-wire fence, a roof, and a stone nestled on the ground. However, upon closer inspection and seen as a group, gnarled faces begin to emerge from the images. One is left to wonder if Strange has an uncanny knack for discovering phantoms captured in everyday objects or if he is manipulating the images. Here, as throughout Within Seconds, a deft conceptual play with the simple and strange leave us smiling and scratching our own clay heads.