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Silo presents an ensemble of new works by New York-based artist Patrick Grenier, his second solo exhibition. Titled A Lack of Imagination, it includes sculptural tableaux, video projection and drawings. On the night of the opening, the artist will perform Dedication AdDRESS.
Grenier’s first show at Silo in 2004 explored how form, site and lore can impact – even impound – the art in a museum’s care. Grenier goes even further in his second show in examining the climatic shift turning artists into hard-nosed strategists and museums into meccas indistinguishable from Niketown. In a wryly humorous twist, the artist recruits the most celebrated exemplars as his protagonists, and in doing so shanghais architecture’s more aggressive, egoistic strains, seen in recent wars for dominance in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan. Downward into a transparent room-sized orb, he projects a videotaped showdown between replicas of newly canonized structures, such as the Walker Art Center addition in Minneapolis by Herzog & de Meuron and Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Inside a makeshift coliseum, building types through the ages watch as five of the anointed, mounted on big wheels, take part in a monster museum rally. The interior perimeter is wallpapered with modern corporate logos, those now determining culture’s course. The four-wheeling museums topple and crash in a fight to the death demolition derby. There are no clear winners; the Guggenheim is unwound. The video installation No Access Use Main Access No comments on the resurgence of conceptual and media work in contemporary museum agendas – art with minimal maintenance requirements – which focus less on building collections and more on gaining state-of-the-art facilities. Multiple monitors show surveillance footage, some archival and some gathered firsthand, housed within rooms enclosed by a transparent vinyl skin and reminding us of the intensifying presence of the museum itself watching us, closely. Colorful sketches punctuate the exhibition. One gouache drawing maps the constellation of intersecting spheres—economic, political, religious, scientific—to which art and architecture are inextricably yoked. Rounding out Grenier’s thesis that the sums required to realize blockbuster buildings have institutionalized corporate control and put both disciplines upon self-immolating paths are a metal detector-shaped armature around the gallery’s double doors, a familiar but altered neon logo, and a model of the Hoover Dam, complete with gushing water. In passing through Grenier’s electrified blue arch, viewers must consider the indeterminate threshold between worlds — whichever way they’re headed.
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