Art is propped up by tradition. It teeters on stilts built by the great masters of Renaissance painting, the varied and expansive traditions forged by a wide range of religions and cultures, and was disembodied by the conceptual artists of the postwar era. It is hard to imagine what could possibly come next. The new and innovative is often a rehashing of an old argument.
The artists of MINT, an art space and collective which is rooted in an old meatpacking warehouse, push every boundary in their twenty plus person members only exhibition Meat Sink. And they are recreating the conversation.
The unraveling begins at the door. The first step the gallery visitor takes into MINT isn’t on cold concrete, but on a bed of freshly laid grass. It’s a strange thought, really. Liz Robert’s installation Below Your Mind is in a smallish gallery space filled wall-to-wall with turfgrass. A video featuring several MINT members performing sensory experience exercises from a 1968 manual plays on the far wall of the gallery. The video appears to have been filmed in the very room the viewer stands in, grass and all. Other gallery viewers relax on the turfgrass, reclining as in a lawn, watching the exercises played out in film and perhaps wondering if they are supposed to follow suit. The whole thing reminds me of a drive in movie. But creating this alternative experience in the gallery is what MINT is all about.
Then there are the paintings and sculptures, although associating a specific discipline to any of these artists would be reductive to their collective nature.
In a large white walled gallery space is an array of works including Grace Bowen’s mid-century Modernist furniture which appropriates a living room set within the gallery space. Appropriation and simulacra become terms which are tethered to much of the work in Meat Sink.
Ginssiyo Apara’s slumped-over paintings including Consider the Mythical Aspects of Privacy, are formally part-painting, part-sculpture. The are carefully crafted, enormous, paintings of lists, notes, and receipts you probably crumple up and toss away daily. Executed on canvas and painstakingly prepared so that not a single brushstroke is visible, these works are orchestrated into mounds of crumbles which sit on the floor. The symbol of trash and cast-off items is at odds with the tedious effort involved in making the work.
Works in the gallery are punctuated by two sculptures by Erik Larsen which protrude from opposite walls. In placement they remind me of ancient Assyrian relief sculptures, often of winged men and appearing in pairs to guard a gate or tomb. But formally, their smooth black surfaces and simple rectangular and hoop composition are similar to neoplastic architecture. Regardless of the reference, Larsen’s works are entrenched in the history of commemorative and monumental sculpture.
Maritt Vaessin Don’t Talk to Me or My Daughter Ever Again is a enlarged and disembodied reconstruction of a stuffed animal drawn by Vaessin’s daughter. Executed in a series of pillows, the work encourages viewers to rearrange the plump pillows into a new stuffed animal. The inviting and participatory nature of the work encourages visitors to lounge with the overstuffed pillows.
Then there’s the second phase of Meat Sink. The one that messes with your senses and tries to alter your impression of the gallery experience.
Cudelice Brazelton’s Helmet (Dead Cowboy) is a sculpture made of an array of materials. The hat is heavily textured and hangs on a post in room of MINT which features mostly video work; the materials used to make the hat are so malleable, they appear to be melting. Brazelton’s Helmet juxtaposes the cowboy hat, an image often associated with the white body, with materials like pomade and weave, which are often associated with the black body. Brazelton’s work is underscored by a similar contrast playing on a large video screen behind his work, as a black woman is continuously dunked, as at the salon, and rubbed with a pasty substance. The figure’s portrait is simultaneously covered and revealed. Meanwhile, an audio track of a heartbeat adds anticipation and anxiety to the whole scene.
Meat Sink has proven that the artists of MINT, with their seemingly endless affinity for experimentation and creative output, are onto something big. For more information visit mint-collective.org.