Sub-Rural # 50, Ringleader at R&D, Madison

R&D is a project space directed by Abby Johnson and Austin Swearengin, artists/curators devoted to experimental art, performance, and installations in a sub-urban context. While my writing bridges cultural contexts within and without the too stringent boundaries of urban, suburban and rural, I value the still expanding context for visual culture between the monoliths of city and country. The Midwest, coincidentally, is where suburban culture took root after breaking free from coastal sprawl. It’s been erroneously identified as passive, sometimes oppressive, and consumerist by the determinants of coastal culture. It’s outlived that identity but myths cling and leave marks.

Noël Morical and Mat Mancini, Chicagoans who collaborate as “Ringleader” just mounted work in R&D’s 1,000 plus sq. ft. 5-car garage behind R& D’s apartment complex. Not exactly a raw space for new research, but perfect for the compression and appraisal of neo-domestic objectives and aesthetics. The works were an auspicious combination of objects, some of which may have already been bound for garage containment before being creatively repurposed – a fortunate manipulation of design and age ironically reconfigured in a familiar, mildly Brutalist space previously suitable only for hygienic auto-sublimity,

Ringleader designed six carnivalesque deep dives into a ghost-in-the-machine theme park. Their exhibition titled “Big Box” consisted of a suite of lavish/funky human-scale sculptures that subsisted somewhere between extraterrestrial household tools and Hanna-Barbera lawn ornaments. “Holy Ghost,” for example, felt like a giant hall closet stuffed with medieval bath accessories and a Pop Art library. Elsewhere there was fine cable knit parlor furniture and I want to say Soviet-era aircraft debris embedded in some of the work but I have no proof. I thought I saw aquatic votive candle stand shadows in one corner but again, unverifiable.

There may have been a surgical tool access structure, a hopscotch headboard, and cast pewter privacy screens in flat-out Russian Constructivist formulae deftly un-designed for connective logic. Imaginary links dominated space between the symptomatic and the paradigmatic. It kept their collaborative work floating just outside subject/object parameters but squarely in the sensory pleasure zones of untidy Frank Stellas, Daniel Spoerris, and Louise Nevelsons.

“Untitled, (Loose Fit)” was the largest work, and the most collaborative with a calculated body of materials and chromatics. The title in parenthesis suggested that the connective tissue was only more or less organized and coordinated. Things “fit” because of a novel assemblage of divergent, de-mosaicked contrivances nesting in turbulat jet-packed paraphernalia. They included colossal jig-sawed Swiss cheese fragments and circuitous faux HVAC duct work. Its overall skeletal structure with internal organs constructed of fiberboard, flexible tubing, paracord, foam, and steel was doubly boilerplate.

“Ring Spun” was a formal exception with an illuminated nylon body stocking, stretched over a vertical steel armature. Three bulbs glowed through soft semi-transparent material decorated with lozenge forms that appeared to be a submergent “Lava Lamp” parody.

A couple of pieces were more conceptual, or rather Surrealist hat trees. In fact Surrealism seemed to be a fallback story in much of the work. And it’s not just that the pieces contained gangly, primitivist formal associations. They were tactfully naïve, uncanny, and psychological, even anthropomorphic. “Loose Fit and “Holy Ghost” were the most proportionally figurative and invited the viewer into an otherwise furious constellation.

Two chair pieces were the most contained and handsomely crafted in the show. They were the only forms that balanced the Surreal with a cool radicalism, material exclusivity, and style. While “Ring Spun” also merged utility with panache it didn’t achieve the same degree of aesthetic volume as “Poolie” and “Fella,” which displayed textures of child-scale comfort and ambient biotics. The artists sowed plain labor in a field of anxious forms and made it stick….made it industrious.

True that central Madison is more metropolitan and less auto-based than what’s considered classically residential – we’re a few decades into recognizing meaningful art by where it’s sited – an extension of Duchamp’s “found object”  becoming “found place,” and “found objective.” Showing art in garages isn’t just practical. It’s emblematic, a natural badge of suburbia afforded with working-class content. Though you might find a loft or empty storefront in the suburban landscape and transform it into a studio, it won’t accommodate your cargo van or small truck. Morical and Mancini observe a note of DIY factory in their fictive architecture casserole. Presenting work in other than the studio or home, moving the domestic to a sliver of outsidedness, is insurgent, a quarrel between public and private spaces and a tempting 1980’s conceit.