With the publication of such books as Art & Artifact: The Museum as Medium and Massimiliano Gioni’s theme The Encyclopedic Palace for the 55th Venice Biennale, it is evident that artists’ engagement with taxonomy, categorization, and museology has hit an all-time apex in the contemporary art landscape. This framework for making hasn’t, of course, cropped up out of nowhere; rather, it has been fomenting for quite some time. Artists like Mark Dion, British artist Robert Williams, and Fred Wilson, among many, many others have been working like this for decades. While Dion’s modus operandi is to develop curiosity cabinets that re-categorize objects held in the collection of a given institution, and Williams similarly carefully researches and taxonomizes various materials and subject matter, Wilson reflects the museum back onto the viewer, critiquing and exposing the institutional reinforcement of racial biases. In a good half of his exhibition Retro-Spectacle (all 2013), currently up at Wade Wilson Art, Michael Crowder joins the conversation.
Mariposa mori, 2013, Cast glass butterflies, mahogany cabinets, tromp l’oeil library, rug, dimensions variable.
The back half of the gallery houses Crowder’s installation Mariposa mori. The viewer enters through open red velvet curtains to encounter a space reminiscent of a museum, or an avid collector’s study. Methodically placed throughout are seven cabinets or display cases of the same name as the installation with varying parenthetical subtitles like Historia Naturalia or Specimen Pedestal. Along the back wall is a tromp l’oeil of a library, replete with Mariposa mori (Collector’s Portrait) mounted resolutely above the faux mantle. Each dark mahogany display case holds anywhere from one to over one hundred butterflies cast in a process known as pâte de verre, which is a method deriving from 19th century France in which an artisan melts and fuses glass particles together. Evocative of both curiosity cabinets and natural history museums, Dr. Scott Sherer says this of the work: “While simple colorless glass particles conjoin to capture the idiosyncrasy of a singular butterfly and suggest the remarkable journeys that enable the survival of a kaleidoscope, Mariposa mori also maintains a deeper conceptual foundation.” Except there is no concept.
Mariposa mori (Collector’s Portrait), 2013, 32x31x5 inches.
The butterflies, while impeccably crafted and carefully placed, offer no evidence of research, or taxonomy, or any categorization whatsoever. The most intellectually rigorous endeavor Crowder embarks upon the viewer is Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia), a three-step representation of a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly. And while the beautifully constructed butterflies—in all their muted color and granulated fragility—should arguably be enough, with the incorporation of curiosity cabinets and a museum setting, he has effectively assigned meaning where it doesn’t belong.
Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia), 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.
Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.
Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.
Mariposa mori (Historia Naturalia) detail, 2013, Re-fabricated antique cabinet, cast bronze, cast glass (pate verre), cast lead crystal, antique glass, velvet, mirror, 42x25x59.5 inches.
Where Mariposa mori misses conceptually, Crowder’s Refined Crude series hits the mark. In the room directly in front of Mariposa mori he has mounted seven works from the series, all with the same name but variations in number (as in Refined Crude 68.86 or Refined Crude 58.65), evocative of the banal “Untitled’s” of the foregone era of modernist painting. And although every material used in Refined Crude is representational, Crowder’s angular construction certainly harkens to geometric abstraction. Each piece is a slight variation of the same scene: a cast drill bit attached to a mahogany frame, either hanging or slightly penetrating the mahogany on the opposite side. Slate or a photograph of rock in a landscape occasionally factors in, as in 60.57 or 46.80. Here, Crowder melds complex layers of meaning with the materials he uses and how he chooses to display them. But between the voluptuous red walls, the velvety curtains, the heavy-handed flocking, and the vaginally fetishistic Body of Work: Part 2, the viewer constantly has to contend with props instead of examining the work for what it is. And ironically, the agitation created in these conflations of meaning is actually more erotic than the theatrics enveloping the work.
Refined Crude 46.80, 2013, Cast lead crystal, slate, 13x17x2 inches.
Retro-spectacle undoubtedly lives up to its name. Unfortunately, the spectacular nature of the exhibition betrays Michael Crowder’s masterful craftsmanship instead of buttressing it.
Retro-spectacle runs until October 22, 2013 at Wade Wilson Art.
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