From the riot following the first performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the widespread demonstrations following Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten‘s “face of Mohammed” cartoons in 2005, if art doesn’t have the ability to make a difference, at least it still can offend and outrage a waiting public. David Adamo’s latest exhibition, “Untitled (The Rite of Spring),” takes as its starting point the potential energy after the artistic outburst, the quiet threat in the moment of unveiling. A wobbling, noisy stage of wooden baseball bats lines the floor, while two sharp arrows sit in a corner and another lies nearby, wrapped in felt. Rioters’ weapons are, at least temporarily, disarmed—instead used as both symbolic and (in the case of the Louisville Slugger–branded platform) literal props.
In Without X, 2008, three tables sit on the stage, each a reproduction from the piece of furniture supporting the languid Madame Gautreau in John Singer Sargent’s once-controversial Madame X, 1884. All that remains is a pear on one tabletop and a croissant placed by another table’s leg. These objects evince an expectant, unborn tension, as if awaiting the start of an Ibsen domestic drama.
Maria, 2008, is simply a small tambourine mounted on the wall. In the corner, purple velvet swaddles a lampshade to make French Horn, 2008. The unbegun narrative of Adamo’s readymades risks a heavy-handed metaphoric simplicity. But Adamo seems playfully aware of the temporary values we might distill into the objects. It is a poetry of absence, where the threat of violence is equated with the sound of unplayed music, and whose theatricality creates greater resonance than, say, the similar gestures of Kris Martin. Adamo imbues the gallery’s atmosphere with latent possibility and asks us what we’re going to do with it.
