Jim Lambie’s work is governed by a kind of Pop alchemy, covering, wrapping, and adorning the ordinary with the ordinary, he creates contemporary totems, like Psychedelic Soul Stick (all works 2001), a bamboo cane thickly wrapped in thread and wire, and Phuture, a single glove covered with multicolored buttons. Such vaguely shamanistic, ephemeral transformations are often infused with a sentimental romanticism: The sweetly titled installation Frankie Teardrop comprised lengths of colored plastic beads stretching from floor to ceiling; Puma is a track jacket decorated with pearly beads hooked together on a chain of safety pins. This nod to fashion (the Puma brand is a hipster favorite) is one theme connecting the many eclectic works in the artist’s second solo show in New York; music is another. The artist was part of Glasgow’s club scene in the ’90s, and musical references abound in his output. “Boy Hairdresser,” the name of a band Lambie belonged to in his youth, was the title of the show as well as that of a wall installation: a collection of thrift-store mirrors in various sizes hinged together to form a reflective tableau. The piece was during and gleefully tacky. So too were the propped-up vintage album covers that rotated on a square “turntable” in the middle of the space. As the platform spun around so did the faces of often-derided but still-loved singers—Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Barbra Streisand.
Not all of Lambie’s references are pop cultural. Goo Goo Muck skirted the limits of abstraction: An expanse of white brick wall substituted for a mammoth canvas; paint in various colors was blown through drinking straws that had been stuck in crevices in the brick. Bright rivulets trickled from the straws, which themselves cast strange, angular shadows on the wall; seemingly by chance, a sense of compositional dynamism was achieved. At once random and controlled, the work is like a playful version of one of Niki de Saint Phalle’s ’60s actions, in which paint, released from balloons burst by bullets from the artist’s carefully aimed rifle, was blown away in a different manner. Lambie has all along been inspired by such alternative philosophies of painting; he is well-known for his use of vinyl tape to cover gallery floors in intricate, geometric compositions, which fit so perfectly into the Walker Art Center’s “Painting at the Edge of the World.” The floor piece Lambie made for that show extended even beyond the edges of the exhibition space, continuing on into an elevator.
Goo Goo Muck was the largest work in the show, but it bordered on the invisible: The straws were nearly swallowed up by the expanse of wall, and the margins of the piece were not easily discerned. Indeed, many of these works fulfilled their role as art in deliberately slippery ways. Some of them had to be pointed out or they might be missed, like Lapdancer, a fake air-conditioning vent that looked pretty real, and a bicycle tire spray-painted silver and installed between a fuse box and some pipes in a garagelike corner of the gallery. Everything was obviously carefully conceived according to the limits and possibilities of the environment, but even Lambie’s clever blurring of art/nonart lines left the nagging suspicion that the task of filling this very large space may have been more a struggle than a welcome challenge.
—Meghan Dailey
