The collision of material and stylistic referents animates Joel Otterson’s sculptures. The eight 1989 works shown here are quite absurd variations on common domestic objects, done in the artist’s best industrial baroque manner In their exuberant oddness, they demonstrate their maker’s jovial disdain for anything like an unforced unity, either of substance or style. Otterson likes to oppose the social and historical meaning of a pattern or decorative effect to the material on which it appears. He also sets up oppositions of form and function through such constructive maneuvers as nestling small appliances or pieces of furniture within ornate armatures; these objects appear to embellish but actually subvert the function of the structures that support them.
The mahogany tea table in Dead Or Alive/Teacart Museum has been fitted with a propane gas burner, on which a teakettle is kept at a boil. This apparatus is situated within an arrangement of steel-and-glass shelves holding teapots of many different styles, as well as dishes filled with cookies, biscuits, candies, and marzipan in a variety of forms. The entire array is mounted on a steel base with wheels. The effect is somewhat futuristic: the piece suggests a hospitality cart of the future as imagined by some eccentric citizen of the Victorian era.
American Baroque Highboy Refrigerator is a portable object fitted with a leaded glass door of orange and yellow panes, and through which a supply of canned beer and soft drinks is visible. The refrigerator is mounted in a steel frame; attached metal flourishes bear Native American pottery vases, each filled with fragrant piles of bay leaves, pine cones, and wood shavings. The combination of ornate, vernacular, and industrial effects is more dizzying than the aroma of the various potpourris.
Consistent throughout Otterson’s work is an effectual élan that rescues it from both a moribund political correctness (read: commodity critique) and any conceivable utilitarian scheme. Single Cell on Wheels/ Hindeloopen Piece is a cat’s cradle of plastic sewer pipe mounted on bronze piano-wheels. The lengths of pipe have been painted in a traditional motif by Dutch artisans and drilled with circular patterns of holes, the holes complement the decoration but render the pipes useless as conveyers of fluid. The resulting contraption is a weird mix of jolly kitsch and structural grace. Otterson’s domesticity is an obvious facade; in his profuse and perverse art, he aims for the wilder reaches of thought and form.
—Buzz Spector
