“Just Kick It Till It Breaks”

Josephine Meckseper’s Rest in Peace, 2004, the first work one encounters in this exhibition, sets the tone for the entire show. The video mixes footage of recent political demonstrations in New York with flower power–style party scenes, all complemented by a sound track drawn from urban music genres. This and other pieces brought together by curators Debra Singer and Matthew Lyons offer an allegorical reading of the current ideological landscape and limn various methods of resistance to dominant values. A critique of the materialism that characterizes our global economy pervades the project. One continually pertinent topic addressed by the selected artists is the process of fetishization undergirding advanced capitalist societies, by which any countercultural thinking, action, or object is seamlessly absorbed by the market. Fia Backström’s elegant installations examine this process intelligently: For example, RECYCLE—Hanging proposal for “Untitled” (2006), Sculpture by Kelley Walker (Ecco Art #2), 2007, consists of a delicate arrangement of pillows, dishes, plastic cutlery, and other picnic items placed alongside Walker’s piece atop a small green carpet and in front of a large wall banner decorated with the logo of the oil company BP. Corey McCorkle’s sculptures The Circular, 2007, and Perfectionist (Free Love) Monument, 2007, on the other hand, allude to the Oneida Community, a nineteenth-century utopian group based in New York State that advocated pacifism yet manufactured animal traps for subsistence. Emphasizing a metaphoric approach to the theme, the exhibition deftly sidesteps the charge of proselytizing against the current state of affairs. Instead, the show offers poetic visions of politics that, in highlighting how individuals change things through quotidian acts, may describe the only form of activism that can make a difference now.