Ann Greene Kelly
Chapter NY
Of all the words that have suffered the abuses of our new administration’s slippery rhetoric, drain might have it the worst. In October, Ronald Reagan’s “Drain the swamp” refrain entered the MAGA camp’s repertoire of chants, and in January we learned that the promise to kick bureaucracy and big money out of Washington in fact meant building a cabinet of Republican establishment goons and Goldman Sachs executives.
Drains—burdened as they are with the GOP’s semantic disassociations and destabilizations—were everywhere in “May Not Be Private,” Ann Greene Kelly’s second solo exhibition in New York, a spare presentation of five sculptures assembled from found objects, cast aluminum, and poured-concrete bases whose aesthetic might be described as prison-block domestic. The disclaimer of the show’s title came from a women’s health pamphlet that alarmed the artist during a clinic visit. It refers to the fact that, though congress enacted HIPAA in 1996 to ensure the privacy and security of increasingly digitized health records, more than 250 breaches resulted in the release of over 112 million records in 2015 alone. It’s no secret that the dark Web deals in our most intimate data. It’s also no surprise that we don’t yet have a sense of what the impact of these hacks might be—whether our personal information will be treated impersonally or mined for exploitable secrets.
Drains proved to be an apt metaphor for discussions of privacy and the body: A drain intimately interfaces with those parts of ourselves that we want to shed. It is also the site of our last engagement with those parts before they enter public territory. In Untitled (bricked chair with drain), (all works 2016), a cast aluminum drain is set in the seat of an enfeebled white plastic chair with a severe concrete slab base. Covered in plaster, into which the artist carved tiny bricks outlined in colored-pencil “grout,” the chair improbably conjures both s/m prop and inpatient equipment. Or take Untitled (trashed bed), a mattress modified to diminutive proportions with a white metal gate guillotined through one end to become a baleful headboard: A chlorite drain forms a recess in the sculpture’s center. The drain itself is attractive, but its placement summons the cholera bed. We think of the rot of bedsores or the leakage of decay. It signals putrescence without getting messy. Though elements of Kelly’s past works more forcefully evoke goiters and colons, hair and flesh, these sculptures achieve abjection in a more oblique way.
The work does well when it eschews the figure. In two assemblages—Untitled (figure) and Untitled (mannequin)—the appearance of the body turns the artist’s sinister suggestiveness into a clunk on the head. At their best, Kelly’s works recall the bricoleur humor of Isa Genzken and the careful economy of Thea Djordjadze. Untitled (bottle)—displayed in the back office alongside two colored-pencil drawings—isa piss-colored, bottle-shaped piece of calcite perched above three spindly steel legs that fold up toward the ceiling as though broken at the knee. The work has the same perky malevolence as Louise Bourgeois’s spiders. But if Bourgeois considered her creatures to be protectors—known to eat disease-spreading mosquitoes—Kelly’s sculptures are anemic, on their last limbs.
The most potent reference here is, of course, Robert Gober. How can one speak of drains without remembering his aesthetic of mourning? Whereas Gober’s melancholic objects dealt with all the complexities of the body’s condition at the peak of the AIDS crisis, and its subjugation to an unsympathetic health-care system, Kelly shifts her focus toward the bodies of her time—at risk of unwittingly becoming digital abjection. Gober’s drains are patiently crafted copies; Kelly’s are distorted, nearly unrecognizable. These works summon the architectures of deposit and transference, lest we forget how pernicious those we cannot see in fact are.