Art
SCULPTURES BY CHAD POOVEY, Through Aug. 26 at TAG Art Gallery
Just like the Statue of Liberty commands the entrance to New York Harbor, Mississippi artist Chad Poovey’s take on the familiar icon dominates the new TAG gallery. It stands 6 feet tall and sits on top of a pedestal, which makes it feel huge in the room. Of course, this isn’t the patriotic figure welcoming huddled masses of immigrants, but a politically charged piece that casts Condoleezza Rice as the lady lifting one arm high above her head, holding a gun instead of a lamp. Her dress is opened up to reveal an interior cavern where ghoulish figures of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney cavort over a wire cage that holds two naked figures, crouching and shackled. Bush, sitting astride one of the hooded figures from Abu Ghraib, holds his hands in prayer. Under his feet, the secretary of defense and the veep, both with canine bodies, chortle and enjoy themselves. (Rummy sports a nice pink doggie boner.) Bush has his eyes closed, but his features are kind of pinched, and his prayerful gesture could also be that of a villain rubbing his hands together in anticipation of his next diabolical move—think Mr. Burns on The Simpsons.
Thanks to the expression of the figures, the naked prisoners crawling around below, and the sheer size of the thing, the sculpture clearly casts Bush and crew as a band of ghouls. Obviously not everyone will agree with this characterization, but it represents one of the prevailing public reactions to what has gone on for the last five years. We can appreciate an artist who brings those feelings to life so vividly. In this and his other pieces in the TAG show, Poovey’s willingness to let fly with such a strong point of view gives his caricatures enough bite to become confrontational objects, not mere amusements.
A close reading of the iconography gets more confusing. He places Condi Rice in the dominant position, containing the male figures inside her as if they were her creatures or children. That would seem to indicate she’s the one in control of this enterprise, an unconventional view of the administration’s power dynamics. It could also represent the men hiding behind her skirts, but that doesn’t really make sense unless Poovey means to suggest that the administration’s appointment of a woman and/or an African American gives them cover to commit outrages. And that dismisses Rice as a token, an accusation that gets tangled up with the history of resistance to African American advancement. Also, the figures in the cage, in addition to recalling Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the secret prisons we can only imagine, bring to mind the hold of a slave ship. That echo of the Middle Passage further complicates the image with associations to American race relations, and it is not clear that Poovey intended to go there.
Poovey’s sharpness as a caricaturist comes out as well in four smaller piggy banks depicting Martha Stewart, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay. They all have coin slots on the tops of their heads, honoring their standing as icons of contemporary greed. The two most effective figures are Ebbers and Abramoff, who in life offer visual peculiarities that make for good images. Ebbers sports a chin-strap beard, an odd look for a corporate titan that, combined with his sad-sack eyes, makes him instantly recognizable in ways that seem to reflect the unusual bits in his background: born in Western Canada, worked as a milkman, built a corporate fortune in out-of-the-way Jackson, Miss. Despite his unusual appearance, Ebbers doesn’t seem to pop up as frequently as someone like Ken Lay in the rogue’s gallery of corporate criminals, but as a Mississippi resident Poovey is undoubtedly very aware of him.
Abramoff appears in his post-arrest Zorro getup—the black coat and wide-brimmed hat that made him look like a character in the Spy vs. Spy comic strip. In a strange act of self-presentation, Abramoff turned himself into an instant visual punch line. Poovey jumps on this figure, the perfect fodder for him.
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Chad Poovey’s work shows a keen eye for the visual material of current political discourse, which he handles in vivid and lively ways. He pushes the images hard, exploring their subjects’ complexities, sometimes to the point of confusion—not entirely a bad thing. While the sculptures are clear enough to succeed as satire, they also provide some resistance to easy interpretation, a hallmark of ambitious art.