"Everything in here is made out of stuff that was mine.” Here is a tiny studio apartment — literally both — on the edge of Beverly Hills; everything refers to the assortment of postindustrial patchwork couture hanging from the ceiling, as well as some hefty minimalist plaster lumps on the floor; stuff includes the meticulously deconstructed remains of just about any clutter typical of contemporary urban life — superfluous clothing, towels, grocery bags, exercise mats, magazines, maps, tax documents and high school yearbooks. The speaker is conceptual artist China Adams, who, after more than a decade with Ace Gallery, has chosen to unveil her spring line of detritus wear at Steve Turner Contemporary, a few blocks west on Wilshire.
Alpine Meadow (2008)
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Alpine Meadow (2008)
“I was noticing that I was having a lot of crap built up that I wanted to get rid of,” Adams notes, “so I decided I was going to try to make clothes out of those things. But it’s a little bit more involved than that.” No shit. In addition to the outrageous array of mutant funk fashion, each garment is accompanied by a framed, notarized letter recounting the circumstances of the work’s genesis, alongside a holiday-snapshot-style image of Adams modeling the outfit; the snapshots are then digitally inserted into a stock landscape photo. Landscapes can be anywhere, from the Alps to an equatorial rice paddy. These low-income virtual-dream vacations — or Flights of Fancy, as her exhibition title classifies them — are the actual artworks; the clothes are just evidence left behind.
“It started with this idea that I had when I was in debt from all this health stuff [a bout with anemia], and just always scrounging for money, and never getting out of this small space. And then this thought I’ve always had about advertising: how so much of what people buy is an idea about what is going to happen when, like, ‘If I get the right gown and if I ever go to Cancun, this’ll look fabulous!’ And I wondered, could I create this whole thing all from right here? I do the pictures here, do the whole composites here, I print it here, the clothes are all made here. So it’s like this complete imagined exotic journey that all takes place in my apartment.”
This ad absurdum DIY philosophy will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Adams’ oeuvre. At 30-something, she boasts an unusually long string of solo exhibits — due to the fact that her first was at age 23, while she was still attending UCLA as an undergraduate. Her pivotal work was a classic in what might be called stripped-down performative design — the kind of event that derives a wealth of conceptual significance and emotional impact from a slight shift of the spatial relationship between 2- or 3-D objects. (Think Chris Burden’s arm and a copper-jacket .22 long-rifle bullet or Jeffrey Vallance’s relocation of Blinky the Friendly Hen from supermarket display to pet cemetery.)
In Adams’ Official Cannibal Status (1993), the object in question was a tiny chunk of human flesh donated by a fellow student, which Adams — a vegetarian since childhood — displaced into her digestive tract in front of witnesses, then documented with a framed, notarized affidavit, triggering one of our species’ deepest taboos with a clinical and bureaucratic dispassion bridling with Kafkaesque irony. The elegant formal economy of Adams’ gesture notwithstanding, it was the work’s unrepentant theatricality, outrageous humor and narrative conceit that made it remarkable in the dry context of conceptualist-art practice. It doesn’t get much juicier than raw meat.
Almost any artwork created since the ’60s at least pays lip service to the “nonretinal” tradition of Duchamp, and many of the most critically and curatorially touted masters of that era — just consider the recent L.A. museum shows devoted to Allan Kaprow, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Asher and Dan Flavin — run to the anorexic end of the eye-candy scale. Much of the contemporary art that renounces materiality doesn’t actually involve a lot of sacrifice, and is proportionately meaningless — if you’re tone-deaf, it’s easy to abandon melody. At its most sterile, art amounts to little more than illustrated attempts to rationalize our culture’s pathological alienation from the body and senses, and seldom resonates beyond the semantic confines of academia’s unlubricated semiotic clusterfuck. Op cit creek without a paddle.
In contrast, Adams is clearly a gifted visual artist, a role that necessitates considerable sensory engagement with the world, as well as a substantial investment in the idea of objects as repositories of meaning. Now that’s a monkey worth shaking off your back. The struggle with materialism, which led to Adams’ sacrificial (but only quasi-transubstantiational) cannibal orgy, continues to be evident in her subsequent work: selling deeds to the bones in her body; disposing of more than three-quarters of her possessions in 1995’s The Official Stitch and Hide Procedure; pulping a full year’s worth of mail into “drawings”; even abandoning her personality to participate in the Ms. American Woman beauty pageant; or employment as a phone-sex operator.
