FAIL! Credit: Kenneth Aaron
FAIL!
  • Kenneth Aaron
  • FAIL!

So, I don’t have anything nice to say about Fawn Krieger’s National Park— the exhibit at Washington High School which uses foam, wood, tar, cement, and felt to fabricate a cave, some rocks, and an ambiguous stream/lava flow thing (a material-based interpretation of a national park). Really, National Park reads as a big old fail— mainly due to a rift between the artist’s concept and the symbolic statement communicated by her final product.

More scathing remarks after the jump!

When I interviewed Krieger a few months back I was left scratching my head as she stated “domestic movement” as the conceptual impetus for National Park. Thing is, national parks aren’t symbols for domestic movement. (To figure out what an object symbolizes, ask “what does it do?”) A national park symbolizes preservation, humanity’s romanticism for wide open spaces, the sheer largeness of landscape/smallness of people, the non-domestic nature of nature, etc..

A symbol that does communicate domestic movement? How about a moving van?— build a landscape in it if you wanna get all fancy about it. Point being, there are lots of objective symbols out there for domestic movement, but a national park isn’t one of them. Successful symbols are universal, unsuccessful ones aren’t, and a national park says very little about domestic movement.

Like a half-constructed ball pit at a low-budget amusement park, hundreds of foam chunks represented rocks, tar-coated foam suggested a lava flow, or stream, and inside Krieger’s gray, felt-skinned cave, its wooden support structure was visible— exposing the embarrassingly poor construction skills of the artist, while also displaying an unrealized opportunity to address her concept (via cave paintings or something similar).

Here I found an emotional flatline: no smart cues to remind us of the way we’ve tamed nature via houses and technology (which might produce pride in human intelligence); no nostalgic references to the social aspect of national parks (we often visit those sorts of places with friends and family); no guilty reminders of the way we city folk have sequestered our experiences with nature though national parks.

As I was leaving the exhibit I overheard an unimpressed voice asking, “what’s the point of this?” I called back, “that’s a good question.” Let’s leave it at that.

The exhibit will be open through October 18th, from noon to 6:30 pm on Thursdays and Fridays, and noon to 4:00 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.

6 replies on “REVIEW: Fawn Krieger’s National Park”

  1. Seconded. From the get-go this this seemed like an excuse for Fawn Krieger to have some fun building some shit, figuring she could comp up with with a reason (or lots of unconnected reasons!) for it afterwards. Thanks for not holding back, Matt.

  4. new life plan: go back to school and get an MFA so i can learn how to best neuroticize and obfuscate what few (if any) ideas i have. my thesis project will be a series of choreographic sketch diagrams for an unrealizable performance about a highly evolved herd of german baby deer prancing around the black forest, masquerading as installation artists, braying, “ya, i’m so uber conceptual! do you vant to pet my loins?” then i’ll make a career of producing films about “innovative” playground equipment designers discussing how they failed as pure artists and just gave up the art ghost to make giant sized lincoln log, chain and foam pirate ships and other atrocities which might be easily mistaken for second rate mini golf course accoutrements. the capstone to my no doubt highly successful and rewarding career will be to mount a massive installation of all my films playing simultaneously in the classrooms of a derelict urban school building, which ironically enough has had all the playground equipment removed from the yard. there will be an entire “festival” wrapped around my installation with hordes of the best and brightest PR folks hyperbolizing and saturating the city with enticing shiny impressions of glistening cross dressing supermodels peeing on the institutional linoleum school floor while they bathe in the spotlight of projected grainy pixilated video stills of my films. i’ll smash a champagne bottle on the stage of the opening ceremonies while wearing turquoise faux fur before the senegalese band “umlaut djundjun bang bang” kicks off their musical costume set of emo infused afro-pop kraftwerk covers. alt-weekly writers will trash my work because, frankly, they just don’t get it. other MFA types will fawn over it, smothering me with delightful cooings to the tune of, “i love your work!” intelligent folks everywhere will just raise their eyebrows and say, “huh?” while scratching their heads, wondering about the likelihood and pragmatics of my professed medium of choice: trust. i’ll close the festival by staging the performance indicated by my now aged yet immaculately archived MFA thesis diagrams. as the show plays on to a capacity crowd, i’ll thrash from classroom to classroom wrecking screens and projectors and laptops and generally freak out about my wasted life peddling lies and producing crap. by the end of the show i’ll be curled up on the floor of a white room singing a twinkling little number to myself about how we’re all just half broken music boxes arranged in sacred geometric patterns with god arbitrarily and capriciously pulling our strings, winding us up with false hope. after the standing ovation, the auditorium crowd while deftly dodging deer scat on the red carpet will pour out and discover me fetal, and burst out once again in a roar of applause, though now slightly disturbed and irreversibly touched by my thousand mile stare and disconnected patchwork of tangential utterances. exhausted, spent, and confused, i will return home to my urbanite concrete and steel loft studio, only to find a hand written letter from some young impressionable creative type bestowing ultimate gratitude for receiving such inspiration from my life and work and how new life plans are being made to return to school to get an MFA in order to learn how to best…

  5. Saw the artist interviewed during the festival at the site itself. Ridiculous… but what a fun lifestyle. I’m jealous. I have half-baked ideas all the time!

    I am quite fascinated by the idea of a miniature-ized landscape or an enlarged diorama. It could be such an interesting setting to experience – it could render such a interesting effect – but this piece sadly doesn’t accomplish much at all. First off, the construction is embarrassing. Secondly, the piece resonates in only two – and likely unintentional – ways: 1) as a creative-type’s sloth and 2) art as waste (it is essentially garbage soon headed for a landfill)

    This artist was awarded a residency at PICA. She was provided “assistants.” She is not local. Why doesn’t PICA support local contemporary artists? I have a hard time believing there isn’t much more interesting conceptual and fine art found among artists in our own city. If PICA must search elsewhere, I would certainly expect that it would achieve much grander and more nearly unique results.

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