Distopia: Rae Culbert’s WorldviewRae Culbert’s worldview is apparently raw, discouraging, violent, and angry. And it is a functioning, dysfunctional, myopic, visual tableau of reality, at least an American (United Statesian) reality. Culbert who is a native European – from both sides of the Channel – has a deliberate critical eye of what is American and what it means to be American. Having spent his first few months in San Antonio traveling loops 410 and 1604 by bicycle, he has more than a bird’s eye view of the underside of ‘American’. In both of his installation pieces (at Art in the Hood and Blue Star) the space his work occupies encapsulates all the elements of a broken and unyielding society. Each installation appears like a stage set with immense visual information that one reads like a book or a narrative painting yet Culbert creates inconclusive narratives. As if walking in on a crime scene the audience becomes the detective working to find clarity and a semblance of meaning within the tragic chaos. Adding complexity to the larger picture, each clue yields its own narrative, which propels the work into numerous tangents and deters any final meaning. Although, in both installations politics are overwhelmingly signified; either through the guise of a white trash persona that – feeds and feeds off of – a white aristocracy, both politically and economically, or through the veil of an ancient-modern regime that ‘took the money and ran’; Culbert’s work suggests more, too much more, than the obvious implications and parallels. In “The future will be better tomorrow,” G.W. Bush, the stage is set with the lazy boy, the tattered plastic blinds, and days old Spam; but moving the scene out of possible cliché Culbert includes loaded objects that tell much more. On the wall there hangs a living room staple – an early fall mountainous landscape painting in poster format mirroring itself like a vertical Rorschach. Further down the wall, a visual play of history’s progress hangs cynically and naively next to three wooden ducks that fan across the wall, appearing to be flying towards the next wall addition of greasy hunting caps screwed into the wall in a triad. Just below them another diametric relationship of strategically placed objects: an old globe remains a top a broken, leaning bookshelf filled with no more than three books all on space – Handbook for Space Colonists, Voyagers 1&2 Robots in Space, and How Do You Go to the Bathroom in Space – the only other titles to be found are a paperback romance novel, Born in Texas, resting on the arm of the lazy boy and a hardcover book, The Man Who Would Be President: Dan Quayle, waiting by the chaos around the barbeque. Emanating from this barbeque is the scattering of more signifiers from Nike labeled rubber boots to a knife and can opener, Dole pineapple and generic (Basics) cigarettes lie side by side while reel to reel tapes burn on the barby – no one will ever know. The fictive and non-fictive strategic elements of Culbert’s piece reveals itself in the plans written in black marker on a Spam stained paper bag all the while – relieving and reinstating anxiety – Henri Mancini’s Moon River plays on the 8-track. A continuous instigator of the scene was found in front of King William Realty, a six-foot satellite dish, made out of hammered flat Budlite, and Miller Highlife, tallboy cans. Its mission, “to send and receive messages, secrets, and music, across the universe, everything slightly crackly and the smell of baked beans burning.” But who is the character and what is the plot, certainly all the signs are there and immediately signify behaviors, mini-narratives, and psychology but none of which present a definite signified idea lending itself to the experience of it all just being “fucked up!” (read: the world is going down) Slash and Burn echoes that same experience. The installation was located upstairs in a corner room of an old church comprised of mayhem and unease. From another perspective – that of the agent – Slash and Burn appears to be pre-“The Future will be better tomorrow,” G.W. Bush. The narrative projected in Slash and Burn seems politically at odds with Culbert’s other installation, yet within any political adversity there are many parallels. The first visual clue to notice is the overpowering addition of a hand painted hammer and sickle insignia over a large amateur, semi-exotic landscape painting, clearly this sets the tone. Again, the audience is left with an amalgam of stories, actions, and unrest, but Slash and Burn is a little bit different. It is more immediate, inclusive, and implicating. The room is filled with agitation, not merely from the ‘new’ landscape, but from the hyperactive, off-kilter, floor fan, the two heavy metal desks; one descending into the floor due to being sawed diagonally in half, the other twisted, and the possible thought of a celebration seen in the half drunken glasses of champagne and the bottle that lies beside them. The room itself is filled with secrets – the secret entrance is an iron ladder via the men’s restroom below – the strewn reel-to-reel tapes – the broken and smashed safe lying in the middle of the room is filled with an empty secret – and leads to the escape route visible from the rope of sheets that hang out the only open window. Once again, one moves through the room as a detective, hoping to trace the right movements, yet all the while there is nothing to trace. The power of Culbert’s installations is their lack of formula. They don’t tell us anything specific yet they raise specific issues, which become laden with their own issues – through their placement and the overall context of the piece. Unlike much of the installation work from conceptualism’s second phase, Culbert’s work continues to be active and subversive, and there’s no “getting it.” The beauty of Culbert’s persuasion is precisely the elicited experience and creation of desire – to solve or understand – a chaotic fusion of illusion and reality. These installations are fabricated, documentations of a not-so-fictive reality seen in two parts, from different perspectives, and as a whole. Still inconclusive Culbert’s narrative installations create a sensory environment causing varying sensations among the audience and clearly, working. |