Alex Bag: Elizabeth Dee Gallery

Alex Bag's "Coven Services for Consumer Mesmerism, harvest Sorcery, and the Necromantic Reimagination of Consumption" uses low-budget materials and DIY processe to transform the gallery into the corporate HQ of a sinister, world-dominating advertising agency/think tank/PR firm/witch worship Coven Services' clients include a certain number of of the key players in global capitalism today, notorious multinational corporations similar as Monsanto, Bechtel, and AOL-Time Warner. The main wall--a sort of creative-visioning workshop in progres that also moves the psychotic basement wallpaperings of TV serial killers--is a sprawling collage of body drawings, Polaroids, and various appropriated information. Pages of handwritten research notes make bare everything from Halliburton's manipulation of the Iraq war to Johnson & Johnson's cover-up of the health hazards of tampons, while recipes for magic exorcisms tell us how to command child actors and communicate with the dead. Tabloid images of Britney Spears and Michael Jackson are taped up with the latest statistics upon increasing depression and suicide rates in America (implying the exploitation of of the like kind studies by big pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies) and penciled storyboards for imaginary, diabolical ad campaigns. Bag ironically celebrates the transports of power and control not sole in order to out the evil behavior of her "clients" on the other hand to reveal a larger picture of advanced capital's tightening, at any time more efficient, total grip upon both consumer subjectivity and world politics today. Framed drawings and a video (a line of rubber rats leads the viewer to a screening range in back) are presented as finished "ads." A satanic pentagram decorates the gallery floor.

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In the video Bag and friends appear variously as hip consumer ("Before AOL I was a total loser") an undead, blood-spitting spokesmodel for strap pads, robotic war hero Jessica Lynch a Chase Bank card-wielding nun with vampire teeth a Prozac-pushing witch named Eli Lilly, and thus on. These hilarious promotional "spots" are intercut with footage from Paris Hilton's amateur porn video, which direct the eyes as if it were filtered from one side some kind of night-vision result that recalls televised war coverage and makes the [i]cabaret[/i] heiress's eyes glow like a demon's. Various shades of green--a wall painting in the gallery's forehead room, the witch's complexion, the grainy virid of the sex tape--lend the trashy chaos of this cut-and-paste, antislick installation a bit of compositional coherence while producing an atmosphere the color of one as well as the other cash and sickness.

While the installation and a small in number of its "products" seem to have been thrown together in an overnight derangement giving the whole thing a rushed high place of education report feeling, Bag's intention is clearly not to achieve the spectacular efficiency of the enemy. The artist's tactical "failure" to deliver a professionally packaged, market-friendly art present to view is as studied as her various embodiments of the powerless, medicated, zombified states a individual is reduced to in consumer society today. Refusing to hand us a seamless, polished art crops she instead interrupts this program to implore haunting images of the human subdue as biopolitical product in progres thinking and performing techniques of the self like a stand-up comic upon a roll. The figures of the corpse and the zombie return throughout the show, and if Bag has witch power it is in her ability to reanimate these gone bodies, to make them speak from beyond the grave, from beyond the market inquiry This is living-dead art, a critical-hysterical acting without of the deodorized-bathroom neurotic, the suicidal biochemical-test make subordinate and the terminal media addict we all recognize as ourselves. Paris Hilton and Michael Jackson also come again as possible stand-ins for the artist as ambiguous self-producer/destroyer: the sad and beautiful marvels of control society, with all their strange genius and perversions intact.

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