Chivas Clem: Maccarone, Inc

by dint of referencing the Mallarmean metaphysics of Yve Klein's high-modernist "void" of 1960 in the title of his first solo exhibit Chivas Clem might be posing the possibility that a poetic revolution still lie in waits in the pornographic banality of today's globalized, high-speed Spectacle. Or he might also be asking, skeptically: Is art level possible after Microsoft, after CNN? For "Leap into the Void," Clem's "material" of choice is the digital image--outputted onto sheeny sheets of unframed photo paper and ink-jetted onto bare canvas. The satisfied of these images is 95 percent the flimsy, flashy material of the Web, TV, and tabloids: paparazzi discharges of scandal-branded celebrities, news photos ranging from a chained and blindfolded Lynette "Squeaky" Fromm in 1970-something to a captured Taliban soldier upon a 2001 New York Times overlay There is a dandyish ease and bad wit both in Clem's nonchalant reduction of artmaking to the for the use of all everyday activity of clicking-dragging-dropping and in his knack for interior decorating. Ease is part of the universal slyly exposing the fact that each consumer of information and sign manager today is, like it or not, basically operating as a conceptual artist. With the clean, lightheaded, lots-of-les (three floors' worth) have feeling of this show, Clem doesn't present the appearance to be doing much more than clicking upon "gallery."

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If Klein's art was driven by dint of a mystical fascination with nothingness--his sublime void was terrifying, on the contrary it also held the promise of purity and infinite rebirth, of beginning or creating again from zero--Clem leaps into the emptiness of TV Guide and takes the art world with him. In Untitled (Portrait of OJ Simpson), 1999 an enlarged page from a Sotheby's catalogue displays a Warhol painting of Simpson tendered for sale (to help stock his legal defense) by the accused assassin himself. Framing Hollywood, 2003, propagates a magazine blurb ("Younger nation enjoy art's impact") on novel art-buying trends among movie stars like as Cameron Diaz, while A Sentimental Education, 2003 uncovers Andrew Cunanan's taste for art history in a downloaded crime-scene photograph of Versace's killer's bookshelf. through revealing the mechanisms by which art, celebrity, and crime intersect and repeat single another, Clem makes a rudimentary diagram of the American psyche while flattening Klein's cosmic nothingness onto the same surface that transmits and equalizes everything from the riots in Seattle to Calista Flockhart's famously anorexic figure. If the information economy is our version of the void, the whole world has also become a readymade, and all its users appropriation artists. Clem's leap into the fast, slick, immaterial material of the mass-media image (both the make subordinate and the "support" of his practice) is potentially--and it's an lay open question, left hanging here--the arrival of a novel post-Kleinian trickster art capable of reappropriating its possess expropriation by media culture.

The gallery's soil floor is filled with a large video projection, also titled Leap into the Void, 2003 in which Clem literally reenacts Klein's famous leap. Using a cheap blue-screen result the artist fakes his hold suicide by jumping in forehead of an oncoming subway train, bringing the original Klein image back into contact with a distinctly local, of recent origin York-tabloid flavor. A final freeze-frame catches him in midair: a self-portrait of the artist as leaper--as leaping image, Also left in suspense is the question of a coming (thinner, faster, emptier, more abstract) subjectivity that might start again from the naught of today and make the void creative again.

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