According to the curatorial statement, William Cordova’s current solo show at the Mills Gallery this one’s 4U (pa’ nosotros) is apparently about “unmasking and remixing seemingly disparate and repressed histories”. I say apparently because I find it interesting to imagine that it instead addresses some other narrative: Goldilocks, for example.
The gallery contains a large slightly predictable open frame “house”, two sets of images, hair ties, photographs, and something growling and articulating in a tiny room. That noise could be bears. (Angora bears, possibly, hence the hair ties). Dancing angora bears, as a matter of fact, because there are also some period-piece cardboard record-album covers installed on a wall, as well as, I think, a tin-foil boom box placed in a broken fishtank in another area of the gallery. Angry dancing angora bears, even, since there’s an object in the front space made from carefully marred Sheetrock incised with tiny (clawed??) lines and studded with shiny precious polished rocks of the sort you find in New Age stores. There are no chairs, porridge, or small famished females with boundary issues, but this renders the alternate narrative no less palatable, to create a truly horrible turn of phrase.
This is not to say that I necessarily dislike the show; merely that I would never guess the focus of the work were it not for the explanatory text. I’m a looker not a reader when it comes to art shows. And besides, there are those growling sounds . . .
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The whole place smells of pine. I wish the artist had capitalized on this and can’t help thinking of Klara Liden’s show of abandoned Christmas trees at Reena Spaulings. The space is also filled with broken sounds. Possibly a nice touch but it also leads me to fear the emergence of some Tourette’s afflicted gent from one of the Mills side galleries. One of the Tourettes rooms contains a video loop of Jim Morrison going off the deep end at a show. I quite like it but feel sorry for the gallery attendants seated near it. It is the source of the bear sounds.
The small delicate gestures are the ones that really work for me: a row of used hair ties hanging on the wall, the set of 5 Polaroids near them, an isolated hairtie hanging lonely on an empty wall across the room. Cordova works with series and systems, but he does best with inscrutable ones where the logic is simple and the response to materials more instinctual.
There’s also a nice small spotlit sculpture in the far-most room. An assemblage of feathers and a paper bag it is formally engaging and in some ways has a presence far greater than the immensely larger frame house of the main room. But the feathers look as if they once belonged to a seagull. As the work is titled untitled (geronimo I & II) I find this confusing. Surely the original G wasn’t a coastal dude? Or maybe I don’t know my feathers. These are the things that confuse me, the links that fail to connect, and the reason I keep coming back to bears. Also in the room is another video: Spanish audio mis-paired to a video of someone who looks like Tupac. More bear sounds.
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I’d like the house thing more if it didn’t remind me of a show I saw several years ago at the ICA in London of Oscar Tuazon’s work. Tuazon’s pieces pushed the boundaries further (literally), sections of his more robust beams extending into and through the walls of the gallery, rendering the forms of a traditionally nurturing and protective structure far more masculine and aggressive: making a sculpture, in other words. There’s nothing transformative about Cordova’s house and I wish the plans had instead been simply drawn out on the floor: Dogville style. I really don’t know what the point of it is. My favorite part is a set of small matched sepia photos on the floor. Their level of formal engagement and abstraction pulls me out of the barren linearity of the simple 2x4s. Of course what I really wish is that Cordova had instead done a re-creation of his massive speaker piece Badussy (Or Machu Picchu After Dark): far more engaging and it would provide a linkage to the album covers. Some good subwoofers would amplify the low tones of the bear sounds nicely, too.
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Ratings:
Small objects: 7
Small photos: 7 or 8
Videos: 7
Projected slides: 6. Fix that bulb and hide that wire for a 7
Large objects: house: 6, precious drywall thingie: 5
Image multiples: 5. More is not always “more”
Use of space: 6. Not enough work
ill-roasted egg 