LOS ANGELES, CA.- CMay Gallery presents Art Malpractice featuring a body of work by Manfred Menz, which was first executed between 1992-95, augmented by new, related works from 2015 and 2016. Taken together, Art Malpractice is an epic poem of scientific and instructional dogma misappropriated for purposes of political, social, cultural, erotic, poetic, conceptual and aesthetic satire. To deal with it, the viewer must have total freedom.
The structural armature of the series has always been the artist’s deft pairings of words and images; disaffected photographs of phenomenological banalities (cast shadows, reflected views, impressions in sand, a gun in a block of ice) with eccentric texts lifted from technical writings (users’ manuals, news desk blotters, twee luncheon menus, fictional courtroom transcripts). This basic DNA of the word/image helix remains intact, including the four early works further expressed as dimensional sculptures—most especially the monumental suicide trap “Euthanasia Solicitation” that still provides the show’s emotional and physical climax.
Art Malpractice offers more than a dozen diptychs juxtaposing an image/object and a facing text. The degree to which the halves are truly interdependent or self-contained is a matter of discourse because their power as pairings is often derived from an insistent sense of cognitive disconnect. Menz’s is a deadpan surrealism, in which the brain can’t help but try to figure out the connection; the more tenuous and counterintuitive it is, the more seductive the puzzle. “It was Stanley Kubrick who said of his own work,” quotes Menz, “that, ‘All interpretations are correct.’ And so it is. There’s no wrong answer, but neither is there an obvious one.”
Menz reimagines the iconic graphic plaque from “Pioneer 10”—the first object to leave our solar system, in 1976—but with soldiers instead of Adam & Eve representing humanity. He goes sci-fi with “Strong AI”, in which a futuristic humanoid being voices abrasive, money-crazy, misanthropic snark. Menz imagines the courtroom defense of a sentient; articulate simian made the scapegoat of puerile human desire and ego. He recasts the explosive rage-release of a firearm juxtaposed as a frozen gesture of silence, with the help of an ice machine’s instruction kit. And in “Paranormal Masturbation” (in one of the few texts written by Menz himself) he uses the alluring allegory of discovering alien-life to send-up the power- and money-hungry ambitions of disingenuous political calculations.
It’s all very uncomfortable and ambivalent and hilarious in this maniacally poetic way like something is lost in translation, but you’ll never know what. The homeless signs (“Smile Dammit” and six more like it) alone are not satirical. If they are, then the art world’s consumerist element is the target of their irony —together with any other hypocritical, un-original power structure that threatens “the freedom of each” to which the artist has dedicated the entire exhibition.
