ART-PREVIEW:Zurich-Lucas Blalock
Lucas Blalock has emerged as one of a new generation of photographers, a group largely concerned with issues of image scale, speed, and physicality in a time when the medium’s relationship to these conditions is becoming increasingly complicated. Using his characteristic clunky editing style, Blalock brings the behind-the-scenes labor of the picture to the forefront and invites us to question aspects of image production that we otherwise take for granted. And he does so with a great deal of humor, allowing for many entries into his work.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Lucas Blalock’s solo exhibition “Ketchup as a Vegetable” at Galerie Eva Presenhuber takes its title from the swirl of controversy stirred up by a proposed piece of Reagan-era legislation that sought to cut spending on lunches in public schools in the United States. Under the proposed legislation Food and Nutrition Service (the governmental organization responsible for the school lunch program) was given a new leeway when it came to meeting nutritional requirements, which allowed certain condiments to be designated as vegetables. This bald-faced absurdity, which was pounced upon by Reagan’s Democratic opponents, lead to the swift scuppering of the legislation. Current regulations allow two tablespoons of tomato paste to be considered as a serving of vegetables. Attempts to change these regulations in 2011 were blocked with the help of lobbyists from large food corporations. Proponents of the regulatory change lamented that fact that striking down the proposed legislation was tantamount to declaring pizza to be a vegetable. The allusion to these ridiculous governmental machinations subtlety inflects the reading of the show. It points not only to the fraught climate of contemporary American politics, in which undercutting the well-being of the populace in the service of monied interests is the norm, but also to America’s deeply sad inability to provide nourishment of all kinds, be it physical, psychic or spiritual, both to its own populace and to the people of the world who have adopted its culture as their own, or had it foisted upon them. The cheap, grubby objects that populate Blalock’s still lives, and the hopeless discombobulation of his portrait subjects seem a logical extension of a world in which a sugary paste can be transubstantiated into a tomato, by way of the blessing capital. Though Blalock’s work draws on energy from both of these theoretical and political impulses, its central dynamo is undoubtably the unconscious. His pictures are increasingly tinged with the strangeness of dreams and visions, populated with creeping shadows and disembodied spirits, throbbing with psychosexual anxiety and gleeful prurience. This surreal, unconscious aspect has always been a part of his work, but for this exhibition he has made it doubly explicit. Hidden away on the back of each work’s frame is a small additional photograph, distinct from the larger work, but related in some oblique, free-associative manner which is difficult to parse. It is as if the show, born of the unconscious mind of its creator, has spawned an unconscious of its own.
Info: Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zahnradstrasse 21, Zurich, Duration: 3/3-7/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.presenhuber.com
