Photo credit: Glen Larson
It might seem a dubious distinction to be included in the current exhibition affectionately called “Fakes,” on view at the UW-Parkside Fine Art Gallery through Dec. 14. However, the four artists included in the show—Conrad Bakker, Eric Doeringer, Mark Klassen and Stephanie Syjuco—accept the label and wear it with a surprising amount of originality. It’s difficult at first to imagine what set of circumstances might justify conferring the label of “original” on any artist committed to the art of fakery, but a spin through this tightly curated funhouse offers plenty of satisfying answers.
From the first footstep into the gallery, the lines between art and non-art are blurred. To the immediate left sits a desk topped with a fabricated boulder on which a single pea is placed. It is unclear at first whether the desk is permanent furniture being used by Milwaukee-based artist Mark Klassen as a pedestal for the two recreated elements, or a co-conspirator. When smoke begins pouring out the desk drawers, we get the answer. It’s a well-selected opening remark that helps dial up viewer’s skepticism for the remainder of the show. One begins to wonder whether fixtures like fire alarms and thermostats on the near wall are sculpture or building fixtures. They’re legit, but suddenly everything that’s not the floor becomes fair game for reconsideration.
Conrad Bakker’s bulletin board on an adjacent wall requires extra scrutiny. With its trompe l’oeil pushpins, staples and torn paper corners, the piece doesn’t come clean without prolonged interrogation. Nearby, on the main wall, five Campbell’s Soup can paintings by Eric Doeringer hang smugly. They’re more overt than the works by Klassen and Bakker; we all know these are after screen prints by Andy Warhol. Copies of copies. The logical question arises: is copying someone, who many would say had the final original word on unoriginality, a case of diminishing returns? If it keeps us asking this question in good faith, no. And he keeps us asking it by being as dogged about pilfering from the art world (see his copies of Chris Wool, Elizabeth Peyton, Richard Prince, as well as Warhol’s film Empire) as Warhol himself was about pilfering from Bloomingdales.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
In front of the ersatz Warhols, on an arrangement of banquet tables, we see what seems to be a counterfeit money operation busted in mid-operation. Stephanie Syjuco’s Debt Worth presents sheets of fake hundred-dollar bills and encourages anyone with debt to cut out what they’d need to pay it off. Syjuco’s installation is more socially minded than the rest of the work in the show, but like the others it feeds off context, requiring the right place and audience to ultimately give meaning of the work.
When Marcel Duchamp first exhibited a readymade urinal titled Fountain in 1917, the public was apoplectic, both because the art wasn’t made in any traditional sense, and because its only distinction from any other urinal was that it was misplaced. For the next 100 years, a polite battle ensued between so called “retinal” art and appropriation art. Incidentally, there was a mild dustup earlier this year when Mark Klassen’s Air Conditioner won first prize in the Wisconsin Artists Biennial, when some, presumably from the retinal contingent, took issue with the victory. The resistance to Klassen’s deadpan appliance came a century after the hostile reception of Duchamp’s urinal, and tells us that strategies centered on “manipulating signs rather than making objects,” as Hal Foster famously put it, still aren’t universally accepted.
Why, anyway, should a faithful rendering of a cow or a cat be considered any less “fake” than a replicated workbench, such as the one in this show by Conrad Bakker? After all, the bench is simply doing in three dimensions what the drawing is doing in two. And in the case of the workbench, it’s possible one might be actually surprised by encountering it–I’ve never been surprised by a naturalistically rendered object. And that surprise might in turn lead to examination, and that examination might lead to inquiry, and that inquiry just might lead to extrapolations about the nature of yet more stuff.
