JJ PEET
On Stellar Rays, New York, USA
JJ PEET, Hedge (2009)
Few exhibitions reward careful scrutiny and repeat visits as much as JJ PEET’s ‘The TV Show’ at On Stellar Rays does, where the dozen sculptures that occupy the main gallery are just the tip of the iceberg. His smallish assemblages of found items and repurposed materials resemble an apocalyptic strain of folk art, and are constructed in a provisional manner, stacked or held together with rubber bands or caulking as if to assure maximum flexibility for future disassembly and reuse. Many bear anthropomorphic touches, like Luxury Leader Voodoo Doll (2009), a meager little character with a crudely drawn pair of glasses for a face and a withered carrot for a body, attached with a black shoestring to a scrap of wood.
Several works have changed incrementally from one day to the next – a square of fabric cut away from one work, a bit of text added to another. That oddity, along with particulars in the works’ list of materials (horse hair, a stolen doorknob, a silver spoon, a vulture feather), indicates that their status as artworks is secondary to some more pressing purpose. They are the most public, static element of PEET’s first New York solo show, which also includes a series of small, untitled paintings (2009) – available only by barter – and the titular TV series. Magpie sculptor, would-be pirate of the airwaves, and possible secessionist, with a dash of The Wizard of Oz thrown in for good measure, PEET is at work creating a complex narrative system through which he regularly conveys his utter dismay with modern times.
The TV Show (2009). Pre-recorded video and live broadcast (still)
PEET is surely an artist worth keeping an eye on; it’s only fair, since he may well be keeping an eye on us. Each Saturday throughout the show, an audience gathers to watch PEET’s latest video installment, which he produces live from a clandestine nearby location, dovetailing real-time visuals into prerecorded footage. Dubbed media clips of the past week’s political and economic news begin each segment; Gordon Brown’s G-20 speech and Obama’s Prague address on nuclear proliferation figured in the first two episodes. Using close-ups, voiceovers, establishing shots of unpopulated urban and bucolic vistas, and scores of oblique visual signifiers, the videos chart the activities of an unseen renegade force, ‘The Resistants’, in their struggle against the ‘Luxury Leader’, a corrupt power figure. (References to Dick Cheney suggest he may be the closest real-world parallel.)
The TV Show (2009). Pre-recorded video and live broadcast (still)
Tantalizing and nonlinear, The TV Show is filled with so many self-referential layers that it flirts with inscrutability. But as television series like Twin Peaks and Lost have demonstrated, providing narrative satisfaction isn’t such a critical factor, or any help at all really, when it comes to keeping viewers glued to the box week after week. Either by personal obsession or deft artifice (likely some of each), PEET draws viewers in by using visual repetition and a multitude of small mysteries. Props from the video have a totemic tendency to appear in the sculptures; one wonders how he will cope with their eventual sale, since they seem integrally involved in his ongoing, enigmatic activism.
Anne Wehr
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