Review: C109
In his archly titled recent show at Schroeder Romero, Defense! , one could argue that New York-domiciled, Irish artist Peter Hendrick is trying to explain American culture to Americans. Now this is an uppity thing to do. For the most part here, in the post-September 11 US, there has been a frenzy of not-explaining and not-examining. We have launched instead upon a festival of huddling together as unwarranted victims pondering how we can bring greater security to our homeland. Broadly speaking the answer we have come up with resembles a flawed patchwork of homilies and clichés. Despite the obviousness of the flaws and the bankruptcy of the homilies, few have been willing to point to the emperor's nakedness.
In this installation Hendrick has recourse to examine the collision of a series of very particular, very local, even parochial contemporary American cultural references. For example, the televised Humvees that one sees American troops using to patrol Iraqi streets have a civilian cousin. It is called a Hummer, it is about the size of sixteen Volkswagens, costs approximately $40,000 and gets eleven miles to the gallon. Shortly after the United States invaded Iraq the New York Times ran an article in which Hummer owners reported that driving the vehicle allowed them to "identify" with the troops "liberating" Iraq. In the Offensive paintings Hendrick employs a particularly muscular typeface - it is that of the Hummer logo - to spell out the word HOMELAND . In three paintings the word is repeated identically save for the coloring of the camouflage pattern in which it is rendered. In Offensive 111 , it is difficult to divine in what military context the garish colors would work as camouflage. The key to such understanding is to realize that Hendrick's palette echoes that of of the US Department of Homeland Security's color-coded alert system - red for highest alert, and so on down to green for lowest alert. This, in its turn, closely resembles the color-coded alert system of Jim Kirk's Starship Enterprise. Somewhere in this peculiar concatenation of American military adventures, popular spectacle and Detroit marketing savvy we get a sense of what shapes American public discourse post-September 11.
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| Peter Hendrick: Fear factor , 2004, mixed media, 203 x 89 cm; courtesy Schroeder Romero Gallery |
At his best, as in the Offensive paintings, Hendrick hits a subtle and comic beat that prevents his work from sliding beneath the tarnished label of polemic. At other times his critique can rattle a little thin, as is the case in the central installation work of this show, wherein the white picket fence of so much American schmaltz is reconfigured as jailhouse bars. Then again in Fear factor , a light sculpture that resembles a flag which again references the Homeland Alert system, Hendrick regains his tempo. By sharing his title with a current reality-TV show in which contestants are publicly submitted to enduring their greatest fears and humiliations - spiders, snakes and the like - Hendrick invokes a subtle democracy of titling that worms its way into that aforementioned overlapping of politics, pop culture and consumerism. Blink between the end of the nightly news and the beginning of the latest installment of Fear factor and where are you, Abu Ghraib or Hollywood?
Laurence Hegarty is an artist and writer based in New York.
Peter Hendrick: Defense! , Schroeder Romero Gallery, Brooklyn, March - May 2004
