Alex Bag at Elizabeth Dee
Art in America, Sept, 2004 by Edward Leffingwell
Seriously engaged with grudges to bare, Alex Bag conjured the multifaceted installation "Coven Services for Consumer Mesmerism, Product Sorcery, and the Necromantic Reimagination of Consumption," a fantasy PR firm in the service of big science, corporate whores and media luminaries. Papering the gallery space with tear sheets, notes and drawings, Bag offered an abundance of Research and Development ideas for clients on one of three chartreuse-painted walls. Among much else, she provides Halliburton with a new approach to the promotion of tampons and pads high in toxic dioxin. Coven Services clocks 38 years of menstruation and thousands of contacts at the site of the most absorbent part of a woman's body before turning its attention to Halliburton's opportunities in Iraq. Elsewhere, Coven offers Procter & Gamble a drawing with a woman's face in place of reproductive organs, "giving a face to the genitalia," and enumerates the instances of the firm's use of animal testing.
A storyboard for Bechtel begins with the corporate lego, proceeds through drawings of an orgy and concludes as a sated participant licks the lego. NIMH lists mental disorders prevalent in the U.S., and Eli Lilly appears as an octopus, an idea nixed as "confusing and unsettling" by the manufacturer of Prozac. Reimagined as the suicide of a depressed teen, the revised plan addresses "the depressive, Christian youth we want." The adjacent wall is given to drawings of Michael Jackson and Rush Limbaugh. With his children masked as Spider-Man, Jackson is wrapped in the twin serpents of the caduceus--one of them a double helix--promoting trust in Monsanto, deliverers of Agent Orange, Bovine Growth Hormone and aspartame, for "changing the global food market forever." Limbaugh's body is a pentagram, crowned by hems and a burning candle, surrounded by an aura depicting OxyContin, a highly addictive narcotic famously used by Limbaugh himself, who says, "Try it today, need it tomorrow, cherish it always, and then simply enter an exclusive inpatient detoxification facility." The remaining wall is covered with a wallpaper-like series of repeated images in ink, ornamented by scrolls in red and featuring drawings of hanged witches, palmistry and physiognomy studies.
Screened large in a darkened gallery, Bag's video loop sent up the enthusiasm of television advertisements, one of them promoting Jessica Lynch's "I Am a Soldier Too," starring Bag as Lynch, praising Halliburton's presence in Iraq: "Halliburton will be here every step of the way, making bad things good." For Eli Lilly, Bag is the Wicked Witch, observing that "Prozac has made us all so much happier. I'm Eli Lilly. Trust me with your child's mind." Between commercials, a recurrently startled audience viewed the infamous phosphorescent chartreuse of the Paris Hilton sex video, an enthusiastic icon of conspicuous consumption, filthy rich and happy at last. Eschewing the gritty anger of Sue Coe and the street cynicism of Robbie Conal, Bag reaches an audience she has primed with laughter.
--Edward Leffingwell
COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
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