Under the
Skin:
A Graham
Stamets Retrospecive
Some may find the idea of a Graham Stamets
retrospective a bit off-putting; for someone whose art depends so
much on trickery -- and disease -- seeing it again for the first
time might not be such a hot idea. But give the Judy Martling at
Hallwalls in Buffalo credit for trying. She can't really recreate
the installations -- too many people were in on the joke, and some
of them could cause legal trouble -- so you don't have to worry
about your face peeling off, or being sent into a drug-induced
spasms. But given videotape, and a few of the orginal artifacts,
she's done a pretty could job of selecting and documenting.
The exhibit starts, fittingly enough, with
a photocopy of the incident report that got Stamets kicked out of
medical school. Stamets had pulled pranks before, but this one seemed
almost designed to get him thrown out: the day before an anatomy
lesson, he broke into the room with the corpses and surgically altered
one to look like the cancer-ridden wife of his professor; then, he
sunk small eyelets through the skull and wrist, threading them with
fishing line, so that he could make the corpse sit up and wave at the
beginning of class.
It's a cliche that beginnings contain the
seeds of what is too come, and here that conclusion is straining so
hard at the leash one almost want to put it to sleep. But it's true,
probably, not only in the event itself, which sketches out the themes
that dominate Stamets' work -- disease and the mutabiliy of the human
form -- but more subtly in his ambivalent reaction to the
aftermath. From the eyewitness accounts, it seems like Stamets could
have avoided getting caught -- except that he brought a Polaroid
camera to document the good Professor's reaction, and the pictures
were all over his room when the campus cops came to chat.
The retrospective skips over Stamet's
tentative post med school years, launching right into what made first
got him some attention: the 'illusion of beauty' installation. It was
part of a multi-artist show, a seemingly innocuous row of face-shaped
indentations in a wall. Looking inside each indentation revealed a
series of faces -- some of the most beautiful known to man (Audrey
Hepburn, Cleopatra vintage Elizabeth Taylor, and Rudolph Valentino are
duplicated here) alternating with faces in various stages of
decay. The last indentation in the series was just a mirror; the final
face you saw was your own. Big deal, eh? Sounds like a C- undergrad
art studio semester project. It left the observers distinctly
unimpressed -- until they woke up the next morning and looked in the
mirror. Stamets had designed the indendations to coat the faces of
observers with an enzyme that caused their skin to peel off in sheets
overnight. A few irritated patrons came by the next day to figure out
what was happening, and Stamets was happy to explain. It's all here on
videotape, too -- the scenes of Stamets nodescriptly trying to give a
bio-chem lecture on a whiteboard while the enraged art scenesters
formerly known as the beautiful people try to place the event in the
context of their art theory classes makes the show worthwhile all by
itself. You can almost see the "It was worth it to be a part of art
history -- I bet this'll help me get laid, too" lights going off above
their heads, one by one.
Although the art community found this
sophmoric and maybe even a little irresponsible (but who can tell,
really?), it got him some attention -- attention Stamets was able to
parlay into shows at more and more prestigious venues. But as his
reputation grew, Stamets had to grow trickier and trickier to achieve
his desired effect. In the next major installation represented here,
"Spasm" from the N.A.M.E. Gallery in Chicago, patrons sipped
complimentary beverages as they wandered around a room littered with
vine-like robotic arms that rose out of the floor to flail and snap
like angry snakes. No one could figure out what was happening until
three strobe lights, off-sync and placed in an equilateral triangle,
went off.
Stamets had spiked the beverages with
various psychoactive chemicals; Those who chose bottled water got
4-TASB, an Shulgin-derived compound that produced uncomfortable erotic
urges and epileptic spasms. Those who chose wine or regular soda got
small amounts of psilocybin and just stared, hypnotized. Those who
were lucky enough to drink diet soda got diet soda, nothing more, and
stood around confused by the behavior of their dates. Just think of
all the poor models.
In addition to the obligary videotape, the
arms are here; you can get pinched by them if you want, and you can
press a button to activate the stroblights. Unfortunately, there's a
disclaimer explaining that the gallery can't encourage illegal drug
use.
That one actually got Stamets in trouble;
there was a civil suit brought, and a criminal investigation. Stamets
did what every good fugitive would do and fled to Japan to work on art
direction for avant-garde pornography. That ground has been too well
trod for me to go over here; I'll just say that although both the
Tanaka-inspired "The Plague Years" and his crypto-Lovecraftian
tour-de-force "Casing Layer" are present in continuous video loops, I
would have liked to have seen something from his clinical period as
well.
After his return, he he spent more time
toying with his image -- when, at the height of virus-mania, he
announced an installation called 'ebola' to be held as PS 1 in New
York, no one walked into that gallery without at least a tinge of
worry. In the leadup to the exhibit Stamets went out of his way to
portray himself as a man with nothing to lose -- planting rumors of
drug abuse & an abortive stay in a psychiatric ward, staging a frantic
breakup with his girlfriend that was virtually a performance art piece
in itself.
The exhibit itself was almost an
anti-climax; probably anything short of having someone crash and bleed
out on the gallery floor was sure to disappoint his hard-core
fans. Not that he didn't give them their money's worth: he dressed the
patrons up in Level 4 bio-hazard suits and ran them through an
amusement park of faux dangers. There was a corridor filled with
test-tubes, each filled with an oily liquid and suspended about waist
high, swinging back and forth, for the patrons to evade; a room with
an entire wall of what seemed to be caged monkeys, crying out in pain
as their bodies seemed to decay in real time; and for the finale a
tour of a simulated plague-ridden African village, re-created for the
current show.
Stamets had rigged the suits to start
springing leaks & falling apart at his command; so as the patrons
orderly filed through the devestation, they could literally feel their
protection from the environment collapsing around them, exposing them
to air that Stamets had filled so full of charnel rot that they
panicked and stampeded -- again, on videotape for your viewing
pleasure. Later, in an interview, Stamets explained that it took him
five weeks to get that smell right. Lucky you, it's avialable at the
gallery giftshop.
Inevitably, it was impossible to duplicate
the atmosphere of fear and loathing Stamets devoted both his art and
personal life to creating; you have to settle for re-creations and
videotape. It's just that nature of his work. It's too bad we haven't
heard anyting from him for a couple of years; like Dada, he seems to
be painting himself into a corner. Many are betting he'll take the low
road, and just splatter so much blood around no one will notice his
stealthy escape; but I hope he finds a way to surprise us all once
again.
