Artist Rodriguez provokes in Troy fetish exhibit
Meanings behind large installations at Arts Center in Troy up for interpretation
Warenfetischismus? Painter and sculptor Jamie Rodriguez means to push a lot of buttons as he rides hard some ambiguous ideas in a one-person show of installation sculptures called “Warenfetischismus: Commodity Fetishism.” The title is a reference to Karl Marx going back to the 1840s, and whatever it means to you, it insists that we see the artwork here as activist incitements, and erudite ones.
The four large works sprawl like earthy, makeshift shrines. There are guns and trumpets and a sculpted raccoon. There are posters—reworked, it seems—from the USSR and 1930s Europe. Animals roam like stuffed simulacra in a museum diorama. In fact, for all the energy here, the works are in stasis, ready-made for a museum, displays of displays.
Start with one, called (in full, punctuation intact): “Argumentum ad baculum, (Fact Check: To The unhinged and useful idiots, the Revolution has been canceled as part of culture, No Justice, No Peace for Wendy’s, The Rubicon has been crossed.” This is the large work at the far end of the gallery, and it invites all kinds of interpretation.
This “installation sculpture” (my own awkward phrase, since it isn’t really an installation that activates the room, but it is no ordinary object with clear boundaries, either) is a fragmented landscape. There are bits of earth and greenery in islands on the floor, containing microponds, and in paintings sitting on cement blocks, propped against the wall. Three guns are aimed at the ceiling, bullets are scattered about. A fox and a wolf, realistic in their plaster solidity, stalk a lamb a few feet away (the wolf has a fur made of nails, and is trapped in an old tire around his belly, à la Robert Rauschenberg).
All kinds of interpretation? It’s one thing to identify some of the symbols, or dissect the title, Latin and all. It’s another to really get somewhere specific. In fact, this kind of work is more securely digested for its aura, its suggestions. One broad stroke might be: violence is incited by the encroachment of civilization, and yet it's also embedded in Nature, and we (the civilization part) are Nature, too.
But there are other cues.
Commodity fetishism—the tendency to see products for their inherent qualities without remembering the labor and social interactions behind those products—can be fairly blamed for some of our environmental callousness. The fair trade movement, or the increasing attention to the quality of life for livestock, are efforts to address this disconnect. So is this show.
Each of Rodriguez’s four main constructions is meant to be its own piece, but similarities in approach make them converge and blur. If only the artist had been given the money and time to fill the gallery with a single work. How dizzying that would be! What a title he could write!
The environmental mayhem Rodriguez creates, in pieces, is a generalized metaphor for the damage we have wrought, if we believe in Warenfetischismus. If it strikes you as hyperbole, or an unfair broadside, don’t miss the handful of separate paintings of places in Spain and Portugal. These are conventional views, realistic in style, with a heavy application of paint and full, natural colors. They are surprisingly peaceful in the larger view, and pretty in a painterly way: a view up an old street, a mountaintop landscape, a rustic building.
Maybe Rodriguez is actually sentimental beneath the provocations. In the larger works, the aggravating symbolism—the Lysol, the Soviet posters, the beachhead barriers, the melted chessboard—ends up being a foil for the bird poised in a mini bird bath, the warmth of brick and tiles, and a shrine-like calm with persistent greenery and wildlife throughout.