Manfred Menz: Euthanasia Solicitation
Life is short, and the Art [of Medicine] long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must be prepared to do what is right. -- Hippocrates
Like the physician's circumstance, Manfred Menz's Art Malpractice is also fleeting, fallacious, judgmental, difficult -- and long. Its current iteration opening this May in LA comprises works first executed between 1992-95, augmented by new, related works from 2015 and 2016. Taken together, Art Malpractice is an epic poem of scientific and instructional dogma misappropriated for purposes of political, social, cultural, erotic, poetic, conceptual and aesthetic satire. To deal with it, the viewer must have total freedom.
Manfred Menz: Euthanasia Solicitation (text)
The structural armature of the series has always been the artist's deft -- and slightly daft -- pairings of words and images; disaffected photographs of phenomenological banalities (cast shadows, reflected views, impressions in sand, a gun in a block of ice) with eccentric texts lifted from technical writings (users' manuals, news desk blotters, twee luncheon menus, fictional courtroom transcripts). This basic DNA of the word/image helix remains intact, including the four early works further expressed as dimensional sculptures -- most especially the monumental suicide trap "Euthanasia Solicitation" that still provides the show's emotional and physical climax. The most recent work, especially the large-scale "America For Sale" and the related series of seven hand-painted signs purchased for cash from the homeless people who had made them for their own use, blur the lines not only between image and picture, but between performance and sculpture, authorship and appropriation, conceptualism and satire, gesture and polemic.
Manfred Menz: Violence in Ya Body
Manfred Menz: Violence in Ya Body (text)
In between, Art Malpractice offers more than a dozen diptychs juxtaposing an image/object and a facing text. The degree to which the halves are truly interdependent or self-contained is a matter of discourse, because their power as pairings is often derived from an insistent sense of cognitive disconnect. Menz's is a deadpan surrealism, in which the brain can't help but try to figure out the connection; the more tenuous, liminal, and counterintuitive it is, the more seductive the puzzle. "It was Stanley Kubrik who said of his own work," quotes Menz, "that, 'All interpretations are correct.' And so it is. There's no wrong answer, but neither is there an obvious one."
Manfred Menz: Paranormal Masturbation
Menz reimagines the iconic graphic plaque from Pioneer 10 -- the first object to leave our solar system, in 1976 -- but with soldiers instead of Adam & Eve representing humanity. He goes sci-fi with "Strong AI" -- in which a futuristic humanoid being voices abrasive, money-crazy, misanthropic snark. Menz imagines the courtroom defense of a sentient, articulate simian made the scapegoat of puerile human desire and ego. He recasts the explosive rage-release of a firearm juxtaposed as a frozen gesture of silence, with the help of an ice machine's instruction kit. And in "Paranormal Masturbation" (in one of the few texts written by Menz himself) he uses the alluring allegory of discovering alien-life to send-up the power- and money-hungry ambitions of disingenuous political calculations. It's all very uncomfortable and ambivalent and hilarious in this maniacally poetic way, like something is lost in translation but you'll never know what. The homeless signs ("Smile Dammit" and six more like it) alone are not satirical. If they are, then the art world's consumerist element is the target of their irony -- together with any other hypocritical, un-original power structure that threatens "the freedom of each individual" to which the artist has dedicated the entire exhibition.
Manfred Menz: Nude People
Manfred Menz: Nude People (text)
ART MALPRACTICE opens Friday, May 27, 5-9:30pm at CMay Gallery in the Pacific Design Center, and continues through July 8.
Manfred Menz: Sense of a Presence
Manfred Menz: Sense of a Presence (text)