In Which We Try To Blow Up A Meth Lab

Gallery Chronicle

by HANSON O'HAVER

I have been thinking a lot about art. I have been thinking a lot about methamphetamine. If the two subjects seem dramatically different, well, that's because they usually are. Art is the epitome of cool. Artists are tastemakers, and, despite protesting that they just want to create, they know this. Methamphetamine is definitely the least cool illegal drug. It's barely hipper than Viagra. Cocaine has a glamorous appeal; heroin has that heroin-chic thing; marijuana has its own attraction to basically every different subculture. Even crack has Richard Prior and rappers like Biggie and Young Jeezy. Meth has none of this. It's not associated with rock stars or models or hippies but with skinny hicks with acne drinking Big Gulps.

Which brings me to Hello Meth Lab with a View, Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, and, most recently, Black Acid Co-op, art installations done by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe (yes, he is Rob's brother). The two Hello Meth Lab's, consisted of reproductions of meth labs in places like a desert greenhouse and a Miami apartment. Black Acid, which ran at Manhattan's Dietch Projects from July 2 - August 15, was an expansion of the two previous installations. An eighteen room exhibit, it was centered around a blown-up urban meth lab.

This raises several questions. The most obvious of these is the perennial Yes, but is it art? Of course it is art. In fact, the answer to this question is almost always yes. This is not a very good question, however, because if someone says something they made is art, it is art. You're not the art police. Who are you to argue with them?

The next question asked is, What are the artists saying when they build a reproduction of a meth lab and call it art? In their minds, are meth cooks artists, with their lives, inseparable from their drugs, being their art?

This is an interesting idea, but it seems unlikely that the artists had this statement in mind. So is installing a meth lab at Art Basel and in the middle of Soho some sort of ironic posturing? It could certainly be argued that Freeman and Lowe are making an elitist joke, taking a subject, a substance, usually associated with the rural poor and placing it in the upper-class art world. Are these installations the equivalent of white kids ironically wearing Tupac "Thug Life" shirts?

Fortunately, the artists explain their intentions: the installation expands on the notions relating to the connection between counter-culture and industrial society resulting in a spatial collage that extends itself into a vast architectural setting.

Unfortunately, as is generally the case with artists' statements, this statement doesn't really mean anything. Artists' statements always read like they were written well after the work was done; i.e. the artist thought it would be interesting to build a meth lab, and only later came up with a bullshit explanation on the social ramifications of their work. This is understandable, because it's got to be nearly impossible for an artist to explain the purpose of hundreds of hours of work in a couple of sentences. Anyway, I'm not quite sure how important the artists' intention really is.

Maybe social context and intent don't really matter. I'm inclined to think that the aesthetic is what matters; if a work makes some deep statement that’s fine, but it doesn’t have to. I'd rather look at meaningless art that I find cool or pretty than some Shepard Fairey anti-war stencil any day. Perhaps the most important question is: How does this art look? In this case, Lowe and Freeman’s project completely succeeded. Black Acid looked fucking awesome. And how could it not? After all, it consisted of eighteen rooms filled with things like an abandoned Chinese bodega selling pornographic t-shirts, walls covered in pictures of naked women and astrological charts, sleeping coyotes, and formaldehyde jars. Plus an exploded meth lab! Radness was inevitable.

Hanson O'Haver is a contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these pages about the Velvet Underground. He blogs here.

"Troubled Medium" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)

"Like How You Are" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)

"Entendre" — P.S. Eliot (mp3)