elsewhere
by Douglas Messerli
Michael
C. McMillen Outpost / Venice (Los
Angeles), LA Louver, January 13, 2016
Over the past several decades, Los Angeles
artist Michael C. McMillen has been showing larger installations and smaller
combines that often portray mysterious architectural landscapes and objects
conjured up by his lively imagination.
His
work has been shown in group shows and major one-man shows and retrospectives
in 1977 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; in 1978 at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York; in 1980 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,
Australia; and, most recently at the Oakland Museum of California in both 1990
and 2011 and the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art in 2015. Each of these have
combine his larger scale “rooms,” “pavilions,” and even “motels” along with the
more miniature constructions.
McMillen was also largely responsible for
the fantastical set of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner,
and for years I took all out-of-town visitors to his large-scale The Central Meridian at LACMA, which
most museum visitors simply called “The Garage.”
In all of these works, as well as in the
new show at Venice’s LA Louver gallery, McMillen presents highly detailed
collages of metal, wood, and various everyday objects that together create
model buildings, boats, planes, and more abstract objects that, in his theatrical
presentation of them, become what might be described as American dream
landscapes that evoke a vision of a lost or quickly decaying world.
One might almost be led to describe
McMillen’s method as a kind of cannibalization of the banal, woven, through his
fantastical wonderment, into worlds just beyond the rational, particularly
given that the most striking of these works in the current show is a large
ship, The Pequod II, hanging from the
ceiling, its masts puffing from the movement of gallery visitors and an
out-of-sight fan, as if we were witnessing it from the bottom of the sea
looking up through the ocean waters.
The
Pequod, of course, is a reference to the small whaling vessel destroyed by the
whale Moby Dick in the great Herman Melville novel, wherein the central
character had a deep friendship with his own cannibal, Queequeg.
In fact, when this work was first shown in
1987, so McMillen told me, it was paired with a giant whale fashioned by artist
Red Grooms. What was a small vessel in Melville’s work, however, is here
rendered as a kind of giant behemoth itself—appearing almost as if constructed
of rusted iron rather than wood—with its dozen of portholes and a mainmast
observation deck that looks a bit like ramshackle village topped with a metal
water strainer. The monster is ballasted on both sides by huge pieces of surf
boards, while on the very end of an overhanging lower level, a small figure
stands, appearing almost to be bowling or, perhaps, just tossing something into
the sea. However we might “read” this work, we recognize it as a powerful statement
of life and death, suggesting as it does a kind of “ghost” ship, with only its one
“bowling” human being left.
Similarly, the spinning shadowed structure
we witness in his Transmitter (2014)
appears like a ghostly oil derrick floating across the waves, its transmitting
tower beaming out information of its near cyclonic voyage.
At the other end of the Transmitter, one might quip, is McMillen’s
Receiver, a mixed-media construction
that appears almost as some terrible scientific mechanism, or even a sort of “electric”
chair upon which the viewer sits to witness the images it projects. But unlike
the rather frightening mix of electronic “receivers” and plugged-in chords, the
image it projects is a soothing portrayal of the ocean itself with its rising and
lowering tides.
McMillen’s most recent work in this show,
Outpost (2015), demonstrates his more
comical side. For in this work the artist has taken an antique chair onto which
he has collaged another of his ramshackle buildings, as if the workers who
might inhabit this dangerously fragile construction were truly frozen in a
space where at any moment a large human giant might squash everything if he
chose to use the object for its real purpose.
Dr.
Crump’s Mobile Field Lab from 2004-2014, consists of a small mobile trailer
which the mysterious doctor has inexplicably left behind, its insides filled
with an impossible tangle of pipes, chords, and other scientific tools presenting
clues of what the doctor might have been experimenting on. Four short films, “Politbureau,”
“Science Institute Presents,” “Wastelandia,” and “The End” give us further
clues, while suggesting some possibly horrifying conclusions that Dr. Crump
might have come to. This work, like much of McMillen’s art, is both comic and
terrifying at the very same moment.
While the other four works in this show are
whimsical and charming, they cannot match the eerie quietude and sense of
displacement created by the works I describe above. But even they, as one of
the works proclaims in stenciled sign painter’s enamel on wood, represent worlds
that are “elsewhere,” somewhere outside of our own space and time, suggesting
a forgotten past or unimagined future that makes us wonder how our activities
and constructions in the present might be seen by others.
Los Angeles,
January 14, 2016
