Interview with Justin Lieberman, pt. 1
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Justin Lieberman's concurrent exhibitions at Marc Jancou Contemporary and Zach Feuer Gallery, The Corrector in the High Castle, is based on the notion of a figure, the Corrector, in an alternate history where Japan and Germany have been found victorious after WWII. Both installations put forward sculptural works comprised of the Corrector's quotidian collections of popular culture objects, such as beanie babies, stamps, baseball cards, and various other visual ephemera, and obsessive insouciance coats his pop archives in a Matrix-like sap of consumerist fatigue. Lieberman's tongue-in-cheek project cleverly addresses the gluttonous need to accumulate.
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Justin Lieberman's The Corrector in the High Castle, his latest solo exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, is a den of resin-encased pop-culture trash and treasure. The exhibition was inspired by Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history in which the Axis forces win World War II. In the novel, the protagonist Nobusuke Tagomi is an avid collector of American pop culture, and Lieberman transforms the gallery into Tagomi's apartment, the littered nest of a pop-culture pack rat.
Videocassettes, LPs, baseball cards, self-help books, Beanie Babies, and cereal boxes are piled in absurd groupings, whose logic is familiar to anyone with a suburban tchochke addict in the family. The objects are coated in dripping resin, decaying plastic consumables that (like Beanie Babies) are long past their sell-by date. Lieberman has also created hand-made reproductions, 'placeholders', of more rarefied items to fill in gaps in Tagomi's collection: the Gutenberg Bible, the inverted Jenny 1¢ stamp, and the commemorative Princess Diana Beanie Baby. These recreations contain the mistakes and misunderstandings of a creator with no access to the original, like the twisted phrase at the end of a long game of Telephone. Lieberman's Gutenberg Bible Placeholder, for example is strangely bulbous and contains only the page to which it is open, as if viewed for so long in a museum case, it might have been forgotten that the bible had other pages.
Another reconstruction, 'The Day the Clown Cried' Bootleg Placeholder is a recreation of the notorious 1972 Holocaust film, The Day the Clown Cried. Again, the object has come so far in translation that there is only a film box and no film to view. Here is the sort of clever turn one comes to enjoy in a Lieberman show, for this is a film that could never be viewed in the first place. The Day the Clown Cried was shot but never released. It is infamous both for its deliciously wrong premise (Jerry Lewis as a circus clown imprisoned in a concentration camp) and for the fact that it cannot be viewed. Since the tapes were never released, the film is known in concept alone. (The scene for instance where the clown entertains the children within the gas chamber can only be imagined.) Each placeholder and each carefully curated pile of junk is an attempt to concretize such concepts and to reconstruct a version of 20th century history through its crap.
In The Corrector in the High Castle, history is a construct that is up for grabs, able to be translated, changed, misunderstood, and reconstructed in alternate histories and futures. The exhibition expands into an entire environment, the game of imagining how archaeologists, aliens or future generations, the inheritors of this vast quantity of plastic, will give meaning to this period of history. From this sampling the outlook is dystopic. Most of the stuff, the Froot Loops, Beanie Babies, and Breast Cancer for Dummies book aggregate to little more than absurdity. Winston Churchill quipped that history would be kind to him, since he intended to write it. Yet standing amidst Lieberman's piles of plastic, there is little doubt that the most inane and absurd objects of the 20th century, our Beanie Babies, our regrettable fads, will be our most lasting record, and will survive us all to do the telling.
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Are worries about the future getting the best of your imagination? Do you lie awake at night imagining a perfect storm of poverty, war, and anarchy? It may be small comfort, but you are not alone. After all, America has a long and proud tradition of dystopic fantasy and creepy paranoia. In his new exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, Justin Lieberman creates one such nightmare — in an installation meant to represent the home of Nobusuke Tagomi, a character in Philip K. Dick's novel "The Man in The High Castle," which envisions a world where Germany and Japan have defeated the allies in World War II, occupied the U.S., and outlawed American culture. While Dick's book is set in the 1960s, Lieberman's installation looks like it might belong to the present day. Tagomi, a resident of Japanese-occupied San Francisco who wears a cape with a swastika, is also an obsessive collector of contraband Americana, and his apartment is filled with troves of comic books, newspapers, VHS cassettes, records, baseball cards, and other ephemera. In Lieberman's installation, most of these items are frozen in time in a plastic resin, which drips from the collections in thick, clear stalactites, giving the scene a slimy, post-apocalyptic feel.
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Are stories larger than objects? Justin Lieberman's exhibition at Marc Jancou Contemporary certainly suggests as much: a viewer might be able to gain a broad view of Lieberman's organized igloo of yard sale ephemera, but it would be nearly impossible to get that kind of perspective on all the text attached to each piece. Displayed on a computer inside the sculpture, a program renders a clickable 3-D anime version of the work while projecting the individual objects and writing the user looks at on an adjacent wall.
Lieberman's exhibition, The Corrector's Custom Pre-Fab House, draws from an array of post-modern influences. The dome itself is inspired by renowned po-mo architect Robert Venturi, along with Denise Scott-Brown's 1972 book, Learning From Las Vegas, which recognizes an emerging kind of building that responds to speed, mobility, the superhighway, changing lifestyles and a taste for the lowbrow. In front of the building stands The Corrector, a custom made sculpture of a Japanese store owner, influenced, according to the press release, by the fictional figure, Nobusuke Tagomi, in Philip K Dick's multi-faceted alternate history novel, The Man in the High Castle.
As far as cultural references go, Lieberman's choices are almost too perfect. The architectural form and philosophy nearly identically match the artist's idiosyncratic collection of stuff, and the structure of the novel Lieberman draws from contains as many story lines as the piece he's made. The artist couldn't be more text-book post modern if he tried. Perhaps the most meaningful connection between the work and its influences comes from the blurring of the true and false reality thematic of the book, also literalized by the sculpture. After all, The Corrector's Custom Pre-Fab House demands a viewer experience just as much virtually as they do in real time. Physically this doesn't require much we're not already used to; switching between flat mediums and three dimensional is at this point routine for most of us, even if Lieberman presents a form we're not used to. However, the piece points to an appetite for and efficiency of cultural consumption unique to contemporary life. Even if it's impossible to read every plagiarized product description, short story and aesthetic meditation the artist's computer program provides, the desire to do so seems to have increased with the ease in which it can be done.
Mirroring most data structures, synthesis of these stories seems to be beside the point. Says one piece of text from a narrative accompanying a can with the word KOOL on it, "We look at the same thing but what registers on us is completely different." And yet, these differences don't erase stereotypes. Certainly The Corrector, Lieberman's sculpture of a Japanese man with big teeth and squinting eyes begs the question: is it ok for artists to iterate racist pop culture iconography without making a critical point? If Leiberman's work is any indication, in the name of collection, display and consumption almost anything goes so long as it can be queried in a database. In this light, perhaps the only flaw of this piece is that The Corrector himself isn't given a story.
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