Jim Shaw, 'The Donner Party', installation view.
Fewer subjects today remain as taboo and disturbing as cannibalism, and Jim Shaw's 'The Donner Party' exhibition, premiering today at PS1 in New York, gutsily takes on the topic as a code-rich, tongue in cheek allegory of American culture's inherently darker foundation.
'The Donner Party', originally created in 2003, consists of a diorama-like installation of twelve cloth-covered pioneer wagons placed in a circle and laden with twenty-seven sculptures made out of objects found in thrift stores. Surrounding the tables is a visual tapestry of unusually connected characters - St Teresa of Avila, Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard, and the artist Lynda Benglis. While the project most directly alludes to the historical Donner Party, a Christian pioneer group whose survival of a 1846 journey across the Sierra Nevada mountains amidst a blizzard was the result of resorting to cannibalism, Shaw's scope of references range widely.
The ghost of Judy Chicago's iconic 'The Dinner Party', the famous 1979 feminist art work which presented tabletop settings for significant women from history, feels very present in Shaw's set-up, which was also made collaboratively, though notably on a much larger scale (Chicago enlisted the help of 400 artists, while Shaw's contributors are twenty-seven). The sculptures on the installation's wagons appear a little toy-like - barbies and cowboy dolls over candy coloured place settings - but the reference to anthropophagy is more than latent - totally different from Helio Oiticica's 'antropofagismo' but taking his into consideration too.
Shaw's interest in American religious movements comes into the picture in other elements of the show, which embody the artist's own fictional cult, the circular-sounding 'Oism'. Its beliefs - a goddess, reincarnation, a backwards sense of time, etc - are incorporated into 'The Donner Party''s sculptures, but the one that strikes me as the pithiest allusion is the ring's centrepiece - a vacuum cleaner standing in the middle of the figurative camp fire, standing for censorship sucking anything dirty and uncomfortable out of society's reconstruction of the past.
Make sure to check Jim Shaw's own explanation of the installation in this New York Magazine feature.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
JIM SHAW, 'THE DONNER PARTY'
May 24 - September 24, 2007
P.S.1 Art Center
Long Island City
22-25 Jackson Avenue
New York
T: +1 718 784 2084
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