Installation shot at Peter Blum
Bullet Hole Constellation, 2008
Posters, paint, C-print, wood, bullet shot glass
5 components: 79 x 140 inches
Garden of Earthly Delights (Spiritual America), 2008
Posters, needlepoint, glass and steel vitrine, wool, paint, C-print, fake taxidermy, wood, blower scoop
180 x 180 x 60 inches (approximately)
Politicos and econo-wonks may spend the entirety of the autumn gnashing their teeth over the crisis of capitalism, and we may all wind up poor, but at least Matthew Day Jackson will be provided with a pathetic fallacy for his fine new double-headed show - and a vindication for his miserable outlook. "Drawings from Tlön", the title of one half of the outing, refers to a story by Borges ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") in which intellectuals have dreamt a future world into existence (having given up on their own). And "Terranaut", the title of the other half, carries exploratory connotations: one imagines rugged, all-purpose vehicles nosing around a blasted terrain looking for signs of life. The latter particularly chimes with the art: on the far wall of Peter Blum's gallery is Here and Now (all works 2008), which fuses a vast reproduction of Donner Lake from the Summit, by the nineteenth century painter Alfred Bierstadt, with a hard-edged abstraction, as if part of the sublime landscape had been cut out and replaced with chips. And in Lonesome Soldier, a space suit, made from felt, is suspended high on the wall by a long plank of wood, rather as if it had got stuck there after an awesome blast (or maybe after the Charles Ray photo-stunt it alludes to).
Day Jackson may not be surprised by the current crisis, but he is probably surprised that the whirlwind has come from Wall Street, and not from Iraq, as the weight of his considerable moral condemnation is aimed at the violence that warring humanity unleashes across the world. Sometimes he locks in on specific conflicts: And Babies? And Babies is a collage that includes a copy of a famous poster by the Art Workers Coalition which responded to the My Lai Massacre of 1968. Sometimes he sees war in a wider canvas, cosmic framework: that My Lai poster is very ingeniously connected to another photograph - by way of a plunging white strip-light - which depicts astronauts clustered around a loom boom, far out beyond earth. And sometimes he sees war and worldly trouble through a prism that is mythic: the Tower of Babel is a recurrent motif in the show at Klagsbrun, and it is a literal building block of the collage in Day Jackson's Endless Column.
What is most striking in this work, however, is not the quality of Day Jackson's anger, but how resourcefully novel he is in his use of materials. The collages in "Drawings from Tlön" operate with a consciousness of all their parts - paper and frame and glazing. In Body Pressure, a panel extends on to the floor, extending the sense of various surfaces and perspectives - the walls of rooms, the landscape of the earth - that are evoked. The glass that covers part of Bullet Hole Constellation, which encloses an altered document relating to shootings in the U.S., does itself seem to have been shot at. And there are a series of dark wooden wall-hanging tableaux which employ brightly coloured wool to delineate some of the figures in recreations of scenes from Goya's Disasters of War.
Given the choice, I would opt for Day Jackson's reinventions of Goya's images over many others riffs on the same that I've come across before: the soldier slumped in shadow beside the coloured corpse hanging from the tree in Tampoco, has the scale of a figure in old Salon history painting. Yet the fact that one can contemplate such a selection reminds one that Goya's images have done heavy work over the years. And one could say the same of the Tower of Babel, or of Brancusi's Bird in Space (1932-40), which occupies a marbled platform in As Seen from Outerspace. Such references leave some of the work in these shows looking jaded, whilst other works, which rely on sheer invention, strike one as sharp and fresh and vivid. Works like Sunrise (after Roger White): here Day Jackson used an emergency blanket to serve as the glittering surface of one of the panels, and in the centre of it, the light seems at first to flare off it, until you look again and realise that a faint image of a distant explosion has been transposed across it. One imagines the awful catastrophe, and the figures huddled in fluttering blankets amidst an enormous valley rather like the one Bierstadt imagined. And it's an awful, but a powerful prospect.
Morgan Falconer
To watch Saatchi Online TV's visit to Matthew Day Jackson's Brooklyn studio click here.
Matthew Day Jackson
Drawings from Tlön
Nicole Klagsbrun
Until 18 October
Terranaut
Peter Blum (Chelsea)
Until 8 November
Morgan Falconer is a journalist and critic. After an age spent immersed in 1920s New York as a graduate student, the result now props up his computer, and today he writes about contemporary art and culture for a variety of publications including the Times (London), Art World, Art Review and Frieze.
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