Mary Brogger
Before therapy we told fairy tales: classic conflicts between the soulless and the soulful, those with self-knowledge and those who crave power and material things. Today the gap between the mind and the body, the conceptual and the material, religion and philosophy is so great that it takes more than stories to understand ourselves and our disillusionment. Luckily, modern psychology can treat some of our afflictions at hourly-rates. For artists, however, the tradition of the avant-garde has complicated issues of identity even further, making them vulnerable to what Russell Ferguson calls, 'a kind of glamorised otherness'.
As evidenced in her work, Mary Brogger struggles with this identity malady. Her generation of artists, schooled in critical deconstruction and weaned on the 'celebrity artists' of the 80s, is reaching maturity to witness a new, literal and self-accepting generation of art practice. As a result, her exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art has an air of schizophrenia, offering the viewer both complicated models of everyday life and hieratic objects loaded with metaphoric platitudes.
By packaging psychology, cultural criticism, humour and a theatrical formal language into the predictable 'look' of museum-sanctioned art forms, Brogger succeeds in proudly parading her 'art' acumen. In doing so, she sacrifices the integrity found in her previous work (in particular, the unpretentious yet decorative domestic objects fashioned primarily from steel cut into intricate lacy patterns) for a trendy installation of art regalia with a lot of ironic significance.
In spite of its title, Homeomorphic (1997) is the only piece in the exhibition that retains the conceptual forthrightness and intrinsic formal beauty of her past works. Like a contemporary interpretation of Plato's techne tou biou, this panoramic scan of Brogger's Chicago apartment is an impressive attempt to understand the 'otherness' inherent to the artistic condition. Here, without artifice, Brogger's own 'craft of life' is frozen in a photographic document of what is both her ivory tower and her bohemian haunt, the common flat and the site of marginality, the exotic and the mainstream. Through digital manipulation and printing technology she perfectly fits the narrow-field print of her home into the MCA's Project Space. Wrapping around the entire darkened gallery like a tape measure around a waist, this measurement-of-self and space is genuine and brave. It has far greater impact than the other two works in the show - a giant, erect, black fun-fur fez that spins in a clockwise rotation, and a floor mounted, back-lit transparency depicting an aerial view of a forest clearing.
The photographic frieze, broken only by the entrance to the gallery, beckons the viewer to orbit around the space again and again. We survey Brogger's medley of natural teas and collection of books. We puzzle over the Ektachrome film box on her night table and take inventory of her studio supplies in the hope of getting a preview of a future project. Yet it is what we don't see that is most disconcerting: the evidence of other people - a lover's toothbrush or a pair of dirty coffee cups - and the customary trappings of home entertainment such as a computer, television or stereo. Taken in by the humble apartment and its curious appointments (old German maps, exotic fabrics and models for public sculpture), the viewer gets the sense that Brogger could have hidden in this place the answers to reconciling the splits that ail our fragile identities. At first glance into Brogger's compressed bricoleur habits, it would appear that, like the Renaissance philosophers who married magic to medicine and daily life to ancient wisdom, she manages modern life and art with sufficient depth and contentment.
Unfortunately, the sincerity and straightforwardness of this running photograph is called into question by the other two works inhabiting the same space. In keeping with recent strategies in contemporary art, the six-foot-high fez and back-lit photograph are closer in conception to a giant topiary puppy or a 600-pound block of gnawed chocolate than to the poignantly tailored photograph that encircles them. Like Cinderella's stepsisters, Drizella and Anastasia, Brogger tries desperately to squeeze her foot into the privileged slipper of the art world. What she has neglected to realise is that the glass slipper has fallen out of style and the simple house-shoes under the bed are not only more comfortable, they're all the rage at the castle.
