Michael Mahalchick
The smell of strong coffee pervaded Michael Mahalchick’s fourth solo show at Canada Gallery, entitled ‘It’, just as it does his apartment/studio. In fact, the coffeemaker running continuously just inside the door of the gallery came from his apartment, as did many of the other objects collected into the artist’s deceptively precise assemblages. His collections of mundane, domestic cast-offs were still adorned with the grime familiar to anyone with a pot they hate to really scrub, shelf they forget to dust or a neglected, back-of-the-closet pile. The baking sheet, pillows, bong, candelabra, socks, wheelchair, dressing screen and dried flower petals (to name just a few objects) that comprise Mahalchick’s palette are still resonant with signs of daily life, giving a coy new meaning to the idea of the ‘hand’ of the artist. In Vestment (all works 2012), in which a golden cloth with shapely daubs of turquoise lies draped across a clothes rack, one could imagine a former life as a blanket and, well, a clothes rack – even as the combination whispered about Robert Morris’s felt hangings and Duchampian appropriations.
Many of the sculptures in ‘It’ make use of materials such as the fabric in Vestment, that gave the show a quiet undercurrent of queerness. Interested parties would find tulle, dressing screens and bits of jewellery throughout. In the silver Mylar Mirror and the gorgeous thread-and-found-canvas Copa Cabana, Mahalchick winks at Pop and Minimalism as if he were cruising them on the Christopher Street Piers. Some could find fault with his use of stereotypical tropes (glitter as gay signifier), but like the best camp performers, he is hilariously self-aware.
Mahalchick is present in a literal way, too: most of the sculptures were ‘made’ during an hour-long performance. What began as detritus scattered on the floor slowly manifested into sculptures as he smoked, sang and cooked in a carefully orchestrated series of body-centric actions at the opening of the show. In so doing, Mahalchick emphasized the banality of the things that were later elevated to the realm of sculpture, but never left their thing-ness behind. Acting as an acolyte of the everyday, during the performance a shrouded Mahalchick slowly built object-cairns like The Bride, a ziggurat of dirty speakers, old DVD cases, an analogue phone, tulle and an empty bottle of poppers. Duchamp enters again here: the title recalls the mechanized figure in The Large Glass (1915–23).
The whole of the performance was thick with this intense, ritualistic atmosphere, which recalled mystic godparents such as Joseph Beuys. He, too, was invoked with multiple references: after Milking Machine (a stack of pornography underneath a glass coffee table top, a lamp made from half a disco ball, and a George Foreman grill) was assembled, Mahalchick fried bacon on the sculpture, catching and reserving the run-off fat in a small dustbin.
Sitting at the head of the table in Mahalchick’s constellation of referents is Robert Rauschenberg. Although he’s treated reverently, Rauschenberg’s work here felt like a dead letter. Mahalchick’s anti-formalist tendencies give his less successful pieces the feeling of objects that happen to find themselves at the same party – but across the board you found evidence that Mahalchick has inscribed his sculptures with his daily life. The vibrancy of this gesture contrasts with Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’, which even at the height of their ugliness were unapologetically ‘Art’ with a capital A.
The smells of coffee and bacon, combined with a taped radio broadcast emitting from the sculpture Youthquake, made the exhibition an almost-complete sensory experience, while objects like the deeply stained pillow in Deli Boy pointed to an abject physicality. The body is evident in Mahalchick’s work in a way that freshens his art-historical antecedents and grounds a ‘queering’ that, if it had been mishandled, would have been pedantic. He inverts high formalist traditions to honour commonplace objects with elegant, lovely contiguities.
