Not to re-fight old battles, but the domestic sphere as a feminist art concern never lets me be comfortable. On the one hand, raising The Domestic to the level of high-art-worthiness most “masculine” subjects enjoy, is all to the good. On the other, I’ve been dismayed by the overwhelming rush of women artists of my generation to fetishize the ironically tacky feminine sphere of our childhood. We hit the mid-nineties — our cultural ascension — and pseudo-primitivist folk painting, handicrafts, and seventies home decorating colors became a cliché faster than you could say “Margaret Kilgallen at the Whitney.” The noise of such blatant bandwagoning eventually had the effect of drowning out the intended dialogue.
But since we went to war (a conjunction to be plumbed another time), the tsunami of fashion victims worshipping orange shag has receded, and left the artists who set the terms of the debate in a high and dry place. High and dry, or rendered and clarified; what a difference half a decade makes. This month, Megan Wilson, an artist so centrally situated within the third-wave domestic aesthetic that the connection can sometimes be hard to see, is offering tours of the high and dry in her installation Home: 1996-2008.
The installation is Wilson’s home; her apartment since 1996. Since 2004, Wilson has been turning her space into an art installation — one never finished and therefore never made public. But now, the victim of an Ellis Act eviction that will have her out of the apartment before the end of the year, Wilson is opening up the space to visitors and giving guided tours, for the entire month of November 2008.
For those who have been following Bay Area arts for the past decade, Home offers an unexpected completion…a closing of a circle you may not have felt was open. For Wilson’s prolific and ubiquitous practice tends to abstract and reduce; in each piece or installation the artist picks out one element of the home aesthetic — a cartoon flower, a cut-paper curlicue, a discrete form in an upholstery pattern — and repeats that module in a pleasing and decorative format until its origin is completely obscured, and the individual piece approaches the purely formal. Extending these modules over the surfaces of an entire apartment over the course of nearly five years has allowed these … ideographs …to accrete geologically. The apartment installation serves as a lexicon of the past decade of Wilson’s work. In Home the abstracted finds its way back to context.
Or is further abstracted. What’s most noticeable — and what Wilson, on her tour, first points out — is the set of curtain-cloth shapes she has cut out and pinned to the walls and ceilings. You’ve seen these before if you’ve seen Wilson’s work before; here they are in such profusion because of the number of rooms they must decorate. Yes, these decorative items, snipped and abstracted from decoration, have been turned back into decoration. It’s a double inversion that takes you back to the same longitude, but a different latitude. You are here in a meta-home: a meta-seventies-childhood-home, a meta-Wilsonian-childhood, and a meta-gallery-of-Megan-Wilson’s-ideas.
