Laura Richard Janku is editor-in-chief of Artweek, a monthly publication that has been covering contemporary visual art on the West Coast for thirty-six years. A freelance writer and curator, Laura contributes to many catalogues, magazines and Web sites.
Prankishness seems to be a prerequisite for our current viral and visual culture. But there’s a difference between YouTube clips of glorified vulgarity and artworks that use slapstick as a subversive vehicle for Big Ideas. James Melinat treads this tightrope with pieces that slyly reveal substance beneath punny surfaces.
Case in point is A Portrait of the Artist (as a young man). With its super-wide, super-thin mag wheels stacked tire shop style atop a photograph of Melinat, this sculpture discloses as much about his cred—the street icons, literary riff James Joyce, and art historical reference to classic modernist Constantin Brancusi—as any conventional self-portrait would.
Density and levity also undergirds the Gravity and Grace (a sum of all my hopes and fears) series: three still photographs and an installation of a life-sized upside-down house that appears to have been dropped into the gallery from the stratosphere. Similarly concerned with falling (literally and figuratively from grace), the photos depict people dangling from various landscapes, attached to the earth only by way of their heads. Getting our own heads around the visual trickery here calls for contortions that resemble the poor saps in other works like In my beginning is my end and In House of Man (the harder they fall). In this latter sculpture/photo, an office type is attached at the neck to the interior of a framed wooden structure that could be part of a UFO barn raising. There are no studs here, only a bizarre hybrid of person and place that recalls the Chaplin-esque absurdity of Erwin Wurm’s one-minute sculptures and the video version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” Either way the message is clear: For Melinat, Newtonian gravity is a stand-in for light-hearted Cartesian gravitas. Bottoms up!
