Cathy Akers’ large, anonymous cube—Natural Selection 2 (2006)—could be a blue-collar version of Kubrick’s monolith or a distant relative of Robert Morris’ dead-grey structures. With peepholes drilled into every side, it may be closer to Tom Burr’s sexualized post-minimalist work. After all, the holes are at awkward heights; some of them force us to bend over in order to get a good look at what’s happening inside. Like a feminist version of Duchamp’s Etant Donnes (1946-66), the cube houses a diorama of nude women in an idyllic setting, often doing less-than-innocent things. Although rendered in the charming style of model trains and fueled by a return-to-the-woods utopianism, the piece has dark edges. If Duchamp’s original deals with the male gaze, Akers’ has more to do with the possibility of some wonderland where such a gaze is no longer the Law. Maybe Natural Selection 2 is feminism’s zoetrope in the macho garb of post-minimalist Home Depot aesthetics.
But not all of the artist’s references are high end. Akers’ obsession with View-Master reels, for instance, isn’t lost on this piece. Not only does the diorama inside the box have the un-slick feel of another age, but Akers has placed monocular lenses over the peepholes. Flattening her 3D diorama into a 2D View-Master world, creating as many different scenes as there are apertures, Akers introduces photographic/filmic concerns into the medium of sculpture. Setting up camp between formal investigation and the fantasy spaces of childhood and feminism, Akers rethinks the micro-utopia as fairytale. And as Ernest Bloch constantly reminded us, there is enlightenment in the fairytale: it teaches that we are born with the right to be happy.
