Outlaws in art land: bad was good in a recent show at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, where a score of feisty artists tested the limits of the legally permissible - Report From Ridgefield

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Sarah Valdez

Like a clubhouse for miscreant youth, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art--a white-paneled colonial house with rolling green lawns in Ridgefield, Conn.--was recently overrun by 22 contemporary artists who transgress rules and push boundaries with their work. "Art at the Edge of the Law," curated by the museum's assistant director, Richard Klein, featured mind-altering drugs, marketplace pranks and strategic appropriation among its many quasi-illicit treats. Local Ridgefield police and a lawyer were consulted to protect the museum from potential litigation. Cautionary security procedures were advised and undertaken. Signs warning parents to preview the exhibition before bringing in children were set out in the admissions area. The show was, in fact, a bit of a three-ring circus. But even so, superficial shock value was (mostly) avoided, while heavy-hitting issues like freedom of expression, individual autonomy and the relationship between imagination and reality were raised.

"If I were to curate a show, it would look a lot like this one," artist Tom Sachs told A.i.A. He contributed assemblage works incorporating homemade, functioning pistols and shotguns to "Art at the Edge." Sachs's dealer, Mary Boone, was arrested in 1999 on charges stemming from a show of similar work (which included two such guns, eventually confiscated by police) and a publicity stunt that allowed gallery-goers to help themselves to 9mm cartridges set out like after-dinner mints in a bowl on the gallery's front desk [see A.i.A., Nov. '99]. According to Klein, the presence of such firearms in the Aldrich exhibition was legally permissible because "there's a gray area in Connecticut law. Guns that are historical, or being exhibited, are pretty much overlooked so long as the public can't get access to them. If you go to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, you'll see they have a big collection of Colt firearms. The Colt Company is there, you know."

Gregory Green contributed a two-part installation. In the attic, he set up a low-powered pirate television station (replete with dirty laundry and coffee cups littering the floor) to broadcast news coverage, on a 13-minute loop, of the fracas caused by his 1995 installation, 10,000 Doses, at Feigen Gallery in Chicago. When first shown, the work comprised 12 antique apothecary bottles filled with yellow liquid and a recipe for LSD. Provoked, Chicago police seized Green's bottles and tested the substance; when results came back identifying the liquid as acid, they arrested gallery director Lance Kinz. With mounting pressure due to media attention, a second test was performed. The liquid turned out to be distilled morning glory seeds, which contain traces of lysergic acid. The police said they'd made a mistake and Kinz was released.

The second component of Green's Aldrich piece was a re-creation of the installation (with two of the bottles "damaged," i.e., opened by authorities), accompanied by documents pertaining to the seizure and arrest. A television was added to the installation to receive the programming from upstairs. As a way of transmitting information, Green's illegal broadcast (unsanctioned by the FCC) was a bit more complicated than, say, just using a VCR. But exerting effort impractically was one of this show's most prevalent art-making practices. Intentionally unproductive labor can come off as meditative, anti-capitalist or anti-elitist. In this instance, however, it mostly has to do with invading "private" public space (the airwaves) and daring the authorities to do something about it. To date, however, the range of Green's several pirate broadcast setups has been too limited to attract regulatory ire.

British artist Janice Kerbel showed Bank Job, a project a bit more likely to make law enforcement itch. For two years, she carefully researched everything required to rob a private investment institution in London's financial district, photographing the bank and its environs, taking notes, studying floor plans and otherwise casing the place. She stopped just short of the actual heist. Kerbel's documents have serious criminal potential, but in and of themselves are "just" art.

Jeffrey Hatfield, presently enrolled in Hunter College's MFA program, heightened the exhibition's unruly vibe by presenting a large, functioning moonshine still. Its network of copper pipes connected to heating and cooling tanks; water trickled down a trio of brightly colored baby pools on shelves, suggesting a crude yet gleeful fountain. The contraption yielded actual white lightning of around 100 proof, which Hatfield packaged in antique glass bottles and sold--embedded in law books--as limited-edition, souvenir art works.

"In Connecticut, it's legal to make beer and wine," Klein explained, "but you're not really supposed to make distilled spirits. And technically, you need a liquor permit to sell liquor to the public. But if you wanted to go and get drunk, you probably wouldn't buy Hatfield's sauce. It's $400 for one bottle." As if winking approval for Hatfield's delightful machine, a few of Fred Tomaselli's pill "paintings" hung nearby--happy, hippie-style designs made out of an assortment of multicolored pharmaceuticals set in shiny black polyester resin.