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

Chicago-based artists Michael Hernandez de Luna and Michael Thompson design faux postage stamps with a range of illustrations too nervy and stylish--cockroaches, condoms and pinup girls--to have been commissioned by the U.S. government. One Thompson-designed example, bearing the image of a pistol, reads "Kill All Artists," referring to a 1994 manifesto written by a cultural organization known as "The New York City Militia":

If art were illegal and punishable by death, only those willing to risk their lives for their work would prevail.... The spirit of originality or the right to dream have [sic] been quashed and replaced by the remixing and rehashing of the styles of yesterday in a failing attempt to recreate an originality that was never there to begin with. In the midst of it all, there lie We. Our role, friends, in order to create once again is to: KILL ALL ARTISTS! (2)

Hernandez de Luna and Thompson mailed letters to themselves, to friends and to their gallery with their stamps--sometimes successfully, so that postal workers' complicity in the prank can be inferred. An ill-gotten postmark is a trophy, a sign of life garnered from the systematized void of the postal system. At the Aldrich, sheets of stamps (minus the ones used) were displayed in frames, next to envelopes that successfully made their way back home.

An Austrian "art company" called Ubermorgen gave people the "chance to take part in the U.S. election industry" during the last U.S. presidential election. Their [V]ote-auction.com was a Web site that hypothetically facilitated the purchase and sale of votes. The domain was shut down by InterNIC, the main American company that stores service records for .com/.net/.org names. In the museum, the project took the form of a bunch of legal papers and a video of CNN's Burden of Proof, on which the Web site was discussed. Esthetically speaking, there wasn't much to look at here. But that the artists took a democratic election as a potential medium to manipulate overtly is, one must admit, intriguing. It's a little more high-concept than, say, oil on canvas.

Michael Oatman's entire existence appears to be but the sum of senseless transgressions as he serially confesses his paltry, generally unremarkable sins in a nearly two-hour-long video. The piece is surprisingly stirring, given the low-energy, self-centered nature of his idea. HIS sequence of drolly admitted violations, interspersed with flickering mug shots of various 19th-century criminals, has the capacity to plunge a viewer into a certain existential angst.

Steven Tourlentes has traveled the country and often trespassed to make his black-and-white night-time photographs of prisons that carry out the death penalty. As an art project, the series is admittedly a one-liner, but chilling nonetheless. The documentary photographs are technically very good but mostly function as the optical equivalent of a high-pitched drone: overwhelming yet oddly silent, the irreversible starkness of death drowning out the relative insignificance of everything else.